Biafra Quotes

Don't hate the media; become the media.

Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.

There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.

Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.

I enjoy getting people angry and getting underneath their skin, especially people who don't think.

In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.

Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn't be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.

What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.

The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.

a prank a day keeps the dog leash away.

At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit'. . . I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in . . . expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) . . .

What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

Ada orang yang menghabiskan waktunya berziarah ke Mekah. Ada orang yang menghabiskan waktunya berjudi di Miraza. Tapi aku ingin menghabiskan waktuku di sisimu, sayangku. Bicara tentang anjing-anjing kita yang nakal dan lucu. Atau tentang bunga-bunga yang manis di lembah Mendalawangi. Ada serdadu-serdadu Amerika yang mati kena bom di Banang (?) Ada bayi-bayi yang mati lapar di Biafra. Tetapi aku ingin mati di sisimu, manisku. Setelah kita bosan hidup dan terus bertanya-tanya tentang tujuan hidup yang tak satu setan pun tahu Mari sini sayangku Kalian yang pernah mesra, yang pernah baik, dan simpati padaku Tegaklah ke langit luas atau awan yang mendung. Kita tak pernah menanamkan apa-apa, kita tak'kan pernah kehilangan apa-apa.

At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population.

Big Brother has no interest in well-informed citizens capable of critical thinking. Big Brother wants you to shop at Wal-Mart, where He will control the media that influences your life. The media works with the government and with the large corporations to form mass culture, which is utilized to create public consent, and most folks aren’t even aware of this process as it goes on all around them. Big Brother is actively seeking the complacency of the wage-slaves. Big Brother doesn’t want you to know about the spoken word performances given by Henry Rollins, or Jello Biafra or Terrence McKenna- or a thousand other people- because they will crack your laminate of societal posturing. Big Brother doesn’t want you to know about Bill Hicks, because Brother Bill will provide you with the courage and impetus to spit in Big Brother’s face. The internet is but one facet of our mass-marketed popular culture, and everyone is plugged into it. If you’re reading this, you are a part of it, the internet, one large hive mind, a singular consciousness. And that can be a good thing, but too often, people let themselves slip into it, into this world, to the point where they are no longer able to differentiate between what they think, what they know, and what is thrust upon them. They have no access to their own point of view, or their own spiritual consciousness, for lack of a better way to phrase it. So, to answer your question, in a lengthy and circuitous fashion, I would say that disgust with intellectual sloth, puerile voyeurism and dissent are the primary proponents in my work.

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement! The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.

Statistics no longer frghten us. But pictures of the starving children of Biafra, of Haiti, or of India, with thousands sleeping in the streets, ought to. And this entirely apart from the horrors that befall the poor when they struggle to deliver themselves from their poverty: the tortures, the beheadings, the mothers who someow manage to reach a refuge, but carrying a dead child--a child who could not be nursed in flight and count not be buried after it had died. The catalogue of terrors is endless.

Its basic axiom is to be followed by individuals as well as great nations, by Losers and Winners alike. We have demonstrated the workability of the axiom in Vietnam, in Bangladesh, in Biafra, in Palestinian refugee camps, in our own ghettos, in our migrant labor camps, on our Indian reservations, in our institutions for the defective and the deformed and the aged. This is it: Ignore agony.

We must bear in mind, however sadly, that psychopathology is no longer the exclusive preserve of the degenerate and perverse. The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra -these are games that anyone can play. Their violence, and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place now, within sex as elsewere (...). Were all this leads one can only speculate (...). What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations.

Ugwu fumbled, awkwardly, for something to say. ‘Are you still writing your book, sah?’ ‘No.’ ‘”The World Was Silent When We Died”. It is a good title.’ ‘Yes, it is. It came from something Colonel Madu said once.’ Richard paused. ‘The war isn’t my story to tell, really.’ Ugwu nodded. He had never thought that it was.

But we all die, and all death is violent, the overthrowing of the state of life, so why did that year [1968]seem so terrible? Are King or Kennedy or some peasant folk in a village more important than the starved-out of Biafra, the names on the Detroit homicide list? Maybe I'm playing an intellectual game, marking out one year or two on a calendar as special in horror so I can add that they were also special in significance, and thus compensate for the horror, or even redeem it. Humans are fond of finding ways to be grateful for their suffering, calling falls fortunate and deaths resurrection. It's not a bad idea, I guess: since you're going to have the suffering anyway, you might as well be grateful for it. Sometimes, though, I think if we didn't expect the suffering, we wouldn't have so much of it.

Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church’s pastor. “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?” The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.” Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?” “Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.” Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshipping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.

गिद्धों एक और तेज बारिश एक निराशाजनक है सुबह में पूर्वजों द्वारा देखा गया एक धूप का दिन कई ऊंचे पेड़ टूट गए हैं हड्डी की हड्डी में बैठे पास बैठा हुआ उसके साथी की चिकनी सिर की चोट में, एक बजरी एक काटने में जड़ें कुरूप पंख झाड़ी दिल से घूरना झटके की ओर। कल वे मिल गए पानी के छेद में एक सूजा हुआ शव दो आँखें और आँखें खाओ क्या था। पेट उन्होंने खाने के लिए चुना उनके आराम बाकी सब खोखले मांस में है कूलर के व्यंजन आसान हैं दूरबीन आँख के नीचे ... जिज्ञासु वास्तव में एक और प्यार तो रास्ते में विशिष्ट एक बाहरी कोने लें शवगृह का घर अरेंज-बॉस वहां बैठेंगे, शायद वहां सो जाएगा - शकुनी का चेहरा दीवार का सामना करना! इस तरह से बालसेन शिविर है कमांडेंट दिवस के अंत में सभा जले हुए लोगों के साथ गया धुआं विद्रोह और नाक आपके बालों पर एक काज है सड़क पर सीफूड की दुकान एक चॉकलेट उठाओ उसकी छोटी चप्पलों के लिए घर पर इंतजार कर रहा है पिता कब वापस आएंगे उदार दृष्टि आप चाहें तो प्रशंसा करें वह भी लोग राक्षस भी एक छोटा है उपहार उपहार कोशिकाओं में कोमलता क्रूर दिल की बर्फ की गुफा में अन्यथा यह उस बीज के लिए है हुतोष को उससे प्यार हो गया ताकि हमेशा के लिए स्थापित किया गया है बुरी किस्मत वाला

De Biafra kindjes van Victoria's Angels, - Secrets -, kunnen zelf hun kleertjes niet bekostigen. Het antwoord volgt direct vanuit gelijksoortige sferen van autoriteit. Voltooid en, of, onvoltooid verleden tijd.

As for national greatness: It is probably true that all nations are great and even holy at the time of death. The Biafrans had never fought before. They fought well this time. They will never fight again. They will never play Finlandia on an ancient marimba again. Peace.

We shall bear in linea, however sadly, that psychopathology is no longer the exclusive preserve of the degenerate and perverse. The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra- these are games that anyone can play (...) What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations.

Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then to a plantation in colonial Virginia. Equiano’s further adventures—and there were many—are narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789. After spending much of the Seven Years’ War hauling gunpowder on a British frigate, he was promised his freedom, denied his freedom, sold to several owners—who regularly lied to him, promising his freedom, and then broke their word—until he passed into the hands of a Quaker merchant in Pennsylvania, who eventually allowed him to purchase his liberty. Over the course of his later years he was to become a successful merchant in his own right, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His eloquence and the power of his life story played significant parts in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

I believe this quasi-religious attitude explains the repeated misunderstandings and deficiencies of revolutionary Marxism in the face of all the major events that have accompanied decolonization—such as the secessions of Katanga and Rhodesia, the Biafra war, and even the Algerian war and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Marxists seem to circle round and round these problems without knowing from which angle to tackle them. Innumerable ‘mini-theories’ are produced that contradict one another; words are refuted by other words; and no current doctrine of imperialism is accepted by more than a small group, even within the great ‘left-wing’ parties themselves on those occasions when reflection is encouraged, allowed or simply tolerated. This confusion becomes unbearable when the inadequacy of the old concepts is recognized and people try to save them with a multitude of deductive developments instead of firmly replacing them by new ones.

Max Verstappen, grootste eikel der mensheid.

We as Nigerians do not know how lucky we are …with everything falling apart in several other countries we should count ourselves very lucky to still be at peace …I feel sorry for the young igbo man screening biafra …bu then even in the mist of peaceful loving people I guess a hint of madness is allowed to remind the normal minded people of love peace and unity d basis upon which the country, Nigeria was originally built on …Nigeria has indeed grown and is blossoming to become the beauty of the world every day…no country even America got to where they are now without first nearly going extinct. ..look at the grate depression amongst others, am not saying we have to get to that extent but its darkest before dawn..lets persevere and hang in there ..Nigeria will be great I tell u…thanks for the lovely pictures. .God bless our motherland .

On some issues, it will be an apparent insult to expect one not to be emotional about it, not to be prejudiced or side one's kit and kin. On issues as deep and as touchy as the Nigerian civil war and its consequences to the easterners, till this present day, to ask me not to cry, not to mourn, not to discuss it, is reduce me to a robot and ask of me a miracle, I am no TB Joshua. I may not discuss it often, but in truth, it was a regrettable and sorrowful experience, for any people at all!

If she had died, if Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu had died, the bunker would still smell like a freshly tilled farm and the sun would still rise and the crickets would still hop around. The war would continue without them. Olanna exhaled, filled with a frothy rage. It was the very sense of being inconsequential that pushed her from extreme fear to extreme fury. She had to matter. She would no longer exist limply, waiting to die. Until Biafra won, the vandals would no longer dictate the terms of her life.

There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality~no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile,Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences). There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.

We didn't do anything illegal, all we ever did was exist as IGBO PEOPLE.

I taught an introductory creative writing class at Princeton last year and, in addition to the classic ‘show don’t tell’, I often told my students that their fiction needed to have ’emotional truth’ […]: a quality different from honesty and more resilient than fact, a quality that existed not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind of fiction that shows. All the novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have this empathetic human quality. And because I write the kind of fiction I like to read, when I started Half of a Yellow Sun […], I hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait. […] Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’. Yet, […] to write realistic fiction about war, especially one central to the history of one’s own country, is to be constantly aware of a responsibility to something larger than art. While writing Half of a Yellow Sun, I enjoyed playing with minor things [such as inventing a train station in a town that has none]. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time. I could not let a character be changed by anything that had not actually happened. If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to artistic vision of it. The writing itself was a bruising experience. […] But there were also moments of extravagant joy when I recognized, in a character or moment or scene, that quality of emotional truth.” In the Shadow of Biafra (essay included in the 2007 Harper Perennial edition of Half of a Yellow Sun).

Whereas older generations protested in empathy with distant peoples – in apartheid South Africa, in Vietnam, in Biafra and in solidarity with those in Latin America or the Caribbean who were suffering as a result of US foreign policy – today’s privileged, angry students seem far more preoccupied with changing the world for themselves and those near them.