Ghana Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Ghana. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Surely, there's strength in being dressed for a storm, even when there's no storm in sight?
Yaa Gyasi (Transcendent Kingdom)
They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all. They were dreamer-women. Very dangerous women. Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, "brutal, senseless," etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become. So, insatiable women. Un-pleasable women.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
Here’s to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land. Here’s to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers. Here’s to the janitors who don’t understand English yet work hard despite it all. Here’s to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile. Here’s to the laundry man at the Marriott who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru. Here’s to the bus driver, the Turkish Sufi who almost danced when I quoted Rumi. Here’s to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation. Here’s to the taxi drivers from Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and India who gossip amongst themselves. Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels. Here’s to international money transfer. For never forgetting home. Here’s to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on.
Ijeoma Umebinyuo (Questions for Ada)
While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of mans humanity to a man.
Maya Angelou
Productivity is about turning valuable inputs into valuable outputs. Individual people are more productive when all the elements of the permaculture economy are at work in their lives. When individuals are productive, then businesses become productive. When businesses become productive, the nation becomes productive.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)
In Nigeria, or Ghana, for that matter, no one grabs you by the ear to march you off to the police station. Vigilante justice is much faster and more effective.
Kwei Quartey (Last Seen in Lapaz (Emma Djan Investigation #3))
The world needs great inspires, who will encourage every living soul to reach their highest potential. You can be one.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
loss” is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what he does not permit to exist in his mind.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
I think about how the language I’ve mourned never learning has on some levels already been taught. A language I thought too difficult to warrant effort has already embedded itself into me.
Jessica George (Maame)
True, I used to see a lot of hope. I saw men tear down the veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same men, when they have power in their hands at last, began to find the veils useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been growing, becoming different, that is all. After a youth spent fighting the white man, why should not the president discover as he grows older that his real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all the blackness in the big old slave castle?
Ayi Kwei Armah (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)
Marjorie was made aware, yet again, that here "white" could be the way a person talked; "black the music a person listened to. In Ghana you could only be what you were, what your skin announced to the world.
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
A nation can be mighty, when the citizens put away their political differences, work together for a common vision, a common goal and a common good.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
In order to retain money in savings, you have to feel in your subconscious mind that you deserve to keep the money.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
This is not their place. In time they will pass. Ghana was here when they came. When they go, Ghana will be here. They are like mice on an elephant’s back. They will pass.” In
Maya Angelou (All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes: An Autobiography)
We ought to know the history of our ancient ancestors.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
In Ghana, it is said that a stranger is like water running over the ground after a rainstorm: it soon dries up and leaves behind no traces. “Stranger” is the X that stands in for a proper name. It is the placeholder for the missing, the mark of the passage, the scar between native and citizen. It is both an end and a beginning. It announces the disappearance of the known world and the antipathy of the new one. And the longing and the loss redolent in the label were as much my inheritance as they were that of the enslaved.
Saidiya Hartman
What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? And what are we going to reply if a court in Ghana or the Congo quotes the Eichmann case as precedent?
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief. You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.
Chieko N. Okazaki
People tend to buy more at a lower price and less at a higher price. Also, people who produce goods or supply services tend to produce more at higher prices and less at lower prices. This juxtaposition constitutes equilibrium.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)
She used the word akuraase, the same word she would use for a village in Ghana, but I had already been conditioned to see America as somehow elevated in relation to the rest of the world, and so I was convinced that an Alabama village couldn’t be an akuraase in the same way that a Ghanaian village could.
Yaa Gyasi (Transcendent Kingdom)
My parents are not special people, they’re ordinary, and one of my problems is that I’m expecting perfection from ordinary people. They’re not saints or masters of knowledge just people, people who have children, which, last time I checked, required no proficiency test. People who continue to make mistakes, attempt to learn from them and repeat, until death.
Jessica George (Maame)
And what happens to daughters whose mothers betray them? They don’t become huggable like Sadie, Taiwo thinks. They don’t become giggly, adorable like Ling. They grow shells. Become hardened. They stop being girls. Though they look like girls and act like girls and flirt like girls and kiss like girls—really, they’re generals, commandos at war, riding out at first light to preempt further strikes. With an army behind them, their talents their horsemen, their brilliance and beauty and anything else they may have at their disposal dispatched into battle to capture the castle, to bring back the Honor. Of course it doesn’t work. For they burn down the village in search of the safety they lost, every time, Taiwo knows.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal-logical-admirable refusal-to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places!, in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
Everyone must be given the opportunity to think, read and write.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
What a mighty nation, we will be, if we encourage one another?
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
Ghana
Yaa Gyasi (Transcendent Kingdom)
We will be a mighty nation, if we build each other.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
The author urges taking the pulse of the church outside our own neighborhood. More church attending Presbyterians in Ghana than Scotland, and while Western pastors beg to fill seats, some African pastors are asking people only to attend every second or third week to give room for others in packed churches.
Dinesh D'Souza (What's So Great About Christianity)
Our sins are our downfall. We must repent and return to the Lord. And He will receive and forgive us graciously.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
She sleeps like a cocoyam. A thing without senses. She sleeps like his mother, unplugged from the world.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
We inter-change ideas. You can stay in the United States and inspire people in Indonesia. You can stay in Ghana and inspire people in Turkey. You can stay in Nigeria and inspire people in cote'd voire. You can stay in Senegal and inspire people in China and vice versa.
Michael Bassey Johnson
There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
South Korea and Ghana had the same income per capita in the 1950s. One received far more aid, advice and political intervention than the other. It is now by far the poorer of the two. In general, Asian economies grew their way out of poverty in the late twentieth century, while African economies failed to be aided out of poverty. Trade, not aid, proved the best way to achieve an increase in prosperity.
Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
Most recently, these people have been emigrants trying to get into Italy, not emigrants trying to leave, and their passage is no easier or safer than that of their antecedents. Thousands of refugees from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Nigeria have died off the coasts of Italy in the last ten years, capsized, drowned, sunk in flames. History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.
Juliet Grames (The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna)
Then Ghana, and the smell of Ghana, a contradiction, a cracked clay pot: the smell of dryness, wetness, both, the damp of earth and dry of dust. The airport. Bodies pushing, pulling, shouting, begging, touching, breathing. He'd forgotten the bodies. The proximity of bodies. In America the bodies were distant. The warmth of it ...... Why had he hated this view? Of this beach, of the backs of these fishermen, glistening brown, of the long wooden boats, evangelical names in bright tricolor paint on their splintering sides, Black Star Jesus, Jah Reign, Christ the Fisher of Men, in the red, yellow, green of the national flag and the national spirit of open-source ethos, this mixing of Anglican, Rastafarian, Ghanaian? What was there to hate in this? There was only openness. As far as he could see. A cheerful openness. An innocence. An innocent beach on the road to Kokrobite at seven A.M. November 1975, little country lurching, cheerful, unaware, to revolution. Little taxi lurching, blasting revolution, to grief.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
You have to be careful to kill a fly that is perched on your scrotum.
Ghana
It is only by our hands that we can build this continent to the standard that we envy and admire in the advanced countries.
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
Death must take place in the heart to be believed in. After love dies man believes in his death.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
The fall of the nation, there is no; Faithfulness, Kindness and Knowledge of God in your sacred land.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
Ghana is a huge grindstone, and depending on what you are made of, can grind you down or polish you up.
Alba Kunadu Sumprim (A place of beautiful nonsense)
Your baby is crying," says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanian way of saying your cell phone is ringing.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
The glorious presence of God is with us. Let us rise in mighty strength to build the nation.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
Ghana and Nigeria resented each other and competed for supremacy in every sphere—politics, academia, sports, you name it.
Chinua Achebe (There Was a Country: A Memoir)
African leaders must desire to liberates it’s people through intensive education (formal and informal). The African people deserve to be educated.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
There is enough work for every soul, if we use our specific gifts to meet the specific needs of the society.
Lailah Gifty Akita
loss” is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
Krezy, he pronounced it, krezy. Pure Roscommon. Pure Ghana.
Sebastian Barry (The Temporary Gentleman)
She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we’d never seen.
Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin)
My cardinal belief is that it is the natives of the land that till the land best, with passion and meaning. The advanced nations of this world built their countries by the sweat of their indigenes.
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
One group of huge men from Congo and Ghana yelled insults at the beasts from the top of their lungs. They brandished war hammers, Nzappa zaps, Japanese Tachi blades, and ancient Greek Harpē swords.
A.O. Peart
I tell Mum she married a patriarch Look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s And your point is? You really can’t expect him to ‘get you’, as you put it I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women She says human beings are complex I tell her not patronize me
Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
The coast of what is now Nigeria became known as "the slave coast," just as the coast of neighboring Ghana to the west was called "the gold coast" and that west of Ghana was (and still is) called "the ivory coast.
Thomas Sowell (Conquests and Cultures: An International History)
In the village there was a man whose job it was to clear up all the shit from the holes in the ground. He used to collect it in a big copper pan and walk off with it balanced on his head. Proud that he’s got a job. All the kids run behind him and dance in front of him shouting, “Shithead! Shithead!” and laughing those little African laughs. Whenever he gets a chance he puts his hand in the shit pan on his head and flicks shit at them. They all run away laughing, but apparently, he’s quite a good aim, occasionally catching a kid right in the face with shit. This, apparently, is a daily occurrence, and I thought it was quite a good story.
Karl Wiggins (Gunpowder Soup)
When Kwame Nkrumah, the pro-Chinese ruler of Ghana, was on a state visit to Beijing, Mossad orchestrated the uprising that led to both Nkrumah’s overthrow and the destruction of the CSIS infrastructure in the country.
Gordon Thomas (Gideon's Spies: The Inside Story of Israel's Legendary Secret Service)
Ghana was a particularly relevant example for us subjects in the remaining colonies and dominions of the British Empire. There was a growing confidence, not just a feeling, that we would do just as well parting ways with Her Majesty’s empire. If Ghana seemed more effective, as some of our people like to say, perhaps it was because she was smaller in size and neat, as if it was tied together more delicately by well-groomed, expert hands.
Chinua Achebe (There Was a Country: A Memoir)
There is a lot of money in Africa. There’s a lot of value being created by the people of Africa, from Egypt to Ghana to Zambia and everywhere in between. Ideas are flowing from African minds, innovations are emerging from African intellect, African businesses are providing solutions and valuable products and services. We are seeing it now and we will see it even more as the century progresses. As an investor, I’m putting big bets on Africa.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Botswana was rich in diamonds, Ghana in cocoa and gold, Morocco in phosphates. There were many countries I was eager to visit and revisit, such as Zambia, with its emeralds and copper, and Cameroon, awash in oil. I could not wait to visit
Jim Rogers (Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip)
Vicharvanu ae chhe ke je nagarikdharmana kanuno ghade chhe, na to aatli adalati thothabaji pachhi aemana ghana khara nagarik banya chhe, na to aene chutnara tola khara aarth ma rashtriya nagrik banya chhe. Nagarik chhodo manas pan kya banya chhe?
Jay Vasavada (JSK : Jay Shree Krishna)
Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone With the Wind in 1937. She was 37 years old at the time. Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1948 at the age of 49. Ruth Gordon picked up her first Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary’s Baby. She was 72 years old. Billie Jean King took the battle of women’s worth to a tennis court in Houston’s Astrodome to outplay Bobby Riggs. She was 31 years of age. Grandma Moses began a painting career at the age of 76. Anne Morrow Lindbergh followed in the shadow of her husband until she began to question the meaning of existence for individual women. She published her thoughts in Gift from the Sea in 1955, at 49. Shirley Temple Black was Ambassador to Ghana at the age of 47. Golda Meir in 1969 was elected prime minister of Israel. She had just turned 71. This summer Barbara Jordan was given official duties as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. She is 40 years old. You can tell yourself these people started out as exceptional. You can tell yourself they had influence before they started. You can tell yourself the conditions under which they achieved were different from yours. Or you can be like a woman I knew who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it and then said to herself, “It’s my turn.” I was 37 years old at the time.
Erma Bombeck (Forever, Erma)
Nkrumah declared that we faced neither East nor West but we faced forward. But, see, we can face forward and just look at the horizon. Sometimes, as I think of Ghana, I am tempted to believe that we kept looking East and West and never made up our minds, so we just stood still.
Nana Awere Damoah
King established a Pan-African frame for what was to follow. He harkened back to a night in West Africa in 1957 when he stood with Ralph Bunche and the black congressmen Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Diggs and witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s installation as the first president of the new nation of Ghana. Being there had called up the most primal associations, linking him, present-day Africans, and his own slave forebears in an intimate embrace. He had strolled the streets of Accra and wept with joy as he heard both young and old Ghanaians calling out “free-doom!
Jonathan Rieder (Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation)
It’s about soldiers who don’t think for themselves, they just follow orders. The song got him into a lot of trouble. Like what? Ironically, he was banned from Ghana. And because of the song, the very soldiers he spoke out against were ordered to kill his mother. Did they? The zombies did.
Kwame Alexander (Solo)
Over the course of nearly a half-century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by U.S. strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire.
Jeffrey D. Sachs (Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable)
In the 1960s, South Korea, Ghana, and the Philippines were all poor countries. American diplomats used to bet with each other as to which of the three would become rich, and which would remain mired in poverty. Most diplomats thought that the economies of Ghana and the Philippines were the ones about to take off. They explained their prediction by pointing out that both Ghana and the Philippines were warm tropical countries where it was easy to grow food and there were many natural resources. In contrast, South Korea was a cold, resource-poor country that seemed to have nothing in its favor.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
So, the women he's loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having gotten what they wanted always promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy... They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all. They were dreamer-women. Very dangerous women. Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, "brutal, senseless," etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become. So, insatiable women. Un-pleasable women. Who wanted above all things that could not be had. Not what THEY could not have--no such thing for such women--but what wasn't there to be had in the first place.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
The youth. The youth of Africa. The youth of this world. Are we harnessing the potential of the youth enough? Are the young ones… giving off their best to the continent, the nation, the universe that is giving us so much? Why do we think we can only contribute something after age forty? Are we not causing wealth loss to our generation?
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
It is broken in four places. Just the cracks in the beginning, left untreated now for years. His mother in Kokrobité, Olu in Boston, Kofi in Jamestown, Folasadé all over. That woman, all over him, deep in the fascia, in the muscle, in the tissue, in the matter, in the blood. He is dying of a broken heart. He cannot help but laugh at this.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
Marjorie’s father pulled her aside that night and asked her if she knew the answer to the white man’s question, and she had shrugged. Her father had told her that the word had come to mean something entirely different from what it used to mean. That the young of Ghana, itself an infant country, had been born to a place emptied of its colonizers. Because they didn’t see white men every day the way people of his mother’s generation and older had, the word could take on new meaning for them. They lived in a Ghana where they were the majority, where theirs was the only skin color for miles around. To them, to call someone “obroni” was an innocent act, an interpretation of race as skin color.
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
If I had hoped to skirt the sense of being a stranger in the world by coming to Ghana, then disappointment awaited me. And I had suspected as much before I arrived. Being a stranger concerns not only matters of familiarity, belonging, and exclusion but as well involves a particular relation to the past. If the past is another country, then I am its citizen. I am the relic of an experience most preferred not to remember, as if the sheer will to forget could settle or decide the matter of history. .I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over. I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead. And history is how the secular world attends to the dead.
Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route)
Looking back at a world that considered her irrelevant with a look that said she considered the world irrelevant, too.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
Laziness has made our cities unclean. If we begin to work and act appropriately, we will clean our cities of any dirt.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
Peace and gladness in every home is a peace for the society, nation and the world.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
The failure of the citizens to pray for the nation will lead to its collapse.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
Come to Africa and help! Wherever you may be in the world, there is something you can give back to the continent that gave you a name and an identity, at least.
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
Don’t wait till you have grey hair before you believe people will take you seriously because scientifically, grey hair is a sign of old age and not necessarily of wisdom.
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
Don’t cause wealth loss to your generation! Life is too short to be little. You have an impact to make on your generation and the time to start was yesterday.
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
Education is no barometer for superstition
Karen Palmer (Spellbound: Inside West Africa's Witch Camps)
Don’t under-rate the scope of your influence in your youth. Don’t think you have all the time to make a difference in this world. Recognize that both brown and green leaves fall to the ground.
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
Looking around today, I see a lot of young people who act as if they have all the time in the world, and older persons who think this attitude is alright. It is unfortunate that there are young citizens who still believe life begins at forty and that life before forty is non-scoring, and older citizens who still insist that unless you are old, you have nothing to offer, equating age with wisdom.
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
If I’d realised how much that pressure would build inside me, the slow descent into a dull existence, days blemished with concern for my dad and whether I’m looking after him properly — well, I would have stayed out late some nights, lost my virginity at sixteen instead of still having it, developed a fondness for alcohol, sat at bars, smoked weed, danced at clubs, and turned strangers into friends.
Jessica George (Maame)
I tell Mum she married a patriarch look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s and your point is? you really can’t expect him to ‘get you’, as you put it I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women she says human beings are complex I tell her not to patronize me
Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
Suggested Reading Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun Aidoo, Ama Ata. No Sweetness Here and Other Stories Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Healers Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names Cole, Teju. Every Day Is for the Thief Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Morrison, Toni. Beloved Okparanta, Chinelo. Happiness, Like Water Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo. Dust Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North Selasi, Taiye. Ghana Must Go aaknopf.com
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a lot of African innovation, experience and culture have been lost, undocumented.
Nana Awere Damoah (Through the Gates of Thought)
Young men and women are causing wealth loss to their generation because they are sitting on inert ideas, bottled-up potential energy and scratching the ground when they should be gliding the skies and perambulating with the stars. These people are so disillusioned they live life without any urgency.
Nana Awere Damoah (I Speak of Ghana)
Today, the witch theory of causality has fallen into disuse, with the exception of a few isolated pockets in Papua New Guinea, India, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Tanzania, Kenya, or Sierra Leone, where “witches” are still burned to death. A 2002 World Health Organization study, for example, reported that every year more than 500 elderly women in Tanzania alone are killed for being “witches.” In Nigeria, children by the thousands are being rounded up and torched as “witches,” and in response the Nigerian government arrested a self-styled bishop named Okon Williams, who it accused of killing 110 such children.
Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
Better means being open. It means allowing yourself to surrender. It means saying things which are honest and true, Godlike even. It means leaning into the quiet, even when it's loud with echoes of the past. It means gathering together on Sundays with others who, like you, have come from Ghana and Nigeria, Senegal and Jamaica, to London, to build a new life. It means making space for you all to pray, to reach towards your innermost desires; to reach past your beautiful, through your ugly, towards your vulnerable. It means making the space to feel safe enough to ask for anything, and believing what you ask for might be possible.
Caleb Azumah Nelson (Small Worlds)
Before leaving the earth altogether, let us as: How does Music stand with respect to its instruments, their pitches, the scales, modes and rows, repeating themselves from octave to octave, the chords, harmonies, and tonalities, the beats, meters, and rhythms, the degrees of amplitude (pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, forte, fortissimo)? Though the majority go each day to the schools where these matters are taught, they read when time permits of Cape Canaveral, Ghana, and Seoul. And they’ve heard tell of the music synthesizer, magnetic tape. They take for granted the dials on radios and television sets. A tardy art, the art of Music. And why so slow? Is it because, once having learned a notation of pitches and durations, musicians will not give up their Greek? Children have been modern artists for years now. What is it about Music that sends not only the young but adults too as far into the past as they can conveniently go? The module? But our choices never reached around the globe, and in our laziness, when we changed over to the twelve-tone system, we just took the pitches of the previous music as though we were moving into a furnished apartment and had no time to even take the pictures off the walls. What excuse? That nowadays things are happening so quickly that we become thoughtless? Or were we clairvoyant and knew ahead of time that the need for furniture of any kind would disappear? (Whatever you place there in front of you sits established in the air.) The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we formerly made, and this was what kept us breathing, was what took place within them. Their emptiness we took for what it was – a place where anything could happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became inviting (chances in consciousness, etc.) to go outside, where breathing is child’s play: no walls, not even the glass ones which, though we could see through them, killed the birds while they were flying.
John Cage (A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings)
There are now six times more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than there are in all of the United States. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in the United States and Scotland combined. Korea has gone from 1 percent to 40 percent Christian in a hundred years, and experts believe the same thing is going to happen in China. If there are half a billion Chinese Christians fifty years from now, that will change the course of human history.6 In most cases, the Christianity that is growing is not the more secularized, belief-thin versions predicted by the sociologists. Rather, it is a robust supernaturalist kind of faith, with belief in miracles, Scriptural authority, and personal conversion.
Timothy J. Keller (The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism)
Our actions and the problems they create are connected, all around the world. Goats in the Mongolian desert add to air pollution in California; throwing away a computer helps create an illegal economy that makes people sick in Ghana; a loophole in a treaty contributes to deforestation in the American South to generate electricity in England; our idea of the perfect carrot could mean that many others rot in the fields. We can’t pretend anymore that the things we do and wear and eat and use exist only for us, that they don’t have a wider impact beyond our individual lives, which also means that we’re all in this together. • A lack of transparency on the part of governments and corporations has meant that our actions have consequences we are unaware of (see above), and if we knew about them, we would be surprised and angry. (Now, maybe, you are.) • It’s important to understand your actions and larger social, cultural, industrial, and economic processes in context, because then you can better understand which specific policies and practices would make a difference, and what they would achieve. • Living in a way that honors your values is important, even if your personal habits aren’t going to fix everything. We need to remember what is at stake, and the small sacrifices we make may help us do that, if you need reminding. If we know what our sacrifices mean and why they might matter, we might be more willing to make them.
Tatiana Schlossberg (Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have)
L'unico scopo di una relazione è quello di inscenare, in miniatura, tutto lo stramaledetto dramma della vita e della morte. L'amore nasce come nasce un bambino. L'amore cresce come cresce un bambino. Un uomo sa bene che deve morire, ma non avendo conosciuto altre realtà che la vita non crede veramente nella propria morte. E poi, un giorno, il suo amore si raffredda. Il cuore dell'amore smette di battere. L'amore muore. In questo modo, l'uomo impara che la morte è la realtà: che la morte può esistere nell'essenza di una persona, la "sua" morte. La perdita di un animale domestico o di una rosa o di un genitore può farlo soffrire, ma non sono convincenti, non abbastanza. La morte deve avvenire nel cuore per essere creduta. Dopo la morte dell'amore, l'uomo riesce a credere nella propria morte.
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
Finally there would be total unity within the Federation, the first step toward people’s being at home on any planet instead of only one. The principle from the old United States, basically; it didn’t matter if you were raised in Vermont and lived in California. You were still home, still American. If your name was Baird or Yamamura or Kwame, you weren’t necessarily loyal to Scotland, Japan, or Ghana, but to America. A few decades of space travel, and the statement became “I’m a citizen of Earth,” and no matter the country. This ship was that kind of first step. Whether born on Earth or Epsillon Indii VI, you were a citizen of the Federation. The children on this colony Enterprise would visit the planets of the Federation and feel part of each, welcome upon all. This starship was the greatest, most visionary melting pot of all, this spacegoing colony. Unique. Hopeful. Risky.
Diane Carey (Ghost Ship (Star Trek: The Next Generation, #1))
The second of the dimensions that Hofstede's team added to their original four was long-term–short-term orientation, based on the Chinese Values Survey. In addition, Michael Minkov identified a similar dimension using the World Values Survey. While the precise nature of the constructs varies, African nations tend to score strongly toward the short-term end of the spectrum in all of them. For example, Ghana is the second most short-term oriented society out of 93 countries in the World Values Survey; Nigeria the fifth most and, out of the bottom 20 countries, 6 are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Chinese Values Survey construct of long-term orientation, the only two Sub-Saharan countries out of 23 studied were Zimbabwe and Nigeria, which respectively scored fifth and second from bottom. Although a different construct, African societies also score very low on the Globe measure of future orientation.9 Experimental
Gurnek Bains (Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization)
Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!
Kwame Nkrumah
Racism is group consciousness at its most repugnant, built on the premise that human beings can be divided by skin color into innately superior and inferior groups. Yet, paradoxically, racism is also a form of group blindness. Racial categories like 'black,' 'white,' and 'Asian' erase ethnic differences and identities. The original African slaves brought to America knew - and might have tried to tell their children - that they hailed from the Mandinka tribe or the Ashanti people, or that they were descended from a long line of Yoruba kings. But even as they were stripped of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, America's slaves were also stripped of these ethnic identities. Slave families were deliberately broken up, and heritages were lost, reduced by the powerful to a pigment and nothing more. Even now, immigrants from, say, Ghana, Jamaica, or Nigeria are often stunned to discover that in America they are just 'black.
Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
Ik stelde voor dat ik met de koning op staande voet Leopoldstad zou verlaten en dat de regering het daags voordien gesloten vriendschapsverdrag met Kongo opnieuw zou onderzoeken. Buitenstaanders hadden blijkbaar mijn woorden opgevangen, want niet lang daarna deed de ambassadeur van Ghana een demarche bij mij met de vraag of de zaak niet min of meer kon worden bijgelegd. Ik ging daarmee akkoord. Er volgde een bijeenkomst van enkele ministers. Het voorstel was dat Lumumba tijdens de lunch die na de middag was gepland een tafelrede zou houden waarin hij hulde zou brengen aan de koning en het Belgische koloniale werk. Minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Pierre Wigny en de diplomatieke adviseur van gouverneur-generaal Cornelis Fredericq De Ridder schreven in mijn bijzijn de redevoering. Ik liet vervolgens de tekst aan Lumumba bezorgen met de vraag of hij die al dan niet aannam. Het antwoord was positief. De ambassadeur van Ghana trad hierbij als tussenpersoon op.
Gaston Eyskens (Gaston Eyskens de Memoires)
The Ashanti conquered forests to build an empire, but they knew nature was from whence they came and to nature they would return. They would tame the land, but they would know when Asase Yaa needed her rest. Their most sacred duty was to ensure harmony and peace between the community, the earth, and the ancestors; to ensure justice. To the community, the Ashanti pledged loyalty. To the earth and the ancestors, they made sacrifices -- to each their due. But harmony is a fragile thing, and so is justice. They bend and break easily. We bend and break them with greed, with violence, with lies and obscurations. The people sold into slavery are modern-day Ghanaians' ancestors too. Their backs and hearts broke under whip and weight. The incomplete story Ghana tells about slavery is a breach. Ashanti culture was breached by colonization. My family broke before and I knew it might break again. The earth broke from the force of a meteoroid, which sent shock waves in every direction.
Nadia Owusu (Aftershocks)
Cups and Rings and Drawings. I stopped by a famed park, Picked a blank sheet And drew a cup. For me, it represented me holding myself up in a storm, It represented the start of life, Something to pour out every lesson learnt Out of every misfortune we’ve ever been. The cup — the container to hold chocolate drink Water. Wine and strawberries. I drew a ring, A marriage between blessing and joy The bloom of flowers in spring The sprouting of leaves in midsummer And the smell of fresh grasses at night. I drew Monalisa I painted art I became Michaelangelo Da Vinci I became the Renaissance I healed through art “Don’t you know that you are gods?” So the first day, I cleared the storms out of my life. The second day, I dried all my tears The third day, I reinvented myself. The fourth day, I finally remembered what it felt like to be happy Like two children drawing arts on a canvass. Delilah & Annabelle Arts curled out of girls trying to reinvent the world Or the colours of the rainbow. The fifth day, I opened the windows wide To let the lights shine in. “When I’m down on my knees you’re how I pray.” The sixth day I created my favourite masterpiece — Baroque. The seventh day, I admired myself in the mirror. I missed me I missed the time I had so much optimism I miss you And I miss writing so innocently.
J.Y. Frimpong
A vida dela até aquele momento tinha parecido tão original, um conto tecido elegantemente, com um elenco brilhante de personagens - ela: a princesa sem mãe de um palácio vertical, o apartamento de quatro andares na Ilha Victoria; eles: amigos fervorosos e glamurosos de seu pai, os empregados; ele: o rei viúvo do castelo. Se tivesse tido uma morte apropriada à vida deles como ela a conhecia - em um acidente de carro, por exemplo, em seu amado Deux Chevaux, ou de câncer de fígado ou pulmão, até o fim fumando Caos e engolindo rum -, ela poderia ter tolerado a perda. Teria ficado em luto. Teria se descoberto uma órfã em um apartamento de quatro andares, depois de perder ambos os pais aos treze anos, mas teria sido, enlutada dessa forma, uma coisa que ela reconheceria (trágica) em vez daquilo que se tornou: uma parte da história (genérica).
Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)
Another dangerous neoliberal word circulating everywhere that is worth zooming in on is the word ‘resilience’. On the surface, I think many people won’t object to the idea that it is good and beneficial for us to be resilient to withstand the difficulties and challenges of life. As a person who lived through the atrocities of wars and sanctions in Iraq, I’ve learnt that life is not about being happy or sad, not about laughing or crying, leaving or staying. Life is about endurance. Since most feelings, moods, and states of being are fleeting, endurance, for me, is the common denominator that helps me go through the darkest and most beautiful moments of life knowing that they are fleeing. In that sense, I believe it is good for us to master the art of resilience and endurance. Yet, how should we think about the meaning of ‘resilience’ when used by ruling classes that push for wars and occupations, and that contribute to producing millions of deaths and refugees to profit from plundering the planet? What does it mean when these same warmongers fund humanitarian organizations asking them to go to war-torn countries to teach people the value of ‘resilience’? What happens to the meaning of ‘resilience’ when they create frighteningly precarious economic structures, uncertain employment, and lay off people without accountability? All this while also asking us to be ‘resilient’… As such, we must not let the word ‘resilience’ circulate or get planted in the heads of our youth uncritically. Instead, we should raise questions about what it really means. Does it mean the same thing for a poor young man or woman from Ghana, Ecuador, Afghanistan vs a privileged member from the upper management of a U.S. corporation? Resilience towards what? What is the root of the challenges for which we are expected to be resilient? Does our resilience solve the cause or the root of the problem or does it maintain the status quo while we wait for the next disaster? Are individuals always to blame if their resilience doesn’t yield any results, or should we equally examine the social contract and the entire structure in which individuals live that might be designed in such a way that one’s resilience may not prevail no matter how much perseverance and sacrifice one demonstrates? There is no doubt that resilience, according to its neoliberal corporate meaning, is used in a way that places the sole responsibility of failure on the shoulders of individuals rather than equally holding accountable the structure in which these individuals exist, and the precarious circumstances that require work and commitment way beyond individual capabilities and resources. I find it more effective not to simply aspire to be resilient, but to distinguish between situations in which individual resilience can do, and those for which the depth, awareness, and work of an entire community or society is needed for any real and sustainable change to occur. But none of this can happen if we don’t first agree upon what each of us mean when we say ‘resilience,’ and if we have different definitions of what it means, then we should ask: how shall we merge and reconcile our definitions of the word so that we complement not undermine what we do individually and collectively as people. Resilience should not become a synonym for surrender. It is great to be resilient when facing a flood or an earthquake, but that is not the same when having to endure wars and economic crises caused by the ruling class and warmongers. [From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]
Louis Yako