Ivorian Quotes

But Papa was right that most Liberians, most, did not choose Liberia to be their country. Just as Ivorians did not choose. Just as Ghanaians and so many others did not choose; some men in Berlin in 1884 drew those lines, gave those names. Without agency, who can love a country forced upon them?

shakedowns and restrictive new laws. Ivorians from the north, who tend to share family names and the Muslim faith with immigrants from Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, came in for similar treatment. If a single word can be said to have started a war, ivoirité started Ivory Coast’s. Cool B’s father

Clarissa Tan, who wrote in 2014 about the issue of Chinese racism. Although ethnically Chinese, Clarissa had lived for a time in Singapore. As she herself said, there she had been a “banana,” which is to say that she was “yellow on the outside but white on the inside”—that is, someone who looks ethnically Chinese but whose thinking was regarded as “Western.” As she pointed out, Asia is filled with labels like this, where people are summed up along ethnic lines in ways that are rarely flattering. The terms that are reserved for foreigners, and white people in particular, are especially ugly. They include “farang in Thailand, gaijin in Japan, mat salleh in Malaysia, gweilo in Hong Kong.” This last one is particularly interesting. Gwei means “ghost,” and it is meant literally—a white person is not fully human. “Indeed, in many Chinese dialects, the idiomatic term for any foreigner, be they Indian or Ivorian or Irish, contains the ghostly ‘gwei’; only ethnic Chinese are constantly referred to as ‘ren’, which means ‘person’. In other words, only the Chinese really exist as full-blooded people.