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Quote by Maya Angelou

“Why should I be afraid of you?' He was still laughing. He said 'Maybe you think I'll think you are a missionary and I'll eat you.' I said 'I don't think that anyway. If more Africans had eaten more missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.”

Book:The Heart of a Woman

Work

The Heart of a Woman

This novel delves into the emotional landscape of a woman's experiences, examining her relationships, self-discovery, and the trials she faces in her quest for fulfillment and understanding. more

Author

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an American author, poet, playwright, actress, and lecturer, known for her profound exploration of race, gender, and culture in her work. Her autobiographical works, including 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,' which detailed her early life of poverty and sexual exploitation, have gained widespread acclaim. more

“Africans began life in the Americas as subjects profoundly shaped by their Atlantic experience, and the communities they created in the Americas were organized around solutions to the specific problems they faced. The cultures they produced do not reflect the simple transfer and continuation of Africa in the Americas but rather reflect the elaboration of specific cultural content and its transformation to meet the particular needs of slave life in the Atlantic system: their need to reassert some kind of healthy relationship to ancestors; to manage death; to produce social networks, communities, and relations of kinship; to address the imbalance of power between black and white; to stake a claim to their bodies to counter the plantation economy’s claim to ownership. In this sense, the cultural practices of diasporic Africa could have meaning only outside Africa. Shared Atlantic experience and memory served as a touchstone for new cultural practices that emerged in the New World diaspora. Only through the capacity and willingness to invent and experiment—to grow and change the cultural tools carried in memory and create new ones to meet the demands of this new world—could Africans hope to remain recognizable to themselves as human beings in a system that held so much of their humanity in callous and calculated disregard. African immigrants retained that foothold in ways determined by the varied circumstances of their slavery: the immigrant slave might adapt a remembered ritual practice to new applications in American slavery or explore and perhaps ultimately adopt an entirely novel practice. The means were extraordinarily diverse because of the great variety of settings and conditions in which the colonial economies of the Americas enslaved human beings. The continuity Africans needed was not the static, ossifying connection of conformity of practice—doing things in the present as they had been done in the past, even when the context of past cultural forms no longer corresponded to the needs and circumstances of the present. Rather, the connection Africans needed was a narrative continuity between past and present—an epistemological means of connecting the dots between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story out of incoherent experience.”

Culture Community Slavery African American African Diaspora

Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

Source: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

“A notable quote from this chapter could be: "By embracing the term 'bulan,' we are reclaiming our true identity as the descendants of the 'mother of mankind,' acknowledging the rich history and cultural heritage of the African continent, and letting go of the colonial labels and language imposed upon us.”

Identity Decolonization Bulan African Diaspora African Descent Cultural Respect African Heritage Anti Bulanism Cultural Reclamation Language Redefinition

Author:Reuel-Azriel

“My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's dead eye my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral it takes root in the red flesh of the soil it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience.”

Black Authors Caribbean Literature African Diaspora Postcolonial Literature Negritude

Book:Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

Source: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

“If you take a seed, [...] and scatter it across the lands, some will end up in marshes, some in rich fertile lands with flowing streams, others in sand, and others among the mountains and rocks. If the seed is tough, it will adapt and survive in all conditions; if it is weak, it will perish. The same seed in one country may yield a baobab but in another an oak. Our race is a potent seed. Whether you are from Ghana or Guyana, you are born of the same seed and you will be of the same fruit. We must recognize our fruition in London, in Paris, in Dakar, in Harare, and in Maputo. Our roots are deep and wide. We must extend our hearts and minds, like bridges, over the swamps of racial injustice, to link us together.”