“They want to be the ones telling people: “This is what we have done in history” but when people begin to say, “No this is what we have done in history” it’s a different thing.”

How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go?

The Bible affects everybody’s life who is a Christian, from the middle class in Europe to the peasant in Africa and Asia.

The same questions are there in Native American languages, they’re there in native Canadian languages, they’re there is some marginalized European languages, like say, Irish.

The Bible has affected their lives, but in translation, since they do not read the Bible in the original Greek or Hebrew.

Through the act of translation we break out of linguistic confinement and reach many other communities.

So what I thought was just an African problem or issue is actually a global phenomenon about relationships of power between languages and cultures.

Of course it’s very, very important for me to feel Kenya, to feel, every day, this is where images come from. So to be taken away from that by political pressure or other means – one is taken away from the area, which is the basis of inspiration – is difficult.

I think a repressive regime always fears people who are awakened – particularly ordinary people. If they are awakened, I think governments all over the world feel uncomfortable about that; they want to be in control.

Many people do not know that Jesus did not speak Latin or English or Hebrew; he spoke Aramaic. But nobody knows that language.

A person who acquires English has access to all the things that that language makes possible.

For me, being in prison writing in an African language was a way of saying: “Even if you put me in prison, I will keep on writing in the language which made you put me in prison.”

If poverty was to be sold three cents today, i can’t buy it.

The Pan-Africanism that envisaged the ideal of wholeness was gradually cut down to the size of a continent, then a nation, a region, an ethnos, a clan, and even a village in some instances But Pan-Africanism has not outlived its mission.

Life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful.

Those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mould it and those committed to breaking it up; those who aim to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow […] and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes

Then they begin to see through their language that the problems described there are the same as the problems they are having. They can identify with characters from another language group.

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with.

Let me begin by saying not only you can’t have democracy with $75 million. You can’t even have it with $750 billion.

I was president then. I’m not president now. When I said it, this would be a sign of goodwill to begin the talks.

When you begin to become conscious, more aware, when your eyes begin to open, the first thing you see is how deluded you are and how much you’re holding onto that which makes you suffer. This is, in many ways, the most important step: Are you willing to be aware?

Once the pursuit of truth begins to haunt the mind, it becomes an ideal never wholly attained.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.