“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?”

We can appreciate each other’s languages. And the question of being uncomfortable about our languages would go away.

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind?

Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.

The Bible in translation is being read to thousands and thousands in Africa. It is an integral part of their functioning and the way they look at the world.

You get another person who operates only in an African language and there are many persons who operate only in African languages; he or she is excluded from all the goodies that come with English.

What is translated from English and into English – and in what quantities – is a question of power.

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.”