If poverty was to be sold three cents today, i can’t buy it.
NGUGI WA THIONG'OSeen as an economic, political, cultural, and psychological re-membering vision, it should continue to guide remembering practices
More Ngugi wa Thiong'o Quotes
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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.
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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.
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How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?
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The Bible has affected their lives, but in translation, since they do not read the Bible in the original Greek or Hebrew.
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People went to war as a result of it and even today, every Sunday.
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If a novel is written in a certain language with certain characters from a particular community and the story is very good or illuminating, then that work is translated into the language of another community.
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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?
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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.
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In terms of language, English is very dominant vis-Ã-vis African language. That in itself is a power relationship – between languages and communities – because the English language is a determinant of the ladder to achievement.
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Through the act of translation we break out of linguistic confinement and reach many other communities.
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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.
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So what I thought was just an African problem or issue is actually a global phenomenon about relationships of power between languages and cultures.
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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
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It was a revelation for me, in a practical sense, that you could write in an African language and still reach an audience beyond that language through the art of translation.
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Any writer likes to be near the area which is the location of his work.
NGUGI WA THIONG'O