Hugh Masekela Quotes

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

Exploitation was rampant before statehood, and various factions actively tried to eradicate the roots of Hawaiian culture in the process of converting the natives to European religious beliefs. Some of the results can never be undone. We try to honor what is left.

White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.

I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough.

When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

Everything bad about France was transferred to Quebec.

The white race seems to me to blame in saying that all the reason for its interference in Africa is the improvement of the native African, and then to start on altering African institutions without in the least understanding them. It seems to me that the leading men among the European educated Africans have depended too much on the religious side of the question.

What will remain of our cultural identity if audiovisual Europe consists of ... sitting in front of Japanese TV sets showing American programs.

[W]e can be certain that, though preached to more than fifty years, if they [the Aztecs] were now left alone, if the Spanish nation were not to intercede, I am certain that in less than fifty years there would be no trace of the preaching which has been done for them.

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture.

People looked up to us for our values and leadership. But today, they laugh as we are busy debating whether one of the seven wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal, was actually built by Indians.

In 'National Geographic,' you always saw pictures of tribal Africa. And here I am, sitting in Nairobi in our suburban house, watching TV and thinking, 'Why is it always going to be these tribal people 'that are the ambassadors of our image?

The mainstream consumed our culture.

It would be a sad day for India if it has to inherit the English scale and the English tastes so utterly unsuitable to the Indian environment.

A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power.

In Scotland, we're a colony in more ways than one. So when directors come up to work, there's a very particular way they want Scotland to look like and to behave like.

We were a Western civilisation, an English speaking civilisation, both NZ and Australia, and we had all these influences coming from both Great Britain and America to us; sending us their culture in the shape and form of movies and television.