African Diaspora Quotes

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portuguese. the black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead.

I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

My parents met in Kenya. My father is African, is Kenyan. The Kenyan side of my family was involved in the anti-colonial movement.

We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.

The biggest surprise for me, without a doubt, was that the first black people who came to the United States weren't the 20 who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. All of us had been taught that. The first African came to Florida in 1513. And the huge shock is we know his name, Juan Garrido, and that he wasn't a slave. He was free!

There has been a struggle to reclaim the African self. That struggle has been on the part of a minority of dedicated African-Americans who never gave up our African identity at no time during our stay here.

Africa for the Africans.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.

American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.

Like most Africans, I had to work much harder and show much deeper belief than others.

X is not my real name. But if you study history, you'll find why no Black man in the Western Hemisphere knows his real name. Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa and took us into the Western Hemisphere and sold us there, and our names were stripped from us and so today we don't know who we really are. I am one of those who admit it, and so I just put X up there to keep from wearing his name.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was greatest planned accumulation of wealth that the world has ever known.

I should think the souls of the Africans would sit heavily on the swords of the Americans.

If I die in Atlanta my work shall then only begin, but I shall live, in the physical or spiritual to see the day of Africa’s glory.

The Dominican Republic says 'We're black behind the ears.' And in Mexico, 'there's a black grandma in the closet.' They know, they've just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them.

From his roots as a slave, the American Negro - sometimes sorrowing, sometimes jubilant but always hopeful - has touched, illuminated, and influenced the most remote preserves of world civilisation. I and my dance theater celebrate this trembling beauty.

What shall we do with the Negroes after they are free? I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we get rid of the Negroes. Certainly they cannot, if we don’t get rid of the Negroes whom we have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us…. Now we shall have no use for our very large navy. What then are our difficulties in sending the blacks away? … I wish you would examine the question and give me your views upon it and go into the figures as you did before in some degree as to show whether the Negroes can be exported

When I was younger, I would see shea butter being sold on the street, and I was interested how people were still coating themselves in the theater of Africanism. You see that in dashikis and hairstyles and music.

I went to South Africa - Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg - and those were definitely the "I've arrived" shows. Outside of the money, the success, the accolades ... This is a place that we, in urban communities, never dream of. We never dream of Africa. Like, "Damn, this is the motherland." You feel it as soon as you touch down. That moment changed my whole perspective on how to convey my art.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.

I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.