African Feminism Quotes

Through Miss Behave I am attempting to reclaim my voice one word at a time and live my truth to the best of my ability ~ Malebo Sephodi

Misbehaviour does not require a cape, shades or a bazooka. It is in decisions we make that challenge the notions adopted to keep us well behaved ~ Malebo Sephodi

To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others. ~ Malebo Sephodi

The woman leads a twofold existence indeed, the depth of her social ostracism being equally only by her stoic endurance. To live in harmony with the society of man, to conform with men's demands, she resigns herself to a self-effacement that is demeaning, she sacrifices herself. ~ Thomas Sankara

I want to live in a society where we are all liberated. This is what my feminism looks like ~ Malebo Sephodi

And that makes us (black women) feel like we have spokespeople, because everybody we encounter feels they have a piece of you and can tell you how to live your life ~ Malebo Sephodi

How do I negotiate my way across life with a system that I find so violent yet it seems so normal to many others? ~ Malebo Sephodi

Society is obsessed with women's bodies and I take my body back by doing whatever it is that I want to do with my body ~ Malebo Sephodi

I personally am tired of being a subject of study and rescue. A subject that is not imagined upon to have their own thought patterns. ~ Malebo Sephodi

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither ... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. ~ Toni Morrison

African agriculture today is among, or is, the most under-capitalized in the world. Only seven percent of arable land in Africa is irrigated, compared to 40 percent in Asia. ~ Eleni Zaude Gabre-Madhin

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

I think the eyeball is the same, [in] an American or African. The problem is the same, the treatment is the same. Yet why should there be so much variation in quality and in service? ~ Thulasiraj Ravilla

Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the republic. ~ Frederick Douglass

Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom. ~ Albert Camus

I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world. ~ Lee Daniels

A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world! ~ E.L. Doctorow

Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition. ~ Camille Paglia

So much of feminism has been women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much of antifeminism has been men telling them these things didn't happen. "You were not just raped," your rapist may say, and then if you persist there may be death threats, because killing people is the easy way to be the only voice in the room. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Your biceps, six-pack abs, and daring attitude are of no use if you cannot protect and respect women! ~ Avijeet Das

At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is 'community' - the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct. ~ Michelle Alexander

Women that speak against Islam are being labelled as islamophobic, as though our right to free speech is disregarded, when it comes down to an oppressive regime, which does not even recognise women as human... ~ Anita B. Sulser PhD

I was a Methodist when I was anything. What flavor are you selling? The missionary lifted his hands in a gesture of harmlessness that went back to the African plains of the Pleistocene. I have no weapon; I seek no fight. ~ James S.A. Corey

If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further, which means working with France to shore up Chad and the Central African Republic. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don't talk about it, we pretend it doesn't exist, we claim "color blindness," we say white officers treat black men the same way they treat white men. But that's a lie. In fact, the bigger, the darker the black man the greater the fear. The African-American community knows this. Hell, most whites know it. Yet, even though it's a central, if not the defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won't admit it to themselves, or to others. ~ Norm Stamper

Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men's help
except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it. ~ Margaret Mitchell

When my father is stern, no one chastises him. I don't think it's fair that when I act similarly, I'm seen as cruel. I'm making a huge decision, and I'm trying to be wise about it. ~ Kiera Cass

I started to see the bigger picture of things: Islam was not relegated to the tiny, sometimes frustrating and seemingly arbitrary details of practice, but rather entered the larger picture of spirituality and worship that contextualized my womanhood. In order to be able to derive these logical conclusions about my religion, I had to go back to the basics and understand the very fundamental principles upon which it was founded: justice, social equality, racial equality, financial equality, and, possibly most important of all, gender equality. Thus began my lifelong love affair with Islamic feminism. ~ Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

Before I started LimoLand, I mainly bought my clothes in Harlem, where I found clothing my size in fun colors. I still like to go there and see the vibrancy and colors of the neighborhood. I am also very influenced by the colors of my contemporary African and Japanese art collections. ~ Jean Pigozzi

I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices. ~ Lee Daniels

The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs. ~ Dave Barry

Why is this the "new feminism" and not what it looks like: the old objectification? ~ Ariel Levy

As I started to think about how I can claim feminism while also acknowledging my humanity and my imperfections, 'bad feminism' simply seemed like the best answer. ~ Roxane Gay

Nothing is more stimulating and more salutary to (or for) the inner (or inward) development than the exemple of men devoted to the good. It is in the company of men pursuing a same ideal that the still weavering (or unsteady) soul can set oneself ("se fixer", Fr) and stick to (or attach to) everything that is noble and generous. ~ African Spir

To hate is human,
to love is divine.
To destroy is human,
to build is divine.
To fall is human,
to rise is divine.

To break is human,
to heal is divine.
To take is human,
to give is divine.
To feel is human,
to experience is divine. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as a bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you ate alive and whole, and she was said to twitch as she went down your throat. (188) ~ Richard Preston

When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain? ~ Marge Piercy

Listen, baby, life is a series of things we choose and things we carry. The things we choose, well, those are ours. But we don't get a vote on the things we carry. Some are heavier than others, some we can put down eventually, and some are ours to keep. We don't have a choice in the burdens we're given to bear, but we do have a choice in how we hold them. We can strap them to our backs and walk through the world hunched over under the weight like someone who should spend his or her days in a bell tower. Or we can stand tall and straight like one of those African queens carrying a woven basket on her head. ~ Mia Sheridan

You cannot buy our leaders and then sell that to us as freedom." From my new novel, Beyond Southern Africa. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view... ~ Malik Stan Reaves

It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue. ~ Germaine Greer

For fifteen cents a day you can feed an African, they eat pennies. ~ Bo Burnham

Feminism is as old as sexual repression. In this country, women's liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by black liberation the mid-19th century abolitionist movement yielded suffragettes. The mid-20th century civil rights movement yielded women's liberation. Both movements were loudly championed by black men no white men so distinguished themselves. But both abandoned Black Civil Rights and regarded the shift away from the race problem as an inevitable and necessary development. An opportunity to concentrate on exclusively sexist issues. Each time that shift took place, it marked the first stage of divisiveness and heralded a future of splinter groups and self-sabotage. ~ Toni Morrison

My father has passed away. He was African-American. My mother is white. So I was adopted by a couple that was of a similar dynamic as my biological parents. ~ Keegan-Michael Key

My escape route was to emphasize the
idea of "choice." If a woman had a
right to wear a miniskirt, surely I had the right to choose my headscarf. My choice was a sign of my independence
of mind. Surely, to choose to wear
what I wanted was an
assertion of my feminism. I was a feminist, wasn't I?
But I was to learn that
choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off. And that lesson was an important reminder of how truly "free" choice is. ~ Mona Eltahawy

I think I'm speaking for a bunch of girls when I say that the idea that feminism is completely natural and shouldn't even be something that people find mildly surprising ... I find a lot of feminist reading quite confusing and that often there's a set of rules, and people will be like, 'Oh, this person isn't a true feminist because they don't embody this one thing,' and I don't know, often there is a lot of gray area that can be hard to navigate. ~ Lorde

In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land, ~ Miriam Makeba

[Rape is] nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. ~ Susan Brownmiller

We don't want to be wounds ("No, you're the wound!") but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having them, to be something more than just another girl who has one. We should be able to do these things without failing the feminism of our mothers, and we should be able to represent women who hurt without walking backward into a voyeuristic rehashing of the old cultural models. ~ Leslie Jamison

At every turn, girls - even the most carefully raised and deeply loved - are surrounded by a popular culture that exhorts them to think of themselves as sexually disposable creatures. ~ Caitlin Flanagan

As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies". Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies. ~ Gloria Steinem

I don't see black people as victims even though we are exploited. Victims are flat, one- dimensional characters, someone rolled over by a steamroller so you have a cardboard person. We are far more resilient and more rounded than that. I will go on showing there's more to us than our being victimized. Victims are dead. ~ Kristin Hunter

the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If a girl wants to sell her body, so be it. None of my business. Don't athletes sell their bodies, too? People can do behind closed doors whatever they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

I'm just a girl."
"It is tragic how well you have been taught to say that with sadness rather than triumph. ~ Patrick Ness

We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it. ~ Richard Dawkins