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Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ
48 quotes
“Kenya is my starting point but not necessarily my end point”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Growing up in Kenya has shaped a lot of my political thinking; it has certainly colored the ink in my pen”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am always careful that my home does not become my prison”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to think of being able to use multiple genres as being fluent in many musical instruments”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“American nationalism cannot exist if at some point the American citizen did not consciously decide not to look at the rest of the world”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The belief in being the most civilized, most democratic and consequently most able to civilize the world cannot exist if the American citizen sees the full humanity of the African or Arab for that matter”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it is important to understand that these kind of questions, which come across as ignorant or arrogant actually have a function to play in American nationalism putting Africa in its place”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“our intellectuals don’t always contribute to African causes”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“to agitate for African causes is to at the same time have deep faith in African people”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not think I can be a poet who sings (and singing contains wailing) for Africa without having faith that Africa can one day do right by its citizens.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“African writers have been, I think the single most important, facilitators of Pan-Africanism”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We should not always need the medium of English and French to talk to each other”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our generation of writers should, as far as we can, professionalize writing”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“African writers should not have to win a European or American literary prize before we recognize them as writers.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our intellectuals should not have to publish in Western publications before we take them seriously”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we also want to see borders such as between men and women erased”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the mistakes constantly made by previous generations was to understand as one kind of freedom being more important than another”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom to vote is more important than economic freedom or national freedom more important than freedom from racism and in this instance, national freedom as more important than gender equality”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“African writers have to be willing to discuss their differences and therefore it is not so much a question of a common message”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why should, and to me this is the idiocy of leadership, one person feel that only he has the ability to lead a country of millions?”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not afraid to air my dirty linen in public, for how else shall I get it clean”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To erase a border, you have to acknowledge it stands in your way first”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“even within American literature there has been constant debate as to what constitutes American literature”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“literature should show just how interconnected we are and not be used as a barrier between communities”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“a course in contemporary American literature should carry literatures by immigrants as well.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we have to be wary about people who promise a single solution for the continent”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom can only be a word amidst debilitating poverty”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have grown up believing that anything is possible and I think in large part because of my father”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Season of the Great Lake: An Interview with Mukoma wa Ngugi 2 July 2007
“There are various levels of home and what it means”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To me ‘home’ are the places I feel a need to fight in order to make them better.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ethnicity has become a weapon in the hands of Kenyan and African politicians that they deploy when they need votes”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think there is more awareness that violence and civil war are not far behind flaring ethnic tensions”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“African writers are trying to tell a good story that Americans are appreciating more and more, and appreciating its diversity and cross genre aesthetics – and that is a good thing”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: HOT READS: A KILLER INTERVIEW WITH MUKOMA WA NGUGI 26 July 2015
“I also have a very hard time with the divide of high and low culture”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“African literature doesn’t have to be one thing; allow it to flourish in many different forms”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t want to write fiction that doesn’t say anything”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to work with an aesthetics that is not afraid of the political”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“for a very long time home had become a place of negativity”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So to now be able to go back as writers – we are not going back because of anything negative, we are going back to celebrate writing and to celebrate each other’s writing”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Q&A: Novelist, poet and literary scholar Mukoma wa Ngugi 6 July 2013
“It was around midday but it might as well have been midnight, with us canvassing for clues in the light of a full moon — the canopy of the ancient trees let in an annoying in-between light, too low to see well in, yet too bright for flashlights.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Kenya, if someone with enough credibility told you that he or she was going to send you to Ngong, you had better back down unless you could get them there first.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was always a herd boy, venturing into the depths of the forest, who found the dead body. In our instance, he happened to have a cell phone and so we were able to get to the body in a matter of hours.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“More than just being flat broke, you could say we were like boxers who, having slugged through predictable wins, were ready to finally fight a worthy opponent. We were ready for a case like the one that nearly broke us, our first case together...”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whoever killed him took the casing.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was nothing more to do but get the body to the pathologist. We didn’t have any body bags and the Administrative Police, or APs as we called them for short, had to carefully roll him onto a woolen blanket.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“DNA was useful only with a large criminal database — Kenya’s was in its infancy, and unless we were extremely lucky, there would be no match. And dental records? Forget about it. We just had to hope that the body would yield some secrets.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This place, it reminds me how lucky I am — just to be alive, to be walking out of here.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the United States, there’s the Nevada desert — and football stadiums, if you count Jimmy Hoffa.”
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source