Uzodinma Iweala Quotes
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I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.
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Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned?
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Right after undergrad, I started doing low-level work on health issues in sub-Saharan Africa, and what struck me was the disconnect between how people in New York would speak about some of the issues people were facing. At the time, 2006-ish, there were a number of big media campaigns to raise awareness about HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
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I think, all too often, this society has too monolithic a definition of what a black American is.
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Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.
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I think South Africa would be in a lot worse position had you not had visionaries like the Mandelas or the Oliver Tambos or the people there who came together after... both during apartheid and afterwards to create and structure their society.
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I don't think that one should beat himself or herself over the head if immediately you're not like Jesus Christ or, you know, Gandhi or whoever. But I think the idea is to... to look at those examples and try to... try to operate in a way that every day you live or every interaction you have pushes you further along to operating with that mindset.
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There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority.
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Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head - because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself.
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Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.
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I think the fact that we don't really... that the world really doesn't acknowledge how bad and how detrimental colonialism was; that people don't really try to explore it, you know, in popular media and news articles; that... that it's just kind of glossed over as this thing.
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There are some people who will tell you oil is the greatest thing that ever happened to Nigeria. And there are other people who will tell you it's the worst thing that ever happened.
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D.C. is in my blood, my diction, my sensibility and style. I am, though, in love with a city that cannot fully love me back.
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Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.
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Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola's famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice.
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In terms of medicine, I've generally been pretty interested in public health issues as they relate to sub-Saharan Africa on a broad scale - HIV/AIDS, malaria etc.
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There are multiple levels of 'we' and multiple groups that can constitute this idea of who we are. We need to be aware of who we are including and excluding.
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Around the world, our cities are not the idealised open, accessible, and cosmopolitan spaces of our dreams. More often than not, they are sectioned and controlled purviews of the radically wealthy, surrounded by clusters of have-nots.
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I find the sort of unwitting European American outsider who wants to come to Africa to help is a very problematic construction. It's problematic because you don't want to tell people don't aid, don't help, when people feel a need to.
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Nigeria shed the last of a succession of brutal military dictatorships in 1997 and adopted a democratic form of government only in 1999. Our elections of 2003, 2007, and 2011 were complicated and fraught with tension, but each one has shown remarkable progress.
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People just think Africa is this one thing. So if you're from Nigeria, then you're the same as somebody from Kenya; not realizing that within Nigeria, right, we have 250 different ethnic groups, right? Two hundred and fifty different languages.
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When you relate to a disease, you're afraid. When you relate to a person, there is compassion. You see someone that is like you, that could be like you. You can see yourself in that same situation.
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'Talking Peace' is one of the few books from childhood that I still keep prominently displayed on my bookshelf.
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Kidnapping causes a long-term rupture in the psyche of those kidnapped and of those who wait for their return. It doesn't end.