African Women Quotes

• African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence.

  Wangari Maathai

  Happiness, Inspiring, Success

  109 Copy quote

• I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Life, Eye, Soul

  Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker (1979). “I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader”, p.153, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• Women in Africa are really the pillar of the society, are the most productive segment of society, actually. Women do kids. Women do cooking. Women doing everything. And yet, their position in society is totally unacceptable. And the way African men treat African women is total unacceptable.

  Mo Ibrahim

  Kids, Men, Cooking

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.

  Carol Moseley Braun

  Inspiring, Being Yourself, Freedom

  76 Copy quote

• The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it.

  Buchi Emecheta

  Husband, Book, Typical

  16 Copy quote

• When I went back home, I was constantly being reminded, I'm an African woman, and so there are certain things I shouldn't do, certain ambitions that I should not entertain. That was a problem for me because I had never thought of myself as an African woman, never thought of myself as a woman to begin with. For me the limit was my capacity, my capability.

  Wangari Maathai

  Ambition, Home, Limits

  29 Copy quote

• Most African women are taught to endure abusive marriages. They say endurance means a good wife but most women endure abusive relationship because they are not empowered economically; they depend on their husbands.

  Joyce Banda

  Husband, Mean, Wife

  20 Copy quote

• I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Oysters, Knives, Black History

  World Tomorrow "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928)

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• I write about African women, that's really my topic. I have no shame or qualm in it because it's a very underrepresented topic, which is part of the reason I started to write.

  Danai Gurira

  Writing, Topics, Shame

  14 Copy quote

• I stand before you and the world humbled by this recognition and uplifted by the honour of being the 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate. As the first African woman to receive this prize, I accept it on behalf of the people of Kenya and Africa, and indeed the world. I am especially mindful of women and the girl child. I hope it will encourage them to raise their voices and take more space for leadership.

  Wangari Maathai

  Girl, Children, Voice

  Wangari Maathai's Nobel lecture at the City Hall in Oslo, Norway, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 2004.

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• Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time, a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race.

  Mary McLeod Bethune

  Inspirational, Time, Women

  12 Copy quote

• The white woman has never had the co-equal status that the African woman has had.

  John Henrik Clarke

  White, Equal

  Source: www.ourtimepress.com

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• This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

  Ben Aaronovitch

  Children, Facts, Reason

  Ben Aaronovitch (2011). “Midnight Riot”, p.108, Del Rey

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• Because I was a woman, I was vulnerable. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman.'

  Wangari Maathai

  Vulnerable, Tradition, Easy

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Lawrence Hill, a cultural and spiritual descendant of West African griots, has used his vast storytelling talents to create an epic story that spans three continents. The Book of Negroes recites the pain, misery and liberation of one African woman, Aminata Diallo, who was stolen from her homeland and sold into American slavery. Through Aminata, Hill narrates the terrifying story of slavery and puts at the centre a female experience of the African Diaspora. I wept upon reading this story. The Book of Negroes is courageous, breathtaking, simply brilliant.

  Afua Cooper

  Spiritual, Pain, Book

  6 Copy quote

• She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.

  John Henrik Clarke

  Dark, Color, White

  42 Copy quote

• It was easy for me to be ridiculed and for both men and women to perceive that maybe I'm a bit crazy because I'm educated in the West and I have lost some of my basic decency as an African woman.

  Wangari Maathai

  Crazy, Men, West

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Culturally, it is commonplace for African women to work.

  Richard Attias

  Commonplace

  "The Promise of Africa’s Women" by Richard Attias, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 7, 2013.

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• Mobile phone technology can help to bring financial services to the 80 percent of African women who do not have a bank account and bolster the growth of the world's poorest continent. It's not just about empowering women, it's about economic growth. Unless we can make access to finance easier for women in their businesses, we will be missing out on a significant portion of growth within our economies

  Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

  Technology, Phones, Missing

  17 Copy quote

• There are more than 100 million African women who go topless at some point in the day, each and every day, to honor both God and our ancestors. So being in a country like America where nothing is hated more than the image of the black woman, even by black people'because her womb produces the black man and makes us black'I find it of grave importance to implement African images, and especially to produce media images that acknowledge the sexual power and fertility of black women.

  Kola Boof

  Country, Men, America

  6 Copy quote

• I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean.

  Kola Boof

  Children, Ocean, Eye

  6 Copy quote

• It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.

  Wangari Maathai

  Men, People, Feelings

  "I Will Disappear Into the Forest". Interview with Dave Gilson, www.motherjones.com. January 5, 2005.

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• Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.

  Nicholas D. Kristof

  Trying, Fetus, Should

  Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn (2009). “Half the Sky”, p.244, Vintage

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• Let me be very blunt: the heterosexual transmission of AIDS is, in Africa, a function of truly pathological promiscuity. So this is really a violence issue - not the same violence we deal with in Boston, where teenagers stab and shoot each other, but the violence of African men who are killing themselves, and killing African women and children, with pathological promiscuity.

  Eugene Rivers

  Children, Teenager, Men

  "Silence is Death". Interview with Eva Thorne, bostonreview.net. April/May 1999.

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• During the election people from visible minorities stood as candidates on both the left and the right. And only one African woman was elected in a very left-wing constituency in Paris. The French don't seem to be ready to elect people from a visible minority. So maybe this society is not ready to have a woman from a foreign background in this important post. That really surprised us, because we thought we had evolved.

  Patrick Gaubert

  Wings, Paris, People

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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