“People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. It's not viewed as a serious continent. It's a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people don't do what common sense demands ( Read more... )

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“Now it is pleasant to hunt something you want very much over a long period of time, being outwitted, outmaneuvered, and failing at the end of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out there, sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time ( Read more... )

“Yes, we did indeed underestimate the ferocity and ruthlessness of the jihadists in Iraq. Where, one might inquire, have we not underestimated those forces and their virulence? (We are currently underestimating them in Nigeria, for example, which is plainly next on the Bin Laden hit list and about which I have been boring on ever since Bin Laden ( Read more... )

“Madrid is a strange place anyway. I do not believe any one likes it much when he first goes there. It has none of the look you expect of Spain. It is modern rather than picturesque, no costumes practically no Cordoban hats, except on the heads of phonies, no castanets, and no disgusting fakes like the gypsy caves at Granada. There is not one local ( Read more... )

“He had been to Ghana and Kenya and Tanzania, he had read about all the other African countries, their histories, their complexities. You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and who liked Africa too little were the same - condescending ( Read more... )

“Walking along in the silence, he had no regrets. If he died tomorrow, it would be because God was not willing to change the future. He would at least have died after having crossed the strait, after having worked in a crystal shop, and after having known the silence of the desert and Fatima’s eyes. He had lived every one of his days intensely ( Read more... )

“It is about the real modern Nigeria: an enormous, inchoate territory whose ancient ( Read more... )

“You never finish eating the meat of an elephant.”
-African proverb, found here.When Thomas Jefferson plagiarized in ink and parchment the words and ideas of John Locke to create the document that would claim a string of colonies on the North Atlantic seaboard as sovereign, he did nothing so different as do my junior high students who skim back and ( Read more... )

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it ( Read more... )