Studies conducted in a city in Zimbabwe found that half of reported rape cases involve girls less than 15 years of age and that girls are most vulnerable to sexual abuse by male relatives, neighbors and school teachers.

Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.

An Abel Muranda without his wife and children would be a wandering bachelor without any dignity. He would sleep in caves and feed on wild berries. But no matter how lonely life became, he would never come to a place like this

Her task seemed ridiculous, the result of a momentary weakness, of believing in the impossible, that stories have a trajectory where we find things out, resolve things to our satisfaction and come out the other side, wiser and happie

Africa! the blessed land of pure wealth, the sons of the soil tremble over it as they beat the resounding drum; women dancing to the unifying joy of the music in the gold dust of dawn...beloved Africa your concealed power of hope shines.

There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild.

(On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:)Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed.

Africa occupied a relatively blank space in the minds of most Americans, and when they stopped to think about it, aided by old and deeply ingrained habits of press coverage, all they could imagine was volcano, occupation, disease, and horror.

Ils étaient les hommes et les femmes du sable, du vent, de la lumière, de la nuit. Ils étaient apparus, comme dans un rêve, en haut d’une dune, comme s’ils étaient nés du ciel sans nuages.

La littérature est un théâtre à ciel ouvert qui permet de transformer les êtres les plus simples en héros universels, loin des parterres présomptueux.Conrad, Le Voyageur de l'inquiétude

Professor Khupe felt his chest swell with pride. It was doing so without his encouragement. If an electrical fault had stopped the elevator from rising, his inflating ego would have powered the remainder of their journey to the twenty-second floor.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.

Pescatore marveled at the seascape. It gave him vertigo. The wind deployed cloud formations. The sun seared the Moroccan coastline. He had read a line once about "the lion-colored hills of Africa." Were they lion-colored? What color was a lion exactly?

I grew up in an environment where the onus of raising a child was not on the parents alone but of the entire community. The logic is in that a child who becomes a burden or an armed robber becomes a threat not only to the parents but to a whole society!