"Time with the Philosophers" Archive

“Glory, with us, is not for
lending out
so those who want take it by strength
or more often exhort it with a gun

We let them, knowing as we do
what men can take, what they cannot”

- from "Borrowed Airs" by Kobena Eyi Acquah

"I want to go to Keta
where boys drum all the day
and the girls dance agbadza
to keep the tears away"

- from "I Want to Go to Keta", by Kobena Eyi Acquah

“If you educate a man, you educate an individual but if you educate a woman, you educate a whole nation.”

- Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey

"[The American hippie movement] comes with freedom - a certain type of freedom which I think no black person in this world has right now. It's almost like doing something which is beautiful and nice because you want to do it - like writing a story about lovers in Paris - it is beautiful, it is nice. But whereas [Francoise] Sagan could do it, and she does do it with a whole lot of relevance and validity, I cannot see myself as a writer, writing about lovers in Accra because you see, there are so many other problems..."

-Ama Ata Aidoo

“For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”

-Ama Ata Aidoo

"we will make heroes out of streetboys
train felons into statesmen
now world assemblies deal in lies
let us recruit liars for diplomats"

- from "Soweto", by Kofi Anyidoho

"I have always felt, perhaps involuntarily, I should take my poetic sensibility... from the tradition that sort of feeds my language, because in my language there is a lot of poetry... even though it is not written, and so I take my cue from this old tradition, and begin to break it into English, to give it a new dimension."

-Kofi Awoonor

"I'm not the fighting type
But go ahead make my day
You gonna fight me physically
I'm gonna fight you spiritually
I'm gonna fight you truthfully"

- from "My Game", by Lucky Dube

“As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly.”

- W.E.B. DuBois

“If you know the world, you know the greatest men had humble beginnings.”

- Marcus Garvey

“The arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice.”

- Martin Luther King Jr

Lewis Nkosi: What do you feel is the greatest lacking in Nigeria at the moment as far as your life as a writer is concerned, or otherwise?

Wole Soyinka: The greatest lack I think quite frankly is criticism. We have not at the moment got good critics in Nigeria and European critics are not helping by being Eurocentrically condescending, applying a different standard of writing.

-Lewis Nkosi and Wole Soyinka

"Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. They claim it as their own and none can keep it from them."

- Kwame Nkrumah

"woman! woman!
how often you carry heaviness
of your soul...only to empty it into songs..."

- from "Lorgorligi Logarithms", by Atukwei Okai

"You don't always have to have a message when you communicate. You are thinking through a problem or something. If this is a problem which forms the theme of your play you ought to be able to communicate it. It's simple - the aim is that Ghanaians shall understand the art that we think we are doing you see - that's all. It's as simple as that.

-Efua Sutherland