Social Activists

"It's true that past efforts have failed. There's been a lot of energy and a lot of great ideas, but it's been inconsistent."

"I've learned over the years that leadership is everything."

"Was a teacher in a NYC high school and noticed absenteeism was a huge problem from the first day I stood in front of my students. I realized that parents, an essential partner to help get kids to class, were often uninformed, parents play major role in education besides we teachers."

"Eskom will have to convince creditors that there is commitment to good governance and a pathway to sustainability. Eskom’s new board is the most important first milestone. Next steps will be to urgently appoint a permanent CEO and round out the Exco in a way that demonstrates a new beginning. Eskom’s communication needs to be open, humble and give stakeholders a true reflection of the state of affairs whether good or bad."

"I'm a very driven personality, there's no doubt about that. For success in bringing about this kind of change, you have to be pretty ruthlessly focused. I deal with intense stuff at Telkom and it's an enormous challenge and there's pain and pleasure. It's very exciting, but what if you fail? You can't fail."

"If I’m teaching young people to use their voices and be active in making their lives a success."

"I don’t get tired of being called Barack Obama’s sister because I am. I get tired of being called Barack Obama’s “half-sister” because I’m not. In our culture he’s just my brother, I’m his sister, so being called Barack Obama’s sister, I have no problem with that at all. I guess it becomes an issue when people see me as an extension of him and focus on that. So I guess this sense of “we’re inviting Barack Obama’s sister”, “we’re speaking to Barack Obama’s sister” to get closer to Barack Obama and find out more about him. To an extent it is justified, but that’s not all that I’m about, so I’m very conscious of that, and I’m conscious of making people aware of that and trying to make that clear that is part of the conversation."

"I work for my own foundation, called Sauti Kuu (Powerful Voices) Foundation, which I started about two years ago. The focus of the work is to teach young people—girls, in particular—who are from underprivileged backgrounds, that there are valuable resources they can use to improve their lives before they look outwardly to see whether someone will give them relief food or clothing or all of the other things we give them so often in the humanitarian world."

"If it’s just about my brother, I’ll never be a role model."

"I had really nobody in my family whom I could talk about these things with. This passion for making a difference, the passion for helping young people find out who they are, gain strength in their own identity, those were things I was struggling with as well. I realized very young that if I don’t do it myself, nobody can really do it for me. I think young people need to be helped toward that realization."

"I felt a kinship with him automatically. I was very nervous and worried about not connecting immediately and then having to be in his home—because I was going to be staying with him. But when I met him it was so easy. We just started talking as though we’d known each other always, and that was actually something really special."

"My brother is authentic. He really believes in what he is trying to do. So there’s no hidden agenda. In that sense, he really is an open book. And I think that authenticity, that passion, and the image and the drive—it resonates with people."

"I manage that because Barack Obama’s in his present situation as the president of the United States is a very new thing, and it’s also something very temporary. I’ve been around for a lot longer, so I’ve already defined myself long before he became the president of the United States so in my own right I have my own identity. So in that sense I am able to, well, actually I’m learning, and I keep having to adjust to being Barack Obama’s sister, who is the president of the United States. But being me as Auma Obama, that is not an issue. It’s trying to accommodate the “new” – this new role that I’m received in, the attention I get, this visibility I get. In terms of my identity I think I’m pretty secure, as best one can be."

"You can’t do this or that because you’re a girl. Or, You have to do this because you’re a girl. I asked Why? I’m a human being first."

"Poverty is no excuse. Development aid has to be linked to economic development,"

"Germans always like to think that they have a very liberal attitude towards Africans. But when you scratch the surface you can see that they they still carry around the prejudices of their childhood. In German fairy tales black people always appear as the bogey man. You don't forget things like that so easily."

"Once others hear your voice loud and clear, they realise you exist."

"It's special for us and for our children and for our communities because it tells every child that if you work hard you can do whatever you want in this world. You can make you future"

"Why am I taking part? Because I love to dance. And whether I can dance well—I'm like those who sing in the shower. I think I can dance well, but we’ll see in a few days if it’s really the case."

"I'm proud of our name because my brother has really carried our name up there ... it's made its mark in the world."

"I can’t believe that these young people are just trying to demonstrate for their rights and to tell them that we understand that they need to use their voices, and we are being tear-gassed. We’re being teargassed! We have flags and banners, nothing else."

"How can you tear-gas your own people? Listen to them. Listen to these children; they’re the future."

"He wanted to know everything about us, everything about my father everything about our family. I took him to so many relatives. It was part of finding about his own identity."

"I was told it's what will make me a woman. I didn't know that it's something that is done very... it's horrible, you are cut, your genitalia is cut, no anesthesia, you bleed and some people die out of it."

"I went through the genital mutilation not knowing what it was."

"I'm lucky, I only fainted and came back to life."

"If you want to get married, you can get married. You have to choose to whom you get married and when the right time is. Marriage is a lot of work. But there is no pressure, the time will come, and there are a lot of men out there!"

"But when you give a girl an opportunity, she will never, ever embarrass you or let you down."

"I could've easily given up but I didn't. All my breakdowns are breakthroughs. I believe I need them in order to push through."

"My education has enabled me to learn about it and now I stand against it and stand so that no other girl can go through that."

"...to understand that Africa has resources. Its greatest resource is in its people. How you see us as solving the problem together with you, and positioning yourselves to be facilitators of this process, rather than fixing us, might be one way that we could begin to solve these problems."

"Africa has challenges because of its diversity, and that could also be its strength."

"A lot of what we do is affected by our cultural way of doing things. If we engage with African people, they would be able to help us think about their culture and how it affects farming."

"I knew that I wanted something different. So, instead of focusing on being intimidated, I focused on education. I focused on going to school and making sure I stayed there."

"You are limitless, you are in control of so many things, they are superficial. You are an entertainer, the minute you are off that stage don't expect, do not carry that euphoria to the rest of your life"

"I wanted to continue with school because my mother was denied an education and she always told us if she went to school she would have been a different person, so I talked to my dad and told him I can only go through the genital mutilation if he lets me go back to school."

""For me I wanted to use my music to have a positive change into the society, and positive change is not only spiritual change. Positive change for me has been a peace activist, an environmental activist, women empowerment and girl empowerment"."

"A peace process is not about the mathematics of numbers and percentages in relation to who is in majority or minority. It is about plurality, diversity, participation and ownership of all affected by the conflict and who live in the context hence nothing less than full participation and ownership."

"“Feast with your enemies. So I do my best to prepare and offer food to those with whom I find myself in disagreement.""

"I dedicate myself and the right livelihood award owner to the service of peace in a practical way to consolidate the work already undertaken and to give a new energy and focus in developing peace system by harnessing the body of knowledge through establishing a University for peace in Wajir Kenya."

"Just like with feminism, I would say step to the side or to the back. Allow the people for whom this is life and death to take the lead. We all live on this planet, need each other’s support. I’ve been supported throughout my life and career by people of different races, classes, genders. I would be lying if I said no, we can do this alone. We need support, but don’t want the white man to be the centre of the stage. Support us financially, give credit where credit is due – there’s power that comes with whiteness, and you have to acknowledge that. Say ‘you don’t need to invite me, I know this other person who would make an excellent lecturer."

"The African Studies Association of Africa: We’re still young – formed in 2013. The thinking behind this was that when African Studies became a discipline in Europe and North America, it wasn’t about centring African people’s lives; it wasn’t about how can we enable Africans to understand each other better. The agenda was how do we understand the natives so that we can better colonize them – to put it crudely, but realistically! The African Studies associations in UK, US, came out of that mould. They’ve changed a lot, but still don’t centre Africans enough – most of their members are not Africans, and the research is often about the researchers’ own interests."

"And this has a financial cost as well. You’re not only not recognized, but the ‘northern researcher’ then has their name on the report, puts it on their CV when they’re applying for the next research grant. As we say in Ghana, you use fish to catch fish. And the person who was the ‘research assistant’ is nowhere, they can’t claim credit, they are losing money now and in the future."

"But it doesn’t always work that way. You have researchers on the British side who are invested, sensitive, humble enough to recognize the knowledge that is in Ghana. But it means that if the person applying for the funds has to be from the UK, or Germany you have to have that respectful relationship, or the Northern partner ends up dictating the process."

"If you’re not careful, a movement can lose its edge. Other people can appropriate it for their own careers, It becomes devalued."

"This may be pie in the sky, but we should be looking for more money locally. There’s a lot of money in Africa – I’ll give one example: when the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy at the University of Ghana was putting together a sexual harassment policy in the early 2000s and needed to do some research, one of the women on our steering committee said ‘I’ll speak to my Church’. She comes back with some money for us – it’s an example we don’t normally think about. Many of the big churches are extremely wealthy, are very good at raising money. We haven’t approached them enough, with a proposal they would be comfortable with."

"Stephan and I spent a lot of time working together online; we also held a few e-conversations as well as in-person meetings when he was in Ghana. We set very rigid timetables for ourselves, so that when we did lose momentum or got swallowed up by our day jobs, we didn't veer too far off our self-imposed schedules. We assigned ourselves concrete tasks to be completed in between our meetings—who would read what, who would follow up on what with whom, and so forth. I think one of the things that worked best for us was a mutual respect of each other's schedules, as well as ideas."

"Two people could be doing research on slavery, but what questions are they asking? Somebody could map out where people go, how many people moved, do a nice quantitative map, maybe say how many people in North America are related to people in Nigeria, but it wouldn’t get you to the heart of what people are feeling today, to the injustice, to the issue of reparations. If we’re crunching numbers, how about we try and calculate the cost, including the psychological cost? Who would fund that if it was linked to reparations? I suspect it wouldn’t be seen as serious science."

"I urge the Ministry of Education to make history a compulsory subject in schools. That would enable young people to know their true identity as Ghanaians and Africans, and empower them to become responsible citizens."

"If I might add, as this is a challenge for all journals, we also had our fair share of slow or even totally non responsive reviewers. Now that you ask us to look back, I remember a couple of senior scholars who promised, and I mean promised, us a review, and then went totally cold on us. I find this particularly disheartening because, one, everyone knows GS work is a real labor of love. But more importantly, I want to believe that most of us, especially our more senior colleagues, are invested in nurturing the next generation and not simply having their own names up in gold. For what does it profit a man (and in this case by "man" I do mean a couple of biological and social males) if he is considered to be a superstar but does not invest in his intellectual DNA?"