Alain Mabanckou

"Listen up, my boy, be realistic! Drop your sitting around and writing every day, there’s people much better at it, and those people, you see them on telly, they talk well, and when they talk there’s a subject, there’s a verb and there’s an object. They’re born for that, they’re raised in that, while us blacks, it’s not our thing, writing."

"Éditions du Seuil, 2009"

"He says that the African man was the first man on Earth and that the other races only came after. Therefore, all men are immigrants except African people who are right at home."

"A white guy who learns how to play tom-tom, it’s normal, it’s chic, it says"

"I’m a man open to the other cultures of the world and I’m not racist at all."

"A Black man who plays the tam-tam, it sucks, it’s too much back to his roots, back to square one, back to his natural state, back to having the beat. It ain’t surprising that Europeans are interested in tom-tom that way. It is to understand how things went in our country when we had no other of communication."

"....you’ve got to keep up appearances, as we say among the Society for Ambient People and Persons of Elegance, SAPPE, which, without wanting to be contentious, is an invention from back home, born in the Bacongo district of Brazzaville,towards the Total roundabout. We’re the ones who exported “Sappe” to Paris, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, because lately there are so many false prophets swarming these streets in the City of Light, to the point where it’s getting difficult to separate the wheat from the"