People From Ghana

"The government must prioritize the needs of the people over its own interests."

"We will continue to fight for the rights and freedoms of all Ghanaians."

"Given the chaos and ongoing deception attributed to President Akufo-Addo and Dr. Bawumia, I would be astonished to encounter them in heaven in the afterlife."

"We need a government that is transparent and accountable to the people."

"We will continue to hold the government accountable for its actions and inactions."

"I try to shun all sorts of fear because, like I said, I don’t joke with my spirituality as a person, and biblically speaking, when you fear, you attract it...so I live a very happy life, and fear is not something I entertain."

"Nothing but the best is good enough for the African."

"Nothing but the best is good enough for Africa."

"I don't care what you know; show me what you can do. Many of my people who get educated don't work, but take to drink. They see white people drink, so they think they must drink too. They imitate the weakness of the white people, but not their greatness. They won't imitate a white man working hard ... If you play only the white notes on a piano you get only sharps; if only the black keys you get flats; but if you play the two together you get harmony and beautiful music."

"If you educate a man, you educate an individual but if you educate a woman you educate a nation."

"Sulley loves and breathes football"

"When Sulley believes in something, he makes sure he is heard and I am supportive of his decision to use his voice to help other players who go through this …because racism is something that happens on daily basis but we needed someone who is brave enough to stand up against it."

"What you see on the pitch or outside is different from what you see at home. He’s the sweetest father and you should want to have more babies for him. He’s (Muntari) focused and doesn’t want to be bullied. He loves football and eats and breathes it. When you try to take advantage of him then you’ll see the other side of him. We are private although public personalities. We respect one another."

"When I wake up and pray that is the best feeling ever. I first pray, when I'm done with my first prayer is the best feeling ever. And then the day starts, that's it."

"Everything I make, I want to make it evergreen and put in my pain, my all. That’s what I believe is art."

"I do see myself as a preacher for the streets. That’s where I’m from. I don’t only talk about the struggles, I also talk about the beauty of it. It’s not always negative."

"Success is really a challenge more than an honor, because you don’t want to succeed and lose interest in what made you succeed...This success means maintaining it, or growing it. The real beauty is not in the results, it’s in whatever contributed to the success; the people that helped you, or the habits that got you there. The paper, the money, they’re bonuses, man."

"The GFA think they have answers to everything. our youth football is collapsing and it's about time we stop thinking about Black Stars"

"The FA owns a lot of players in the national teams and that's why we don't perform when CK was there, the FA were telling him the king of players he should call and when things didn't go well they kicked him out."

"It's about time we start being fair and tough in our decision. We haven't done enough to be at the Olympic Games."

"We can do almost anything that the man is allowed to do, but, that still does not absolve us of what is considered our traditional roles. Leaving the office at 8pm, I get home and I still have to cook a meal from scratch. I had to constantly explain why getting married first was not my plan and that getting my PhD first was actually my plan. I feel that a lot of the discrimination we suffer is born out of unconscious bias – most people don’t even realise that they are discriminating against us."

"The world will make room for us. The more women push for senior roles, the harder it will be to ignore them.""

"Sometimes it’s important to hold your mentee’s hand and guide them towards opportunities they never knew existed."

"As women, we often say that when a woman decides to have a career it is not always as easy as it would be for her male counterpart. We have been saying this to the extent that it is beginning to sound like a cliché. However, that is the truth of the matter. It is never easy for us women, especially when we grow up in very traditional societies. Right now, we are at the point where women have opportunities available to them."

"When I started my career, I started to realise that there were a lot of things that I could have done if I had received the right guidance earlier. There are also a lot of things I would have done differently. Because of that I see myself as the person whose job it is to give younger people proper guidance. I like to open up people’s lives so that they can see what options they have in this world. The world is actually open and they are free to choose what they would like to do. They are free to try things. If it does not work out, they are free to start all over again."

"I’m a pharmacist so one of my strengths is in chemistry, in pharmaceutical chemistry. I have developed an interest in plants as therapeutics because, as we know, a lot of the medicines that we currently have, found their source from nature, which happens to be a very rich source for new therapeutics. We do not have too many highly effective medicines that can affect conditions of the brain. So, that’s why I’m very interested in developing new therapeutics."

"Actually, to date, 2019 has been the most exciting year for me not only personally, but also career-wise. It was a real honour to be selected for the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science award. I was introduced to all these incredible scientists and I met some pretty amazing people. To be selected for the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World early career fellowship later the same year honestly started to make me feel a bit invincible. It felt that all the good things that were happening to me were happening to me in the same year."

"Your slow motion is better than No Motion"

"You may write me down in history, but still like dust, I rise."

"Anything that I can do to motivate people, to inspire people to go out and live their best lives and follow their dreams, I feel like at the end of the day that's what it's all about...Winning the title is awesome, achieving my childhood dream is great. But for me, it's way more important for me to be able to use this celebrity to influence people to be able to do positive things. And that's what I'm trying to do."

"A lot of people think that I have pectus excavatum, or ‘concave chest’. Not true. My sternum is not concave at all. Rather, my pectoral muscles connect from closer to the sides of my sternum, rather than the center of my sternum."

"You forget how much of a reach you have being a WWE superstar...We just go out and we do our things in front of the cameras. We know the feed is going somewhere, but you don't quite have a grasp over how large that audience is. Everybody was pretty much well aware of myself. A lot of people had watched WrestleMania and shared that moment."

"Anansi is the god of stories - I’m telling Anansi my story. I remember my aunt telling me some Anansi stories when I was 9 or 10, but I didn’t take them in. In my 20s, I bought loads of Anansi books. History, folklore, and culture gives you pride and happiness through a sense of connection."

"Black men are often seen in two-dimensional ways as historical racist ideas have been passed on, and the media doesn’t help – reinforcing these ridiculous stereotypes. We often conflate black British men with African men, and it was important to get nuances on paper."

"Most literary agents are middle class white men who won’t understand what you’ve written unless it’s a slave narrative or someone 'from the streets'. They have a moment where they’re like, 'Well, where do I fit in?'…"

"You don’t get many men talking about personality disorders or schizophrenia. The mental health issues that people find scary aren’t talked about – that’s where the conversation needs to go."

"The need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad,” this thing “white” and this thing “black,” was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else."

"I was devastated. I felt immense rage. The dungeons still smell after hundreds of years. There was grime on the walls and a tiny air hole at the top. When they closed the door, there was no light. Hundreds of people were kept there for three months at a time before being sent God knew where. The terror they must have felt – not knowing what was to become of them. You can imagine and you cannot possibly imagine."

"It is a dual thing – you belong and you don’t. I remember the Ghanaian passport official reading my name correctly and it felt like the biggest, warmest welcome. At the same time, I understand my native language but don’t speak it. So I am necessarily at this remove – the country can never be fully mine."

"It’s interesting because this book comes from a place of always feeling like I wasn’t Ghanaian enough for Ghana and not African American enough for the United States. So it will also be interesting to see how Ghanaian critics respond to it, because I can imagine getting the opposite side of the critique, where they think my treatment of the African American characters is nuanced. I don’t know what to do about that. I have always existed in this weird, murky space where someone is allowed to say I’m not either thing, if they are that thing."

"We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture."

"You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves."

"I thought the novel would be traditionally structured, set in the present, with flashbacks to the 18th century. But the longer I worked, the more interested I became in being able to watch time as it moved, watch slavery and colonialism and their effects – I wanted to see the through-line."

"You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, "now I will remove my knife slowly - so let things be easy and clean; let there be no mess." There will always be blood."

"This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on."

"Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I"

"(What’s the last great book you read?) ...The last great one I read was Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing,” a fascinating novel about the legacy of the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic."

"This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others."

"There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?” She"

"If we go to the white man for school, we will learn the way the white man wants us to learn. We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free."