academics-from-kenya

"My sincere thanks to the Leadership of TUK in considering me worthy of this accolade."

"If you drive a state-of-the art BMW or Toyota, then you are using our map-matching algorithm in your satnav. So, please remember us (for creating it)."

"I am humbled and delighted to receive the honour of EBS in recognition of my contribution to Kenya and beyond."

"I am particularly keen to ensure that the RIN plays its role in addressing the challenges of our time (encapsulated within the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals) across geography and time, underpinned by a culture of equality, diversity, inclusion, respect, excellence, collaboration, innovation and integrity."

"I will serve TUK in any way I can including capability building and fostering international collaboration with the world’s leading universities such as my own, Imperial College London."

"Unite in one body those interested in navigation, and to advance the art, science and practice of navigation and to promote knowledge in navigation and its associated sciences, including positioning, timing, tracking and conduct of a journey, whether on, in, over or under land, sea, air or space."

"I worked on a concept that we implemented in Europe. We created the system not just in Europe; but also in the US and everywhere else, and that system is now being used to navigate aircraft."

"Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food."

"It is also the fulfilment of a dream I held since the age of ten – that these vegetables would be valued and accessible to all who need them for food, nutrition, health security, and economic empowerment."

"For example, indigenous bambara nuts and pigeon pea yield relatively better in low fertility soils and with low rainfall, compared with beans," she notes. "And this allows a diversified, sustainable production model that insures nutritional security and prosperity."

"It is a profound honour. This award is the continent’s foremost recognition of individuals and institutions transforming farming from a struggle for survival into a thriving enterprise. For me, it affirms that African indigenous vegetables are central to the transformation of African food systems."

"I don’t believe we can address the issues of nutrition security, poverty, and health in Kenya without relying on African indigenous crops. With a soaring food crisis, and maize harvests predicted to be 16 percent below former years as a result of changing Kenyan weather patterns, the only grains that could adequately replace maize in my opinion would be indigenous millets and sorghum, which are more drought tolerant."

"African countries, as colonies and even today as neo-colonies, came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe: English-speaking, French-speaking or Portuguese-speaking African countries."

"I would even say that too much education can be a form of foolishness.""

"Why, we may ask, should an African writer, or any writer, become so obsessed by taking from his mother-tongue to enrich other tongues? Why should he see it as his particular mission? We never asked ourselves: how can we enrich our languages? How can we 'prey' on the rich humanist and democratic heritage in the struggles of other peoples in other times and other places to enrich our own? Why not have Balzac, Tolstoy, Sholokov, Brecht, Lu Hsun, Pablo Neruda, H.C. Anderson, Kim Chi Ha, Marx, Lenin, Albert Einstein, Galileo, Aeschylus, Aristotle and Plato in African languages? And why not create literary monuments in our own languages?...No these questions were not asked. What seemed to worry us more was this: after all the literary gymnastics of preying on our languages to add life and vigour to English and other foreign languages, would the result be accepted as good English or good French? Will the owner of the language criticise our usage?"

"This country, our country, is pregnant. What it will give birth to, only God knows...Imagine! the children of us workers are fated to stay out in the sun, thirsty, hungry, naked, gazing at fruit ripening on trees which they can't pick even to quieten a demanding belly! Fated to see food steaming in the pantry, but unable to dip a calabash in to the pot to scoop out even a tiny portion! Fated to lie awake all night telling each another stories about tears and sorrow, asking one another to guess the same riddle day after day: 'Oh, for a piece of one of those!'"

"Therefore there are two hearts: the heart built by the clan of parasites, the evil heart; and the heart built by the clan of producers, the good heart.""

"Gatuĩria was at least aware that the slavery of language is the slavery of the mind and nothing to be proud of.""

"Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others."

"Well – yes – no. I mean, nowhere in particular."

"Soon everyone will know that he has created and then killed."

"Look, Sister,You know I want the boy to grow in the Lord."

"The voice of the people is the voice of God."

"Who has told you that prophesy is yours alone, to keep to yourself? Why are you furnishing yourself with empty excuses? If you do that, you will never be free of tears and pleading cries.""

"To the Kareendis of modern Kenya, isn't each day exactly the same as all the others? For the day on which they are born is the very day on which every part of their body is buried except one—they are left with a single organ. So when will the Kareendis of modern Kenya wipe the tears from their faces? When will they ever discover laughter?""

"Our people, think: I, Wangarĩ, a Kenyan by birth—how can I be a vagrant in my own country as if I were a foreigner?""

"There is no difference between old and modern stories. Stories are stories. All stories are old. All stories are new. All stories belong to tomorrow. And stories are not about ogres or about animals or about men. All stories are about human beings.""

"You two are wrong. A thief is no worse than a witch, and a witch is no worse than a thief. A thief is a witch, and a witch is a thief. For when a thief steals your land, your house, your clothes, isn't he really killing you? And when a witch destroys your life, isn't he stealing everything you own?""

"As a worker, I know very well that the forces of law and order are on the side of those who rob the workers of the products of their sweat, of those who steal food and land from the peasants. The peace and the order and the stability they defend with armored cars is the peace and the order and the stability of the rich, who feast on bread and wine snatched from the mouths of the poor—yes, they protect the eaters from the wrath of the thirsty and the hungry. Have you ever seen employers being attacked by the armed forces for refusing to increase the salaries of their workers? What about when the workers go on strike? And they have the audacity to talk about violence!""

"What is a blood relation? [...] What does it matter if people are alike or not? A child is a child. We all come from the same womb, the common womb one Kenya. The blood shed for our freedom has washed away the differences between that clan and this one, this nationality and that one. Today there is no Luo, Gĩkũyũ, Kamba, Giriama, Luhya, Maasai, Meru, Kallenjin or Turkana. We are all children of one another. Our mother is Kenya, the mother of all Kenyan people.""

"Then the white men had come, preaching a strange religion, strange ways, which all men followed. The tribe's code of behaviour was broken."

"As he watched her disappear, he felt proud that they should think well of him. He felt proud that he had a place in their esteem. And then came the pang. Father will know. They will know. He did not know what he feared most; the action his father would take when he found out, or the loss of the little faith the simple villagers had placed in him, when they knew. He feared to lose everything."

"Why not marry her? She is beautiful! Why not marry? Do I love her or don't I?"

"Stay well, Son. Go well and in peace, Mother."

"I despise the weak. Why? Because the weak need not remain weak. Listen! Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was the division amongst them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb. They shall not tremble or run away before the sword.”"

"[Wambui] believed in the power of women to influence events, especially where men had failed to act, or seemed indecisive […] Let therefore such men, she jeered, come forward, wear the women’s skirts and aprons and give up their trousers to the women."

"I am important. I must not die. To keep myself alive, healthy, strong—to wait for my mission in life is a duty to myself, to men and women of tomorrow. If Moses had died in the reeds, who would ever have known that he was destined to be a great man?"

"It makes his life more interesting to himself. He invents a meaning for his life, you see. Don’t we all do that? And to die fighting for freedom sounds more heroic than to die by accident.”"

"The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been', a struggle, as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history. And the novelist, at his best, must feel himself heir to a continuous tradition. He must feel himself, as I think Tolstoy did in War and Peace or Sholokov in And Quiet Flows the Don, swimming, struggling, defining himself, in the mainstream of his people's historical drama. At the same time, he must be able to stand aside and merely contemplate the currents. He must do both: simultaneously swim, struggle and also watch, on the shore."

"Really, women could never understand. Women were women, whether saved or not. Their son had to be protected against all evil influences. He must be made to grow in the footsteps of the Lord. He looked at her, frowning a little. She had made him sin but that had been a long time ago. And he had been saved. John must not tread the same road."

"Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was division among them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb."

"In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism."

"The Whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the Agikuyu. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had peeled off. The hot water must have gone into his head."

"As long as he did not know the truth, he could interpret the story in the only way that gave him hope: the coming of black rule would not mean, could never mean the end of white power."

"I die for you, you die for me, we become a sacrifice for one another. So I can say that you, Karanja, are Christ. I am Christ. Everybody who takes the Oath of Unity to change things in Kenya is Christ."

"The whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the [Gikuyu]. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had peeled off."

"They looked beyond the laughing face of the whiteman and suddenly saw a long line of other red strangers who carried not the Bible, but the sword. […] The iron snake […] was quickly wriggling towards Nairobi for a thorough exploitation of the hinterland."

"[Mugo] had always found it difficult to make decisions. Recoiling as if by instinct from setting in motion a course of action whose consequences he could not determine before the start, he allowed himself to drift into things or be pushed into them by an uncanny demon; he rode on the wave of circumstance and lay against the crest, fearing but fascinated by fate."

"At Githima, people believed that a complaint from [Karanja] was enough to make a man lose his job. Karanja knew their fears. Often when men came into his office, he would suddenly cast them a cold eye, drop hints, or simply growl at them; in this way, he increased their fears and insecurity. But he also feared the men and alternated this fierce prose with servile friendliness."

"A big lump blocked Mugo’s throat. Something heaved forth; he trembled; he was at the bottom of the pool, but up there, above the pool, ran the earth; life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful; only for a moment; how dared he believe in such a vision, an illusion?"