Women Authors From South Africa

"If you said no, no, no, and kept your claws in a people's heart, what else did you want but that they should all die?"

"No words, however wise, could explain the awfulness of the death, not while the living were firmly attached to love, child-bearing, child-rearing, hunger, struggle, and the sunrise of tomorrow. Life had to flow all the time, for the living, like water in a stream."

"Even the trees were dying, from roots upwards,' he said. 'Does everything die like this?' 'No,' she said. 'You may see no rivers on the ground but we keep the rivers inside us. That is why all good things and all good people are called rain. Sometimes we see the rain clouds gather even though not a cloud appears in the sky. It is all in our heart.'"

"Being an African man he ought to have known that nothing happened on the continent of Africa without all Africans getting to know of it."

"Most men were waiting for the politicians to sort out their private agonies."

"There was always something on this earth man was forced to love and worship by reason of its absence. People in cloudy, misty climates worshiped the sun, and people in semi-desert countries worshipped the rain."

"Dinorego was saying, ‘We can progress too, even though we are uneducated men. The mind of an uneducated man works like this: he is a listener and a believer. Most of all he is a believer.’"

"Poor people are poor because they don't know how to get rich."

"He had grown up in an atmosphere where the most important thing in the world was the stronger whose shadow darkened the doorstep. People were the central part of the universe of Africa, and the world stood still because of this."

"People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. ... It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion a like that."

"I don't know these people but my search for a faith has taught me that life is a fire in which each burns until it is time to close the shop."

"Prostitutes, he was to decide, were the best type of women you'd find among all black women, unless a man wanted to be trapped for life by a dead thing. A prostitute laughed. She established her own kind of equality with men. She picked up a wide, vicarious experience that made her charter in a lively way, and she was so used to the sex organs of men that she was inclined to regard him as a bit more than a sex organ. Not so the dead thing most men married. Someone told that dead thing that a man was only his sex organs and functioned as such. Someone told her that she was inferior in every way to a man, and she had been inferior for so long that even if a door opened somewhere, she could not wear this freedom gracefully. There was no balance between herself and a man. There was nothing but this quiet, contemptuous, know-all silence between herself, the man and his functioning organs. And everyone called this married life, even the filthy unwashed children, the filthy unwashed floors, and piles of unwashed dishes."

"There seemed to be ancient, ancestral lines drawn around the African man which defined his loyalties, responsibilities, and even the duration of his smile."

"Most men want to achieve great victories ... But I am only looking for a woman."

"You find yourself throwing blows but weeping at the same time, because of all the people who sit and wail in the darkness, and because of all the fat smug persecutors to whom this wailing is like sweet music, and some inner voice keeps on telling you that your way is right for you, that the process of rising up from the darkness is an intensely personal and private one, and that if you can find a society that leaves the individual to develop freely you ought to choose that society as your home."

"One might go so far as to say that it is strong, dominating personalities who might play a decisive role when things are changing. Somehow they always manage to speak with the voice of authority, and their innate strength of character drives them to take the lead in almost any situation. Allied to all this is their boundless optimism and faith in their fellow men."

"Tie a man's hands behind his back and then ask him if he's going to chop down a tree."

"It was his belief that a witty answer turneth away wrath and that the oil of reason should always be poured on troubled waters."

"In this country there is a great tolerance of evil. It is because of death that we tolerate evil. All meet death in the end, and because of death we make allowance for evil though we do not like it."

"Well-educated men often come to the crossroad of life .. One road might lead to fame and importance, and another might lead to peace of mind. It's the road of peace of mind that I'm seeking. ["

"It was the mentality of the old hag that ruined a whole continent - some sort of clinging, ancestral, tribal belief that a man was nothing more than a grovelling sex organ, that there was no such thing as privacy of soul and body, and that no ordinary man would hesitate to jump on a mere child."

"Why should men be brought up with a false sense of superiority over women? People can respect me if they wish, but only if I earn it."

"But witch doctors were human, and nothing, however odd and perverse, need be feared if it was human."

"The country presented overwhelming challenges, he said, not only because the rainfall was poor but because the majority of the people engaged in subsistence farming were using primitive techniques that ruined the land. All this had excited his interest."

"He sat quite still, staring ahead with calm, empty eyes, and he looked so lordly for all his tattered coat and rough cowhide shoes that Makhaya smiled and walked up to him and greeted him."

"I don’t care about people. I don’t care about anything, not even the white man. I want to feel what it is like to live in a free country and then maybe some of the evils in my life will correct themselves."

"It's only education that turns a man away from his tribe."

"Head’s contention is that socially ascribed identities arefalse, misleading and degrading to the true inner person"

"“they cannot exist unless they can live in the village insuch a way that the changes that they bring about are necessary … in determining who they are"

"it would seem to suggest that Africanness is not a natural state of existence, [but that] it must be performed"

"Things wouldn’t have been so bad if black men as a whole had not accepted their oppression and added to it with their own taboos and traditions."

"…the Tswana language [like] the bush, [belongs] to all Batswana people"

"“the poverty and tribalism of Africa [are] a blessing if people [can] develop, sharing everythingwith each other"

"“It’s Zulu … I am a Zulu. And he laughed sarcastically at the thought of calling himself a Zulu"

"MakhayaMaseko’s quest is to find inner peace of mind by a constructive engagement with the social world and in the world of GolemaMmidi, these desires are offered fulfilment"

""The philosophy of love and peace strangely overlooked who was in possession of the guns…The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”"

"A woman is a maker of pottery, feeling life with her hands, keeping it whole, moulding it from the depths upwards. Her vision is constant, unchanging. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"The body is a positive thing, and love without a body is negative, useless, purposeless. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"The holy order of doing the right thing is incompatible with love, which does all the wrong things. Love can never learn to choose the woman who has the highest price, or whose father possesses the greatest number of cattle. Love strikes the outcast, the beggar, the stranger, and leaves the dull, dead, complacent conformer to his safety. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"All life flows continuously like water in the stream and I am only some of the water in the stream, never able to gauge my depth. The hours, the years, the eternities slip by too quickly, moving, changing, never the same thing. I move with this current to the ocean only to be flung back again to the stream. The cycle seems unending, repetitive. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"Who am I? What am I? In past and present, the answer lies in Africa; in part it lies within the whole timeless, limitless, eternal universe. How can I discover the meaning and purpose of my country if I do not first discover the meaning and purpose of my own life? Today there are a thousand labels. One of them is 'crazy crank'. I do not mind being a 'crazy crank', as long as I am sure that I am a crank of my own making, as long as I resist environmental, societal, and political attempts to control and suppress my mind. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"There were once highway robbers, who said: 'Your money or your life!' Today, they say: 'Your politics or your life!' [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"A basically timid and cowardly person dare not presume to speak for others. He can only speak for himself. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"The only reason why I always admit pain is that it seems the only constructive emotion."

"Not now, not ever, shall I be complete; and though the road to find you has been desolate with loneliness, still more desolate is the road that leads away from you. It is as though pain piles on pain in an endless, unbroken stream, until it is the only reality. What do they do, those who love?"

"Life is a treacherous quicksand with no guarantee of safety anywhere. We can only try to grab what happiness we can before we are swept off into oblivion."

"Life is not in bits and pieces. It is a magnificent, rhythmic, pulsating symphony."

"She was hardly conscious of her agonised cry as his hard kisses ravaged her mouth. For her it was like a dissolution of body and bones; with only a heart left; a pulsing heart awash in an ocean of rushing tornadic darkness; helpless at its own forward rushing..."

"The task of the writer is to serve humanity and not party politicians and their temporary fixations. But it's a hard path to follow. I'm having headaches over it because I'm too intensely aware of the pressures and issues and yet at the same time wish to retain my right to think for myself."

"There's only one way to make yourself shock-proof. Do not be impressed by evil and do not be impressed by good."