Bold Statements of Yore

1. We are guilty of keeping up slavery by giving increasing prices of slave-grown cotton and sugar. We are the great supporters of slavery – unwittingly often, but truly.
- David Livingstone, 1859

2. You know long ago they used to say, “…the missionaries came to Africa and they had the Bible and we had the land. And they said, ‘Let us pray.’ And when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.”
Desmond Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Winner (South Africa)

3. You inhabitants of the palace you had better reduce your swaggering…
You cannot show off on an empty stomach,
The children went to get relief but there was none,
The elders were thinking that it was due to the children’s lack of strength,
But the whole issue is not concerned with strength.
Proverb from famine in Nigeria 1942

4. We need schools in Africa, but schools in which we show the native the way to the dignity of man and the glory of the (Portuguese) nation which protects him. We want to teach the natives to write, to read and to count, but not to make them learned men.
Cardinal Cerejeira of Lisbon, in his Christmas message of 1960

5. Improving our country for us, are you? Railways, roads, mines, indeed! For whose benefit are they? You can take them away so far as I am concerned. What are you leaving us with? A sucked orange!
Zambian chief, late 1930s

6. The European merchant is my shepherd,
And I am in want;
He makes me to lie down in cocoa farms;
He leadeth me beside the waters of great need.
Ghanaian soldier, 1940s

7. I have heard…that people may become dependent on us for food. I know that was not supposed to be good news. To me, that was good news, because before people can do anything they have got to eat. And if you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you, in terms of their co-operation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.
Sen. Hurbert Humphrey, on the U.S. food for peace program, 1957

8. Food is a weapon but the way to use that is to tie countries to us. That way they’ll be far more reluctant to upset us.
John Brock, during confirmation hearings as Secretary of Agriculture, 1980

9. Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets breakthrough.
Jonathan Swift

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