Apartheid Quotes

“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“I don't fancy colors of the face, I'm always attracted to colors of the brain.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“How, then, does one become an activist?

The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment, together.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“At the time of his death, Biko had a wife and three children for which he left a letter that stated in one part: “I've devoted my life to see equality for blacks, and at the same time, I've denied the needs of my family. Please understand that I take these actions, not out of selfishness or arrogance, but to preserve a South Africa worth living in for blacks and whites.”
― Steve Biko

“There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stalinist past), police and communications are all die-hard Zuma loyalists. Whatever their line functions, they will also play the role they have played so ably to date: keeping Zuma out of court—and making sure the state serves Zuma as it once did Mbeki.”
― Mark Gevisser

“There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.') It was as you can see, no difficult task. I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the 'peace' movement had decided to borrow from this tattered style book. The mantra, especially in the letters to this newspaper, was: 'Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country.'

Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, 'Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one'? 'Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.' 'Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones.' 'Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.' I could go on. (I think number four may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the 'doves' to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to re-read themselves saying things like, 'The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Jesus was not white, hey, he was a black man. Like our pig man, Mzwaki. All the Bible people were dark people.”
― Jonah Becker

“The myth of “artificial boundaries” drawn by ignorant Europeans is one that dies hard. In fact, as the French scholar Camille Lefebvre has shown, colonial administrators went to great lengths to figure out where boundaries should be drawn. In doing so, they made use of extensive local knowledge. Later demands by critics to redraw borders along ethnic lines, she argued, “had the paradoxical effect of erasing the history of African political structures and the role of the local populations in defining colonial boundaries.” This reflected a racist idea “that the essence of Africans is to be found in their ethnicity.”

What is true is that these political boundaries did not always coincide with ethnic boundaries. Many ethnic groups ended up on different sides of borders because carving up “ethnic homelands” would have been both impractical as well as, in Lefebvre’s view, racist. If there is a “high-handed” assumption at play, it is the assumption of later critics that Africans are essentially tribal and need to be organized on tribal lines. Thus borders should be redrawn not based on political, social, and economic logic but on ethnic essentialism. When the apartheid state of South Africa created such ethnic “homelands,” they were roundly derided because they created ethnic ghettos cut off from modern lines of economic and political life. Yet the “artificial boundaries” critique of the borders resulting from the Berlin conference is an appeal for just such apartheid-style “homelands.”
― Bruce Gilley, In Defense of German Colonialism: And How Its Critics Empowered Nazis, Communists, and the Enemies of the West

“Gentle Reader...the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
― W.E.B Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk: Part 1

“But beyond numbers, it is the deep chasm between reality and representation that is most bewildering in the case of Palestine. It is indeed hard to understand, and for that matter to explain, why a crime that was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present, should have been so totally ignored.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“দক্ষিন আফ্রিকার-বর্ণবাদ- এই পশ্চিম প্রভাবের ফলেই সৃষ্ট।”
― Tareque Shamsur Rahman, বিশ্ব রাজনীতির ১০০ বছর

“My childhood involved church, or some form of church, at least four nights a week. Tuesday night was the prayer meeting. Wednesday night was Bible study. Thursday night was Youth church. Friday and Saturday we had off. (Time to sin!)”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“One day this apartheid will be a thing of the past. Our people will be free.’
‘Maybe. But the past claws its way out. You can’t bury it just like that. It’s not like human flesh. And yet we need to move forwards.”
― Niq Mhlongo, For you I’d steal a goat

“We need to pray for people who are racist and the spirit of racism. Because when you are racist you become evil. You hate and hurt others. You become a lier. You plot, kill or murder. you abuse ,torture and are divisive. You have no peace. insult others , have no respect and love for them. You use Gods name in vain You can't be considering yourself a Christian when You are doing all the things God said we must do. You are committing all the sins the Lord says we mut not do. If you really fear and love the Lord . You will cleanse your heart and mind and start doing what is right by God.
For God is love.

Ephesians 4:32 | Acts 10:34-35 | John 7:24”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“The Great Firewall (The Sonnet)

99% of the world's human rights
violations are manufactured by the west,
either directly or retrospectively.
No wonder, China is so strict about limiting
western influence on the national psyche!

China is right to ban our entire western internet,
Wouldn't you do the same if you had the might!
If you were self sufficient enough, wouldn't you do
the same to the moron whose biggest contribution
to the world has been genocide, partisan, apartheid!

Every parent tries their best to keep
their children away from bad influence.
You ain't qualified to speak of liberty
till you take off your western glasses.

Political correctness is not social justice,
any more than bigoted boneheadedness is.
Moral sensitivity is just mark of judgmentality,
till we disinfect ourselves from our westernness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“for Falasteen

the boy i adored at sixteen gifted me his keffiyeh
feeling guilty for living when others were killed
simply for existing i haven’t seen him in sixteen years
but think of him often these days his grandmother’s purse
still carrying keys to their home believing they’d return
in weeks can it even be called a key
if what it unlocked is no longer there?
we’d sneak onto mall rooftops & pretend shooting
only happened with stars! 'we have a duty of memory,'
he said, 'so they’ll kill us all until only the soil
is witness' how could i reply? i sat in my liquid silence
today there are nurseries of martyrs
they bomb babies for they fear enemies
hiding between pacifiers & tiny wrists
bomb hospitals because enemies hide in ICU bedpans
bomb schools because enemies hide in children’s bags
bomb the oldest mosques & churches because enemies
hide in rosary beads & votive candles
they bomb journalists because enemies are hiding
under their PRESS vests & helmets
bomb poets because enemies hide in pages
of peace poems the elderly are bombed
because enemies hide under their canes
the disabled are bombed because they harbour
enemies in their artificial limbs
they raze & burn all the ancient trees
because enemies make bombs from olives
they bomb water treatment plants
because enemies are now water
& so it goes: justification provided
exoneration granted business as usual
& the boy I adored has green-grey eyes
the colour of fig leaves
we don’t speak but i wish to tell him
'i’m sorry the world is a blade i’m sorry
home is blood & bones i’m sorry music
is sirens & wails i’m sorry night is infinite'
but the boy I adored has grey-green eyes
the colour of forgotten ash”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Yet this brings home to me the crucial role that young people played in the struggle against apartheid. We were clear-sighted and idealistic, and we were unencumbered by the adult responsibilities that led many people to make compromises with the regime. Young people's hunger for justice made a decisive difference in South Africa's freedom struggle.”
― Kumi Naidoo, Letters to My Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker

“In 1983, the message of the ANC president Oliver Tambo emphasised the need for a broad united front in the struggle against apartheid.

He said: "We must organise the people into strong mass democratic organisations; we must organise all revolutionaries into underground units of the ANC; we must organise all combatants into units of uMkhonto we Sizwe; we must organise all democratic forces into one front for national liberation”
― Kumi Naidoo, Letters to My Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker

“He [Mosiuoa "Terror" Lekota] stressed that we had to build non-racialism - we couldn't just declare it and hope for the best. If we were to build a mass democratic movement, we would have to do the hard work of dismantling the barriers the apartheid system had put in place to keep us apart in separate townships, separate schools, separate hospitals”
― Kumi Naidoo, Letters to My Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker

“Besides their trauma, the deepest form of frustration for Palestinians has been that the criminal act these men were responsible for has been so thoroughly denied, and that Palestinian suffering has been so totally ignored, ever since 1948.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The general definition of what ethnic cleansing consists of applies almost verbatim to the case of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Zionism was a settler colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Systematic cruelty does not only show its face in a major event like a massacre. The worst atrocities can also be found in the regime’s daily, mundane presence.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Palestine was always the land between the river and the sea. It still is. Its changing fortunes are characterized not by geography but by demography. The settler movement that arrived there in the late nineteenth century now accounts for half the population and controls the other half through a matrix of racist ideology and apartheid policies.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“when you found a state—even one with a thriving culture, a successful high-tech industry, and a powerful military—on the basis of dispossessing another people, your moral legitimacy will always be questioned.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“This land is a colony treated like a colony and acted upon like a colony; unless the colonial mindset changes, nothing will change. It will further deepen the exploitation, hatred and marginalisation.”
― Arzak Khan

“Borders are glorified apartheid.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“If your God entitles you to a specific land and justifies your existence as "the chosen people", then you are no further than the devil himself.”
― Dark Night Beacon

“Of all the countries benefiting from European civilization, only South Africa and Israel have racial laws that distinguish between rights of different groups of citizens. The Jews were against Hitler's racism, but theirs goes one step further. They determine Jewishness by mother alone. I opposed Zionism initially because I was against any form of nationalism, but I never expected the Zionists to become racists. It makes me feel ashamed in my origin: I feel responsible for the deeds of Israeli nationalists.”
― Karl Popper