Miriam Makeba Quotes

African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

The tragedy of civil wars in countries like Angola and Mozambique is that they left many civilians maimed. Poverty is the reason HIV/AIDS spread so rapidly in the African townships and slums. Poverty is the real killer.

I look at an ant and see myself: a native South African, endowed with a strength much greater than my size, so I might cope with the weight of racism that crushes my spirit.

I'm not a political singer. I don't know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.

Her voice and her battles influenced the process of liberation and democratic rebirth in South Africa.

I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.

The bomb is in play! Dylan's called the AFRAT team! They're meeting me at the docks in twenty minutes! We're going to see if we can find it!

Gaza is being transformed as we speak from what a former British Prime Minister once called the world’s largest open-air prison into the world’s largest open-air death camp.

List of presidents of the United States

She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.

In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land.

Elvis Presley movies – I'm a big Elvis fan – although I don't think you should feel guilty about pleasures.

It is excellent for a man to be simple in his tastes, to avoid extravagance, to own no possessions, to entertain no craving for worldly success.

James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. His honesty and courage would lead him to see truth and to write truth in poetry, drama, fiction, and essay. He was a giant.

A pretty little story is related by Stobæus: "A youth who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learnt the first proposition, inquired, 'What do I get by learning these things?' So Euclid called his slave and said, 'Give him threepence, since he must make gain out of what he learns.

I believe I deserve to win the title as I embody resilience, strength and the ubuntu spirit within South Africa. As a deaf woman with a cochlear implant, I represent a community that often goes unheard.