Johnny Mohlala

“Forge your iron; shape it by force,
not into a flower you already know
but into what can also be a flower
if you think it is and it is so.”
― João Cabral de Melo Neto, Education by Stone: Selected Poems

“The colonists usually say that it was they who brought us into history: today we show that this is not so. They made us leave history, our history, to follow them, right at the back, to follow the progress of their history.”
― Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral

“Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”
― Frantz Fanon

“The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we haven't sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth