compassion_for_all

“We are all prostitutes, for in a world of grab and take, in a world built on a structure of inequality and injustice, in a world where some can eat while others can only toil, some can send their children to schools and others cannot, in a world where a prince, a monarch, a businessman can sit on billions while people starve or hit their heads against church walls for divine deliverance from hunger, yes, in a world where a man who has never set foot on this land can sit in a New York or London office and determine what I shall eat, read, think, do, only because he sits on a heap of billions taken from the world’s poor, in such a world, we are all prostituted. For as long as there’s a man in prison, I am also in prison: for as long as there is a man who goes hungry and without clothes, I am also hungry and without clothes.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“How did we come to be where we are? How did it come about that 75% of those that produce food and wealth were poor and that a small group – part of the non-producing part of the population – were wealthy? History after all should be about those whose actions, whose labour, had changed nature over the years. But how come that parasites – lice, bedbugs and jiggers – who did no useful work lived in comfort and those that worked for twenty-four hours went hungry and without clothes? How could there be unemployment in a country that needed every ounce of labour? So how did people produce and organize their wealth before colonialism? What lessons could be learnt from that?
But instead of answering these, instead of giving him the key he so badly needed, the [books] took him to pre-colonial times and made him wander purposelessly from Egypt, or Ethiopia, or Sudan, only to be checked in his pastoral wanderings by the arrival of Europeans. There, they would make him come to a sudden full stop. To the learned minds of the historians, the history of Kenya before colonialism was one of the wanderlust and pointless warfare between peoples. The learned ones never wanted to confront the meaning of colonialism and of imperialism.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Many times I would sit and think: we people … we built Kenya. Before 1895 it was Arab slavers disrupting our agriculture. After 1895 it was the European colonist: first stealing our land; then our labour and then our own wealth in the way of cows and goats and later our capital by way of taxation … so we built Kenya, and what were we getting out of the Kenya we had built on our sweat?”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Aaaaah. I am old. I have no more dreams. And what are my wishes? There is only one. To join my man in the other world.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood