nin.’s Reviews > My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria > Status Update

“I believe that Africa’s susceptibility to cynicism and corruption comes from the fact that African independence was not won in the crucible of war. The people have never been united, through crisis, in the self-abnegation, work, and sacrifice that would have prepared them for the tasks of new nationhood. … 1/2

“In the United Nations, in an extraordinary session, men spoke of the young black who had been assassinated “somewhere over there” in Africa, while outside, American blacks rioted and were clubbed down as they shouted, “Long live Lumumba!”

From that day on, a once indifferent world was to have a new recognition of the deep ties binding black people together.”

“From his side of the river Patrice saw his wife brutally seized by the soldiers. It was then he made an unforgivable mistake… [and] betrayed the Congolese people. He ordered the ferryman to take him back across the river. …[Those] with him, begged Patrice not to go back, for the life of the whole nation was at stake. But Lumumba could hear only his wife’s cries on the other side of the river. He returned.”

“He inherited a scene set for disaster. Government officials and businesspeople were resigning. People in the professions were leaving en masse. The Belgians had not trained replacements. … The workforce was made up only of copying clerks, blue-collar workers, and laborers. The most basic services began to go to pieces. As the Belgians had hoped.”

“When people have been abused and deprived of their humanness for too long, it becomes hard for them to imagine that a better life is possible. Even when they realize that they deserve better, they still may lack the means to reach out for it. And once they are resolved that they will be cheated no longer, still they may not know the correct path on which to move forward.”

“I don’t blame black men for their ways. They were taught to treat their wives the way the whites treated them. This seemed normal in a hierarchy of power rather than a relation of feelings. To show little respect for their wives was the only way that they could assert that they were men. The wife of the black man, then, suffered the double injustice of her husband’s authority as well as the white’s scorn.”

“The mayor was an impressive-looking man. In the colonial system they always were. They were chosen to scare the Africans, to intimidate them with the white man’s authority. He was an insignificant person, about whom no one would have given a second thought in France. But in Africa he had achieved power and prestige. More:he had the privilege of meting out life or death over the people in his little territory.”

“If the whites hadn’t come to Africa, where would the blacks be today?” To which I would answer, “Look at it: if the blacks hadn’t been here, where would the whites be today?”

“I knew that, as a witness to his racism, I was an accomplice to it.”

“I would like to explain the special position that they [Portuguese] held in the colonialist system, and at Brazzaville. Most of the Portuguese had been poor in their own country, and they arrived in Africa as sailors. They were illiterate, with no pretensions of any kind—the proletariat. On Africa’s warm shores they saw they could have a better life than in Portugal. …”