Nicole Balbuena’s Reviews > Looking for Lovedu: A Woman's Journey Through Africa > Status Update

“Western individualism contends that this social life is gained at the expense of the individual”

“And then illiterate manake, who had never read a newspaper or seen television or traveled beyond the next village, told Jane all about the things he’d seen in Paris and New York.”
“It’s some kind of astral travel,”

“We saw modern universities, but invisible to us was the disease that plagues graduates who postpone marriage while getting an education—and substitute casual sex and prostitution. AIDS strikes harvest at the educated classes. Ten physicians graduate from medical school, and within a year three of them are dead,”
-Malawi

Julius Nyerere Is my new idol.
Previous president of Tanzania.
Prioritized ujamaa, African socialism, whereby capitalism is not relevant, only familyhood, meaning a focus on oral mediation and not changing the traditional agriculture system.
He made his country literate in a decade. Extended life expectancy by 20 years.
Destroyed corruption and lived modestly. And Made the national language Swahili, not English.

“The state is a make enterprise serving male interests,”

“Where can democracy come from when all the officials are corrupt and all the people poor and uneducated?”

Muggelton: “don’t tell me you don’t have to lock your doors here. Everyone knows these African blokes will help themselves to anything that isn’t nailed down.”
Alf: “true enough, but they’re used to sharing. They can’t understand why we should have so much when they have so little. I can’t understand it myself. Can you?”

Patrice Lumumba: the first and only democratically elected leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. CIA head Allen Dulles ordered his assassination because he vouched for an end to the economical colony of Europe and America in their country. Eisenhower approved. And the CIA killed him and then dumped him in an unmarked grave.
God bless America

Irritated by the west’s absolute disregard for the 2000 ethnic groups that exist in Africa as they created imaginary lines they called countries dividing those groups in halves, quarters, thirds. I’m Nigeria alone, over 250 different groups with over 400 different dialects have been forced to live amongst each other and completely change their way of life and their culture resulting in decades of “unrest”.

“It seems scarcely to have occurred to either the French or the British that Africans might already constitute civilizations. Or that they might consider the land they lived on to be their own.”
The French thought the Africans needed centralized government in order to survive. The British thought they needed the Bible… just an excuse to colonize, abuse, and use up their resources