Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

History, particularly African history, was the scene of many crimes with many conflicting witnesses.

Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?

As he looked into the future, he suddenly realized that at the rate the money was coming in he would end up being the richest man in Africa, and the only thing missing to distinguish him from all the other black rich was white skin. He saw his skin as standing between him and the heaven of his desire. When he scratched his face, daemons within were urging him to break ranks with blackness and enter into union with whiteness. In short, he suffers from a severe case of white-ache.

The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress. You imprison a woman and you have imprisoned a nation, we sang in a song of celebration.

Women? They may be silent, but, like silent streams, you can never tell their depth.

Don’t argue with a fool, the saying went, for people might not see the difference

Involvement in other people’s suffering turned out to be the best way of coping with her personal woes, for she was able to see that these woes were not peculiar to her situation but were shared by many others.

But he added that the new Aburĩrian system was only making explicit what was latent in all modern democracies, in which parties were basically variations of each other.

crooks are often more realistic in their assessment of a situation than moral idealists.

Maybe knowledge was nothing more than the art of looking at what we already know with different eyes, and asking different questions. Knowledge is the discovery of the magic of the ordinary.