Africa Risen Quotes

“Angry because dozens of brutalized girls didn’t warrant watching the roads. Instead, the rapist got rewarded with a bride. But two men murdered, and heroic selflessness rears its cowardly head.”
― Sheree Renée Thomas, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction

“People think girls don’t go to school here because we’re ignorant shepherds. Attendance rates plummet when the seasonal herds of long-horned zebu turn towards our village and rise again when they leave and drop in another village further away. It’s not ignorance. It’s fear. Keep your daughters home or else … or else the village might get another stone statue or another wedding …”
― Sheree Renée Thomas, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction

“However, science is but diluted magic.”
― Sheree Renée Thomas, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction

“The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes didn’t have tears, Langa. If you’re reading this my mzukulu, it looks like my cookbook has called to you which means I have passed on. Wipe your tears before reading on, I don’t want you staining the pages. Gogo M.M.W.”
― Sheree Renée Thomas, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction

“But it was rumoured by the wise of Igodomigodo that Ogiso Igodo did not die, but bearing hard the humiliation of Elegbara, he had gone into Igbo Eda, the sacred forest of Olodumare wherein the powers of the earth were buried. It was said that as he could not be admitted into the abode of the gods, he besought Olodumare for the power of dominion over the earth. But Olodumare, mistaking his request, turned Ogiso Igodo into a tree whose root went deep into the earth’s core. Nurtured by the earth’s magma, the tree bore no fruits, and its leaves were red like flame, and bitter and poisonous, like the soul of Ogiso Igodo. And to this day, men who seek the powers of the earth bow to the tree and tap from its pitch and drain the bitterness of Igodo into their soul, and the powers they wield are cruel and merciless.”
― Sheree Renée Thomas, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction

“The pioneering works of writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Amos Tutuola, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ben Okri, Kojo Laing, Charles R. Saunders, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Steven Barnes, Jewelle Gomez, L. A. Banks, Eric Jerome Dickey, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Linda D. Addison, Nisi Shawl, Walter Mosley, Andrea D. Hairston, and others created a body of work that blazed a trail for new writers to come. Anthologies such as the groundbreaking volumes Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, edited by Sheree R. Thomas, as well as Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson, helped challenge the assumption of invisibility and created more space for new works from a variety of communities to find their way into the publishing world.”
― Sheree Renée Thomas, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction