Esther Mahlangu Quotes

African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

The tragedy of civil wars in countries like Angola and Mozambique is that they left many civilians maimed. Poverty is the reason HIV/AIDS spread so rapidly in the African townships and slums. Poverty is the real killer.

I look at an ant and see myself: a native South African, endowed with a strength much greater than my size, so I might cope with the weight of racism that crushes my spirit.

[W]hen the President's visitors came to Guinea, we were all called on to go and entertain them. I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists. Even in South Africa today we are not nurtured like that.

I'm not a political singer. I don't know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.

Her voice and her battles influenced the process of liberation and democratic rebirth in South Africa.

I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there, I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.

I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.

When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" — it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.

In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land.

I believe I deserve to win the title as I embody resilience, strength and the ubuntu spirit within South Africa. As a deaf woman with a cochlear implant, I represent a community that often goes unheard.

I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed.

But African languages refused to die. They would not simply go to the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify, and argue about the international conferences.

The European view point of exploitation of women in Europe compared to the African American women shows an inaccurate judgment.

A news item from Dhaka says that "A radical Muslim priest has offered love and marriage to Bangladesh's most controversial feminist writer, Taslima Nasreen, in order to bring her to the faith". "She will be my third wife," said Mr. Rahim Baksh, an Islamic cleric in Cox's Bazar town in southeastern Bangladesh.

Looking at the new generation of African artists, many of them get trapped early on in styles that aren’t theirs, and that limits them. At this rate, I worry about the future of African music, and that in the future, there won’t be many singers who represent the African woman.