Esther Mahlangu Quotes

Real artists ship.

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.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.

It's you who invokes the rain in the town. But the rain doesn't soak my soul. My soul's for you... ...and deep down there... ...celebrations all around! When I behold you... ...it seems your body's made up of the soft rose petals! Your lips... ...are they the same artist as they had once been?

It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.

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.

If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

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.

[Bai Juyi] utilized Confucianism to order his conduct, utilized Buddhism to cleanse his mind, and then utilized history, paintings, mountains, rivers, wine, music and song to soothe his spirit.

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

It needs to be rewarded; you don’t come watch a play and then just go away without putting something down; we need to get grants for artists, we need to support them.