Important Quotations of Lewis Nkosi
On the situation in South Africa during apartheid
- "Africans have learned that if they are remaining sane at all it is pointless to try to live within the law. In a country where the Government has legislated against sex, drinks, employment, free movement and many other things, which are taken for granted in the Western world, it would take a monumental kind of patience to keep up with the demands of the law. A man's sanity may even be in question by the time he reaches the ripe age of twenty-five." (Nkosi: Home and Exile, 22)
On black writers and their literature
- "Black South Africans did not produce on elite which was alienated form the black masses or even from the conditions of everyday life under which our people laboured. In South Africa we were saved from the emergence of Black Bourgeoisie by the leveling effect of apartheid." (Nkosi: Home and Exile, 32)
On his exile
- "A writer needs his roots; he needs his people perhaps more than they need him in order that they should corroborate the vision he has of them, or at least, to dispute the statements he may make about their lives." (Nkosi: Home and Exile, 93)
On the writers and commitment
- "…whether we consider ourselves revolutionaries or not, are playing a marginal role. We may be good for propaganda; we may raise some money and build up contacts for the people of South Africa-but there is no such thing as a revolution fought in exile, without a base among the oppressed masses of the country for which the change is desired." (Nkosi: On South Africa, 286-292)
- "Ambushed by history, deprived of the moral and material support of the socialist camp by the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, a negotiated peace, between a lame government and weary liberation movements was probably the next best thing… The negotiated peace enacted what Doris Somer, writing about the South Africa, described as a premature end of a history." (The Republic of Letters: Mandela’s Republic)
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