[quotes] Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2013

 

"Ele se virou para ela e disse 'Ate que enfim' quando o trem finalmente chegou ragendo, com aquela familiaridade the os estranhos adotam uns com os outros depois de compartilhas a decepcao com um servico publico." - 10

"Como era possivel sentir falta de algo que nao queria mais? Blaine precisava daquilo the ela nao podia dar, e ela precisa daquilo que ele nao podia dar. Ifemelu lamentava por isso, pela perda do que poderia ter sido." - 14

"Aquilo lhe causava uma estranheza desorintadora, porque sua mente nao mudara no mesmo ritmo que sua vida, e ele sentia um espaco oco entre si proprio e a pessoa que supostamente era." - 35

"Ifemelu pousou a cabeca contra a de Obinze e sentiu, pela primera vez, o que sentiria em muitas outras ocasioes com ele: uma autoafeicao. Ele fazia com que ela gostasse de si mesma." - 69

"Hispanicos sao frequentes companheiros dos negros americanos nos indices de pobreza, um pequeno passo acima deles na hierarquia racial do pais. A raca unclui a mulher de pele chocolate do Peru; os povos indigenas do Mexico; pessoas com cara de mesticas da Republica Dominicana; pessoas mais branquinhas de Porto Rico; e o cara louro de olhos azuis da Argentina. Voce so precisa falar espanhol e nao ser da Espanha e, voila, pertence a uma raca chamada hispanico." - 116

"Ifemelu lhe contou sobre a vez em que Allison disse: 'Ei, a gente vai comer um negocio. Venha tambem!', e ela achou que era um convinte e que, como acontecia nos convites na Nigeria, Allison ou uma das outras pagaria a conta." - 141

"Ali, Ifemelu tinha uma leve sensacao acalentadora de renovavao. Ali, ela nao precisava se explicar." - 152

"Com Blaine, ela teve certeza: ele era descendente dos negros e negras que estavam nos Estados Unidos havia centenas de anos." - 193

"Nos Estados Unidos, o tribalismo vai muito bem, obrigado. Existem quatro tipos: de classe, ideologia, regiao e raca. Em primeiro lugar, vamos ao de classe. E bem facil. Ele separa os ricos dos pobres." - 201

"Reconheceu nela o nacionalismo dos americanos liberais que criticavam abundantemente os Estados Unidos, mas nao gostavam que voce o fizesse; esperavam que voe fosse silencioso e grato, e sempre lembravam of quanto a America era melhor do que seu pais de origem." - 206

"Ojiugo usava batom laranja e jeans rasgado, falava sem rodeios e fumava em publico, provocando fofocas perversas e a antipatia de outras meninas, nao por fazer essas coisas, mas por ousar faze-las sem ter morado fora ou ter um pai estrangeiro, qualidade que as teriam feito perdoar sua falta de conformismo." - 258

"'Os paises europeus sao cercados por paises parecidos uns com or outros, enquanto a America tem o Mexico, que na verdade e um pais subdesenvolvido, e isso cria uma psicologia diferente em relacao a imigracao e as fronteiras.'" - 297

"Obinze tinha achado aquele um elogio estranho e guardado com carinho aquela imagem de si mesmo, talvez por saber que nao era inteiramente verdade." - 305

"Comecou a sentir um latejar doloroso por tras dos olhos, ouviu um mosquito zumbindo ali perto e, de forma subita e cheia de culpa, sentiu-se grata por ter um passaporte azul americano na bolsa. Aquilo a protegia da falta de escolhas. Ela sempre poderia ir embora; nao tinha de ficar ali." - 420

"Outras pessoas vieram participar da conversa, todas encerradas numa familiaridade, porque podiam usar as mesmas referencias com tanta facilidade. Logo, estavam todos rindo e listando as coisas americanas das quais sentiam falta." - 438

"'O problema de namorar uma pessoa de outra cultura e que voce passa muito tempo se explicando.'... Obinze ficou satisfeito ao ouvir isso, porque dava ao seu relacionamento com Ifemelu uma profundidade, uma ausencia de novidade superficial. Eles eram do mesmo lugar, mas ainda assim tinham muita coisa a dizer um para o outro." - 492

"O amor era uma especie de luto. Era isso que os romancistas queriam dizer quando falavam em sofrimento. Ifemelu sempre tinha achado meio boba a ideia de sofrer por amor, mas agora entendia." - 508

"A dor da ausencia dele nao diminui com o tempo; ao contrario, parecia ir mais fundo a cada dia, despertando nela lembrancas ainda mais vividas. Mesmo assim, Ifemelu estava em paz; por estar em casa, escrevendo seu blog, por ter descoberto Lagos de novo. Finalmente, havia se esgendrado num ser completo." - 510

[quotes] The Looting Machine - Tom Burgis 2015

 

"Slowly my terror eased. What it left behind was guilt. I felt I ought to suffer as those died had - if not the same way, then somehow to the same degree."

"Oil accounts for 98 per cent of Angola's exports and about three-quarters of the government's income. If is also the lifeblood of the Futungo. When the International Monetary Fund examined Angola's national accounts in 2001, it found that between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion had gone missing, a sum greater than the gross domestic product of each of forty-three African countries and equivalent to one in every four dollars that the Angolan economy generates annually."

"Depending on the vagaries of supply chains, if you have a PlayStation or a pacemaker, an iPod, a laptop or a mobile phone, there is roughly a one-in-five chance that a tiny piece of eastern Congo is pulsing through it."

"The more the state crumbles, the greater the need for each individual to make ends meet however they can; the greater the looting, the more the authority of the state withers."

"Nigeria may be the largest source of African energy exports, but it generates only enough electricity to power on toaster for every forty-four of its own people."

"There are, he said, sixteen factories in China dedicated to churning out textiles with the 'Made in Nigeria' badge sewn into them. For a time the Chinese material was of a much lower quality than Nigerian originals, but the gap narrowed as Chinese standards rose."

"The resource business ruptures the social contract between rulers and ruled... Instead of calling their rulers to account, the citizens of resource states are reduced to angling for a share of the loot."

"Annual steel production worldwide is 1.5 billion tonnes, or roughly one tonne for every five people. The biggest steelmakers, among them ArcelorMittal, India's Tata family and Baosteel of China, bestride a global industrial economy that needs steel for ships and bridges, and forks and scalpels."

"The ones speaking Afrikaans were presumably members of the rough-and-ready corps of white South African former soldiers who signed up as mercenaries after apartheid and who are now to be found scattered across Africa, guarding mines in Congo or attempting coups in Equatorial Guinea."

"The mining giants appeared more determined to plant their flag in the mountain than to mine it."

"Nuclear power stations supply three-quarters of France's electricity. Areva, the French state-owned atomic energy group, held sway over the stretches of nothern Niger under which lie some of the planet's richest seams of uranium. Areva mines about a third of its uranium in Niger, with the rest coming from Canada and Kazakhstan. It is the world's biggest nuclear company, and its annual revenues are twice Niger's gross domestic product."

"In 2008, sub-Saharan Africa, with a population of 900 million, produced as much electricity as Spain, with a population of 47 million."

"Although there was legitimate uproar when a Chinese ship that docked in South Africa was found to contain weapons bound for Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, any notion that China is the sole or even the main source of the oceans of weapons that slosh through Africa is misplaced. One study by two Norway-based academics, based on years of arms import statistics and governance indicators, found that the United States had a greater propensity than China to sell weapons to repressive African governments."

"Without exception, through the 1990s every country that borrowed from the World Bank did worse the more it depended on extractive industries."

"With no record of service to point to, politics becomes a game of mobilizing one's ethnic brethren. For us to win, they have to lose. The social contract is replaced with c compact of violence."

"Corruption does not start or end at the borders of Nigeria or Angola or Equatorial Guinea. Its proponents include some of the world's biggest companies, among them the blue-chip multinationals in which, if you live in the West and have a pension, your money is almost certainly invested."

"... but I think Achebe was seeking to make a wider point about the human spirit: it is capable of loving and of participating in horrors in the same afternoon."

"If you subtract your country's rank on the human development index from its rank on the GDP per head index, you get an indication of the extent to which economic growth is actually bettering the lot of the average person in that country."

"The system is still there: these investors can still form a company without saying who they are, they can still anchor their business in a country that is not concerned about investors' behaviour overseas, and, sadly, there's no shortage of resource-rich fragile states on which these investors can prey."

"Commodities from every continent blend together in the snaking supply chains of the global economy, and it is safe to say that there are incognito nuggets of Africa for sale on my east London high street just as there are in the malls of Los Angeles and the boutiques of Rome. Likewise, through pension funds invested in their shares, we all enjoy the profits of the giant corporations of the oil and mining industries."