Take Care then, mother's son, lest you become a dancer disinherited in mid-dance hanging a lame foot in air like the hen in a strange unfamiliar compound. Pray protect this patrimony to which you must return when the song is finished and the dancers disperse.

They say a man is like a funeral ram which must take whatever beating comes to it without opening its mouth; only the silent tremor of pain down its body tells of its suffering.

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.