Lagos is a fascinatingly infuriating place that its residents love – and love to hate. Licence plates on cars here proudly display the state motto, ‘Centre of Excellence,’ in what often seems a sarcastic swipe at the place we live in. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
Lagos is sometimes emblematic of disorder. In traffic, drivers make their own rules. There is a constant war between our street hawkers and our various forms of law enforcement deployed to eradicate the ‘indiscipline’ of poverty. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
Everybody has an equal right to be on this earth and to be happy on this earth and to achieve on this earth. That’s kind of the way that I would like to try and go about living. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
Washington, D.C., is not a subtle city. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, D.C. is constructed to shout, ‘Here I am! I am powerful!’ to the world. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
When the HIV/AIDS epidemic first appeared, a lot of the reaction was that it’s not happening here. It doesn’t exist. It’s not on the continent of Africa. Then we moved into this other phase, in which it was kind of like, it’s everywhere. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
I find the sort of unwitting European American outsider who wants to come to Africa to help is a very problematic construction. It’s problematic because you don’t want to tell people don’t aid, don’t help, when people feel a need to. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
When somebody says that six million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can understand that. It’s only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it actually was. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
There are skills you pick up on in a clinical environment in terms of how to ask questions, what to look for, how to listen that serve one well when trying to write. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
Kidnapping causes a long-term rupture in the psyche of those kidnapped and of those who wait for their return. It doesn’t end. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
The kidnapped person is so tantalizingly close, kept alive by a devastating hope. Kidnapping or hostage-taking is perhaps the most disturbing form of terror because it turns this hope into a liability that can paralyze. Uzodinma Iweala Read Quote
