Powerful Quotes From African Books (Part 4)

African writers have written in diverse forms, styles and in many languages. They have been able to creatively put words about their lives, experiences, culture, history and myth together in books published widely on the African continent and beyond.

Many of these books consist of sentences that impart divine influence on the mind and soul. eelive.ng is only glad to explore them with you.
This week’s quote examines the work of one of the top Young African writers, NoViolet Bulawayo. The quote is an extract from her debut novel, “We Need New Names”.

 It says:

“There is no night so long that doesn’t end with dawn”

NoViolet Bulawayo/We Need New Names

No matter how long darkness lingers, the light will always resume. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It may take one day, it may take years but definitely not forever. Do not give up, the night is on its way to sunrise. 

We Need New Names is the 2013 debut novel of expatriate Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo. It tells of the life of a young girl named Darling, first as a 10-year-old in Zimbabwe, navigating a world of chaos and degradation with her friends, and later as a teenager in the Midwest United States, where a better future seems about to unfold when she goes to join an aunt working there. The first chapter of the book, “Hitting Budapest”, initially presented as a story in the Boston Review, won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.

NoViolet Bulawayo (pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele) is a Zimbabwean author and Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (2012–14). She was named 5 under 35 honoree by The National Book Foundation in 2012. Bulawayo sat on the board of trustees of the pan-African literary initiative Writivism between 2014 and 2018.

By Samiah Olabimpe