… Fragments of our lost kingdom …
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a deadman's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
There is an extraordinary degree of similarity throughout the region in the nature of the policy problems that have arisen and in the national response to them.
— Accelerated Development, p. 4
We asked for bread
And they chucked a stone at us.
— A senior African economic analyst's observations on Accelerated Development.
Economic growth implies using … scarce resources more efficiently…. Policy making inevitably has to embody wider political constraints and objectives…. The record of poor growth … suggests that inadequate attention has been given to policies to increase the efficiency of resource use and that action to correct this situation is urgently called for.
— Accelerated Development, p. 24
People … must be able to control their own activities within the framework of their communities. At present the best-intentioned governments—my own included—too readily move from a conviction of the need for rural development into acting as if the people had no ideas of their own. This is quite wrong … people do know what their basic needs are. If they have sufficient freedom they can be relied upon to determine their own priorities for development.
— President J. K. Nyere
Our own reality—however fine and attractive the reality of others may be—can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts by our own sacrifices.
— Amilcar Cabral