Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Progress in the colonies is moving faster than the pace of daily comfort in America. Irony highlights the contrast between political freedom and consumer convenience.
In plain terms
Africa will be free before Americans get a cup of coffee.
What can you take from it?
Expect political change to outpace comfort.

Where it applies

  • geopolitics
  • colonial history

Putting it to work

  • recognize pace of change

Questions to consider

  • What is delayed in your society?
  • Who is free?

Another view

Independence did not always bring immediate freedom or prosperity.

More from James Baldwin

  1. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or …

    Permalink to quote #17
  2. The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

    Permalink to quote #19
  3. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for …

    Permalink to quote #16

Related quotes

  1. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

    F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald quote #4
  2. When you look closely it is a question whether that which is a wrong to the present community may not prove to have been a right to the interests of posterity.…

    Arthur Conan DoyleArthur Conan Doyle quote #4
  3. Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a th…

    Thomas PaineThomas Paine quote #4