6 Quotes & Sayings By Howard W French

Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Maryland, French graduated from the College of William and Mary with a B.A. in English literature and philosophy in 1983. He worked as a reporter at the "Washington Post" and the "Baltimore Sun," and he later covered international affairs for the "Boston Globe." After covering Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Liberia again, he was hired by the "New York Times" to teach its foreign correspondents about Africa Read more

He later joined The New York Times bureau in Nairobi, Kenya, and then transferred to The New York Times bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2009 he moved to Nairobi to write about Africa for The New York Times Magazine.

1
Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things. But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally compelling challenge to humanity, but as a burden, and largely as one to be evaded as much as possible. Howard W. French
2
Africa occupied a relatively blank space in the minds of most Americans, and when they stopped to think about it, aided by old and deeply ingrained habits of press coverage, all they could imagine was volcano, occupation, disease, and horror. Howard W. French
3
I didn’t want to argue with my hosts. I wanted them to talk. But I felt like reminding Li that perhaps forty million Chinese people had died of starvation a half century earlier because they followed their government’s orders. It was the largest famine in history. A snapshot taken then would have given a very different picture of the supposedly essential character of Chinese people, and it would have entirely missed the point. Governments matter. Markets matter. History matters. International circumstances matter. Howard W. French
4
In families one can’t choose one’s siblings. Within regions one doesn’t choose one’s neighbors. And if you are one of the world’s leading producers of a critical industrial resource like copper, in the end you can’t really choose your customers. China and Zambia will just have to get along. Howard W. French
5
I sketched North America onto my crude and now crowded map, and Hao was astounded to learn that it was not a piece of Europe, as he had always assumed. Howard W. French