People identify with me - everyone does - African American women Caucasian women they all identify with me because I'm ethnic.

It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political I can't do anything about that.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

I was afterwards sorry for this though if I ever travel again I shall trust to none but natives as the climate of Africa is too trying to foreigners.

This is my first opportunity to visit this part of North Africa so I am going to be able to go back home and talk about this beautiful country and encourage Americans to travel here.

I've been lucky to travel through quite a bit of Europe and Australia but I would love to do Asia and South America and South Africa.

Could I say that the reason that I am here today you know from the mouth of the State Department itself is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.

There are so many things I want to do. Like I want to get an artist a musician a photographer and a bunch of dancers that I know and just travel across Africa and just film it and just see what happens. Do and learn as much as I possibly can. Luckily I have a lot more time.

I grew up in South Africa and I would look at maps and we were at the bottom of the world. There was this whole thing up there. I was always reading encyclopedias about the world. So travel was something I was always attracted to.

The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.

I love going to Africa and stuff. I love going anywhere really but I've been to Africa a bunch of times and it's just a beautiful place that needs help obviously but helping people that are really thankful is really easy to do. And the people out there always seem so thankful.

Every Teen Challenge ministry is responsible for raising its own finances but we assist these works with finances prayer and counseling especially overseas in areas such as Siberia Africa South America.

They are responsible for starting this relationship and wanting to help Africa. The United States is very well suited for this as they are a country that has the capacity they have better access to technology and they are a successful country.

Our success educationally industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves. And the nation can be nowhere else but in Africa.

The future belongs to us because we have taken charge of it. We have the commitment we have the resourcefulness and we have the strength of our people to share the dream across Africa of clean water for all.

It gives one hope this great strength of Africa.

Sports and entertainment have always been windows of opportunity for African Americans when other doors were closed.

The biggest lesson from Africa was that life's joys come mostly from relationships and friendships not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields they laughed all the time.

There's a whole lot more to the African-American community than entertainment and sports.

When I got out of acting school I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots ' and for society not me it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion and I was not.

At the same we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.

Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden.

The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman I'd done this privately I wanted him to look at it approve it and he said he wouldn't read it.

With respect to Barack Obama let's face it Barack Obama is an iconic figure in the African-American community. We respect that. We understand that. African-Americans are going to vote for the first black president especially when he happens to share the liberal politics on economic issues that many in that community hold.

To live your life well and have respect for what came before or after - there's a strong respect for that in African culture.

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent at least since the early nineteenth century when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.