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.

Using the power you derive from the discovery of the truth about racism in South Africa you will help us to remake our part of the world into a corner of the globe on which all - of which all of humanity can be proud.

The large ensemble cast and the fact that it was being shot in New York combined with a lot of strong positive images as far as African Americans are concerned really turned me on to The Best Man.

So the experts think we could have an AIDS-free generation in Africa by 2015 even if the mothers are positive.

My Botswana books are positive and I've never really sought to deny that. They are positive. They present a very positive picture of the country. And I think that that is perfectly defensible given that there is so much written about Africa which is entirely negative.