Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!

Let me tell you never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

We have our own history our own language our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

Let's face it - think of Africa and the first images that come to mind are of war poverty famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations which in their day were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?

From the world wars of Europe to the jungles of the Far East from the deserts of the Middle East to the African continent and even here in our own hemisphere our veterans have made the world a better place and America the great country we are today.

Really the potential for first of all any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today particularly African Americans. With a college degree today you really breach the unemployment rate.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

I'm not a prophet I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy just allowing myself to tell jokes allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

I have run two Olympic 'A' standard times over the past 12 months and with the time I ran at the African Championships last week I know my speed and fitness are constantly improving so that I will peak in time for the Olympics.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context brilliant African father he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness a deracination.

African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength and to be liberated from fear and from silence.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

The poster boy for our superabled future is Oscar Pistorius an increasingly famous South African sprinter who happens to have had both of his legs amputated below the knee. Using upside down question mark-shaped carbon fiber sprinting prosthetics called Cheetah blades Mr. Pistorius can challenge the fastest sprinters in the world.

Maya Angelou the famous African American poet historian and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.