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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture.

I've always gotten a positive reaction to doing African-American characters.

African art is functional it serves a purpose. It's not a dormant. It's not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations.

I guess probably in my time in politics it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community despite being subscription television's most valuable customers they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.

African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals but even as I withdrew into this reading I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

I have a pet lizard named Puff five goldfish - named Pinky Brain Jowels Pearl and Sandy an oscar fish named Chef two pacus an albino African frog named Whitey a bonsai tree four Venus flytraps a fruit fly farm and sea monkeys.

Many African leaders refuse to send their troops on peace keeping missions abroad because they probably need their armies to intimidate their own populations.

I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.

First of all the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

I don't think people have been able to deal with the fact that African American filmmakers can make movies about life and relationships.