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.

In the literal sense there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

In South Africa we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world who through the use of non-violent means such as boycotts and divestment encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture so that Africa is not a net importer of food but an exporter of food.

I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.

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.

I don't think that anyone seriously fears that the world can be blown to pieces all together. But what one can fear and rightly so are regional things like in the Middle East India Pakistan the Korean Peninsula borders in Africa etc.

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.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money because Africa was the 'dark continent' and because I was a girl.

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.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage as I like to put it and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena Queen of the Jungle.'

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.

I think it's a good thing for a president or political leaders to want to put their values or their faith into action. Desmond Tutu did that in South Africa. Martin Luther King Jr. did that here. This is a good thing.

I had very supportive parents that made the way for me even at a time when there were very few women - no women really maybe two or three women - and very few fewer than that African-American women heading in this direction so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith.

My parents shared not only an improbable love they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name Barack or blessed believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

I knew that there were several among African-American leaders who had been put out by me because of my failure or reluctance to endorse Sen. Kerry.

African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa Asia and Latin America?