So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

You cannot blame the mismanagement of the economy or the fact that we have not invested adequately in education in order to give our people the knowledge, the skills and the technology that they need in order to be able to use the resources that Africa has to gain wealth.

I believe education should be a right for every child, but tragically in many parts of world it is a privilege for certain children whose parents have money. There are 72 million children in the world who don't go to school and many of them are in Africa.

With no education, you have neocolonialism instead of colonialism, like you've got in Africa now and like you've got in Haiti. So what we're talking about is there has to be an educational program. That's very important.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

As African-Americans, people of that generation felt pretty much if they were going to see changes in the world, they had to make sacrifices and step up to the plate. I'm very proud that my parents happened to be people who did. They were not privileged to have a formal education.

Free education for all - whilst it is a desirable notion, in South Africa it will simply not be affordable.

You can't build a revolution with no education. Jomo Kenyatta did this in Africa, and because the people were not educated, he became as much an oppressor as the people he overthrew.

When I walk up on that shore in Florida, I want millions of those AARP sisters and brothers to look at me and say, 'I'm going to go write that novel I thought it was too late to do. I'm going to go work in Africa on that farm that those people need help at. I'm going to adopt a child. It's not too late, I can still live my dreams.'

When I look back over my life it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me - from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness.

In the African-American community, we struggle with a lot of health problems that have a lot to do with our diet.

Nike is the uniform for kids all over the world, and African design has been killed by Nike. Africans no longer want to wear their own designs.

I'd already decided I wanted to design shoes after I saw a sign in the Museum of African and Oceanic Art forbidding high heels. Well, who could resist?

People don't ever have to starve to death; there are solutions. We have failed if we can't eradicate hunger in Africa and Ethiopia.

I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.

We have known Hillary Clinton both professionally and personally for close to 20 years, dating back to before President Bill Clinton's first trip to Africa in 1998 - a trip that they both acknowledge changed their lives and gave considerable meaning to their post-White House years and to the activities of the Clinton Foundation.

Without white South Africa realizing what it had done - and on the basis of that realization having the courage to ask for forgiveness - there can really be no significant movement.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

As a gay Jewish white South African, I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. You constantly have to question who you are, what you are and whether you have the courage to be who you are.

It is up to African leaders to show their will and political courage in order to assure that this new pan-African institution becomes an efficient instrument and not a place for endless discussions.

During the worst days of apartheid, we turned to the church for hope and courage as we fought a righteous struggle for a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist, just, and prosperous South Africa.

I see courage everywhere I go in Africa. Fearless human rights activists in Darfur. Women peace advocates in eastern Congo. Former child soldiers in Northern Uganda who now are helping other former child soldiers return to civilian life.