If I don't make heritage visible and the strength of mother tongue important for my grandchildren, it scares me that they might say in 20 years from now, 'Well, it is rumoured that we used to be Africans long ago.' And in many urban areas, it's already happening.

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.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

As a young African, the sense of opportunity that fills my head on a daily basis is, I suspect, reminiscent of how young Africans felt at the cusp of independence.

Africans require, want, the franchise on the basis of one man one vote. They want political independence.

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

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.

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.

The only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans. By unlocking and nurturing their creative potential, we can create a step change in Africa's future.

Being told about the effects of climate change is an appeal to our reason and to our desire to bring about change. But to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it.

Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights ..." thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we've just kept the old ones, but with the word "not" inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn't really have them in the first place.

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.

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

It's a privilege to serve the poor to be servants of noble Africans but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

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

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 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.'

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent subtle and sophisticated people with organized societies and great art.

Being told about the effects of climate change is an appeal to our reason and to our desire to bring about change. But to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas is a glaring injustice which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it.

The biggest opportunity in 2013 is in Africa. It has seven out of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world. In Nigeria alone there are 100 million people with mobile phones. In total 300 million Africans - five times the population of Britain - are in the middle class.