I think that my whole life has been shaped by my South African experience and I would never really fall into the category of a writer who produces light entertainment for people. My whole force and direction comes from having something to say. What we are mainly very bothered about has been the dehumanizing of black people. And if we can resolve these situations-and I work both within the present and the future-if we can resolve our difficulties it is because we want a future which is defined for our children. So then you can't sort of say that you have ended any specific thing or that you have changed the world. You have merely offered your view of a grander world, of a world that's much grander than the one we've had already.

I wanted to assimilate and go back to the abnormal normality I knew. I wanted to wash off the experience of Africa but obviously I couldn't because that's who I was. As much as I wanted to deny it, it was plaguing me, and I was reminded by the images coming through the TV, people on the streets and in the end my family in the house.

I think, when you grow up as a black person or an African in a black and African country, identity isn’t something you are particularly concerned about. I only became conscious of racial identity when I moved to the UK and started to understand the subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways in which this compounds the way you are seen and how you move through the world.

A lot of my inner healing work is spent trying to come to terms with the fact that being a woman living in South Africa is a trauma all on its own.

Black people have freed themselves from the dead weight of the albatross of the Blackness that once hung around their neck. They have done it by picking it up in their arms and holding them out with pride for all the world to see. They have done it by embracing it. Women must come to realize that the superficial symbolisms that surround us are negative only when we ourselves perceive and accept them as negative. We must begin to replace the old negative thoughts about our femininity with positive thoughts and positive actions that affirm them more and more. What we must also remember, is that we’ll be breaking with tradition. And so when you break with tradition, you have to prepare yourselves educationally, economically, and psychologically in order that you’ll be able to accept and bear with the sanctions that society will immediately impose upon us.

The real struggle has been since Africans first set foot on the continent, an affirmation of the value of one’s self. And I think if, in order to participate in American society, in order to accomplish some of the things which the black middle class has accomplished, if you have had to give up that self in order to accomplish that, then you are not making an affirmation of the value of the African being. You are saying that in order to do that I must become someone else, I must become like someone else…