I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising.

If given a choice, I would have certainly selected to be what I am: one of the oppressed instead of one of the oppressors.

Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that.

my thoughts are like quick little fish that swim out of my grasp.

You are damned and praised, or encouraged or discouraged by those who listen to you, and those who come to applaud you. And to me, those people are very important.

In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.

Age is wisdom if one has lived ones life properly.