I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.
When I lived in South Africa, someone told me what the longest road in Africa is. It's not the road from Cairo to Capetown, it's the way from your head to your heart, and from there to the here and now.
In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations . . . If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa . . . the independence movement in India . . .) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world.
The far right is saying to us: Forget about the two-state solution, it is going to be a Jewish state from the coast to Jordan. The left wing says you have to forget about Jewish self-determination, you will have to live as a minority in an Arab state - just like the whites in South Africa. The key word that both have in mind is that the situation in the West Bank is "irrevocable." It is one of the words I dislike the most.
I've travelled extensively in the last 16 years - to slums in Bangladesh, to townships in South Africa, to all kinds of places in India, etc. When I would go and talk to villagers about something like vaccines, if I stayed long enough, the women would bring the conversation around and say: "What about this family planning tool? We can't keep having the number of children we're having."
Do you know what the largest single cause of death in South Africa is? The largest single cause of death is what in the medical statistics is called external causes and that is violence in the society. For instance I've seen figures that say that if you take the male age cohort from16 to 45 years, 54% of the people who die in that age cohort die from external causes.
If we don't move forward with regard to creating a non-racial society in South Africa and we allow this legacy of apartheid to persist, these divisions between black and white in wealth and income and so on, in the future you would indeed have an ugly upheaval.
A democratic government in South Africa is not a threat to white people.
I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.
Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.
I was in South Africa, and Joe [Wright] asked the same exact question that you just asked: "Have you ever seen an episode of Black Mirror?" I went back and played the video for Joe. The episode that I did is called "Nosedive," and it was a year to the week from when I first watched it. It was just very bizarre, this very weird coincidence.
Using the power you derive from the discovery of the truth about racism in South Africa, you will help us to remake our part of the world into a corner of the globe on which all - of which all of humanity can be proud.
Once you have some sort of reputation in the outside world, they will try to woo you. They will say, "Won't you come and be on a talk program about books? That's not political." Then they can say to the outside world, "See how free it is, she appears on television. See how free it is." So I refused to have anything of mine read or dramatized on South African television.
The legacy of Mandela is to have brought the country together... South Africa can be one of the success stories of the 21st century.
In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.
In my many trips to South Africa, I have met and spoken to a lot of people there, and they all seem to find apartheid as repellent as you would.
Nelson Mandela will always be the face of South Africa. The traveler passing through the country will see Mandela's face almost everywhere he looks. Truly, the man is omnipresent.
The history of apartheid-era South Africa is incredibly sad and at times infuriatingly incomprehensible.
My list would be Russia, Morocco, Turkey, and South Africa I'm doing which is somewhere I've wanted to go, Australia, Japan maybe, and China, if I have the energy to go and play at all those places.
Trying to understand, inside, what it is to be Ugandan was crucial to the character, because there are Ugandan ways of doing things that I was trying to capture. Even if I had made this movie in South Africa, it would not have been the same, because it is so specific to Uganda.
South Africans must recall the terrible past so that we can deal with it, forgiving where forgiveness is necessary but never forgetting.
Well, Smoke n' Mirrors has very much a world music flavor and it doesn't park itself in one country. It borrows heavily from the Brazilian angle, which is dear to my heart, and I recorded several albums with that flavor. Probably even more so than the Brazilian flavor, there's an African, South African and West African influence and on a couple of other tracks there's some Latin flavor and there's some Indian tables on one track, all centered around my jazz guitar and acoustic guitars, and very much a Lee Ritenour sound.
Hateful material travels the globe. A few years ago, CNN, America's Der Sturmer, ran a story about Black parents being so low down that they abandoned their children and the children had to eat rats. I was at a University in Wisconsin at the time and the mother of a student from South Africa called to see whether the story was true. She had seen it all the way over there. The story was untrue. The children lied. CNN never corrected the story.
Cuba forces in Angola gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can't just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds.
There's so much stigma around HIV/AIDS. It's a challenging issue, and the people that already have been tested and know their status find it very, very hard to disclose their status, to live with that virus, and to even seek out the kind of information they need. This experience of going to South Africa a decade ago really woke me up to the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, how it was affecting women and their children. I haven't been able to walk away from it.
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