I have been blessed in many ways and one of those is to have been born in Africa for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

I live with one foot in the sand and one in the snow. There's European egocentricity and the African opposite. I normally say that my African experience has made me a better European.

The Klan had used fear intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.

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.

You see Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa and if we're honest conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

Education particularly higher education will take Africa into the mainstream of globalization.

One of the biggest development issues in the world is the education of girls. In the United States and Europe it has been accepted but not in Africa and the developing countries.

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.

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.