I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts of our forests of all our great wildernesses.

After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union.

The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air water and continents are interconnected. That is our home.

What Churchill described as the twin marauders of war and tyranny have been almost entirely banished from our continent. Today hundreds of millions dwell in freedom from the Baltic to the Adriatic from the Western Approaches to the Aegean.

That freedom can never be attained by a nation without suffering and sacrifice has been amply borne out by the recent tragic happenings in this subcontinent.

Australia is the only island continent on the planet which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution - warmer seas which can drive stronger storms and more acidic oceans which wreak havoc on the food chain - are even more deadly here.

On the Continent people have good food in England people have good table manners.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money because Africa was the 'dark continent' and because I was a girl.

Those who have always had faith in its final success can do no less than rejoice as if it was our own triumph after five years of daily struggle to impose Cuban music on the European continent.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.