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I lost my mother when I was very young, and my father when I was in college.

My mother was one of seven girls whose parents went to bed hungry so their children wouldn't. My father lost his mother when he was nine. He left school and went to work for the next 70 years. They emigrated to America with little more than the hope of a better life.

My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.

My grandmother spoiled my father rotten, and he grew up expecting women to do whatever he wanted. When he married my beautiful mother, Elsa, he expected her to give up her career as a champion ballroom dancer and become a good wife and mother, which she dutifully did.

My mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman with a lovely voice who hated housework, hated cooking even more and loved her children. She was always arranging church activities such as a bazaar.

My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour; I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.

My mother persevered through much adversity because she possessed faith in God, self-respect, and an awareness of history; most especially, she was astute in Africa's significant contribution to world history. Sister Betty refused to live her life as a victim.

When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

When my mother had four girls, and she could tell her marriage was falling apart, she went back to college and got her degree in music and education.