Arthur Ashe had been the first black athlete to play Johannesburg at the time of apartheid.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I am very proud to be African. I want to defend African people, and I want to show to the world that African players can be as good as the Europeans and South Americans.
As a young woman, I attended Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa, which was then not segregated. But I witnessed the weight of apartheid everywhere around me.
I always felt that I had to leave a legacy on the African continent. As I was only the third player to come to the NBA from Africa, I felt I had to do my best to recruit more young Africans to come and play in the NBA - and also find a way to bring the NBA to Africa.
I met Arthur Ashe a few times. I know how important education was to him.
Few would deny that blacks have become very dominant in athletics: football, basketball, track, now dominant in tennis and dominant in golf.
He was a professional rugby player in the area that I played as a youngster. So a lot of people who I went to school with knew who he was and knew that he was black. So I would get racist taunts in school.
People don't know that there were very successful black businessmen in the years of apartheid.
Of course, it's fun to play with Blacks.
My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.
The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.