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My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy... and I believed that I didn't really have a function as a useful artist in that anymore.

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 am a nationalist, and a Pan-Africanist, first and foremost. I was well grounded in history before ever taking a history course. I did not spend much formal time in school - I had to work.

I didn't actually realise what apartheid meant. I'm probably a bit naive, but I thought it was more of a vague segregation, like on the beaches and buses.

I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.

We have got to move away from the concept of race and color because that is what apartheid is. We cannot end apartheid if we retain these concepts.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

When I talk about the end of apartheid, I prefer not to claim the honor that I have ended it.

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself.

When I went to live in South Africa, I immediately began to understand what went wrong. Because here was a place supposed to be under apartheid - I arrived there in 1991 - but here a black person had more say and had more influence over his white government than an average Kenyan had over the Moi government.