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Now, of course, we know there has been an end to apartheid in South Africa, but what excited me was seeing it in the context of history.

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.

In my many trips to South Africa, I have met and spoken to a lot of people there, and they all seem to find apartheid as repellent as you would.

I went on safari in South Africa just after apartheid had ended.

When I was a school kid in Coventry, I used to put up anti-apartheid stickers.

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.

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.

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.

Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that.

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