Quotes About South Africa

I have always had great respect for former president Mandela. The personal sacrifices he made in order to achieve what was right for the people of South Africa is something I carry with me every day.

Nelson Mandela's contribution to the people of South Africa has been immeasurable and I look forward to helping with his work all over the country.

I really ran away in 1951 from South Africa, where I lived with my mother and father - who was a doctor - to come back to England to find myself, then hide what I found.

If we'd lived in England or America we'd have told stories abut our lives and nobody would have called it protest theatre. But the reality of South Africa was the arrests and detentions and oppression - we could not escape that, so we decided to take it on.

Perhaps life had a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa.

I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

It's enough to play for South Africa and take wickets for South Africa, and then I managed to get 400. I never thought that that would happen.

When I'm in South Africa, I make it a point to take my dogs out to the beach.

South Africa and Brazil are very similar. We have the same social problems, same issues and same growing economies.

Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.

Usually halfway through a book I have a serious depression, so I go on safari on my ranch in South Africa, or fishing off my island in the Seychelles. When I come back and re-read it, I think: 'What was all that about, Smith? It's fine, just get on with it.'

My biggest ambition, ever since I was a boy in Pakistan, has been to play cricket at the highest level. If I can do so for South Africa, I'll give everything.

I grew up in a farm in South Africa and I was scouted there and they sent me to Europe. It's kind of been blessed, since then it happened all so fast.

The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.

I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code.

I think that many of the issues they were facing in South Africa were the same as those I was singing about. Conscription, resisting the draft, government repression - I mentioned all those things in my songs.

South Africa was to evolve into the most pernicious example of the criminal practise of colonial and white minority domination.

I'm over there filming in South Africa now, and two in five are HIV-positive now. Not many people know that.

I helped found Artists for New South Africa, but it used to be called Artists for Free South Africa. Alfre Woodard and a bunch of us started this.

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release.

Ravi Shastri has been claiming that Indian team was very successful under him, but he never told us that India lost ODI series to Bangladesh, lost ODI series to South Africa at home.

South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.

Using the power you derive from the discovery of the truth about racism in South Africa, you will help us to remake our part of the world into a corner of the globe on which all - of which all of humanity can be proud.