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I don't see myself anywhere specifically, but you can't deny that, in terms of opportunities to create or be an entrepreneur, Africa is a boulevard - it's still all to be done there. And as an African guy, as a Cameroonian, I will obviously do as many things as I can over there.
I think, for a while, there was a kind of debate about whether you could bring back Negro and reclaim it, and then it was black versus African American; now I have noticed in conversation that black people will use all three terms depending on context. I don't advocate one term.
I grew up in the '50s, a tough time for African Americans. I had friends whose fathers would openly say, 'Just bite your tongu;, don't cause any problems.' My father was not like that. Even in the toughest times racially, if somebody disrespected his family, they were in trouble.
Denys Cowan and Dwayne Turner's visions of Wakanda as an ersatz African Epcot Center opened my eyes to the unexploited possibilities; these men, both of whom are African American, together with writer Peter B. Gillis, created an African Asgard of sorts, and I just went, 'Oh, my.'
Even if the production doesn't feel African, the vocal delivery - singing through your nose. Specifically, Highlife music from Nigeria. That was the first music I ever heard as a child. So singing through my nose is something I do often, and that's directly rooted in my heritage.
After decades of persistent, courageous advocacy - often at risk to their own lives, livelihoods, and safety - African Americans succeeded in securing their right to a voice in our government, and their work laid the foundation for the social justice work of generations to follow.
The thing people have to remember is there's nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this historically. We can look at 1619, when Africans first came here, and how early African slaves intermixed pretty indiscriminately with indentured white servants.
A lot of African Americans, especially men, deal with this as a part of life. I've been pulled over by the police in my life, and I think I've only gotten a ticket once. It's just a part of everyday life, and it doesn't matter if you're in the car with your children or by yourself.
I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.
I was born in Evanston, about three blocks away from the Chicago border. My mother, at the time, was finishing her Ph.D. in African History at Northwestern University. Soon after my birth, my parents split, and my father moved to Wicker Park, which is on the north side of the city.
First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
Looking at the numbers, the transatlantic slave trade matches the Holocaust in horror - maybe even without counting subsidiary effects like internal strife and deaths inflected on the continent, death during transport, death during ownership, collapse of African economies, and such.
The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.
In 1967 I entered Harvard as a freshman, confident - in the way that only 17-year-olds are - that I could change the world. My major was African Studies, and my plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism.
Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.
I'm not a prophet; I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future, and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself, but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.
In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race.
Before I started LimoLand, I mainly bought my clothes in Harlem, where I found clothing my size in fun colors. I still like to go there and see the vibrancy and colors of the neighborhood. I am also very influenced by the colors of my contemporary African and Japanese art collections.
Everyone says we have our first African American president. Has there ever been a Jewish president? An Italian president? They don't say a damn thing about that. You think we're still fighting the Civil War or something. If you want to mention it in passing, OK. But don't dwell on it.
To put it simply, as a black man, I started watching films at the age of six, and I've since seen the bad guys changing race - between the African savages, to the Native Americans, and then the blacks and the Arabs and the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Look at 'Rambo': it's exactly that.
I stream this radio station, Radio Nova, that's based in Paris. They curate a beautiful set that's really all over the place - they'll play blues or some West African music, then A Tribe Called Quest, then funk from Ethiopia, then James Brown, and then the Beatles. It's an amazing mix.
Sometimes you can't fight change, because you're a part of it, and I feel that in the context of these films that are happening now, there is a kind of change coming in terms of how history is represented on film, and the African, and the African-American and British African experience.
The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.
I make up cassettes all the time - to take on the road with me - a song from this album, a song from that album. That's the way I listen to music; it's like one of those K Tel things: it's from all over. I listen to Fred Astaire, I listen to African folk music, I listen to Talking Heads.
After I made it to the NBA, I said that I didn't want to be the last player from Africa. After my rookie year, I went to the league and talked about this, and they embraced my idea and started conducting basketball clinics in Africa, and that's when I knew I wouldn't be the last African.
Most Americans know nothing about the African forest, and it seems to them a very scary, spooky dangerous place. I've spent a lot of time in the forests of central Africa. I know they're beautiful places that contain a lot of different kinds of creatures, including some that carry Ebola.
My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
Something that I think extends to a lot of African cultures is that the line between performer and audience is blurry. My mom would lead the wedding song regularly, and she isn't a professional singer. Even as an audience member, you're expected to clap and sing the response to the lead.
In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the 'arm to arm of the blacks,' that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.
My school was pretty much all African Americans, but it was still a little tough to be in because I didn't have a lot of money. And when I came back to my neighborhood, it was tough to fit in there, too, because I was wearing Catholic school clothes, and I had two parents, which was rare.
The working-class Africans are not doing very well, and one of the problems is their education is so shocking. It is routinely said it is a result of apartheid. Deliberately, black people were not allowed to know too much. They could read and write a bit to be useful, but that's about it.
My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.
Africans are on the front lines of humanitarian efforts, distributing life-saving aid in dangerous environments. Africans comprise the vast majority of peacekeepers in civil conflict on that continent. Africans for the most part lead peace negotiations for the wars being fought in Africa.
If Franschhoek has a fault, it is in the lavish refurbishment of wine farms and estates which has reached absurd proportions. Some, like Graf Delaire Estate, are brand new, with jewellery shops, indoor streams, and very high-end lodges for rent at prices not many South Africans can afford.
I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.
While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I've never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
Where the costs of entry are minimal, there is a wide avenue of opportunity for those with little or nothing, which is why football is just about the most democratic sport of all: African and Brazilian footballers compete on a level playing field with their rich white European counterparts.
When I was growing up, Brandy was TV star, reality star, a pop star, a Cover girl, Grammy winner, had her own Brandy doll, and was the first African American to play Disney princess Cinderella. Most importantly, she is a survivor. Many only judge and remember a person's most recent failure.
Music is an expression of who you are, and - at least in that sense - I think I epitomize Black Lives Matter. I'm a big black man, and I'm easily misunderstood. Before I started wearing these African clothes, people would assume that I was a threat and that it was O.K. to be violent toward me.
Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?
The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle.
So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.
An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.
Trinidad's language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it's the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.
Now I've devoted my life to making sure that I can be a trailblazer for any other African American kids or any other gay kids or any other kids that just feel weird or uncomfortable and have their own issues and don't know how to express themselves. I want to be like a beacon for those kids now.
My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.
It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.