I always wanted to be a singer, but I also wanted to be a doctor. I almost got there: I did four years and got my neuroscience BSc.

An adult, as quickly as possible. I wasn’t built for the psychological warfare of the playground.

First something medical, then, without any doubt, an artist.

There will always be so many who might say, “Ah, he’s a politician masquerading as an archbishop.” Politics is so all-pervasive, and in my theology, obviously, all of life belongs to God, and you don’t have compartments, this is your economic life, this is your political life, this is your religious life. Religion encompasses all of those. But yes, I wouldn’t myself have said I was setting out to be a political animal.

I used to be “Mister Disinvestment.” Now I would like to be Mister Investment and say, “Come! Come and be part of an exciting, exhilarating process. Come in! Come in on the ground floor and see a people do something that’s probably never happened before, people seeking to become something radically different from what their antecedents would have made us believe they were likely to become.

I recall when I was about nine picking up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine and I think — I mean, maybe journalists ought to know just how much power they actually have because here I was 10,000 miles away from America with this copy of Ebony magazine and it was describing the exploits of Jackie Robinson and how he broke into major league baseball. Now I didn’t know baseball from ping pong but what was so important for me, what made me grow inches was to know that a black guy had triumphed over all of the obstacles that were placed in his way and there he was now playing for something called Brooklyn Dodgers. Now I didn’t know Brooklyn Dodgers. I didn’t know Jackie, but it helped to exorcise what is the most awful consequence of racial injustice and it is the sense — this demon of self-hate when you have a very low self-esteem.

One moment, Nelson Mandela is in jail, and the next moment, he is walking, a free man. One moment, we are shackled as the oppressed of apartheid; the next, we are voting for the very first time. I was 63 when I voted for the first time in my life in the country of my birth. Nelson Mandela was 76 years of age. But it happened, it happened. It happened partly because the international community supported us. People prayed for us. People demonstrated on our behalf, especially young people. Students at universities and college campuses used to sit out in the baking sunshine to force their institutions to divest and the miracle happened. We became free because we were helped and we want to say a big “thank you” to the world. And, you can become free nonviolently.

And actually now having had the advantage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and being able to look at some of the records of what the apartheid government was doing, the thing that is surprising to me is why so many of us survived. I mean, how is it that they did not assassinate more of us?

But one of the things that my father did was to let me read comics. Now people used to say that’s bad because it isn’t — it spoils your English but, in fact, letting me read — I devoured all kinds of comics — fed my love for English and my love for reading but I suppose if he had been firm I might not have developed this deep love for reading and for English, which stood me in good stead when I later went into hospital for 20 months. I did have something to do. I had — as things maybe got a little bit more serious, I was given a diet — we didn’t have too many books but my father was keen that one read things like Aesop’s Fables and Lamb’s, Tales from Shakespeare . I didn’t read the originals but I read these stories that describe what Shakespeare was saying in the plays and that possibly was something that sharpened your appetite for later.