South Africa is home. My family and I were forced to go into exile in 1966 so by the time Mandela was 'released' from prison, I became really homesick and was ready to come home.

I spent a good part of my exile years in America where the prisons are full with contemporary blacks like me. I still believe race relationship in America, ranks up there with the apartheid system in South Africa. Both systems are complex and brutal.

The recent troubles in South Africa, sparked by xenophobia, is a by-product of the apartheid system and the long shadow it has cast over us as Africans.

Other Africans are brought into the country on fake South African identity cards to fuel the divide and rule sentiment that has bothered Africa for centuries. Many of us South African born blacks are still without identity cards. We have been kept waiting by a system which was in place long before our independence in 1994. For example, I only received a SA ID in 2002 and there are many like me, Africans born in SA, who have no IDs because of corruption in the immigration office.

One of my friends and her brother were deported from Johannesburg airport when they arrived from exile in 2000 and they are not the only South Africans who have received this kind of treatment. I had to curse a white SA embassy official in DC before I could receive my emergency passport to travel back home.

Since I arrived, my experience has been that many African professionals born here (including myself) are jobless because whites, Indians, Chinese, Middle Easterners, etc prefer giving jobs to blacks from other countries - the reason being, cheap labor. This, by the way, also happens in the US.

South Africa and the US are very similar in the way it discriminates and forces division among blacks on a level that many other Africans do not understand. I remember when I first came to the US, whites used to tell us that US blacks are the laziest, unreliable, immoral, drug addicts, etc.

Guess what, non-South African blacks say the same thing about my people too. They have told me and some of my friends and relatives the same things, thinking that we are not South Africans because of our accent!

In the face of all this, we still hope that things will change. That the continent is ready for change with all the excitement about NEPAD and the AU.

Many South Africans who have been to Ghana and other places in Africa love how people are so patriotic. Here in South Africa, we feel it is still a whiteman's country. Apartheid really destroyed my people. Many highly skilled African professionals, born in South Africa, are very frustrated and we are losing them everyday from preventable diseases (please not AIDS) but heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, cancer, It is that bad.

Whites and Indians still control the South African economy and they have gotten even richer after 1994 because their businesses have gone global since. Now no more sanctions!

Mbeki's administration had made it easier and had also been giving these groups more financial support than us Africans. The government agencies would ask us to write proposals and business plans and what would they do? They would give our work to friends, whites and Indians as we Africans keep on losing opportunities and lots of money.

In South African international representations in trade, education, information, media, and legal issues for example, you see mainly whites and Indians. No Africans. If you do see one, chances are that black person is NOT originally from South Africa.

We think there's hope. Today Mbeki has agreed to step down and we hope now its time for change.

Ouma Payne, Johannesburg, South Africa, September 25, 2008