I want you to know that I don't have any right, Malawi has no right to stop any president from coming to an African Union summit because that is an African Union meeting.

I sat down in 1989 and I made up my mind at that point that I was going to spend the rest of my life assisting women and youth to gain social and political empowerment through business and education. I convinced myself economic empowerment of women was going to be key, especially in a country like this where most women didn't go to school.

I convinced myself economic empowerment of women was going to be key, especially in a country like this where most women didn't go to school.

You ask how I feel to be the first female president in southern Africa? It's heavy for me. Heavy in the sense that I feel that I'm carrying this heavy load on behalf of all women.

Of course I have bills to pay, but at the same time, it's more about the passion and the love, and I think that's where music should come from, the heart, not necessarily just to cash a check.

All my six husbands married me for different reasons.

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

Claire Hodgson, born Clara Mae Merritt, was the daughter of a prominent Georgia attorney who had once represented Ty Cobb. She was still a teenager when she married Frank Hodgson, a gentleman caller nearly twice her age.