South Africa Didn't Wait for Me to Be Ready

South Africa Didn't Wait for Me to Be Ready

I landed in Johannesburg with a hangover I hadn't earned and a suitcase that smelled like the lavender sachet my mother had tucked inside without asking. The airport was all fluorescent lights and hurry, people moving past me like I was a stone in a river, and I stood there feeling every hour of the flight in my lower back and my clenched jaw.

Outside, the air hit different. Warm, but not sticky. Diesel and something floral I couldn't name. The sky was bigger than it had any right to be, stretched thin and pale like it was holding its breath. A taxi driver asked where I was going, and I handed him a crumpled piece of paper with an address I'd copied from an email, and he nodded like he'd been expecting me.

I wasn't running this time. Or maybe I was, but I'd gotten better at lying to myself about it. I'd told people I was "taking time"—that polite phrase you use when what you really mean is I don't know how to be a person anymore and I need to figure it out somewhere no one knows my name.

The truth: I'd spent the last year watching my life fall apart in slow motion. A breakup that had dragged on so long it stopped being painful and just became exhausting. A job I'd quit without a backup plan because one more performance review was going to put me in the hospital. Friends who'd stopped calling because I'd stopped answering, and at some point we'd all just accepted that I'd disappeared.

So I bought a ticket to a country I knew almost nothing about except what I'd seen in movies that probably lied, and I told myself it was brave. But sitting in that taxi, watching Johannesburg scroll past the window—sprawling, chaotic, alive in ways I wasn't—I felt like a fraud. Like I was stealing someone else's adventure and wearing it badly.

The driver caught my eye in the rearview. "First time?"

"Yeah."

"You'll see," he said, and didn't elaborate.

The neighborhood where I was staying was called Maboneng, which I learned later means "place of light," and I liked that—the way a name could be both description and prayer. The streets were painted. Not tagged, painted—murals that covered entire buildings, faces and colors and words in languages I didn't recognize but that felt urgent anyway.

I checked into a hostel that was really just someone's house with extra beds, and the woman who ran it—Thandi, with braids wrapped high and a smile that didn't ask for anything back—showed me to a room that smelled like clean sheets and something cooking downstairs.

"You hungry?" she asked.

I was. I was so hungry I'd forgotten what it felt like to not be.

She fed me stew—thick, spiced, the kind of food that makes you realize how long you've been eating things that don't taste like anything. And while I ate, she talked. About the neighborhood, about the artists who'd moved in and turned abandoned warehouses into galleries, about the kids who played soccer in the street every afternoon and how you had to watch for the ball or you'd take it to the shins.

"People think Joburg is dangerous," she said, leaning against the counter. "It can be. But so can anywhere if you're not paying attention. You pay attention, you'll be fine."

I wanted to ask what paying attention meant, but I didn't. I just nodded and finished the stew and went upstairs and slept for fourteen hours straight.

The next morning, I walked. No plan, no map, just feet on pavement and a hope that I wouldn't get immediately lost. The city was loud—vendors shouting, cars honking, music spilling from shops, a dozen conversations in languages I couldn't parse. It should have been overwhelming. But it wasn't. It was distracting, in the best way. Like my brain finally had something to look at that wasn't the inside of my own skull.

I stopped at a market where a woman was selling oranges from a crate, and when I asked how much, she said a price I couldn't convert fast enough, so I just held out a handful of coins and let her take what she needed. She picked out the exact amount, then added an extra orange and pressed it into my hand.

"Welcome," she said, and the word sat in my chest like a warm stone.

I walked until my feet hurt, then I walked more. Through neighborhoods that shifted from painted murals to iron gates to open parks where people sat on benches eating lunch from Tupperware. I passed a school letting out, kids in uniforms streaming onto the sidewalk with the kind of energy that makes you remember what it was like to be that unbothered by the future.

At some point I ended up at Constitution Hill—a former prison turned museum. I almost didn't go in. I was tired, and museums feel like homework when you're tired. But I went anyway, and it broke me open in a way I wasn't ready for.

The cells were small. Smaller than I'd imagined. And standing in one, reading the plaques about who'd been held there and why, I felt the weight of it—not in an abstract, historical way, but in my body. The fear. The endurance. The fact that people had survived this and then gone on to build a country.

I sat on a bench outside afterward, trying to pull myself back together, and an older man sat down next to me. He didn't say anything at first, just sat there with his hands folded in his lap, looking out at the city.

Finally, he said, "Heavy, yeah?"

"Yeah," I said, and my voice came out rough.

"It should be." He paused. "But it's not the whole story. You'll see the rest if you stay long enough."

I wanted to ask what the rest was, but he stood up and walked off before I could, and I sat there alone, feeling like I'd just been given a test I didn't know how to study for.

Cape Town was different. Softer, in a way. The ocean did that—made everything feel like it had permission to slow down. I stayed in a place near the water where you could hear the waves at night, and every morning I'd wake up to the sound of seagulls arguing like old married couples.

Table Mountain stood over the city like a parent watching their kid play, patient and slightly disapproving. I hiked it once, got halfway up, realized I was going to die, and sat down on a rock until my lungs remembered how to work. A group of teenagers passed me, barely winded, and one of them grinned and said, "Almost there, auntie."

I was thirty-two. Auntie. I laughed so hard I almost fell off the rock.

At the top, the view was the kind of thing that makes you understand why people write bad poetry. The city spread out below, the ocean beyond, the sky so blue it looked fake. I stood there with my hands on my hips, breathing hard, and thought, Okay. Okay, I'm here. I made it.

It didn't fix anything. But it felt like proof that I could still do hard things, even when I didn't want to.

I ate my way through the country. Bunny chow in Durban that I ate sitting on a curb because there were no tables and I didn't care. Braai at a backyard party I got invited to by someone I'd met at a coffee shop who said, "You look like you need friends," and wasn't wrong. Biltong from a gas station that I chewed while driving through the Karoo, watching the landscape turn into something so empty it felt like the beginning of the world.

Food was the language I understood when I didn't understand anything else. The way people shared it. The way they argued about whose grandmother made it best. The way a meal could turn strangers into something softer.

I went to a township tour, the kind that makes white tourists uncomfortable because we're never sure if we're learning or voyeurizing. The guide was a guy named Sipho, and he didn't sugarcoat anything. He showed us his home, his neighborhood, the school where he volunteered, the places where things were getting better and the places where they weren't.

"People come here expecting poverty porn," he said at one point. "But we're not a tragedy. We're a place. We live here. We laugh here. We're not waiting to be saved."

I wanted to apologize—for what, I wasn't sure. For being there. For having the privilege to leave. For every stupid assumption I'd carried with me. But I didn't. I just listened. And at the end, I shook his hand and said thank you, and he nodded like he knew what I meant even though I didn't.

The wild was the part I'd been most afraid of. Not because of animals—though, yeah, lions—but because I'm not an outdoors person. I'm a stay inside and read person. But I went anyway, to Kruger, because how do you go to South Africa and not?

The first morning, we left before dawn. The air was cold and smelled like dirt and something ancient. Our guide was quiet, scanning the bush with eyes that saw things mine couldn't. And then, there—barely visible through the trees—a herd of elephants.

We stopped. The engine cut. And for maybe ten minutes, we just sat there, watching them move through the grass with a kind of slow, deliberate grace that made my chest hurt.

I cried. Not loud, just tears running down my face that I didn't bother wiping away. Because it was beautiful, yeah, but also because I hadn't felt wonder in so long I'd forgotten it was a thing my body could do.

On my last night, I sat on the balcony of my hostel in Cape Town with a beer I'd bought from the corner store. The sun was setting, turning the sky into something that looked like it was on fire, and I thought about how I'd come here broken and was leaving... not fixed, but different.

South Africa hadn't asked me to be ready. It had just existed—loud, complicated, generous, hard—and let me figure out how to stand inside it. And in doing that, I'd remembered how to stand inside myself.

I didn't take much home. A few photos. A bracelet I'd bought from a street vendor. The taste of biltong still on my tongue. But mostly I took this: the memory of a country that had survived worse than I ever would and still woke up every day and tried. That still fed strangers. That still painted its walls. That still believed in tomorrow even when yesterday was unforgivable.

I wasn't fixed. But I was here. And that felt like enough.