Wherever you go, there you are (still colonized, I guess)

Lessons from a week in Cape Town

Dear friend,

As I write this to you I am trying not to think too much about the fact that I’m in an overpacked metal cage that’s hurtling itself at an impossible speed through complete darkness above an endless ocean, my face illuminated by the light of my laptop screen while my left elbow fights to keep the sleeping stranger next to me from collapsing on top of me. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

I am on the first of a three-leg journey back “home” from South Africa, having spent one of the most formative weeks of my life among friends; some who are my family and others who are new and already so dear. We spent our time in Cape Town, surrounded by oceans and mountains and the most breathtaking sunsets of my life. Without exaggeration, Cape Town is one of the most stunning places on earth. Its beauty is beyond just aesthetics; there is something that enters your very soul when you’re looking up and around at the sweeping landscape, it feels as though the place - its mountains and oceans and trees - is speaking directly to you, telling you to slow down, to breathe deeply.

Top of Table Mountain, looking toward the Atlantic

I was prepared for the usual things that travel teaches you; the ways in which it leads you to think and to say out loud “oh that’s interesting!” What I did not expect is just how much I would learn about myself over the course of this week.

I don’t know if you can relate to this, but I am someone with a very strong sense of self and of place. I have certain assumptions about myself and how I fit into the world and I hold these assumptions as absolute truths.

Here are some that are relevant to the point I am attempting to make today:

• If I’m going to travel all the way to Africa, I’d rather just go to Ethiopia and see my family.

• I vacation best in Western Europe because I like spending time in art museums and seeing how the architecture plays against the natural landscape.

• I am a solo traveler through and through and the maximum number of people I can tolerate traveling with is three, and they all have to be my closest friends.

• Because life in Africa is often fraught with so much struggle, vacationing there and expecting to have fun is insensitive and uninformed.

Dear reader, I ask you: how can a person be so very wrong about so many things?

I am humiliated to admit that I can easily trace most of these assumptions back to an internalized bias against my own mother continent, my own people, the very place to which I belong and owe everything. I have been conditioned to see Africa as a risky, dangerous, certainly not fun place that isn’t “worth the risk of a ruined vacation.” To be perfectly honest, the only reason I even agreed to go on this trip is because my best friend insisted on celebrating her milestone birthday there, despite my best efforts to convince her otherwise.

It is very hard for me to admit this because it’s a lot easier to wave it all away as something less insidious. I could say that because I am African, it is not an exotic place for me and therefore I haven’t had the desire to travel there. I could also say that because of where I now live in the diaspora (and in capitalism) I simply do not have enough vacation time to account for the very long and often grueling flight times. But these are all excuses. Cover stories for what is really hiding beneath the surface: I have believed the lie that Africa isn’t worth the effort. That there is nothing there for me but survivor’s guilt and being witness to suffering.

These assumptions inserted themselves into every part of my decision making about this trip, even down to how I packed. I studied the map of Cape Town religiously because I wanted to understand “what sorts of people” lived in the different neighborhoods. I packed so many unnecessary things “just in case” that I paid luggage overage fees, and yet I left my “nice” things behind. Me. A woman who spends an ungodly amount of time in Paris, a city notorious for thefts and scams, a place where I have been robbed of everything on more than one occasion. Yet I was too concerned with theft in Cape Town that I took off my necklace and watch before I left for the airport.

Why did I think so much about “safety” while traveling in Africa when I live in a country where I could be gunned down while buying groceries? Where was my concern for law and order when the sight of police in Cape Town didn’t cause me to have a panic attack in the same way it does everywhere in the US? Why was there a constant thought in the back of my mind about making sure I don’t travel too far alone when I’ve never thought that way while being completely alone in European cities?

Cape Town was everything I did not expect. It was a beautiful, warm, calm, soothing city that seemed to embrace us like lost children returned home. On several occasions when looking out to the sea or the mountains I found myself overcome with emotion. I felt at home and at peace in almost every moment of being in Cape Town. And when I did not feel at peace, it was not because of my people. It was because of the dynamics and conditions created and maintained by the white settlers who still hold so much of the economic power in that city.

And the “very large group” that I was sure would spell disaster for my introverted mind? Turned out to be a funny, kind, easy-going and considerate tribe of people who knew how to be there for each other and how to leave you alone when it’s time for quiet. There was not a single moment when I felt out of place or overwhelmed. Apparently, when you communicate your needs clearly, the right people will hear and support you.

I saw so much art in Cape Town, not only in the museums but on the beaches and the streets and the crowded markets and in the way people navigate their city and each other, that I found myself overwhelmed with where to even focus.

In the English language, art is defined as “the expression of human creative skill and imagination.” But in a language deeper than just words on paper, I have learned that Africa is art. There is no greater expression of human creative skill and imagination than Africa and her people.

I will be thinking for a long time about my relationship to Africa, and how much of it has been formed and deformed by an adolescence and adulthood of trying to assimilate into a white supremacist culture. For now, I will just hold gratitude for the gentle way that my motherland shook those assumptions loose from me.

While I sit in this plane holding back tears, flying over the vast ocean that separates me from my homeland, here is what I want to tell you urgently: please do not let your assumptions write a life story for you. Allow the right people and places to shake some of them loose from you, and then go with an open heart in the direction of something new. You may find that it was there waiting for you all along.