“In keeping with the uncertainty of the times, I’m unsure how to approach my second and final blog post. I expected that I would be writing about how I felt leaving South Africa and coming home after I had ample time to reflect in the wrapping-up phase of my program. Instead, I’m writing this a week after I returned home from the airport. Between the lingering adrenaline of an unanticipated early departure, the shock of coming home to this new normal, and taking time to just breathe, sleep, and recover, this is the first time I’ve been in the right headspace to reflect on my time in South Africa.

In the week before I left Cape Town, my friends and I talked a lot about how hard it was to remember when COVID-19 wasn’t looming over our minds, conversations, and plans about the future. It was so jarring to realize that we were talking nostalgically about a past that was less than a week old but felt like a lifetime ago. Now that I’m back home under self-quarantine with my family, my memories of being 7,700 miles away a little over a week ago feel unreliable, shaky, and dissociative from my current reality. I’m guessing this is a common feeling among many of the students like me who came home from studying abroad abruptly because of this global pandemic. When I was in the Johannesburg Airport waiting to board my flight home, I realized that I didn’t have a single gift or souvenir from South Africa that I was bringing back with me. I just assumed that I would take care of that later on. This was a fitting metaphor for how I felt emotionally about leaving so abruptly. I expected that saying goodbye to the people and places I got to know here would be hard and also fulfilling. I imagined that I’d return to my first home-stay family for a farewell dinner, a final round of penalty shoot-outs with my host brother, and a really satisfying hug from my host mama. I was going to try to surprise them and my friends with a heartfelt message in isiXhosa that I was going to rehearse in secret. I was looking forward to living with our final home-stay family in Bo-Kaap where I was curious to learn more about the intersection of Muslim and Coloured identity in Cape Town (and to make it to the top of Table Mountain). I was excited to have one more fat cake and try some Cape Malay dishes. The list goes on.

I’m trying not to dwell on the “I wish I/we…” and instead focus on the “I’m glad I/we…”. It’s in that reframing that I feel I’ve been the most enlarged by my experiences for the past two months. Undeniably, I’ve learned so much about negotiating my positionality, thinking about harm and agency when entering new spaces in relation to my identities, and the parallels and differences between the last four centuries of history in South Africa and the United States. I know these things and many more will continue to impact me and my work for many years to come. Yet, one of the most salient lessons from this experience for me has been the powerful difference for my emotional health that treating difficult and unpleasant moments as gifts of learning makes. It’s super cliché and I’m nowhere near done with interrogating this idea based on my own positionality. This reassures me that I’m not coming home empty-handed, but it does leave me rethinking how reciprocal the learning was between me, my program, and the people and places we were with.”

Sala kakuhle South Africa,
-Matt

Sunset over Table Mountain from my first home-stay in Langa (a township 20 minutes east of downtown Cape Town).

I felt a little closer to home when I came across a Bates mug in the kitchen of my classroom.

We had 3 weeks of intensive Xhosa language classes.

Oh how I’ll miss this chain…

Can’t go to Cape Town without trying to spot some penguins!

The building of the South African Constitutional Court is ripe with symbolic imagery; ranging from the cow hides draped over the desks in the background to the bricks that were reused from the demolished Apartheid-era prison that stood where the court now stands.

Nelson Mandela’s home in Soweto. The police fired upon his house several times (you can see one of the bullet holes above the window).

Our host sister took some classmates and me on the regular evening cow herding trip when we were in a small village called Tshabo.

Views from the Cape of Good Hope.

After an early morning hike up Lion’s Head.

Home.