South Africa

I visited South Africa at a transition time in my life. That year, I finally invoked my FIRE option, which I had worked to build almost from the first day I started my corporate career, presciently anticipating a day when I may want to walk away and need to afford it.

Making another life transition

Or rather, that year was when I told my company. I actually lit the fuse a couple years’ prior. Part of activating the option was re-positioning my finances, and releasing a gap year cash reserve that included a long ‘retirement’ trip. (I also anticipated that I would need to transition psychologically, which includes ‘flushing the corporate’ out of me. I reasoned, even if I were to choose another corporate job, I should know if I would still do it when I didn’t have to rather than just out of habit. And for that, I needed to remember what the world outside of it is like.)

Why I chose South Africa

I had already considered a destination somewhere in Africa. A former mentor was moving to the continent, among other reasons. But I didn’t settle on South Africa as my destination, until the genocide on Gaza began. And then South Africa filed the ICJ case on Palestine’s behalf, invoking the moral responsibility of its apartheid history.

It reminded me that my travel motivations had changed, since my trips into the Pacific. That I was no longer as interested as I used to be in monuments and buildings, than in the people. So I resolved to go to South Africa to learn more about this courage, and what about its apartheid history that forged it.

Understanding a world in transition

And I think I did learn it, and more besides. I understood more than I expected to about apartheid, what its true roots were, and that therefore they extend elsewhere, still sprouting bitter leaves. But on that trip I also saw glimpses of a world at the turn of the tide.

So my stories from South Africa are tilted towards its history, rather than its tourism. For that, I’ve added links so that we don’t forget a country is more than one story, and a single period in history. But in South Africa’s case, they did have one such period that’s important to us all. And its lessons are far from being irrelevant just yet.