I read with a sinking heart the news that six people were killed in Cape Town in just two days, reported by The Guardian recently. Violence is never abstract here — it is immediate, real, personal. And yet, I love South Africa fiercely, stubbornly, impossibly. I have a home there, some of my family are also there. I have childhood memories stitched into every street corner, every curve of the mesmerizing Garden Route, every horizon in the high desert Karoo. I have walked the Gardens in Cape Town, and been stabbed within sight of the Mount Nelson Hotel — the Pink Nellie, with its rose-scented gardens that held so many of my happiest memories. And yes Johannesburg tried to take my car with a gun, and Pretoria rifled through my home also with guns, and yet, still, I return.
Because in South Africa we have vast skies, stark realities and a lot of laughter.
And because South Africa is breathtaking. Kruger National Park is a cathedral of life itself: the hush of the bush, the sun catching a lion’s silky mane, elephants moving like ancient kings. The Karoo stretches into infinity, teaching patience, humility, awe. The Garden Route curves along the coast like a secret smile, while the Wild Coast off Durban crashes against cliffs in a spray of freedom. The skies here are absurdly vast, their clouds drifting like thoughts too big to contain, and the light — so sharp, so soft, so alive — reminds you that life is elemental, raw, and untamed. That soil, oh that red red red soul.
But also in South Africa we have dreams and contradictions.
And yet, it is a country that can kill you. It can humiliate you. It can scar you in ways that never leave your body. You cannot step outside without acknowledging that the promise of the rainbow nation, Nelson Mandela’s dream of equality and reconciliation, is incomplete. That dream is real in the laughter of children playing soccer in dusty fields, in the markets alive with music, in the stubborn joy of people who refuse to surrender to fear—but it is also an unfulfilled promise when gun violence, burglary, and carjackings are daily realities.
Being a white boy of privilege in South Africa adds another, heavier complexity. The streets that terrify me are also the streets where my skin grants me ease in ways others cannot know. My fear is real, but so is my inherited protection, my blind spots, my access to resources and escape. I carry the history of apartheid as much as I carry my own memories: a mix of guilt, gratitude, and responsibility. To love this country is to hold that contradiction, to reckon with my place in a society where the past is never past.
I often turn to literature to make sense of this contradiction, a sort of compass — the love I feel for South Africa and the fear it inspires, the privilege I carry and the danger I cannot escape. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace made me see the fragility of morality when survival collides with desire and violence. Reading it, I recognized the exact tension I feel walking the streets of Cape Town: alert, cautious, but unflinchingly present.
Ivan Vladislavić captures the rhythm of contemporary urban life in Johannesburg and Cape Town with uncanny precision. Through his work, I can feel the pulse of the city—the humor, the oddities, the nervous energy of people negotiating a world that is alive, unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous. In Vladislavić’s prose, I hear the same tension I carry in every car ride, every walk, every decision to trust or to pause.
And the dear Antjie Krog (who I met in my yoga class years and years ago) insists that trauma and memory cannot be ignored. In Country of My Skull, she shows how the ghosts of apartheid linger in ordinary spaces, shaping relationships and daily life. Reading Krog, I understood that fear and beauty are inseparable here; the past is never past and to navigate the present without reckoning is to be incomplete.
I also often turn to Siphokazi Matlwa, the South African writer and doctor whose novel Spilt Milk captures the turbulence and promise of the country’s “Born Free” generation. Matlwa’s characters navigate a South Africa that is free in law but still haunted by inequality, structural violence, and lingering social fractures. Reading her work, I see a reflection of the people I meet — their resilience, their ambition, their frustrations — and it sharpens my awareness of how deeply history and privilege shape daily life. Fuckit. Her writing reminds me that the country I return to, with all its beauty and danger, is also a living, evolving society, shaped not only by memory but by the generation that grew up after apartheid, dreaming of possibility while confronting harsh realities. And how I both belong to this but also outside it.
Literature is not escapism here; it is a lens through which I measure streets, skies, and human behavior. It helps me understand that loving this country—fully, deeply—is a moral act as much as it is an emotional one.
South Africa asks you to feel everything at once: the awe and the terror, the beauty and the danger, the joy and the grief. There is exhilaration in the roar of the waves on the two coasts, and panic in the shadowed streets of Cape Town at night. There is pride in watching families thrive in the townships against all odds, and helplessness when you realize how easily that pride can be threatened. You learn the rhythms of life here: which streets to walk, which times to avoid, which small acts of vigilance can preserve both life and sanity.
And still, I return. I always return. Because loving South Africa is not a choice — it is a blood memory, a moral insistence, a refusal to abandon the extraordinary. It is carrying the contradictions in your chest like a live wire: beauty and fear, hope and history, privilege and responsibility, the dream of a rainbow nation and the reality of violence, all tangled together.
South Africa will not let you rest. It will terrify you, and it will thrill you. It will break your heart and fill it with light. And maybe that is the point: to love a country is not to overlook its faults, but to hold them, to confront them, and to come home anyway.