This year we celebrate the milestone of 30 years as a democratic state and the seventh general election in which all South Africans regardless of race are allowed to vote.

Our history is long, bloody, and racist. South Africa’s apartheid system lasted nearly half a century, from 1948 to the early 1990s. It was a system that suppressed Black South Africans and where the minority white population controlled political decisions, the economy, and society. The majority of the South African population faced systematic discrimination in all facets of life, including housing, land, jobs, and public facility use.

After 1994, and the election of President Nelson Mandela, voting became a form of power for Black South Africans. Elections serve as a reminder that our ancestors fought for our freedom and won.

This election I prepare to vote for the first time with no frontrunner political party championing the radical change my generation wishes to see.

I grew up in Cape Town, the second-largest city in South Africa, located in the southernmost part of the country. It is the second largest urban destination in South Africa, with more than a million international tourists annually. To the world, Cape Town is this picturesque city known for its natural beauty. To me, the mountain is just a backdrop from my yard. From my vantage point, I see disadvantage: young kids not being able to go to school because their parents aren’t able to care for them, becoming what they grew up believing they should be—gangsters. To me, Cape Town is potholes and small shacks that fuel wildfires in summer.

And when I look at South Africa as a whole country, I do not see freedom. I see Black children in poverty and rampant unemployment, especially for young people. I see unpunished gender-based violence and rising economic inequality. I don’t see freedom in a country where the working class isn’t able to afford basic needs because of inflation and rising food prices.

So, are we really free, or have we wasted our hard-won freedom?

In the sixth grade, my school dedicated a whole term to learning about Nelson Mandela. We read about his fight for Black South Africa and how he helped end apartheid, his 1990 release from prison after 27 years, his years as head of the African National Congress (ANC) Party, and his 1994 inauguration as South Africa’s first Black president. After one term he resigned from the ANC, stepped down as president, and transferred leadership to his successor. Even after his death in 2013, his legacy lives on with Mandela Day. That’s a public holiday, celebrated on Mandela’s birthday, July 18, when people do at least 67 minutes of community service—one for each of his 67 years in public life.

The ANC has been in power for the last 30 years, with five different leaders. The party once represented unity and freedom for all South Africans and a promise of foundational change. Instead, it delivered elite corruption that sent the country into a steady decline. The ANC has crippled the country’s economy, loadshedding leaves households without electricity for up to six hours a day, and unemployment is at all-time highs. Even with free healthcare and medication, the country is still battling to contain the spread of HIV and tuberculosis.

For older generations, the ANC has always been a beacon of hope. They had a front-row seat to all the bloodshed and inequality of the apartheid system. Their emotional ties to the party are rooted in experiencing freedom after years of being oppressed.

As young people, we have seen the ANC steal the very resources we are supposed to use to build a future. Many young South Africans believe if the ANC wins the 2024 elections the country will burn, and we will be left with nothing but ashes.

When I look beyond the ANC to the other opposition parties, there isn’t much to consider voting for them.

This election, former President Jacob Zuma surprised South Africans when he announced he would helm a new political party, uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK Party). Zuma was charged with corruption in 2005, when he and a close colleague, businessman Schabir Shaik, took bribes from a French arms company. He stole billions from South African taxpayers and was accused of fraud, corruption, racketeering, money laundering, and rape. He was released after two months of a 15-month term on medical parole.

The Democratic Alliance (DA)—founded in 2000 through the merging of multiple parties—is a centrist, majority-white party, and the second largest. It has been ruling the Western Cape province since 2009. Its leadership is comprised of mostly white politicians. The DA’s main goal is to bring down the ANC they see South Africa as a place they need to “rescue” from the ANC and their corruption. They’ve shown blatant disrespect to the people they want to “rescue” by paying for an advert that shows the burning of the national flag—a flag that represents unity and the “rainbow nation,” a representation of all the cultures and nations in South Africa.

The DA is also openly supporting Israel, a matter that weighs heavily on many South Africans’ hearts and minds, who, like me, think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. DA leaders have made high-profile trips to Israel, including a 2017 journey when Mmusi Maimane (former DA leader), Geordin Hill-Lewis (now mayor of Cape Town), John Steenhuisen (current DA leader), and Michael Baigram (DA parliament member) met Israeli president Isaac Herzog. The DA also suppresses pro-Palestine speech: In January 2024 law enforcement painted over a mural of the Palestinian flag, including the words “we stand with Palestine,” in the Lavender Hill neighborhood of Cape Town, citing permit issues. Though it has issued a statement in support of a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, the DA has made no mention of genocide in Gaza, even after South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice. Many South Africans see this—genocide, oppressive laws, policies, and practices that segregate Palestinians from Israelis—as a reflection of what our parents, grandparents, and ancestors went through during apartheid and the Boer War. It is also a clear indication that the world is still so unequal, and that human rights only matter to those who have powerful influence.

Other smaller parties like Action SA, BOSA, SNP, ISANCO, UIM, VF PLUS, RISE Mzansi, and IFP also stand with the DA and their policies. They believe that South Africa doesn’t need fundamental change but only improvement. This type of incrementalism is unacceptable to my generation. We see it as just another way of maintaining the status quo.

So, who is fighting for my generation’s future?

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is the third-largest political party in South Africa. The party was formed in 2013 by former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema and the former ANC Youth League spokesperson Floyd Shivambu. In 2015, the EFF was one of the biggest supporters against the #feesmustfall movement, which was the largest student protest in South Africa, fighting for free education for students who can’t afford higher education. Its 2024 political manifesto was the best by any political party. With clear goals for job creation, the energy crisis, and bold ideas like establishing a state-owned housing and infrastructure company, it seeks to create about 4 million jobs. The party also wants to open borders, a position many South Africans unfortunately think will create a rise in xenophobia and strain an already unstable economy.

I only have one semester left at the University of the Western Cape. I’ve seen the struggles of my fellow students; I’ve seen the struggles of the people in my neighborhood; I’ve seen the struggles of people who have the same skin color as mine all over South Africa. We all have witnessed how incompetent our leaders are and how ordinary people suffer.

So this is what I face in this election: balancing the fact that so many major parties are only fueling their own agendas with the need to keep some faith in an already-broken government.

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That’s an incredible achievement over the short span of a decade. However, climate divestment’s increasing visibility has also cultivated an audience of detractors who argue that it is ineffective. Bill Gates is famously skeptical of the benefits of divestment because it doesn’t directly stop carbon emissions the way innovation in new low-carbon technologies might. Other opponents claim that divestment cannot meaningfully change the demand for fossil fuels. Divestment might lower share prices, but according to these critics, those lower prices make them attractive to less ethical investors, making the strategy self-defeating. Going a step further,  such critics even claim that divestment’s economic harm to companies has always been minimal—that it was so even in apartheid-era South Africa, where divestment as a tactic was born.

The problem with these critiques is that measuring divestment’s success solely on its financial impacts is a mistake. Focusing on short-term balance sheets obscures divestment’s true power: the strategy changes minds and mobilizes action, with effects that reach far beyond targeted investors and companies.

What happened in South Africa shows why this is the case. From 1960 through the 1980s, anti-apartheid activists were unable to persuade governments to push back against South Africa’s oppressive racial laws. American presidents, for example, were loath to act because South Africa was an important ally during the Cold War, acting as a regional policeman and actively warring against Marxist groups in neighboring countries. Individual congressmen were often sympathetic to imposing sanctions on South Africa, but overriding a president meant building a bipartisan movement—and creating consensus, even within a political party, took time. With governments unwilling to take action, activists in the United States and elsewhere had to look for different ways to undermine apartheid. They turned to divestment, refusing to invest in companies that did business in South Africa.

But divestment was not seen as a way to hurt the South African economy, or even to punish U.S. companies. In 1966, minister and activist George M. Houser, who helped found the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), a group dedicated to opposing colonialism in Africa, wrote a strategy paper advocating what he called “disengagement”—both withdrawing existing investments and prohibiting new ones. It reflected a growing consensus on how to strike at South Africa. At the time, ACOA was working with other groups to boycott Chase Bank (then known as Chase Manhattan Bank) because of its policy of lending to South Africa. “This campaign is not based upon the thesis that even if all of the economic power of the United States was brought to bear…the architects of apartheid would feel they had to accept new policies,” wrote Houser. Rather, he argued that this type of disengagement policy “would materially affect the outlook of many other powerful countries.” Houser’s model was the strategy that became divestment, and in many ways, continues to guide the movement today.

Initially, the tactic targeted specific companies and financial institutions who engaged in high profile projects in South Africa. In addition to the Chase campaign, Polaroid was targeted in 1970 for selling its photographic equipment for use in producing the hated passbooks used to control the movement of people in South Africa. Then, in the mid-1970s, activists began to pressure city and state governments to remove investments from companies working in South Africa.

Divestment gained steam with small victories, such as at Hampshire College in 1977 and the University of Wisconsin in 1978. Within a decade, companies found themselves constantly under criticism for their presence in South Africa. As divestments multiplied, some companies did decide to withdraw from the country.

But beyond these material effects, divestment had one huge effect that even Houser and others might not have fully foreseen: it helped build a truly national anti-apartheid movement in the United States. Up until divestment, the anti-apartheid movement in the United States saw limited success. While ACOA was technically a national committee, it was primarily a New York institution. During the Chase Bank campaign, the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph referred to the anti-apartheid cause as “the germ of a movement.” Some activists launched consumer boycotts, but sustaining such efforts could be difficult, because many South African goods exported to the United States, such as platinum, could often be difficult to boycott. And as long as South Africa dodged the news cycle, it took the wind out of organizing sails. But divestment broke through. Where Houser was hoping to sway other countries into supporting sanctions, the strategy worked on the hearts and minds of people within the United States.

What made divestment different, and ultimately so popular? Some of it was moral appeal. It’s no coincidence that the movement gained strength quickly in churches and on college campuses: whether or not you could stop apartheid, profiting from it was immoral. Part of it, too, was political. Activists had great success reminding Americans that even as U.S. companies were shedding manufacturing jobs, they were taking advantage of cheap labor in South Africa. Amidst poverty in the United States, investments in an oppressive and immoral regime seemed doubly hypocritical.

Image created by Angus Crutcher.

But even more successful was the way that divestment created opportunities for action: in the words of activist Cherri Waters, “movements need something for people to do.” Divestment created tangible targets for people to organize around and against that were also specific to where they lived: university pension boards, church investment boards, and local governments. Lobbying these organizations was effective. Not coincidentally, this helped the movement to spread all across the country.

This widespread activation led many Republicans to endorse sanctions against South Africa against the wishes of Ronald Reagan. It simply became too difficult to ignore their constituents. Richard Lugar, a prominent Republican senator from Indiana, began supporting sanctions after complaining that he couldn’t go to his kids’ baseball games without constituents asking him what he was going to do about apartheid. Privately, Lugar was skeptical that sanctions would pass, but the pressure to do something simply became overwhelming. Congress authorized sanctions against South Africa in 1986, precisely because of that pressure.

The critics are right, in a way: divestment’s economic impact on companies was small during the anti-apartheid movement. Lowered U.S. share prices on their own were not economically damaging to South Africa. Even the withdrawal of businesses was largely a blow to South African morale.

But that doesn’t undercut the importance of divestment as a strategy. By increasing awareness of apartheid and the U.S. role in sustaining it, divestment activated a core of people who would support other actions against South Africa and beyond. This is the best way to understand divestment’s power then, and its power today. Stigmatizing companies and lowering investor confidence is important, but the tactic’s primary advantage is that it organizes people, gives them an action to accomplish, and leaves them open to pushing for even more substantive change.

Against climate change, which is not a human target and which isn’t an effect of the same sheer evil that undergirded apartheid, this approach is all the more critical. Whether it affects the bottom line or not, building a movement of people is what matters.

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Philosophers can bring humanness out of the inhumane, as they can bring beauty out of ugliness and peace out of war. So philosophy is a powerful human tool for forgiveness, but it can also radically rethink the idea of forgiveness as the bearer of dignity. This is why philosophers are more than philosophers; they are individuals who can give meaning to the dignity of the human race. It was this flame of dignity and the power of philosophy to ignite it which led me to become a philosopher in the first place. However, philosophers have differed widely as to their answers to the question of forgiveness.

First, we have to establish what forgiveness means, in a political way. It is not an end to suffering. Suffering is part of life. As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.” As such, each new generation, and every new human being, must pave anew the path of suffering.

The important question is how we deal with that suffering. One option, often taken in political situations, is to go for revenge against the person or people who have caused the suffering. But revenge doesn’t offer consolation. Only insofar as the heart can draw things into itself are they of any value. We are not only animals of reason, but also beings capable of compassion. It is only through forgiveness that we can derive consolation from the troubles of life.

Neither does forgiveness mean forgetting the wrongs that were done. Entering the process of forgiving does not necessarily mean that we hold back the bitter past. There are always memories of evil that we cannot forget. Many Holocaust survivors believe that forgiving the Nazis would fail the memory of past victims. But isn’t it true that forgiveness cannot forgive anything but the unforgivable? Otherwise it will lose its meaning.

What is important is how the action of forgiving works. Forgiving, as much as revenge, is one way of entering into a relationship with the Other. But while revenge is the negation of Otherness of the Other— because it disregards and discards the Other as a moral person—forgiveness, instead, tries to enter into a dialogue with that Other.

Forgiveness is both the condition for dialogue and is also realized through dialogue. Dialogue is not a phenomenon that occurs from nowhere and goes nowhere—engaging in it establishes a shared past and creates a future. Furthermore, dialogue requires both questioning oneself and caring for the Other. Thus, forgiveness is about moral repair and rebuilding decency, trust, and hope.

Unlike revenge, forgiveness is not an automatic response to injustice. It requires much more reflection and thought. All human beings can be reflective, in the sense that thinking about what one does is part of doing it. Maybe what perplexes individuals so much about the concept of forgiveness is that forgiveness is seen and felt as a newcomer in our lives. Yet forgiveness, by including both the self and the Other, gives humanity a common horizon, and a shared future.

It is the creation of a shared future that makes forgiveness important in a democracy. A truly moral conception of citizenship requires that one listen to the other with empathy and learn from the past. It is the action of learning to forgive that can reverse the meaninglessness and thoughtlessness of the de-civilizing process we are currently going through.

However, there are pitfalls. The language of exclusion can easily lend itself to the invention of a revengeful worldview. When justice is no longer about compassion, it is only a table of abstract regulations that people use or abuse without care for others. This kind of formal “justice” lacks empathetic listening to the other and voids the possibility of forgiveness. In fact, forgiveness is more than a simple event: It is a paradigm shift to a new outlook on human affairs. If we seek forgiveness, whatever form it may take, we must labor to find it rather than work for an insignificant world based on values such as greed, power and hatred.

This is a responsibility that our human civilization should accept without fear or apprehension. The ethos of shared responsibility finds its best expression in the process of taming violence through acts of forgiveness. The best example of this can be seen in the moral and political efforts of Nelson Mandela to establish national reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa. As Mandela said: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”

This is where we should look for a political exercise of moderation and empathy and where a climate of cooperation and reconciliation could flourish.

Today, in a world suffused by feelings of insignificance and violence, indifference is no longer an option. To fail to recognize this is to betray our conscience. Indifference has cheapened our human life. Therefore, forgiveness is a quality that cannot be manufactured by businessmen and politicians. What’s more, it must have a level of sincerity—individuals have to see past their own arrogance and hostility to pursue decency and human dignity.

Its ongoing relevance makes forgiveness all the more compelling in current debates on violence, democracy, and culture. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “It is ultimately in our own best interests that we become forgiving, repentant, reconciling and reconciled people, because without forgiveness, without reconciliation, we have no future.”

While some will follow Tutu’s advice, others will think that what he suggests is madness. If there is only one beautiful madness in the world which can free us from all forms of political and religious lunacy, it’s the act of forgiving the person while not forgetting the event.

This is when we enter the stage of history not from the back door, but by being fully present in the agora in order to predict the horrors and warn others. As Hannah Arendt says: “Men in plural can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.” As such, forgiveness, as a new beginning, is not when the past is forgotten or hidden in a corner of our mind, it is when our past sufferings are not repeated and we do not repeat each other’s.

We accomplish the politics of forgiveness when we are capable of organizing our societies around the idea of decency of humanity. There is no reason to think that this struggle is a lost cause.

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But not entirely. Not until I went to South Africa.

The trip was in 2001, my third year at UCLA. I chose to go to South Africa on a study abroad program because I wanted to visit Africa—what I was always told was the “Motherland.” When I toured the townships of Cape Town, I was shocked and humbled by the sight of shanty towns: small, impoverished cities made up of crudely built dwellings. When we stopped in Langa to get water, the abject poverty was hard to reconcile with the version of poverty I experienced, and the images of American prosperity upon which we all were raised. I came face to face with my own privilege.

As we traveled to Cape Town District Six, where 60,000 residents were compulsorily removed during the apartheid regime, I saw the deplorable effects of racism and forced segregation. As I walked the stony roads, I could not help but think of my experiences moving from home to home and wondered how those South African children felt. The District Six Museum stood as a monument that taught us about the legal structure and systematic denial of life and liberty to the South African majority during apartheid. And then it was on to Robben Island, where the profound moment of standing in Nelson Mandela’s cell forced me to think about the legacy I wanted to leave the world.

Why did South Africa change me? Somehow, being there, and traveling through the country, connected my past to my future. Given all the damage apartheid caused to native South Africans, I still saw so much hope. Somehow, the challenges I experienced growing up didn’t feel so heavy anymore. As we traveled around the country, I learned more about the leadership of the African National Congress, read the works of Desmond Tutu, and visited the Transvaal where Zulu men, at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879, threw off the shackles of British rule. These experiences created a desire to evaluate the social, economic, and political conditions caused by racism. The travel made me more human. When I saw South African children, I saw myself.

By the end of my trip to South Africa that August, I decided that I would live a different life, one that would focus on loving and caring for people, because of all that was around them.

My journey from there would not be a straight line—shortly after I returned from South Africa, the U.S. was attacked on September 11, and I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Through my travels in the Navy and nearly five years I spent in the service—including a tour in Iraq—I came to see the story of South Africa in other nations. This gave me an even greater desire to become an agent of change. I returned to UCLA to fulfill the commitment I’d made to myself first in South Africa.

Concerned about the issues facing black males like me, I was selected to become a McNair research scholar, where I established my foundation as a researcher and scholar committed to addressing these issues. This trajectory took me back full circle, to Morningside High, where I conducted my research with black male youth. The need of these young men led me to develop an academic intervention program in 2006 called the Black Male Youth Academy (BMYA) where I worked with 25 African-American male youth in grades nine to 12 to mitigate gang violence, imprisonment, and recidivism. I taught students how to conduct research and also about their heritage, so they could become self-reliant, more aware of (and critical of) conditions in the communities around them, and more powerful as advocates. In our first cohort, out of the eight young men who graduated, five were accepted to a four-year university, two attended a community college, and one went to a trade school. These were young men from a high school where the graduation rate was 36 percent for black males at the time. (None of them went to UCLA or other elite institutions, which inspired me to become an advocate for higher education access, diversity, and affordability—and a University of California student regent.)

The success of the BMYA spurred me to go to graduate school, pursue a Ph.D. in education, and launch an educational nonprofit called the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI) with the goal of spreading our success nationally. We’re now serving more than 250 boys and men of color throughout Los Angeles County, with plans to work in Sacramento this year. Although we were helping young men achieve academic success, they were still living in an environment where they could die because of unhealthy or unsafe food they ate. As a result, SJLI has developed a local food system with community gardens, a community-supported agriculture program, and five Healthy Lifestyle Centers in the communities of Inglewood and Lennox.

Every time I see lives changed because of what we’re doing at SJLI, I think of my experiences in South Africa. I am reminded that even when the world seems upside down I have the power to make it better. If change is possible in my community, it is possible in every community where people face racism, segregation, and inequality. We must remember our journey to stand in our power. This is the purpose and legacy of Black History Month.

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So when Mandela praised China as an “inspiration to democracy and freedom of expression,” many of the students took offense. Later that day, at a news conference, when Mandela praised China as “”one of the pillars of democracy,” a journalist pointed out that China had behaved repressively toward its minorities (including Tibetans) and its dissidents. Mandela took a moment, then answered, “This is a matter we have not evaluated in any depth.”

Today, amid the encomia, Mandela has gotten criticized for this sort of thing—for turning a half-blind eye to the abuses of his allies. Michael Moynihan writes of Mandela in The Daily Beast, “For a man imprisoned for his political beliefs, he had a weakness for those who did the very same thing to their ideological opponents, but were allowed a pass because they supported, for realpolitik reasons, the struggle against Apartheid.”

And this is mostly true. But what’s less remarked upon—at least as far as I have seen—is that Mandela quietly offered an explanation for his approach. What’s more, contrary to the associations one has with realpolitik, he did so in moral terms.

On his Beijing visit, Mandela turned over the microphone to his spokesperson, Pallo Jordan, to lay out his thinking when it came to standing alongside dictators.

“One neighbor driving in a state of inebriation kills your child,” Jordan began, according to the Chicago Tribune. “The second neighbor mourns with you and nurses you over your loss. The third neighbor talks platitudes about drunken drivers but helps the killer with lawyer’s fees and throws a party when he wins the case.

“Then one day you find out that the good neighbor who helped you beats up on his wife. Now I ask you: Would it be just to go out and humiliate him after what he has done for you?”

Mandela, taking back the microphone, then made the link to this allegory more explicit. “Our first president [of the African National Congress] appealed to the Western countries for help but they would not even let him see the most junior official,” Mandela recalled. “But when he came to China he was accepted with open arms and given all the assistance he desired. Which human being would now turn against the very country which allowed him to make progress in his cause?”

And this was the principle that guided Mandela, the reason that he stood by even as allies like Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s erstwhile despot, and Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s notorious dictator, committed the crimes they did.

In 1997, Mandela paid a visit to Qaddafi in Libya, drawing condemnation from much of the Western world. “Those who say I should not be here are without morals,” Mandela told reporters, with some heat. “This man helped us at a time when we were all alone, when those who say we should not come here were helping the enemy.”

I found Mandela’s loyalty to such bad men to be dispiriting, especially as Mugabe proceeded to betray his nation and destroy its institutions. But Mandela’s behavior, while disagreeable, always seemed to be dictated by moral calculations. There is no easy moral answer to the question of what we owe sinners who have helped us. How do you treat the man who saved your life but beats his wife? People will disagree. Some will think Mandela made the right ethical call; others won’t.

But the least moral approach is to dodge the question and pretend that no conflict exists. Mandela acknowledged the clash, and his response was, in my view, a compelling one, even to those (including me) who might disagree with his ultimate decisions.

Yes, there are many halos being drawn right now. Yes, Mandela surely had his flaws. But few world leaders—to say nothing of politicians—who are confronted with such serious moral dilemmas ever meet them with anything approaching Mandela’s clarity or candor.

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I was the 20th person on a 16-passenger bus out of Graskop, sandwiched between a giggly old man clutching a can of beer and a shy teenager who wouldn’t shut up. I’d been in town exactly 19 hours, which is an eternity in Graskop time.

Graskop is a delicate South African town in the middle of nowhere that is overrun by a sprawling, emerald green forest and wide-eyed tourists who come to take as many pictures as they can before moving on to somewhere more interesting. As part of a year-long, 14-country trip through Africa, I decided to come here because, well, everyone else does.
I woke up at 6:00 a.m. for a hike to God’s Window, a vista overlooking a nearby canyon. The guidebook said it was a five-kilometer hike to get there, although it turned out to be a seven-kilometer hike that ended after two kilometers when I took a bus the rest of the way. In 20 minutes, I hiked to all of the vistas at God’s Window, took photos to show my Facebook friends, and rode another bus down the mountain. A timid fog covered only the tops of the trees, and, if I’d stuck around a little longer, I probably would have written something about how ethereal and mystical the scenery felt. After I packed my bag at the hostel, it was 11:30 a.m.

I couldn’t miss that bus out of Graskop. I was supposed to be in Swaziland before nightfall, and the trip required a series of transfers that likely would take the entire day. To get to Swaziland, I needed to take a bus to Nelspruit, a much bigger middle-of-nowhere South African town. But the only way to get to Nelspruit from Graskop is to go first to Hazy View, a 30-minute ride away through more winding, emerald-green forests.

Before I could grab my seat on the bus, an old man began speaking to me. He thought I was South African.

“English,” I replied.

“How can we talk then? I don’t speak English well,” he said. “Another language?”

“Spanish?”

He laughed and waved his finger. “No, no, no.”

The bus started moving, and the old man’s beer sloshed lightly against the can’s sides. I closed my eyes. When you’re traveling on a budget, simple discoveries, like finding somewhere to nap, or finding clean water, or finding somewhere to put your bags, become a raison d’être.

“Are you from the U.S.?”

A young man was speaking to me now. He added something to the end of his question, but it was trampled under the whine of the bus’s engine.

“Yes,” I said. “California.” I opened my eyes, slowly. The young man had small beads of sweat ready to launch themselves down his forehead.

“I’ve been to the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy. I’ve been to many places. I’ve always wanted to go to the U.S.”

“It’s very nice there.” I wished he could see the period at the end of my sentence, the finality of it.

“What do you do?”

Explaining the whole writing thing would take too much time. “I’m a painter.”

“Ahh, I am too! I also like house music. I make my own songs. They call me DJ KB Blaze. Would you like to hear some?”

“Sure.”

DJ KB Blaze with the shy voice and sweaty forehead opened his phone and played two shrill, up-tempo house songs. That little adventure left 16-and-a-half minutes of travel time.

The ride was smooth; you never know what kind of driver you’re going to get when you hop on a South African bus. Sometimes the driver does everything right: he doesn’t pass when there’s a hint of danger, drives at a moderate speed, moves over speed bumps carefully. Other drivers drive as though they don’t care whether they live or die. We had the former. I closed my eyes again.

“Are you whispering at me?!” the old man shouted. The entire bus, front to back, rippled in laughter.

“These ladies,” he pointed to a few women sitting in front of us, “they know English better than me.” He smiled, and I could see his tongue through the window where his two front teeth should have been.

Fourteen minutes left to Hazy View.

“So how is it to live in Texas?” DJ KB Blaze asked.

“It’s very nice. Hot.” Normally, I’d correct him and explain that California and Texas could be two different countries. But that would take three or four minutes that I could use to sleep.

“Someday, I would like to go to the U.S. That is my dream. Maybe I can visit you there.”

“Absolutely. That would be cool.”

He pulled out his phone, again, and I recoiled at the thought of listening to more music. “Here, add me on Facebook,” he asked.

I added him and made a mental note about “the true meaning of globalization.” Eleven minutes to go. I closed my eyes.

“Are you well?” the old man shouted, giggling again, and tipping his head back to drain whatever beer was left in his can.

“I could use a beer,” I said.

He laughed and waved his finger, “No no no.”

“Do you have a sketchbook?” asked DJ KB Blaze. “I’d like to see some of your drawings.”

I opened my bag, shifted a few books around, and pretended to be disappointed that I couldn’t find my sketchbook. “Nope, don’t have it.”

I closed my eyes. Eight minutes to go.

“You like books?” asked the old man with the empty beer can.

“Yes.”

“I like books, too. I am strong.”

I closed my eyes and heard the old man crush his can. He started talking to me in a South African dialect, completely abandoning English, laughing at his own jokes.

Three minutes left. All hope of my nap was lost. I smiled and laughed when the old man with no front teeth laughed, and watched the last of the forest melt away.

“What will you tell people about Graskop when you return to America?” asked DJ KB Blaze.

I hadn’t thought about that. I was too busy hiking and taking pictures and getting the hell out of Graskop to think about what I thought about Graskop.

And we’d just arrived in Hazy View.

“That it was pretty, I guess. Very green.” I knew I sounded stupid.

“OK, well maybe I will visit you in Texas.”

“Sure,” I said. We all jumped off of the bus, they in separate directions, and me, off to Swaziland, with a camera full of pretend memories.

Lanre Akinsiku is a California-born travel and short story writer.

*Photo by Lanre Akinsiku.

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