Zimbabwe Vacation: Exploring South Africa's Urban Pulse & Victoria Falls

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... After three and a half weeks in South Africa and Zimbabwe, returning to the United States feels like stepping out of a vivid, sun-soaked world into a cold landscape of unrelenting gloom, as if the country itself had forgotten how to breathe warmth and optimism. The saturated colors, layered conversations, and unexpected encounters of the past month still cling to me, like a second skin not yet ready to be shed. What lingers most is not only the beauty of the places themselves, but the movement between them: the jacaranda-lined boulevards of Pretoria, the mountains and oceans of Cape Town, the mist-shrouded thunder of Victoria Falls, and the sprawling, ever-becoming cityscape of Johannesburg. The journey began in Pretoria, where broad avenues unfurl beneath purple blooms, and the Union Buildings sit like sentinels above the city. Pretoria: Learning in Future Africa My wife and I spent five days in Pretoria as one of six facilitators for a leadership development forum for university administrators from across the continent, organized by the International Association of Universities (IAU) and UNESCO. The sessions were held at the Future Africa Campus of the sprawling University of Pretoria. I presented twice, first on “Rethinking Revenue: Diversification and Fundraising in Universities,” and then on “Steering Higher Education in the Digital Era.” The discussions were robust, textured with both urgency and imagination. It was a pleasure working alongside fellow facilitators: current and former vice chancellors (presidents) from Egypt, Ghana, Britain, South Africa, and Australia, and a provost from the United States, as well as participants from universities across the continent. I learned as much as I taught, not only in formal sessions but in unplanned conversations over meals and coffee breaks, including sumptuous dinners in the city and on campus. Outside the program, Pretoria revealed itself in quieter ways. I strolled, sometimes accompanied by my wife, through the neighborhoods around the campus, soaking in the rhythms of this bureaucratic capital, watching people move through their day, including government employees, office workers, youths, and students. I paused often, letting the city pass before me like a gently unfolding film, its pace measured and unhurried. Shops and cafés exuded the intimate rituals of daily life: parents shopping for the holidays; friends meeting after work and leaning in to exchange the latest news; young couples holding hands across a table, whispering with the seriousness of first love; older men reading newspapers slowly, pausing now and then to glance up at the street as if measuring the world outside against the headlines. A low hum of cups, footsteps, and conversation became its own form of welcome. At small shops and bakeries, people queued patiently, exchanging greetings in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana, the languages layering into a soft, melodic hum. There was something grounding about watching ordinary suburban life happen, including gardeners tending to hedges with quiet pride, parents coming from work, and students returning from school. These simple moments offered a reminder that dignity lives in routine, and belonging is built in fragments of everyday gesture. It reminded me that cities, even those where power is concentrated in offices and ministries, are also held together by the small, steady acts of people who belong to them. In those moments, Pretoria felt less like a capital and more like a living neighborhood, textured, human, and quietly compelling. Cape Town: Where Oceans and Histories Meet From there, the world opened wider in Cape Town, where we spent a week. My wife and I stayed at a boutique hotel at the Waterfront, a place where ocean, commerce, and culture meet, creating an atmosphere that feels both worldly and deeply rooted. Each evening we sampled different restaurants, feasting on seafood and conversation. One night, joined by friends, we dined in downtown Cape Town to the sounds of a legendary South African jazz musician, with music rising like memory and lingering in the cool evening air. We spent a day with a friend, a senior administrator at the University of Cape Town, together with his wife, driving the winding coastal road toward Cape Point. As we ascended the escarpment, we stopped at lookouts to take in the city behind us and the shimmering ocean below, the water shifting from slate to turquoise as the sun rose higher. The road curled along the mountainside like a ribbon laid between rock and sea, each turn revealing new vistas: vineyards tucked into valleys and hillsides, clusters of pastel houses clinging to the slopes, and fishing boats scattered across the bay like flecks of paint on a canvas. At each stop the wind carried the smell of seawater and fynbos, and our interlocutors narrated the landscape with the ease of people who know it well, speaking of its beauty, its tensions, and the histories laid into the shoreline. Further along, we stopped at the penguin reserve at Boulders Beach, where the charismatic, tuxedoed birds waddled along the sand and into the surf with disarming dignity. Watching them slip into and out of the water felt like witnessing a quiet miracle of nature. We continued the drive, passing through Simon’s Town, home to South Africa’s principal naval base, with its whitewashed buildings, stately harbor, and the faint scent of salt and engine oil mingling in the wind. Eventually, we reached Cape Point, the southernmost tip of the continent, where the land drops off into wind and endless sea, a place that feels like both an ending and a beginning. Another day, an old family friend, a renowned academic born, bred, and intellectually formed by Cape Town, guided us through neighborhoods layered with history, pain, and extraordinary beauty. With her, the city became a text, one written in memory, resilience, and a fierce sense of place, as alive in its vistas as in its silences, complexities, contradictions, immense wealth and deep inequalities, cosmopolitanism and provincialism. Between outings, we explored the Waterfront’s bustling shopping malls, watching the holiday season unfold in hurried purchases and joyful reunions. We walked the expansive boardwalk along Beach Road all the way to Sea Point, pausing at neighborhood eateries for refreshments. One memorable morning I visited the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, reportedly the world’s largest museum dedicated to contemporary African and diasporic art. The building itself, an architectural marvel, seemed to breathe creativity. Cape Town lingered with us long after. Table Mountain rose like an ancient god, the harbor shimmered with possibility, and the promenade at sunset left me speechless as I witnessed beauty made effortless. No wonder Cape Town, combining the unparalleled natural splendor of majestic mountains and hills with the dramatic meeting point of two oceans, the Indian and the Atlantic, and the energy of a vibrant urban life, is a global tourist mecca. It draws international visitors and new residents in numbers that have increasingly priced many locals out of the seafront and the tony suburbs, altering the social geography of neighborhood after neighborhood. The result is a city of astounding wonder and complex tensions, a place where nature and aspiration coexist uneasily in beauty and strain. Victoria Falls: At the Mouth of Awe Victoria Falls arrived like a revelation. Nature there overwhelms language: thunderous sheets of water collapsing into a gorge of mist and rainbows, the earth breathing in geologic time. We stayed for five days at an old, elegant hotel built in 1904 that, despite its size, feels almost intimate. The service is superb without being obsequious, anchored in a graciousness that seems inherited from another era. Our room was spacious and full of old-world charm with polished wood, high ceilings, and windows that opened to a chorus of birdsong. Its neatly made bed with crisp white linens sat beneath a soft, flowing mosquito-net canopy, creating a serene, elegant, and gently romantic atmosphere. There were several dining spaces, including a beautiful verandah where we ate lunch, a thatch-roofed open-air restaurant, where breakfast was served as the morning mist rolled in, fronted by a stone sculpture garden that showcased the artistry Zimbabwe is famous for, and an ornate formal dining room where some meals were prepared in front of us with quiet theatricality. The well-manicured grounds, dotted with mango and other trees, overlooked stunning greenery and the far-off plume of mist rising from the falls, like smoke from a sacred fire. The national park at Victoria Falls is astonishing in scale. The cataract runs for more than a mile, almost three times the length of Niagara Falls, bordering Canada and the United States, and forms an immense sheet of water that seems to break the world open. The stone walking trail along the cliff was busy with visitors from Zimbabwe, from neighboring countries, and from every corner of the globe. Standing before the roar of the falls, the air thick with spray, we were drenched in seconds. It was a deeply moving experience that left us suspended between awe and humility, reminded of how small human ambition feels beside the overwhelming beauty and power of nature. One evening, we took a sunset boat cruise on the Zambezi, the fourth-longest river in Africa. It begins in northwestern Zambia, winds through Angola, curves along the border of Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and then slips through Mozambique until it reaches the Indian Ocean. Light caught in reeds, hippos bared their huge teeth from the water while crocodiles basked on the shores, and the sun slipped toward the horizon like a dropped coin. The passengers formed a temporary community, a lively mix of voices, accents, nationalities, races, and stories. The chatter felt animated, carried by the collective wonder of strangers sharing the same moment of enchantment. We also explored the town beyond the hotel. We visited the nearby mall, ate at a restaurant in the town, and stopped at crafts shops displaying ornaments, carvings, fabrics, and paintings rich with color and history. As is my habit, I bargained with the vendors, not only for the joy of the exchange but for the conversations that came with it. I spoke with Uber drivers about national politics and the state of the economy. I asked about their lives and their aspirations. Their candor revealed a country navigating difficulty with creativity and endurance. The horrid settler colonial past was not gone; it negotiated itself with the harried postcolonial present through every conversation. Johannesburg: The Glitter and the Grind From Victoria Falls, we went to Johannesburg, where we spent ten days, which felt like the final movement of a symphony: restless, creative, bruised, and triumphant. It is a city that never sits still. It thinks aloud. It improvises. It hopes in public. We stayed in an apartment hotel complex in Sandton, the financial heart of Johannesburg, and often described as the wealthiest enclave on the continent. The area is a glittering collage of corporate offices, glamorous hotels, polished shopping malls, fine restaurants, and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Nelson Mandela Square, a ten-minute walk from our hotel, served as a daily anchor, a plaza where locals and visitors gathered beneath the statue of Madiba. Our time in the city was framed by visits to places where history sits close to the skin. We toured Soweto and spent an afternoon at the Nelson Mandela House Museum, which has been impressively upgraded since our last visit in 2008. The driver who took us there also guided us through the city, pointing out landmarks along the way, and then up to Northcliff Hill for a panoramic view of Johannesburg’s sprawl, a horizon of suburbs, townships, shopping centers, and distant towers shimmering in the summer heat and rain. Another day, an old family friend, one of South Africa’s leading writers whose family name is woven into the history of the ANC and the anti-apartheid struggle, took us with her two sons, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter to the world-renowned Sterkfontein Caves, part of the UNESCO-designated Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site famed for its extraordinary paleoanthropological discoveries. The caves, located about an hour’s drive northwest of Johannesburg, are among the richest early hominid fossil sites in the world and have yielded more than 500 hominid specimens that illuminate human origins over several million years. Excavations there produced the first adult Australopithecus africanus fossils, including the iconic skull known as “Mrs. Ples,” and “Little Foot,” one of the oldest and most complete early hominids ever found, with parts dated to around 3.6 million years ago. Tours of the caves take visitors through chambers and passages where these fossils were uncovered, bringing to life the deep timelines of our shared past and offering a humbling perspective on the sweep of human history. On our own, we took Ubers across the city to see its layers: historic townships, where South Africa reckons with its past, and new residential developments like Waterfall, where the country rehearses its future. What made Johannesburg especially memorable was the reconnection with family and friends. On several days, we spent time with one of my nieces, whom I had last seen in 2012 when she was thirteen, and her mother. We visited their home in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, which looked as pristine as it did the last time my wife, her mother, and I were there in 2008. One of the highlights was the Christmas lunch they invited us to at a hotel restaurant nearby, a large, warm, and inviting space overlooking a beautiful yard where midday sunlight filtered through the sky high windows. The room felt bright yet relaxed, the gentle clink of cutlery underscoring the holiday mood, and the garden view lent the setting an easy grace. The tables were elegantly dressed, the service attentive without intrusion, and two musicians, a man and a woman, performed festive music by African American and South African artists, their harmonies threading soul, jazz, and township rhythms into the afternoon air. The meal was served buffet-style, with guests moving at an unhurried pace between stations offering an abundant spread of dishes. The restaurant was full of people from across the city and beyond, a diverse gathering speaking the many languages of the rainbow nation, with some visitors from neighboring countries joining the celebration. It felt like belonging in motion. Among the most memorable moments in Johannesburg were our visits with old friends the day after Christmas: first with the former vice chancellor of the University of Pretoria in the morning, and later with the former vice chancellor of the University of Johannesburg in the afternoon. The latter welcomed us into his beautiful home in Houghton, the leafy suburb near where Mandela once lived, a place that still carries the echoes of history in its quiet streets. Over a generous meal, with music playing softly in the background like a quiet current beneath our words, the conversation widened and deepened by the minute. We moved from the state of South African universities to the shifting architecture of local and global politics, from personal memories to national memory, from the unfinished work of liberation to the fragile possibilities struggling to be born. It was the kind of exchange in which time loosens its grip, hours passing like minutes, leaving us both more informed, more reflective, and quietly stirred by what the future might yet hold. Johannesburg is a city where transformation is visible, especially in its expanding Black middle class. Post-apartheid South Africa has experienced a significant rise in Black professionals and households with stable incomes, a demographic now larger than the white middle class and a crucial engine of economic growth. Yet the gains are uneven. White households continue to hold most national wealth, and the divide within the Black middle and working classes is widening, with some advancing while others struggle to maintain mobility. Compared with many other African states, South Africa’s Black middle class is larger, more established, and more economically grounded, whereas in many other countries the middle class remains newer, smaller, and vulnerable to economic shocks. The United States has a much larger Black middle class in absolute size, but it too suffers from entrenched racial wealth disparities. Despite advances in income and education, Black household wealth remains a fraction of white household wealth. In both countries, the question of who rises, who stalls, and who is left behind remains central. There were also encounters that told quieter stories. We met several African Americans at hotels, restaurants, and tourist sites, some visiting for the holidays, others planning to relocate or already settled in Johannesburg or Cape Town. Many spoke of South Africa as a place where they could breathe more freely, where the weight of racial hostility was absent, and where they could enjoy a standard of living equal to or higher than what they had in the United States. Their reflections carried the resonance of both relief and reinvention. At the same time, we met African migrants from other parts of the continent, especially Zimbabwe my country of birth, drawn to Johannesburg by professional opportunities, education, or simply the hope of something better. Their journeys were shaped by resilience but also by vulnerability, as they balanced possibility with the risk of xenophobia, which continues to surface unpredictably in the competitive social dynamics of everyday life. By the time we left, Johannesburg had imprinted itself upon us. It is a city of staggering contradictions, where triumph and sorrow, brilliance and struggle, live side by side. Yet it is also a place of irrepressible creativity, of a vibrant art scene, film industry, theater, and music, including the latest genre of Amapiano. It felt, in the best way, like standing backstage before the curtain rises, the conversations in restaurants and living rooms carrying the tension of an orchestra tuning before history begins its next performance. As our days in Johannesburg unfolded, the conversations around us widened. What began as casual exchanges about daily life often opened into deeper reflections on politics, history, and the fragile scaffolding of democracy. In living rooms, restaurants, cars, and queues, the question kept arising: not only what South Africa is becoming, but what the United States has become. Questions We Could Not Escape Wherever we went in South Africa and Zimbabwe, conversations eventually circled back to the United States. Almost everyone we met asked about it. Uber drivers, hotel staff, vendors in markets, family and friends at dinner tables, strangers who overheard my wife’s accent and turned with curiosity. They asked how someone as crude, cruel, and chaotic as Donald Trump could have been reelected president. They inquired about what had happened to a country once seen as a global model of democratic aspiration. They wondered why American institutions that seemed powerful from a distance, from Congress to corporations to universities, appeared hesitant and uncertain, indeed craven, in the face of democratic backsliding. Some were aghast at how misinformation spreads so quickly in the United States, including claims circulating in certain right-wing media ecosystems and MAGA circles about so-called genocide against Afrikaners in South Africa, questions fueled by online narratives and public figures with South African roots in business and technology, often labeled locally as the South African apartheid mafia. They wanted to understand why such claims are taken seriously by so many Americans. A few of those we encountered expressed support for Trump’s America first agenda, but it became clear that this was rarely an endorsement of what the Trump administration was actually doing in the United States. It was more a projected wish that African leaders might also put their own countries first, govern with urgency, and act with clarity of purpose. In response, we shared our perspectives that the United States has always been a flawed democracy rather than a full democracy, to borrow the classification used by The Economist. Its weaknesses are structural as well as cultural. The Electoral College distorts representation. Gerrymandering protects minority rule. The judiciary, including the Supreme Court, is intensely politicized. Voting rights remain uneven and vulnerable. All of this is rooted in the country’s original sin of white supremacy, a foundational contradiction that has never been resolved. Today, demographic change and the fear of a coming majority-minority nation have accelerated the crisis, fueling a volatile blend of white racial anxiety, nativism, and ethnonationalist revival. We also noted that this moment in the United States does not exist in isolation. It is part of a wider global political current. Across parts of Europe, identitarian movements have re-emerged, alongside populist parties restricting immigration from the Global South. Asylum seekers are framed as threats rather than people. Anti-immigrant rhetoric is normalized in parliamentary debates. In this context, some Americans sympathetic to these movements look to South Africa’s apartheid past as a cautionary model, or even a blueprint, for preserving white cultural dominance and minority rule. The result is a feedback loop where American racial panic and European anti-immigrant populism reinforce one another, producing a shared political vocabulary of exclusion. The questions we heard were not voiced with malice or triumph. They were asked with concern, confusion, and sometimes sorrow. If democracy can falter in the United States, many wondered, what hope is there for younger or more fragile democracies elsewhere? It was a reminder that America’s crisis is never only America’s affair. Its failures are witnessed. Its struggles are studied. Its consequences are global. These encounters stayed with us as we boarded our flight from Johannesburg to Washington DC last night. They formed the backdrop to our reflections on South Africa as we prepared to leave, a country still in motion and still negotiating the meaning of freedom. We were struck by how well informed so many South Africans and Zimbabweans are about world affairs, especially the United States, often with a depth and nuance that far exceeds what most Americans know about Africa, South Africa, or Zimbabwe, a disparity shaped by histories of global hierarchy and each society’s place within it. It reminded us that knowledge, like mobility, is unevenly distributed along the lines of power and geography. We were equally fascinated to see that the flights to and from Washington DC and Johannesburg were now predominantly Black, a marked contrast from years ago. In the late 2000s, I published an essay on the “Whiteness of Airports” and the way white bodies dominated the global circuits of travel, even to and from Africa. That is clearly no longer the case. Even with Trump’s travel bans, visa restrictions, and the frictions that still govern mobility from the continent, something has shifted. The skies themselves seem to be changing. Conclusion: A Country Still in Motion While our visit to South Africa was largely a vacation, save for the first five days in Pretoria, as an academic who once taught the history of South Africa, and having engaged with South African scholars and even a few politicians for decades, I cannot help putting on my analytical hat. Travel sharpens perception, and the beauty of the present coexists with the shadows of the past. Since 1994, the country has made undeniable gains. It has built and sustained democratic institutions, expanded civil liberties, unified a previously fragmented education system, and increased access to housing, water, electricity, and healthcare. Millions who once lived at the margins were drawn closer to the center of national life. For a time, economic growth was strong, with GDP expanding significantly and public finance management, inflation control, and macroeconomic governance improving compared to the uncertainty of the twilight years of apartheid following the Soweto uprising of 1976. Yet, the structural legacies of apartheid remain formidable. South Africa still carries the burden of being the most unequal society in the world, with wealth concentrated in the hands of a few and poverty deepening again in recent years. Unemployment is staggering, especially among young people, with joblessness exceeding sixty percent in some cohorts. Infrastructure has faced strains: until recently, loadshedding was commonplace, water systems challenges persist, and service delivery gaps weigh heavily on the poor. Corruption and governance failures continue to corrode public trust. The energy transition remains fraught, anchored in an overwhelming dependence on coal and complicated by regional gas supply vulnerabilities, although green energy is apparently expanding, facilitated by the liberalization of energy markets. Education, while more accessible, struggles with quality, uneven resources, and exhausted institutions. Land and housing inequalities persist, shaping who belongs where and on what terms. And yet, South Africa is not a simple story of decline or progress beloved by the country’s foes and friends. It is a story of contestation, of what we used to call in radical African political economy, uneven development, the persistent mismatch between growth and development. It is a country where the future is negotiated in real time. It remains one of the few postcolonial states where democratic accountability, constitutionalism, and civic voice still hold meaningful power. Its Black middle class, now larger in absolute size than the white middle class, has become an engine of economic dynamism, even as racial wealth gaps stubbornly endure. Cultural and intellectual life is vibrant, universities remain laboratories of critique and innovation, and new forms of organizing and imagining are emerging from the ground up. The problems are immense, but so is the civic imagination that confronts them. Leaving Johannesburg, I carried two truths that sit side by side without canceling each other out. South Africa is a place of astonishing beauty, creativity, and resilience. It is also a place wrestling with inequality, broken systems, and the unfinished work of liberation. But perhaps that is the point: freedom is not an arrival; it is a process. And in South Africa, that process continues, noisy, brilliant, wounded, determined, and alive.