It’s 11 a.m. on a Monday in the middle of May 2023, and most people in Cape Town are at work, in school, or caught up on the wrong end of the socio-economic divides of the city a.k.a homeless and hungry. Then there are those like me, conspicuous outsiders who are here in this city but removed from the real world veins of it, and from the world that the play we’re about to watch will plunge us into.

I’m in the very back row of the theatre, the only row with a few empty seats in an otherwise packed room filled with school kids and their teachers. The girls are in the very short skirts we all associate with South African school uniform and which the little girl in me envies immensely. Some are in tights too and I silently hope that the ones that are not, aren’t too cold. Then the play begins and for the duration of two 45-minute Acts sandwiching a brief interlude of chatter, bathroom queues, and for me another red cappuccino, nothing else exists.

The play is predictably set in Apartheid SA and tells an evergreen story of struggle, cruelty and redemption as lived from the perspective of a black teacher, his black student, and a white student from the rich school on the other side of town.

You’ll think that you already know a lot about colonialism and racism, but artists and playwrights will take this, knit it up with some great writing and impeccable acting, and the results will unravel you.

Visiting a country after you have lived in it is never the same as the experience of only ever having been a visitor. I feel enmeshed with South Africa, its beauty, the people, its problems, its infrastructural presentation veiling massive structural problems. I like it a lot but I also have a knowledge of it that may not be quite so deep as I would like but deep enough that I understand it cannot always be for me what I need it to be.

Even then, whenever I happen to be immersed in its art, whether that’s the insanely gorgeous landscape or the ever-impressive performance arts scene, I can’t help but be intoxicated by it all — this country really is who she thinks she is.

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