South Africa - 2014
August 16, 2024
In the summer of 2014 after my sophomore year of high school, at age 15, I was fortunate enough to go to South Africa as an exchange student. My two months there were transformative. This experience has significantly shaped the decade of my life since.
A quest for independence was a large part of my motivation for going. I remember feeling a giddy charge coursing through my body immediately upon being dropped off at the San Francisco airport, eager for the opportunity to develop my own personhood in a distant country away from familiar influences. I brought a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, after a connecting flight via JFK, pulled out the book somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Johannesburg. The following quotes and passages especially spoke to me:
“Do the thing and you will have the power.”
“What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“There is a mortifying experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean the ‘foolish face of praise,’ the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.”
My host family picked me up when I landed. The arrangement was for me to stay with them in Johannesburg; my exchange partner Devon would then come stay with me and take classes at my high school in the fall. Devon went to an all-boys boarding school with a separate all-girls school nearby. I stayed in the school dorms with Devon during the weeks, and on the weekends we would usually go back to his family’s house.
Soon after I arrived, the head of the school’s exchange program arranged a sightseeing tour around Johannesburg for me and three other exchange students—two from India and one from Colombia. We piled into a van and drove past one of the soccer stadiums where the 2010 World Cup was held. Next we went to Soweto, an impoverished township of a couple million people to the southwest of Johannesburg. We then took a double-decker bus tour around downtown Johannesburg before returning to campus.
I quickly determined that going to class was an utter waste of time given that my grades there would not be included in college applications. I was normally a very good student throughout high school, but this was driven solely out of pragmatism rather than any sense of something I “should” be doing. I completely stopped showing up to classes after the first week. The teachers and administrators either didn’t care about my absence or forgot about me entirely.
I thought it would be fun to join the school’s rugby team for a game, and watched some Youtube videos to first learn the actual rules of the game and then try to figure out how to tackle people without getting concussed or tearing knee ligaments. Near the beginning of the game, I obliterated an opposing player with a tackle that drew high approval from my new teammates. I attempted to duplicate this performance a few minutes later, but instead got kicked in the face as I was going in for the tackle and had to sit out most of the game because I could barely see out of one eye. Later I sent a picture of the black eye to my mom, telling her I had gotten mugged in Africa. She was not amused.
Devon had a friend Aidan whose family was extremely wealthy; they owned hotels and other properties around the world including a huge private game reserve bordering Kruger National Park in South Africa. Aidan invited me to go there with his mom, two older brothers, and another friend our age over a weeklong school holiday. We stayed at their estate outside of Johannesburg for a couple days, where Aidan and his brothers provided me with my first marijuana experience. From there, their mom drove us many hours to the eastern edge of the country where the game reserve is located. At one point we drove over a pass in the Drakensburg Mountains, a place I now would love to return to and explore but at the time didn’t pay any mind to. As it was getting dark, we got to the region near Kruger National Park and drove down a rutted dirt road onto their private reserve through a gate patrolled by an armed guard. We stayed in a villa fenced off from the wild giraffes, zebras, and elephants that would casually wander by. Monkeys would swing down from the trees and try to steal our food while we were eating on the outdoor balcony. Just about every species of African wildlife you could imagine lived on their enormous plot of land, including lions though we didn’t see any while I was there. The property was fenced off around its perimeter but was basically unspoiled wilderness aside from some jeep tracks. The five of us - all immature teenage boys - took a safari jeep around this wilderness each day completely unsupervised. One day they let me drive and I promptly steered into a dense thicket. After reversing out of it, I was relegated to the passenger seats for the remainder of the trip. I distinctly remember one night sitting on the roof of the safari jeep as it was getting dark. High as a kite, we watched a hippo defecate into a watering hole. It was an impressive display of force.
These were pretty remarkable experiences to have as a teenager when I think about it now, but the nature and culture of South Africa were of about as little importance to me as academics at the time. Fueled by a potent combination of existential seeking, teenage sex drive, and insecurity, I was far more interested in forging my body and mind in the weightroom and going to nightclubs on the weekends. After relieving myself of the classes I was meant to be attending and returning from this unique safari experience, I devised a maniacal training program for the rest of the summer. It involved 17 weightlifting workouts per week, basketball shooting and dribbling drills almost every day, followed up by hard cardio sessions several times per week. Near the end of the summer I managed to deadlift 285 pounds while weighing half that much. I had been consistently working out for a couple years already, but in South Africa I decided I wasn’t fucking around anymore and that it was time to build a body I was proud of. It was an obsessive, all-consuming pursuit. My days revolved around training and eating as much food as I possibly could. I obtained a questionable blend of protein powder and creatine with other unknown compounds that seemed pretty effective, though this was mild compared to the anabolic steroids that many of the boys there were regularly taking. Toxic masculinity seeped out of every corner of the school, and I fully embraced it.
It was intoxicating to feel my self-belief grow in parallel with my muscles, gathering concrete evidence that I was capable of setting my mind to something that required pouring all of myself into it, and then following through on it day in and day out with tangible results. I came up with this little mantra that I would repeat to myself every day: “I am a human being of great value and power, and I can be and do anything I want.” With intention and focused effort, I saw that I really could forge my own reality and alter perceived limitations. By taking action. Doing the thing.
Equally intoxicating was the hard liquor at the nightclubs we frequented on the weekends. Age didn’t seem to be a barrier to entry; we would just hand the bouncers a small bribe. I wasn’t unfamiliar with alcohol before arriving in South Africa, but certainly stepped it up a notch. I actually believe this was really good for me. I saw clearly what these activities could and couldn’t offer me at a relatively young age. While the allure of substance use and partying persisted to some degree for another year or two, there has been very little desire in this area since. When I fell in love in my first relationship in 2016, it was obvious that a strong, loving connection with a woman I cared deeply for was vastly better in every way than whatever else I was seeking.
Spending time around Devon’s family revealed a lot about my own upbringing. One day his dad was driving us somewhere. Devon’s little sister started crying when smoke from their dad’s cigarette blew into her face. “Daddy you said you wouldn’t smoke in the car,” she pleaded. “Oh sorry sorry sorry,” he dismissively replied, and proceeded to change absolutely nothing about his behavior. Something clicked for me and I recognized similar patterns in my own family more clearly than I previously had. Maybe I will write more about all of this another time, but I started to better understand why I often felt inadequate and struggled to enjoy things. Possibly for the first time, I could see that I had no inherent shortcomings and had just internalized these things from elsewhere. I began journaling about what was coming up for me. This has transformed into a 400+ page word document that I have regularly added to for the last 10 years with unfiltered thoughts on all sorts of things.
My priorities have shifted since 2014 (in a way that I think much better serves me) but there is still a deep well of drive and self-belief within me because of how I spent my time in South Africa. I am who I am today in no small part because of what 15 year old me experienced and did that summer. I am incredibly proud of him, and still often look to him for inspiration and guidance.
Do the thing and you will have the power.