The thirtieth of November marked my twenty-sixth birthday and my return to the continent of Africa since I left Zambia as an eight-year-old. I would not be returning to Zambia though—I was heading to Cape Town, South Africa. While on the twelve-hour Turkish Airlines flight from Chicago’s O'Hare International Airport to Istanbul, Turkey, my first stopping point, I began to think more about the rapture of leaving Zambia and years of immigration concerns that prohibited me from leaving the United States and being able to visit Zambia. After an eleven-hour layover in Istanbul, I boarded another Turkish Airlines flight for an additional twelve-hours until I reached Cape Town. Why I chose Cape Town stems from me being afraid of how overwhelming Zambia would have felt. All those decades of not seeing family members, losing the native language, and a sense of familiarity with a space that was once home was too much of an endeavor to take on. When I arrived at Cape Town International Airport, I panicked into a series of questions: What was I searching for in going back to Africa? Would I still be regarded as an African or was I already too diluted with Americentric views of who I was and what my placement was in the world? My fears would all surely be put to rest because to my surprise, as my flight from Istanbul to Cape Town where I was one of only five Black passengers proved, Cape Town was heavily filled with a white South African or white tourist presence. I wondered what this meant in the history of South Africa and what Apartheid had done in terms of displacing so many Black and mixed race (commonly referred to as coloured people in South Africa) Capetonians from the bustling city center in places like District Six to the Cape Town flats— areas like Belhar, Delft, and Mitchell’s Plain. This distance essentially is what came to define so many of my experiences in Cape Town. From visiting Robben Island on the solemn ferry ride full of white tourists and very few Black Cape Town locals who I later found out were able to attend due to government programs; the ex-political prisoners of Robben Island who operated as tour guides and made a modest living by retelling their traumas of Robben Island and taking tourists to Nelson Mandela’s jail cell to take pictures; the Iziko Slave Lodge which highlighted how human cargo was one of the pillars in which Cape Town was founded on; the Zeitz MOCCA Museum which could only be afforded by well to do locals and tourists; and to Cape Town’s famous Long Street where you can dine at Mama Africa Cafe or Madam Taitou. It was because of this that I purposely rented an apartment in The Diplomat building on Hans Strijdom Avenue in downtown Cape Town to give me a sense of proximity to everything I wanted to engage with. I found myself spending an ample amount of my mornings at Tiger’s Milk on Long Street eating local foods like salomies, snoekparcels, biltong, and gatsbys where I attempted to gather my thoughts. Cape Town indeed had a significant white presence which was correlated to the gentrification and colonialism of so many Black and coloured spaces pre-apartheid that left so many of its Black and coloured populations in disarray as the country’s policies changed to still better suit so many of its white population. That disarray manifested in various forms—be it the museums that catered to retelling the history of the locals or leaving them to sell their identity through African paraphernalia and sunset boat rides on the Atlantic ocean among a few, to sustain the locals with some form of an income. This explained the men and women at V&A Waterfront who painted their body and adorned what they termed as “Zulu warrior attire” and posed as statues to scare random tourists passing by; the women and men singing freedom songs from apartheid on the streets while tourists took pictures; and dancers in animal print costumes. If anything, the locals were only left with the relics of their pasts as a viable driving force for Cape Town’s economy.