BEYOND DIVISION: I walked 1,600km across SA — here’s what the country taught me

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At the time of writing, I am five days away, if all goes according to plan, from walking into Cape Town and completing a journey that began nearly two months ago in Durban.

When I first set out on this 1,600km walk, I thought I knew exactly what I was doing. I was walking to raise awareness about South Africa’s ongoing housing crisis, raise funding for my upcoming Master’s studies at Harvard University, and document the mission of Ubuntu Home, an AI-driven platform I founded to help ordinary people navigate the overwhelming process of designing, financing and building a home.

Those goals remain deeply important. But somewhere along the road between KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape, the journey transformed.

It became an education, and not the kind I expect to receive in an Ivy League classroom, but a raw unlearning of my own assumptions. It forced me to confront the enormous gap between the SA that dominates our headlines and the one that actually exists on the ground.

For 55 days, I have walked alone through townships, wealthy suburbs, farming communities, informal settlements and historic missions like Suurbraak.

I have shared meals with strangers, slept in backyard rooms, and sat with mayors, teachers, pensioners and unemployed youth.

What I discovered along the road didn’t match our national script of perpetual division. The SA on the ground is kinder, more resourceful and far more connected than the one designed to keep us outraged.

As a Zulu boy who grew up in KwaMashu, I carried my own baggage into this journey. Apartheid was not simply a system of land dispossession; it was a psychological engineering project designed to control human relationships.

Laws like the Group Areas Act physically separated us into silos, ensuring entire generations grew up knowing nothing about one another except the fears and stereotypes they had been taught. This walk forced those inherited stories to collide with lived reality. One by one, they collapsed.

In the Eastern Cape, a gogo in Humansdorp woke up before sunrise to make sure I had my requested oatmeal, only to surprise me with a massive, secondary full English breakfast right after. Weeks later, in the Western Cape, an Afrikaans tannie in Mossel Bay asked me the exact same questions and prepared an almost identical breakfast. The same maternal care happened again in Wilderness with an English-speaking host.

The languages changed and the accents shifted, but the maternal instinct was identical.

Even our cultural m