In April 2025, I traveled to a remote part of South Africa to volunteer at a school. I expected to be one of two volunteers, but upon arrival, I learned the other person had dropped out at the last minute. Filling the spot was Mr. G, a retired South African journalist who had sold most of his material possessions for a van that doubled as his house. He was on a soul-searching quest for something deeper than journalism.
After some initial awkwardness, we became friends. Our personalities didn’t necessarily click, but we had no one else to talk to, and our hosts weren’t exactly likable. We spent our mornings and afternoons volunteering in our assigned classrooms and our evenings talking about our lives and future plans.
After a couple of weeks, our conversations shifted to more vulnerable topics, like childhood trauma and past relationships. That was when he told me about the Black woman he had dated during the height of Apartheid.
Mr. G had been working as a journalist covering a political riot in the KwaZulu-Natal area. I was stunned to learn that his fellow reporter was a Black woman; the sheer nerve it must have taken for a Black woman to work as a journalist during Apartheid is unimaginable. I felt a deep awe for her, and I could easily see why Mr. G had fallen in love.
By then, they had been together for a few months. Once they finished covering the riot, they decided to take a few days for a vacation. But for a white man to be seen with a Black woman outside of work was dangerous and unacceptable. Seeking solitude and quality time, Mr. G booked a sweet little cottage tucked away in the woods.
Under Apartheid, South Africa enforced strict racial segregation. Black, Coloured, and Indian citizens were restricted to designated townships or “Bantustans”, while modern cities and beautiful landscapes were reserved for white people. Naturally, this nice cottage in the woods was owned by a white man, and Black guests were strictly forbidden. To get around this, Mr. G booked the property under his name alone, and smuggled his girlfriend onto the property inside the trunk of his car.
After exchanging pleasantries with the owner and collecting the keys, he had to wait for the man to leave before he could let her out. An educated, beautiful, young journalist had to hide in the dark for over thirty minutes just because of the color of her skin. I cannot fathom the humiliation, shame, and fear she experienced in those moments. The horrible cycles of cruelty this world goes through are a reality I have come to understand more deeply as I travel.
For the year and a half of their relationship, they could never publicly go to a restaurant, take a walk, or holiday together. Under the Apartheid regime, Black South Africans were stripped of their citizenship rights. The normal, everyday moments couples share were simply not options for them.
As he recalled their days together, Mr. G admitted their relationship slowly fizzled out. There is only so much time you can spend behind closed curtains and hiding in car trunks before the magic fades. Eventually, they drifted apart. Mr. G went on to marry, have two children, and later a divorce. After 30 years in the reporting world, he set aside enough money for his children’s education, sold everything else, converted his Ford pickup truck into a home on wheels, and began traveling South Africa—volunteering and working wherever he found peace and purpose.
As he sipped his coffee, lost in thought, I asked if he knew what had happened to her. I didn’t really expect an answer, but to my surprise, he had one. Many years later, while in KwaZulu-Natal for a job, he thought of her and dialed the last number he had. She answered.
Over an hour-long call, he learned that she had also married, but she hadn’t been lucky enough to end it with a simple divorce. Her husband was a cruel scum who cheated on her constantly, frequently sleeping with sex workers. She didn’t realize the depth of his betrayal until she was diagnosed with AIDS. She sought treatment and divorced him, and now lived alone in a small house, getting by on her savings and whatever medical care she could afford.
It broke my heart to hear this. In a cruel twist of fate, her best days were when she had to hide in cars. At least then all she had to deal with was the loss of dignity rather than an incurable virus that controlled how she lived the rest of her life. South Africa may have finally attained its independence, but this beautiful Black woman lost hers.