Loose Ends: A South African Reflection in Venice

Hands Across Generations – Diaspora Connection

Author: Lisu Khuzwayo

Some moments don’t ask for attention, but stay with you anyway. They unfold quietly, without warning, yet hold the weight of entire histories. Mine began in Venice, on a trip that was meant to be about learning. It became something else.

In my final year at Kearsney College, I was selected to join an academic tour to Italy and England—two weeks abroad, far from South African soil, with the promise of cultural enrichment. For a young Black South African, this wasn’t just a school trip. It was a passport into another reality. A first-world experience. A moment to see how the world works—when things work.

We explored cathedrals that looked like miracles in stone. I stood under the works of da Vinci and Michelangelo, awed by their ambition and detail. In museums, I came face-to-face with colonial loot: Zulu spears, traditional shields, and artefacts taken from the continent generations ago—collected not with admiration, but through violence. One of them, the umkhonto (spear), sat behind a sterile sheet of glass in a British museum.

For a moment, I didn't feel anger. Instead, I thought: This is what empire looks like. Ruthless, enduring, unapologetically powerful. While it stung to see our heritage displayed as trophies, I saw in that image a hard lesson: nations that build, that conquer, that record and preserve, shape how the world remembers.

Would it be better if these relics lived in South African museums, attracting tourism, funding, and national pride? Of course. But the uncomfortable truth is that they remain overseas, guarded and contextualised by foreign hands.

Still, none of this prepared me for what happened on March 27, 2024, in Venice.

Jetlagged from our sixteen-hour flight from Durban to Dubai, then Venice, I woke up alone. My classmates had already left our hostel to explore, grabbing McDonald’s and alcohol to celebrate the start of our trip. I threw on my shoes and headed out to catch up.

The streets were quiet and drenched in old-world charm. I passed Lime electric scooters lined neatly on cobbled sidewalks—simple, sleek, and so efficient it felt futuristic. That small moment reminded me how far behind we often are in South Africa, where something as basic as transport can still feel like a daily struggle.

As I searched, I came across two women managing a street vending machine—one Black, the other her mixed-race daughter. They were selling snacks, soft drinks, cigarettes, and 0% THC cannabis.

I stopped to ask:

“Hi, sorry—I’m a South African tourist. Could you tell me where the nearest McDonald’s or SPAR is?”

The older woman looked up, surprised.

“You’re from South Africa!?”

“Yes,”

I replied.

She gave me a look I couldn’t quite read.

Then she said,

“My father brought us here. We emigrated to Italy in 1975. A year before the Soweto Uprising.”

A silence stretched between us. I finally said it:

“Apartheid.”

She nodded slowly.

In that moment, time folded. Here I was—a child of post-apartheid South Africa—meeting someone whose life had been upended by it. She had fled the country I was raised in and now stood selling snacks in a foreign land. We were both South African, but separated by history, choices, and necessity.

It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t need to be. That look between us—half knowing, half aching—said everything. There are things words can’t carry.

And I realised something I haven’t stopped thinking about since: Our story is bigger than us.

South Africa is not just home. It’s a place people had to flee. A dream some never returned to. An unfinished project scattered across oceans, vending stalls, and museum displays. While some of us remain committed to fixing, questioning, and building, others carry our history abroad, etched in memory, held in survival.

That day in Venice reminded me that South Africa’s past didn’t just happen to us. It still lives with us—in subtle echoes, in diaspora encounters, in the unspoken bond of people who share a homeland marked by contradiction.

We don’t just carry passports. We carry loose ends.

And now and then, we tie one back together.