TIA

I’ll never forget when I started to understand Africa.

I was at a beach bar overlooking the Indian Ocean in Durban, South Africa, on spring break during my term of study at the University of Cape Town, writing a column for my college newspaper and feeling like Nicholas Kristof.

There’s a very common acronym in South Africa, TIA. “This Is Africa.” It’s used to describe anything you find quintessentially African, and has many different connotations – a pickup truck full of bloody sheep heads, TIA; free condoms in every bathroom, TIA – but is just as descriptive and frequent as LOL or WTF.

That week, ending at that bar in Durban, was the most TIA week I could imagine. I was taken through most every setting you think of when you think of Africa.

My group started the week in Kruger National Park, one of the biggest wildlife refuges on the continent. Our two-day safari was everything my childhood self hoped it would be: we drove in an open green ranger truck, got within mere feet of lions and elephants, watched the orange sunrise over fertile plains. This, surely, was Africa.

From Kruger we drove south to sprawling Soweto, on the edge of Johannesburg, for a few days of township life. Townships like Soweto sprang up all over the country as apartheid territory laws kept blacks away from whites, and it remains a mostly poor, black community. But within this framework also exists wealth: Soweto has more millionaires than anywhere else in South Africa. And prestige: we visited Nelson Mandela’s old home, now a museum, and the stunning Soccer City, home of the 2010 FIFA World Cup final. And joy: we played soccer in the park with local kids and encountered nothing but welcoming, friendly people. This had to be Africa.

And then it was on to Durban, as we caught a train from Johannesburg (where, in the span of an hour, we were almost mugged three times…TIA). Durban is a place outside geography – it sits in Africa, looks like California, and has more Indians than any city outside India. We sat in a café and listened to the Gipsy Kings, making the melting pot complete.

But Durban might have been the most TIA place of all, or at least what Africa may become. In the near future, it will stop being a dark place of mystery for Westerners and become as much a part of the world as anywhere else. Kruger seems like Africa’s wild past, Soweto its complex present, Durban its international future. Together, they formed for me the complete picture of what it currently is.