South Africa, Revisited: Going Back for the First Time
Eighteen months in, you book the flight. Here’s roughly how going back to South Africa for the first time tends to go, worked through one visit at a time — not because every trip looks identical, but because the shape repeats often enough to be worth naming in advance.
The first morning. You wake up in a childhood bedroom or your parents’ spare room, five minutes from where you grew up, and something is quietly off before you’ve even worked out what. The most commonly reported version of this is feeling like a tourist in your home country — noticing the shops that have changed, the route that’s been resurfaced, the way everyone’s accent sounds slightly different to your own ear now. None of it is wrong. It’s just evidence that you’ve been somewhere else long enough to notice, which is its own strange thing to sit with over coffee on day one.
The first family gathering. This is usually where what changes when you visit SA after emigrating becomes concrete rather than abstract. Conversations you used to have without thinking now require a small translation — explaining what a Canadian winter actually feels like, why a two-week vacation is generous by Canadian standards, what your kids do or don’t remember about the country everyone else in the room still calls home. Some relatives will ask hard, well-meaning questions about whether it was worth it. You don’t owe anyone a settled answer to that, especially not on day two.
The middle of the trip. The emotions of a first trip home after emigrating tend to shift here, once the reunion adrenaline wears off. Grief and relief show up in the same afternoon more often than people expect — grief for a version of belonging that’s changed while you were away, relief that the place is still recognisably itself, that the people you love are still themselves too. Neither feeling cancels the other out, and needing both at once isn’t a contradiction worth resolving quickly.
A quiet afternoon alone. This is where why going home feels strange after moving abroad tends to land most clearly, usually somewhere unremarkable — a supermarket aisle, a familiar street, a specific smell. You’re not choosing between two homes in that moment so much as noticing that you now have two, and that neither one holds all of you anymore. That’s not a loss to fix. It’s closer to just what happens when you build a life somewhere new without deciding to stop loving where you started.
The flight back to Canada. Boarding it after visiting is often harder than the outbound leg, and worth expecting rather than being surprised by. Leaving the second time can feel more final than the first, even though logistically it’s the opposite — you’re going home, not away, and it can take the whole flight to feel true. Give yourself room for that to be a genuinely mixed feeling rather than a clean one.
None of this is a reason to stay away, and none of it is a reason to doubt the decision either. Staying in touch, visiting when you can and holding both places honestly is a normal, sustainable way to live this — not a compromise you’re supposed to eventually resolve.
For the emotional side of settlement that never quite fits a checklist, alongside the more practical guides, Cape2Canada’s blog is the place to keep reading.