Johannesburg | A Long Walk

“"There's nothing like returning to a place that's unchanged to discover how much we've changed."” Nelson Mandela

It was to the sound of a hymn that Johannesburg ceased to fit into what I am about to tell you.

Node Steyn City Clubhouse, Amidst a lavish meal, a Springboks game, a fine South African Sauvignon Blanc, and the suspended attention of all those present, we began to listen. It was July 18th, Madiba's birthday, known to us as Nelson Mandela. And when the South African national anthem rose in the room, it didn't seem to embrace merely a rugby field, a flag, or a ceremony. It carried with it a story too grand to be heard without something resonating within.

It was our last night in Johannesburg. The following morning, we would leave for Kruger, in search of that Africa that takes root early in the imagination of those who grow up watching wildlife documentaries: the open savannah, the silent elephants, the lions lying in the shade, the almost childlike expectation of finding a leopard among the trees. But, before the journey changed scale and language, that anthem brought together everything that the previous days had begun to teach us.

This song arrived at the end of our stay in the largest city and economic center of South Africa. And perhaps that's why it stayed.

Mandela wrote about a long walk towards freedom. The expression has become so well-known that it risks becoming worn out. We repeat it in speeches, in news reports, in classes, at birthdays, and in moments of tribute. I also couldn't resist using it in the title of this text. We sometimes forget that it was born from a life in which freedom was never an abstract idea. It carried the weight of a prison cell, of a distant family, of a country divided by laws designed to humiliate, separate, and convince millions of people that their dignity could be measured by the color of their skin.

In Johannesburg, Mandela's march ceases to be an exclamation and becomes a question.

What happens to a society after it achieves freedom? How does one learn to live in community when the past has taught, for so long, that the other was a threat? How does one heal a city whose geography still reveals the scars of people who were pushed away, categorized, displaced, prevented from choosing where to live, work, or simply walk?

No answer fits in a museum, a book, a rugby match, or a photograph of a smiling Mandela. But all these things help to understand that South Africa is not just the country that won the... apartheid. It is the country that continues to live after it. And living after a wound of this magnitude does not mean forgetting it. It means waking up every day within a story that is still being written.

Our arrival took place days before that night.

We departed from Lisbon at 9:25 PM on July 15th. The flight had a layover in Dubai, that luminous and almost unreal interval between two continents, where airports seem designed to make the body lose track of time. You sleep little, drink coffee at nameless hours, stare at screens announcing impossible destinations, and suddenly, the world changes language, latitude, light.

We arrived in Johannesburg at 4:15 PM. The fatigue of a long journey always brings with it a kind of vulnerability. You don't yet know the city, you haven't mastered its rhythm, you don't know where to look for initial landmarks, you can't distinguish what is accidental from what reveals the nature of the place. Arriving in a new country is also a silent negotiation: the body tries to adapt before the mind begins to understand.

The first sensation wasn't fear. It was alertness.

Johannesburg demands it. It would be naive to pretend that security is a concern invented by those who view the country from the outside. It accompanies the routes, the times, the places where one parks, the areas one passes through, and those where one shouldn't improvise. One quickly learns that certain careless freedoms, so common in many European cities, don't work the same way here.

That is why, in the two most sensitive cities of this trip; Johannesburg and, later, Cape Town; we chose the Jarat Tours to accompany us. We were looking for safety, naturally. We were traveling as a family, with Bia and Gui, and we wanted to explore the places without turning every trip into a worry. But we quickly realized that the choice would give us much more than protection and comfort.

Moses, our driver and guide during those days, was no longer just someone there to drive us from one place to another. He had the rare intelligence to know how to be present without taking up space. He often stepped aside to give us more privacy, so that a visit, a meal, a conversation, or a photograph could remain just ours. But a closer look revealed that he had never truly stopped being present: he observed, anticipated, discreetly kept watch, and reassured us, without causing alarm, that we were alright.

It was through him that we learned so much about Johannesburg. Not just the streets, the right places, and the safest routes, but also stories, gestures, contexts, and silences that a city doesn't reveal to those who merely pass through it. Moses helped us see better. And that is, perhaps, the most generous way to guide someone.

He also did this through languages. Moses spoke most of the languages of South Africa and switched registers with a naturalness that fascinated us. Among them, one sounded particularly delightful to us, Zulu, punctuated by clicks in the tongue that seemed to defy everything we know about language. We listened to him speak and realized that a language is not just for greeting, making a purchase, or exchanging ideas. It's a way of entering a place. Of saying, even before explaining who we are: “"I know who you are, I recognize your house, we are brothers, I will not harm you."”

In South Africa, where so many identities, memories, and wounds coexist so closely, this awareness takes on a different depth. Language can bring people closer or push them away, build trust or raise defenses. It can allow one to recognize a friend among strangers or sense that someone has chosen to keep their distance. Moses taught us this without ever turning it into a lesson. It was enough to see him sing, talk to people, hear the changes in tone, rhythm, and expression, to understand that his map of Johannesburg was not made only of streets, but above all of voices.

For Bia and Gui, he simply became a friend they had for a few days. For us, he remained one of the good memories of Johannesburg: someone who started by protecting us and ended up bringing us closer to a city that, without him, we would have known in a much more limited way.

But it would be equally unfair to allow prudence to become the only lens through which Johannesburg is viewed.

Because, behind the attention it demands, the city revealed a generosity that was difficult to anticipate. It was the availability of those who explained a place, a story, or an everyday gesture without the haste of someone merely fulfilling an obligation. It was the ease with which children were received. It was the way conversations lingered because someone genuinely wanted to know where we came from, what we were looking for, how our trip was going. It was hospitality without pretense, closer to a way of being than a strategy to impress visitors.

It was also the light.

Johannesburg has sunsets that seem immune to time. The sky opens up over the plateau, touches the earth with warm hues, and creates an almost theatrical distance between the last sounds of the day and the arrival of night. It's not just about beauty. A sunset can be beautiful anywhere, but there, it seemed to restore scale to things. After a day full of roads, stories, warnings, and discoveries, the horizon reminded us that the world is always bigger than what worries us.

A Steyn City It was our first nest in this new world.

It didn't just function as a hotel. It functioned as a temporary home: a strange expression, but perhaps the most accurate to describe what we seek when traveling as a family. A temporary home doesn't try to replace the one we left in Portugal. It gives us, for a few days, the freedom to put down our bags, find a rhythm, wake up without the feeling that every hour has to be used as a test of tourist efficiency. It allows the children to stop being just travelers and start inhabiting the trip.

A Steyn City It offers this possibility with an unusual ambition. The hotel, created in partnership with Saxon, It doesn't attempt to replicate the classic idea of urban housing. It's situated within a property that seems to conceive of the city as an everyday experience: space, greenery, pathways, restaurants, sports, a lake, families, people living at their own pace. The scale is large, but it doesn't impose itself through ostentation. Comfort appears more as a form of confidence than a prestige.

It was important to arrive there after so many hours of flying. Openness, silence, space to breathe, and time to recover are not minor details when entering such an intense city. The two-bedroom suite allowed us this rare normalcy: each of us had our own space, the children could rest without the trip turning into a succession of hotel rooms, and we could talk again about the day without the anxiety of still needing to decide everything for the next morning.

The quality of a hotel is also often measured by what it fails to demand of its guests. Steyn City It didn't force us to always be in consumer mode. It didn't demand that we be permanently dressed for a photograph, sitting at the table as if every meal were a ceremony, or choosing between comfort and family life. It gave us room to simply exist. And, on a trip with Bia and Gui, that's the greatest luxury.

Gastronomy followed this idea. The Guild It functioned as a natural extension of the days: unhurried breakfasts, light lunches after visits, and dinners that restored a more relaxed rhythm to the family. Among the expertly prepared sushi and a carefully selected South African wine list, the dishes that best brought the country to the table stood out: the seafood pasta with... linefish, shrimp, squid and mussels; the braised oxtail with creamy samp, comforting and profoundly South African; and, in the end, the inevitable mallow pudding with Amarula custard. A Ntombifuthi It made everything even better. Kind, attentive, and spot-on with her wine suggestions, she turned her service into a discreet form of hospitality.

O Clubhouse It belonged to a different atmosphere. More open, more social, with the golf course widening the view and the feeling that there was a community there, not just people passing through. I'm neither a player nor a fan of golf, yet it's easy to be overwhelmed by the beauty and size of those courses. It's also the right place for a leisurely dinner, to see families, groups of friends, players, children and guests sharing the same space, without the hotel becoming a bubble disconnected from the world around it.

The menu also served as a bridge. There were flavors that didn't need to advertise themselves as local to be so: chicken livers with peri-peri sauce and... dombolo; cow's tongue with chakalaka; the kingklip grilled; the boerewors, accompanied by pap ...and that spicy vegetable that seems to contain, in a single spoonful, fire, color, and conversation. In the glass, a 21 Gables Sauvignon Blanc, Stellenbosch reminded us that the Cape was already present that first night, long before we reached it.

And in the end, the lemon posset, with its clean acidity, the curd The lemon, pistachio, and raspberry wine brought to the table the perfect counterpoint to a meal of deeper flavors: light, fresh, and precise. Thanks to the kind invitation from the Marketing team, we sat at the most coveted table to watch the Springboks. Around us, the room began to fill up. On the screen, the game began to capture everyone's attention. And so it was, amidst wine, food, children, voices, and rugby, that the evening approached its most unexpected moment, the one with which I began this text.

The following day, the 17th, the Apartheid Museum It forced us to change our approach. You don't visit a museum like this like you visit an art collection or a historic house. The visit requires time, availability, and some courage to not rush away from the discomfort. apartheid It was not a moral abstraction, nor some kind of ancient and distant evil that can be summed up in two dates and a few names. It was a meticulous, bureaucratic, and brutal system, designed to enter people's lives from birth: in the place where they could live, in the school they could attend, in the job they could aspire to, in the street they could walk down, in the loves they could pursue.

The most terrifying violence of certain regimes lies precisely in their ability to turn the absurd into routine. To make an injustice seem administrative. To make humiliation seem like the rule. To make someone get used to asking permission to exist.

We left the museum with fewer certainties and (much) more silence.

Then we went on to Soweto. It would be easy to describe it "simply" as Mandela's neighborhood, as a place of resistance, as a symbol of the struggle against... apartheid. All of this is true. But all of this is not enough. Soweto is also everyday life. It's houses, schools, shops, children returning home, music, traffic, conversations, neighbors, people who don't live within a page of history. They are people for whom melanin, which shouldn't strictly measure anything, still too often means less pay, less property, less access, less choice.

Traveling through places marked by such suffering and revolt demands a certain moral caution. The visitor always runs the risk of seeking a ready-made emotion, of transforming the pain of others into decoration for their own trip. Soweto deserves more than that. It deserves to be listened to. It deserves the humility to realize that places do not exist to confirm the images we bring from home. They exist to contradict them, to deepen them, or to dismantle them.

That was Johannesburg's first great lesson: a city cannot be seen all at once. It is seen in layers. Through the history that explains its fissures, through the stories of the people who inhabit it, through the comfortable spaces that allow one to breathe, through the areas where caution becomes necessary, through the sunsets that make everything seem vaster, through the conversation that reminds us that we continue to be guests.

On the 18th, we left Johannesburg heading towards a place that forces anyone to realize that the journey didn't begin selfishly with oneself.

We started with Sterkfontein Caves, ...where the landscape closes in, the light diminishes, and the outside world quickly loses its authority. The stone forces the body to slow down. One descends through narrow passages, feels the humidity in the air, sees how water, over millions of years, has sculpted an architecture without an architect. These are not beautiful caves in the superficial sense of the word. They are more than that: they are archives.

In them, the earth preserved what would have disappeared on the surface. Its sediments held bones, teeth, animal remains, tools, and successive layers of time. Each fragment found in these... Sterkfontein Caves It doesn't just answer the question "who lived here?". It helps to reconstruct how we lived, in what environments we survived, what other species existed with us, and what paths evolution explored before bringing us to the present.

It is important to distinguish between the three names, because they tell the same story on different scales. The Cradle of Humankind It is the territory and collection of paleoanthropological sites classified by UNESCO: a vast landscape of caves and fossil deposits where one of the most important memories of human evolution is preserved. Sterkfontein Caves These are one of those sites, perhaps the most famous: the ancient caves where we descended and where some of the discoveries were made that changed the way the world looks at our origins. Maropeng It is the visitor and interpretation center of Cradle of Humankind, the place where science organizes what caves make us feel before we are able to understand it.

To the Sterkfontein Caves they gave us Mrs. Ples, one of the most famous skulls of Australopithecus africanus, and Little Foot, A nearly complete skeleton, approximately 3.67 million years old, was discovered. Above all, it proved that evolution was not a simple ladder, with each species climbing step by step until triumphantly reaching modern humans. It was a much more fascinating story: made up of branches, adaptations, attempts, close relatives who disappeared, and lives that were interrupted without knowing that, millions of years later, someone would descend into the same caves to try to reconstruct their faces.

It's difficult to be there without thinking about the disproportion between our haste and the passage of time. We arrived by plane, with reservations, schedules, cameras, and a lunch planned for after the visit. Beneath our feet, however, lay a history that began before any country, before any language, before the borders and divisions that today seem so defining. Before we were Portuguese, South African, European, or African, before we identified ourselves by religion, color, place of birth, or the side of history we believe we belong to, we already belonged to a common origin.

Then we went to Maropeng.

Upon arrival, the guide greeted us with a question that seemed simple, but ended up becoming one of the most beautiful phrases of the entire trip:

“"Welcome home. Why did it take you so long to get here?"”

It wasn't just a catchy phrase. In Maropeng, it took on an almost physical truth. The interpretation center doesn't just aim to display famous fossils or transform millions of years into a succession of showcases. It helps us understand the magnitude of what we've just visited. It gives language to wonder. It explains why those caves, those rocks, and those bones make this place one of the most historically and scientifically significant on the planet.

Maropeng In Setswana, it means "return to the place of origin." And perhaps no idea explains it better. Cradle of Humankind. Not because every human being started in that specific cave, nor because science allows us to reduce the origin of all of us to a single point on the map. But because this territory holds an essential part of the answer to the question that has always accompanied us: where did we come from?

Africa is not just another continent in human history. It is the place where our species and its closest ancestors find some of their oldest and most decisive memories. The discoveries made in Cradle of Humankind They helped to definitively dispel the old idea that humanity originated far from here. More importantly, they reminded us that our origin does not belong to one people, one nation, or one identity. It belongs to all of us.

That's what made that phrase from the guide so moving. “Welcome home” It didn't mean we were entering a museum dedicated to a distant past. It meant we were returning to a history that predates everything we use today to distinguish ourselves from one another. The languages, the flags, the religions, the fears, and even the enemies we've invented are recent compared to the journey that brought us here.

After the caves, after the chambers of Maropeng, After looking at the first steps of beings who didn't yet know that one day we would be them, the question ceased to be simply where we came from. It became more demanding: after so much time to get here, what do we do with each other now?

We had lunch with a different perspective on things. After millions of years compressed into one morning, a table, a conversation, and the return to the surface took on a different importance. At the end of the afternoon, we returned to... Steyn City, for the last night in Johannesburg.

And then dinner arrived at Clubhouse, the Springboks game and the national anthem.

Nothing needed explaining. The day had already done that work. We had started at the stone, among remote signs of human origin; we were now returning to a room full of people, voices, dishes, children, sport, and memory.

The South African national anthem rose up in its five official languages. The lyrics changed in sound, rhythm, and language, but freedom continued to permeate it entirely. Not as a decorative word, nor as an achievement that can be considered complete, but as a demand. As a promise repeated by different voices, each carrying its own history, its own pain, and its own way of saying "we.".

As I told you at the beginning, it was Mandela's birthday. And, on that day... Clubhouse Her long walk ceased to belong only to books, museums, or photographs that the world has learned to recognize. It resonated with me in a way I will never forget. Perhaps because, just a few hours before, Sterkfontein Caves e Maropeng They had given us back an even older truth: before we spoke different languages, before we invented borders, before we learned to recognize a friend or fear an enemy, we already belonged to the same home.

Language can bring people closer or push them apart. It can open a door, reveal a sense of belonging, give us the security of recognizing someone among strangers. It can also erect a border. But, on that night, the five languages separated no one. On the contrary: they met in the same hymn, like paths that finally realize they have always led to the same place.

Perhaps that is what freedom is: not the absence of borders, nor the illusion that differences disappear, but the possibility of no one having to ask permission to exist within them. The possibility of each voice preserving its language without ceasing to be heard by others. The possibility of walking together without anyone having to stop being who they are.

The following morning, we would leave for Kruger.

Johannesburg had taught us that we are made of memory, language, and relationships. That a city can be difficult without ceasing to be generous, and that a shared table can say as much as a museum. Kruger awaited us with another lesson: after discovering that we all come from the same house, it would be time to realize that it never belonged to us entirely.

Because, on this long journey, we all carry in our feet the memory of that same first step, the very one that unites us.

Recommendations:

• Steyn City Hotel by SaxonOur temporary home in Johannesburg: very safe, luxurious and fully equipped, but without losing the rare ability to make a family feel that they can simply settle down, breathe and inhabit the journey.
• GuildFor leisurely breakfasts, sushi, carefully prepared cuisine, and an excellent selection of South African wines.
• The Clubhouse at Steyn CityFor a more social meal, overlooking the golf course and the vibrant pulse of the community.
• Jarat ToursThe right choice for exploring Johannesburg and Cape Town safely, comfortably, luxuriously, and with the local expertise of those who know how to guide you without ever intruding on your trip.
• Apartheid MuseumA must-see visit, to be undertaken without haste and with time to listen to what History still demands.
• Mandela HouseIn Vilakazi Street, Soweto, lies the house where Mandela lived. Small in scale, enormous in memory: an essential visit to give human form to the story the museum tells.
• Soweto Tourism: a useful starting point for discovering Soweto with more context, respect, and time.
• Sterkfontein Caves e Maropeng — Cradle of HumankindTwo visits that should be made together: first, the descent to the rock; then, the return to the history of us all.