If Noni Jabavu’s writing is best described as autobiographical, it is likewise akin to travel memoir. But travel memoir in the context of a South Africa that, for Jabavu, was made relatively inaccessible in the face of apartheid legislation, and yet a South Africa she sought to visit, if only quite sporadically. This chapter explores such continuities of departure and arrival, of leaving South Africa (whether permanently or temporarily), and the consequences of such departures for those who left and returned. Accounting for the historical period extending from the time immediately following the establishment of apartheid through to the period immediately following apartheid’s collapse, I look to the work of the United States-South Africa Leader Exchange Program (USSALEP), which brought South Africans to the USA and Americans to South Africa. Given the primarily educational charge of the Exchange Program, the chapter moves to examine the assumptions, possibilities and impasses of ‘study abroad’ and overseas ‘job training’ as catalysts for black social mobility. ‘A private, multiracial association dedicated [since 1958] to fruitful communication, the fostering of human dignity, and the broadening of options within and between South Africa and the United States’, USSALEP would come to understand its charge as addressing the blight of racism in both societies. Humble, and not a little naive at the outset, the programme would give way in due course to standard non-governmental organisation (NGO) activities focused on ‘transformation’ and ‘development’. Supported by Congressional funding administered through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in later years USSALEP directed its work quite explicitly at moving the political needle in South Africa.