Elsewhere is always a difficult country. I left South Africa in August 1976 for the United States on a Fulbright scholarship to study for a Masters in Business Administration at Ball State University in the Midwest. I can remember flying out of Jan Smuts Airport on that cold winter's evening wondering when I would return. I was not going into exile, I was not emigrating, although my wife, Nana, and our children would join me. We would set up a house and call it home. For years we would do the things that the people of our new country did. We would raise our children, and acquire a circle of friends. I would go off each day to further my career. We would eat out, go to the theatre, to movies, we would buy the trappings of a north American lifestyle. But there was always a hole in my heart. Always the feeling that I was only partly living. Until in 1982 I returned with my family to the land of my birth.

But it was not an easy re-entry, it was not without trepidation. Our furniture and our car were in a container heading for South Africa which implied an intention, yet we decided to return via Europe and a two-week holiday, almost as if we were reluctant to face the future. So we travelled from New York to Rome for two days, and then spent four days in Paris.

Our final stopover was London, where we spent a weekend with our friends of long standing, Johnny and Edith Moema. Often our conversations were of what was happening back home.

And then the day dawned – we flew out of Heathrow for Johannesburg. Our landing could not have been easier. We found that Citibank had arranged for us to be housed in a premier hotel in Johannesburg on the lower end of Hillbrow, The Johannesburger, one of the international hotels that had the legal status to accommodate Africans, Coloureds and Asians – ‘non-whites’. We occupied one of the penthouses. It had two bedrooms, and a large lounge overlooking the skyline of Johannesburg. Hillbrow was not what it is today. Then it was not just a good place, it was prestigious, the preserve (in terms of the Group Areas Act) of white citizens.