I never thought that I’d allow “politics” to govern my travel. But times have changed. I’m now wary of traveling to South Africa.

It was December, 1978. EWT was hardly two years old although I’d been successfully creating the business for more than five years and already had an impressive list of university alumni and zoo groups. My contact at Northwestern University, the late Vice-President Ray Willemain, was already a loyal client, some time mentor and quickly becoming a friend.

Ray called me early one dark wintry morning and asked me to create a South African tour for his alumni association. EWT had already taken them to East Africa. Ray had another meeting walking into his office. We’d talk, later.

I hung up the phone and looked pugnaciously at the morning Chicago Tribune opened on my desk to page 5: “Stanford University Shut Down By Apartheid Protests.”

It was in the very early days of American protests of apartheid that would escalate considerably into the 1980s. But Stanford was hip. A roster of young geniuses newly tenured had come largely from the anti-war movement a decade earlier. Stanford, like many Ivy League Schools, had an endowment invested heavily in apartheid South Africa. In December, 1977, all hell broke lose on the campus.

Ray was an old kitchen employee unionist. He read the SunTimes not the Tribune. Before he could call back I rang his secretary and told her to get him a copy of the Trib turned to page 5.

Ray didn’t call back that day, or the next, but a week later I learned the request didn’t come from Ray but from the President of the University. A potential big donor wanted to see Cape Town before he died and apparently the clock was ticking.

I swear that before the thousands of brochures were off the press Northwestern started to grumble. First it was some students and then the faculty. I didn’t call Ray. I knew he’d call me.

“So what do we do?” the man who rarely asked me a question about anything asked me.

Quickly we had a new brochure, a new press release. The trip was now Kenya and Zimbabwe. Only… it wasn’t really. At least not for the special dozen including Ray and me and the potential donor dying of heart disease. For the 20 others who signed up it was just Kenya & Zimbabwe. But for the stealth group we started a week earlier in The Cape.

A few years later the VP of the University of Iowa asked if we dared run a trip to China. “No problem,” I said knowing absolutely nothing about China except that Mao wasn’t nice, “I know exactly how to do it.”

This is not a mia culpa. I carry my scars from the anti-Vietnam War Movement very proudly. I was reborn a communist in the 1960s.

I believed back in the 1970s as I continued to believe until very, very recently, that travel is research and research should not be constrained by either convention or politics. Tourism to troubled places is eye-opening and the risk is usually bucking political admonition at home more than bullets or anything else abroad. I’m very proud of the places I’ve shown risk-takers and believe it’s correctly altered conservative beliefs for the better.

The reality of troubled places should not be something assumed from a TV box or online chat group. Personal experience validates true reality.

Also until recently tourism was not a significant enough fiscal component of a foreign land’s mien that more or less of it would alter the status quo.

That started changing about two decades ago: I’d begun a venture with the last white Senator in the then Zimbabwe-Rhodesia parliament. His political role ended in 1992 when the ten-year moratorium on democratic representation in the new Z-R constitution imposed by Britain and the U.S. expired. So like many wasted politicians in old Africa, he started a safari business.

He needed a lot of help. It was a short but productive association. But the more time I spent with him, the more I learned of his version of Zimbabwean history, the more I realized that our safaris were supporting an abhorrent political landscape.

The last trip EWT did to Zimbabwe was in 1999. Zimbabwe hasn’t changed since then. In fact, the repression of its peoples has only grown.

Even before that decision, risk-taking “enlightened” tourism wasn’t doing so well: My group barely made it out of the Rwandan genocide. My daughter and I and a few friends barely escaped being kidnapped by the Interamwe. “Rebels” were more educated, richer, bolder and much better armed. The days of dipping your toes into troubled waters then casually patting them dry were over.

Ten years ago I guided EWT’s last Ugandan safari. I was presented at the Ugandan/Rwandan border post with a hand-written “persona non grata” document for writing blogs supporting the political opposition. Uganda has just gotten worse and worse and today has the most unbelievable draconian laws against LGBTQ culture in the world.

So now, what’s troubling with South Africa? I haven’t decided this will be my third blocked African country because of abhorrent politics and human rights abuses, but I’m … wary if weary wondering.

South Africa is a founding member of BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. BRICS was inevitable when Trump started bad-mouthing Africa. He wasn’t the cause, just the enzyme that made it happen quickly.

The cause was western institutions, primarily the World Bank and IMF, with their bias against societies questioning the less productive ramifications of purer democracy. South Africa’s constitution is probably the most democratic in the world. But it’s a new country, beset by corruption while simultaneously experimenting with new world orders and unafraid of pointing out the hypocrisies of mature democracies like the U.S. It’s a huge economy by African standards, modern and innovative. It needs capital.

BRICS to the rescue, or so Putin said at the time. China has actually pulled back its African investment. Russia never had anything but cheap oil and gas to sell. BRICS is raw politics.

Brazil, India, China and South Africa continue to feign neutrality with regards to Ukraine. The hypocrisy of jeopardizing the Third World’s grain supply by supporting through default a patently immoral war is astounding. Moreover, South Africa’s hope that Biden’s maintenance of his Indian and Brazilian relationships creates a justification of South Africa’s behavior is really juvenile. Read some Kissinger.

So South Africa is shooting itself in the foot. And tourism to South Africa is more meaningful than ever as the country sinks more and more into recession.

Creating that stealth trip to South Africa in the 1970s I firmly believe accelerated the end of the apartheid. We met Helen Suzman and Christian White. It wasn’t just lions and wine.

But the world doesn’t have 20 years to come round with regards to Ukraine. Literally millions are starving in The Sudan in large part because of that war. The recent “South African Peace Trip” to Ukraine is a comic failure, underscored by Poland’s panic. Changing South Africa’s attitude through enlightened tourism will take longer than it takes a current malnourished child in Syria to starve to death.

So as my old, late friend asked, “What do we do?”