Actress Abroad Reckons With Three Years Away; South African Expats Share Her Longing

Bonnie Mbuli had not returned to South Africa for three years when the weight of that absence finally became undeniable. The actress and media personality, who relocated to the United States around 2014 with her then husband in pursuit of international opportunities, recently shared reflections on what distance has taught her about home, and the response among fellow expatriates has been immediate.

Growing up in Soweto, Mbuli built a career that moved from local television into international productions. Her professional path took her across borders repeatedly, and she has spent considerable time moving between South Africa and life overseas. Her recent observations, available at https://capetimes.co.za/travel/south-africa/2026-06-29-bonnie-mbuli-reflects-on-the-unmatched-love-of-south-africans-while-living-abroad/, have struck a chord with those who understand the particular ache of expatriate life.

What she describes is not grandiose. It is the texture of ordinary South African life: quick conversations with strangers, humour exchanged between people who have never met, an implicit sense of belonging even among unfamiliar faces. These small moments accumulate into something that only becomes visible once you are no longer immersed in them. “No one is going to love you like South Africans. If you have not been loved by South Africans yet, do something,” she says, capturing a sentiment that many come to understand only through absence.

The three years away were, by her account, genuinely hard. When she finally visited and then returned to the United States, the homesickness intensified rather than eased. The visit sharpened the longing rather than satisfying it. “South Africa is possibly the best place in the world to live,” she reflects, acknowledging that the country is far from perfect and neither are its people. Yet something about the way South Africans love, survive and show up for one another creates a bond that persists across distance.

Mbuli places this connection within a larger story about national resilience. She observes that South Africans have endured profound challenges as a people, yet return from each difficulty changed. “We’ve died so many deaths as a nation and I really believe that every time we come back, we come back more beautiful and strong than before,” she says. That resilience, she argues, is not merely a national characteristic but something vital to humanity itself.

By contrast, the pattern she identifies among South Africans abroad is familiar: people leave in pursuit of what they imagine as greener pastures, new cities, new opportunities, new versions of themselves. They adjust. They adapt. They convince themselves that distance represents growth. But somewhere in the process of relocation and reinvention, a quiet awareness emerges of what has been left behind. It is rarely a dramatic realisation, more a slow accumulation of small moments that highlight the absence of something taken for granted when it was present.

What Mbuli ultimately articulates is the paradox of leaving home in order to understand it. “If you don’t even know what it means to have a place like South Africa, then you need to do what I did, leave and then come back,” she suggests. The distance itself becomes the teacher.

The open question, for the many South Africans still abroad weighing that same calculation, is whether the return she describes as clarifying is one they are ready to make.