Nelson Mandela was 95 and had taken ill when Anthony Bourdain visited South Africa’s largest city 11 years ago for CNN’s Parts Unknown. Mandela’s spiritual presence endures to this day, despite the country’s still uncertain future.

Undoubtedly, some Parts Unknown docs resonate more with viewers on a personal level than others. South Africa, which bowed on CNN in October 2013 toward the end of Parts Unknown’s sophomore season, strikes a chord in me since present-day South Africa is a state I know well. Like Anthony Bourdain, I have spent more time in Johannesburg than the more familiar—and more touristy—Cape Town.

Bourdain’s decision to focus on Joburg, or Jozi as many of the locals call it, is reflective of his swim-against-the-tide style and global worldview, though. There is probably no other travel documentary filmmaker on the planet who would have gone to South Africa and chosen to focus on … Johannesburg.

It’s apparent why, though, in South Africa’s opening moments. Yes, Nelson Mandela was incarcerated in a 2x2 meter jail cell on Robben Island Prison off the coast of Cape Town for 18 years (“Prison,” Mandela would later write, “far from breaking our spirits, made us more determined to continue with this battle until victory was won”). Mandela’s soul and raison d’être were rooted in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, though, and it was Soweto — and Johannesburg as a whole — that became symbolic of the anti-apartheid struggle as a whole. South Africa’s opening shot is of a bemused Bourdain scowling at a statue — still standing to this day — of Boer settlers with big guns fending off the hoards of “darkies” who don’t belong in the place where they were born and raised.

Bourdain: “They don’t look friendly. Who are those … anyway? Some ugly Dutch guys, it looks like, with guns. I’m guessing friendly to the current (apartheid) power. They look like they’re going to, or coming from, oppressing a black man. First order of business, man. When I take my country back, first order of business is to take that [deleted] down. Am I right or what? I’m kind of amazed (it’s still there). Tear that [deleted] down.”

Food has its moments in South Africa — a delectable brai, a barbeque, prepared, served and consumed outdoors in the fresh air, naturally, with the emphasis on meat and sausage, naturally — but Bourdain always intended this to be an exquisitely personal geo-global political and sociological show, which is why it was made for CNN and not the Food Network. Enough with the statue of ugly Dutch guys with guns, Bourdain quickly turns to the subject that really interests him: Mandela and how the people of South Africa have navigated the post-apartheid years, not always successfully but with an enduring hope and human resilience.

Bourdain again:

“In July 2013, when I went to South Africa, 95-year-old Nelson Mandela was critically ill. And the country he freed from white minority rule was already in mourning.

And already fearful of what the future might be without him. … So a good friend of mine, a really great travel writer, said something. The more I travel, the less I know. I feel that paerticualrly strongly here in South Africa, a place I came in a state of near total ignorance, loaded with preconceptions.”

Moments later, watching soccer over beers in a shebeen — “the perfect place to watch a game, talk about a game, drink yourself silly over the results of a game, or just have a very fine local-style meal … There are a lot of places like this; I mean, this used to be the garage or the carport, right?” — Bourdain is beginning to get it, though he knows it’s going to take a lot more than a flying visit and a TV program to get to the bottom of what really makes South Africa tick.

“In what was once a garage are now six tables. A lawn-turned-lounge out back. Closed on Sundays if Grandma’s visiting. These kinds of bars were born during apartheid times when black South Africans not allowed to own businesses in white areas adapted and improvised. They did their own thing. Created these little micro, under-the-official-radar restaurants known around here as eat houses.”

Generally speaking, Bourdain asks his hosts moments later, “Are these good times in South Africa? Bad times? Transitional times?”

1994 was the peak of good times in South Africa, he’s told.

“Then, now with other politics, you know,” Bourdain is told, “other parties fighting, it’s quite tense now.”

That was in 2013. Today, in 2024, that much hasn’t changed really.

Bourdain: “The ANC (African National Congress, Mandela’s founding party) is not universally loved anymore. In recent years, they’ve been criticized for inaction, corruption, and cronyism. And opposition parties are gaining strength.”

Toward the end of the program, after the brai, after the gunning down of an eland, the world’s largest antelope — a scene I could have done without, and Bourdain too, judging from his momentary qualms — Bourdain takes a moment to reflect, in only the way he knows how.

“What did I know about South Africa before I came here? Exactly nothing, as it turns out. But I think, based on what I've seen, that if the world can get it right here, a country with a past like South Africa's if they can figure out how to make it work here for everybody. absorb all the people flooding in from all over Africa, continue to make Mandela's dream a reality, maybe there's hope for the rest of us.”

There it is. In the end, that’s what Bourdain was all about. Hope. It’s why so many of us continue to follow TV travels to this day.