Since 1997, Anglophone South African poet Ingrid de Kok has written about Italy as well as about her country’s apartheid past and post-apartheid realities. This essay focuses on one dimension of Italy’s presence in de Kok’s poetry: the theme of inhospitality toward Black Africans who either attempt to enter Italian territory without authorization or are already living there. This theme intersects with de Kok’s poems on xenophobia toward citizens from other African states in post-apartheid South Africa. Whether it focuses on Italy or South Africa, de Kok’s poetry hospitably depicts Africans and deplores the xeno-racism that imposes borders between im/migrants and natives. This essay argues, however, that while de Kok’s poems may declaratively welcome African immigrants into their purview, their declared sentiments are in tension with the poet’s implication in South Africa’s settler-colonial legacies as well as in dominant formations of whiteness in contemporary Italy. Discussion of these matters is anchored in close readings of three poems that explicitly engage the twin themes of hostility and hospitality. The essay concludes by noting that despite the overdetermined ambivalence that qualifies their declarative hospitality, de Kok’s poems can nevertheless be honored for welcoming “the words and worlds of Others.”