Natives, tourists, and makwerekwere: ethical concerns with ‘Proudly South African’ tourism

Abstract

South Africa wants to be the African destination for tourists from the continent and elsewhere in the world. Its ambitions rely on an amorphous ‘African’ brand that simultaneously positions itself as quintessentially African and ‘not African’. Examining this tension reveals at least three contradictions implicit in South Africa's current tourist strategies. The first is a schizophrenic response to Africans from elsewhere on the continent who are at once a critical component of South Africa's Africanness, mighty consumers, widely touted as criminals, seen as burdens on the state, and deported by the tens of thousands. The second is the tourist industry's empowering previously disadvantaged South Africans as its raison d'être, while relying heavily on colonial imagery that is inherently (if implicitly) racist. The third is the way it profits from the country's democratic transformation but to a large degree remains symbolically and financially inaccessible to most of its citizens. This article argues that as long as South African tourism is about an African brand while denying its African spaces and people, it will struggle to become a sustainable and ethical industry.

Notes

¹Somali asylum seeker, interviewed by Tara Polzer at Komatipoort police station (3 February 2005) on behalf of the Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand.

²Despite international campaigns to sell South Africa as a ‘world in one country’, many foreign tourists' understanding of the country as a destination rests on their perception of it as a place of wildlife and a space where they can find the ‘real’ Africa, a largely imagined place coming out of colonial fantasies about Africa. In this respect South Africa as a tourist destination has yet to really distinguish itself from other African tourist sites (Hayward, 1994; Rassool & Witz, 1996; Ebron, 1999; Hall & Bombardella, 2005).