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.

In a country where we fawn over tourists and shun refugees, an examination of our attitudes to home, borders, journeys and displacement is never, for want of a better expression, going to be black and white. (Paul Edmonds, 2000)

1. Introduction: Travelling In (South) Africa

Phyllis, a young American student who travelled throughout southern Africa at the conclusion of her year of study abroad at the University of Cape Town, likes to preface her travel stories with an anecdote about the ‘special visa’ she had to pay when crossing the border into Zimbabwe from South Africa. This was 2000, when Zimbabwe re-entered the global media as a country in chaos and its once profitable tourism industry had began to collapse. Phyllis's narrative highlights the thrill of travelling in Africa – not only its natural beauty, but the excitement of paying ‘special visas’ and the moments of genuine tension when being hit on for a bribe. This fear, the chaos, and the thrill of transgression are essential tales for tourists who want to be seen as travellers and not participants in the mass tourism industry. A momentary threat soon becomes an amusing anecdote to tell friends and family back home, helping to cement the authenticity of the traveller's African experience.

For those looking for work or seeking protection from violence, instability (economic, institutional, political, social, etc.) or persecution, borders represent something other than a source of adventure and transcendence. In an unpublished report prepared for the South African Human Rights Commission, a Somali asylum seeker in South Africa describes what happened after walking for several weeks from Somalia:

I came to a small town near Ressano Garcia [Mozambique] and there was a soldier with an AK-47 asking for a passport … There were many people getting passed through the border … they were taking R100 from Mozambicans and passing through. So I watched where the people were entering all day, so when the sun set, I went and decided I will die or I will live. I ran from bullets and war so maybe I will die here and it will not be worse …1

For such a person, instead of adventure, crossing the border represents an existential passage where success is anything but assured. These are experiences that will inevitably enter into the memories of flight and the pre-memories of generations born in South Africa (or elsewhere) – but most would be more than willing to forgo such adventures.

Border crossings are an inevitable part of travellers' experiences, whether for pleasure, work or refuge. Even domestic tourists moving from a city such as Johannesburg to one of South Africa's deservedly famous game lodges encounter a landscape that can make them feel as though they had traversed not only great space but time as well; across a boundary dividing their home world from a foreign one (Ndebele, 1998).

In this paper we explore the experiences of these three categories of travellers in South Africa. We are especially interested in the contradictions that become apparent at the point where it matters whether travellers are perceived as tourists, natives, or illegal aliens. There is an especially pronounced disjuncture between what it means to be a white tourist in South Africa and what it means to be a black traveller in South Africa, whether citizen or foreigner. This, we argue, undermines the ethical base on which the South Africa tourism industry is currently being built. Our concerns about the clash between discourses on migrants and those on tourists in South Africa arise out of our two very different research experiences: as an ethnographer of tourists to Africa (Mathers, 2003, 2004; Mathers & Hubbard, 2006) and as a researcher trying to understand the situation of people who enter South Africa from elsewhere in Africa (Landau, 2005). The dialogue between our two perspectives reveals a schizophrenia in the experiences of migrants and South Africans' reactions to them. While both tourists and ‘illegal’ or undocumented aliens are central to South Africa's current and future economic prospects, the citizenry and leadership remain divided on to how to approach these ‘outsiders’.

2. BORDERS' POWER AND THE POWER TO CROSS

[T]here is much to be learned about neo-colonial projects by researching mobile groups not traditionally viewed as migrants but who nonetheless move across borders and undergo transformations abroad. (Mahler, 2000: 206–7)

Our work builds on the traveller's position as a common metaphor for many aspects of the social world and the understanding that identities are often forged in the interstices or contact zones along or across borders (Malkki, 1995; Lavie & Swedenburg, 1996; Peace, 1996; Clifford, 1997). Tourism, however, has generally been a stepchild to the theories that have circulated around the idea of borderlands as spaces where ideas of culture and geography are sufficiently disturbed that hybridity is able to develop and identities can be constructed or resisted (Anzaldúa, 1987; Rosaldo, 1993). Mobility for leisure or learning, however, need not be less interesting than mobility due to economics, politics, or violence. Focusing on these forms of benign or malicious transgressions – depending on one's perspective – reveals both immediate fears and interests and fundamental principles of community and relations to the ‘other’ (Arendt, 1958).

Border studies have been important for highlighting how the ‘movement of ideas, people and goods allows for a de-linking (i.e. deterritorialisation) of identity and geography’ (Cunningham & Heyman, 2004: 290). But this scholarship has tended to de-emphasise borderlands as specific sites or places in the interest of understanding them as zones in which power is at once made visible and subverted (Cunningham & Heyman, 2004). The emphasis on metaphors means the lives of people living at and across borders have often been neglected (Vila, 2003). It has obscured the continued influence of the state in the formation of even postmodern hybrid identities as well as the ways that borders continue to enforce fragmentation and difference, especially as they are, paradoxically, being increasingly controlled in the name of making the world safe for globalisation. Borders in fact quite literally and rather effectively encircle centres of wealth (Cunningham, 2004). Cunningham and Heyman (2004) propose that movement needs to be understood in terms of both mobility and enclosure, contrasting usefully for our purpose the ease with which prosperous tourists flow across borders with the barriers poor shoppers encounter. Movement, they argue, cannot just be understood in relation to a home or specific location, because ideas of the ‘proper’ place for things and people are ‘defined, internalized and enforced’ by the nation state and its political and economic agendas, thus the value of the counterpoints of enclosures and mobility (Cunningham & Heyman, 2004: 293). This is not to suggest that globalisation means either simply increased mobility or enclosure but that it is necessary to understand which people get particular kinds of handling – who experiences greater mobility or tighter enclosure, and why. It is this tension that is highlighted if we pay attention to white and black travellers' contrasting experiences of movement in southern Africa. As Cunningham (2004: 332) observes,

since September 11, nations and their borders – having been ‘unbound’ so to speak – are experiencing a kind of ‘rebound’, both in terms of their symbolic salience and in terms of how nation-states are asserting control over national and international landscapes.

Attitudes to mobile populations in South Africa touch on both the diaspora during apartheid and the country's gradual reintegration into the world economy and culture. Our focus on how the country responds to the outsider within therefore speaks about the nature of the nation and the emerging boundaries around it. Indeed, given that many refugees see themselves only as temporary migrants – not immigrants – suggests considerable parallels with tourists in the way they may relate to more stable populations and institutions (Landau, 2006). Of course, the two enter foreign territory under markedly different contexts, so the way ideas circulate about ‘the tourist’ as distinct from other border crossers can be equally fruitful for exploring citizenship, identity and belonging in a world of supposedly porous boundaries (Hubbard & Mathers, 2004). In particular, we highlight in this paper the way tourists and migrants are seen differently in South Africa. This difference clearly indicates the extent to which the border is less than porous and how much its permeability is linked to national anxieties about who belongs and why. It also indicates the internal borders that continue to exist between the transplanted white and the country's highly mobile black residents. The paper does not deny the value of South African tourism to many within the country or dismiss the possibilities the industry holds. Rather, it reveals tensions within South African tourism; contradictions that must be considered alongside its promises.

3. Travellers: Good And Bad, Black And White

Tourism, like many emerging economies on the periphery, has been named by the South African government as a vital and important growth industry (see for example Mbeki, 2002). The Tourism Act's mandate to the government institution responsible for executing policy, South African Tourism, is to contribute to sustainable GDP growth and job creation and make it possible to achieve the government's goals for redistribution and transformation (SAT, no date; DEAT, no date). In fact tourism is generally seen as a major force for transformation, as this press release for the 2004 Tourism Indaba attests:

The real value of tourism goes well beyond concepts like revenue, turnover, and occupancy rates – the greatest value of tourism lies in its power to bring people together and to uplift communities. This unifying force is most visible in the way that tourism draws people across great geographical distances, but tourism crosses more than just physical boundaries, it draws people together within countries like South Africa, across the borders of the mind. (Aucamp, 2004)

A similar optimism is reflected in a recent budget speech by the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, who states that there is ‘little doubt as to why tourism has been identified as one of the immediate priority sectors within the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA), as it remains one of the most dynamic sectors in our economy’ (Pressly, 2006). The expectations for tourism are high and overwhelmingly positive. Van Schalkwyk again: ‘As part of the growth platform targeted by AsgiSA, tourism has been set some very steep goals for the next five years: 500 000 new jobs, 8.5 million international arrivals annually and a contribution to GDP of at least R100 billion a year’ (Pressly, 2006). This optimism is repeated on a local scale, as when a new hotel was opened in Soweto:

‘For the community, this project is a recognition and gives a sense of hope to the people, new opportunities,’ said Ipelegeng chairperson Peter Mbuli, stating that there was a 40 per cent unemployment rate in the area. ‘It will create 48 permanent jobs and will give work to hundreds of people in Kliptown through a laundry service,’ added Zatic's Sangweni-Siddo. (Panoussian, 2006)

The hand held out to potential tourists is rapidly lifted into a ‘halt’ sign for poor Africans seeking work or protection in South Africa. As in Cote d'Ivoire and elsewhere in the world, concerted and implicit efforts to forge unity from a diverse and fragmented citizenry have seized upon autochthony as a point of commonality and distinction. One may speak of South Africa's 11 official languages, but proof of origins within the national territory (even if born in exile) establishes (in principle) rights to space and to services the state provides. The presence of growing numbers of non-South African migrants (makwerekwere, a term used to mock foreigners' unintelligible tongues, has become shorthand for African aliens) provides a convenient ‘other’: not only a scapegoat for crime, disease and unemployment, but a visible, physical reminder of difference that lends weight to that which South Africans potentially share. Such formulations are not only a reaction to the super-fluidity and dissolving boundaries stimulated by globalisation, but a reaction against the country's own fragmentary past (Heilman, 1998; Conversi, 1999; Mbembe, 2004). Given that the inner city's black population are almost all new arrivals – apartheid pass laws prohibited their residence in these areas – nativist discourse provides the language for forging a prismatic national identity.

Whereas the Tourism Minister sees migrants as the country's future and potential salvation, the famously xenophobic (former) Minister of Home Affairs (1994–2004), Mangosuthu Buthelezi, saw the movement of Africans into South Africa as an acute threat to the country's reconstruction and development. Crush and Williams (2003:1) quote a 2002 statement from Buthelezi in which he justifies moving beyond the law in addressing the threat posed by non-nationals:

Approximately 90 per cent of foreign persons who are in RSA with fraudulent documents, i.e., either citizenship or migration documents, are involved in other crimes as well … it is quicker to charge these criminals for their false documentation and then to deport them than to pursue the long route in respect of the other crimes that are committed.

Somewhat more subtly, Johannesburg's Executive Mayor reflected widespread sentiment in his ‘State of the City 2004’ address when he argued that ‘While migrancy contributes to the rich tapestry of the cosmopolitan city, it also places a severe strain on employment levels, housing, and public services’. Regardless of the actual costs – impossible to calculate given the lack of sound data and likely to be limited by widespread refusal to grant services – local authorities and citizens have reacted to foreign migrants either by implicitly denying their presence, excluding them from developmental plans, or allowing discrimination throughout the government bureaucracy and policy.

But allochthony is not exclusive to the migrants who increasingly form part of the South African landscape. The new nation is as much troubled by domestic travellers, many of whom bear a burden of reclaiming membership of the South African nation in the face of an apartheid-like landscape. This is no clearer than at the mainstay of South African tourism, the Game Park.2 Most packages to Game Parks include a visit to a cultural village, encouraging tourists to experience at one and the same time a trip into a primeval ‘natural’ past and traditional ‘African’ culture. Game lodges invariably reference colonial trappings in their design and décor, creating an experience for most tourists that evokes the great white hunter days of Hemingway, Roosevelt and the film ‘White Mischief’. Although there is far more to South African tourism than the game lodge, few first-time Western tourists forgo the opportunity to participate in these fantasies of imperial pasts made possible by the extraordinary level of service provided by, inevitably, black staff, and to enjoy the protected, pristine environment made possible by a colonial history of land grabbing. (One group of tourists to South Africa who consciously avoid game parks are those who participate in the ‘reality tours’ run by the leftist US NGO, Global Exchange. These tours do not incorporate a visit to a game park or any kind of reserve, but many participants stay on in South Africa after their tour so they can do a ‘safari’ – Ronge, 1998; Mathers, 2003.) Side by side with traditional Zulu dancers or Ndebele artists, it is hard to imagine what black South Africans experience in such tourist zones and we are dependent on a singular voice to explore one possible experience. Ndebele (1998: Ch. 10) describes the experience of the black tourist at a game lodge thus:

Being there, they experience the most damning ambiguities. They see the faceless black workers and instinctively see a reflection of themselves. They may be wealthy or politically powerful, but at that moment they are made aware of their special kind of powerlessness: they lack the backing of cultural power. They experience cultural domination in a most intimate way. Especially when they go game viewing. It is difficult not to feel that, in the total scheme of things, perhaps they should be out there with the animals, being viewed.

Ndebele wrote this damning piece on being black and a tourist in the midst of the very re-creation of his previous disenfranchisement in part to reflect his sense that the ANC government is contributing to the reiteration of apartheid geography in South Africa. He describes black South Africans as being ‘like people who awake in an enormous vacation house which is now supposed to be theirs but which they do not quite recognize’ (Ndebele, 1998: Ch. 10). There are more ‘progressive’ game lodges and alternative forms of tourism, but even a cursory look at South African tourist websites suggests this is not the vision of Africa the world comes to see, even in South Africa. Here clearly is the tension that so much of the discourse on tourism in South Africa fails to acknowledge, that it is an industry that cannot be successful in attracting overseas tourists to their fantasy of colonial luxury and environmental emptiness while also purporting to attract the people whose lives had to be erased in order to create the fantasy.

4. Tourists and migrants: What are they good for?

Assumptions about the positive impacts of tourism on South Africa's economy and people are so hegemonic that it is hard to identify exactly what those impacts are. A rare study conducted by a Master's student in the department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Pretoria is exceptional in its close ethnographic analysis of the impact of nature reserves and the related tourism industry on development in Maputaland. It shows all too clearly that such projects, though seemingly ‘successful’ according to the development agency's evaluations, did more to harm than to benefit the economic and social relations of the region (van Wyk, 2003). Here again the tourism industry and its supposed potential for poverty alleviation is exposed as, if anything, an agent for supporting the continuation of apartheid geography. Despite winning a land claim, the exigencies of environmental conservation were used as the basis for not returning land to its rightful owners. Tourism is, however, meant to ensure that ‘ownership’ of tourism dollars brings benefits to the local people. However, it seems that the magic combination of global environmental principles and a faith in tourism developments make it possible for the government to have its cake and eat it, saving the land from the encroachments of economic projects while making it possible for local ‘land owners’ to make money from the tourists who will come to the pristine parks (Turner, 2006).

However, in the case of Sodwana Bay, among other challengers to a profitable economic strategy for locals, the development agency's branding of authentic Zulu culture makes it impossible for craftspeople to make even a minimum wage for the labour they put into crafts (van Wyk, 2003). Tourists are oblivious to the importance of the craft markets in the local economy and assume that the making of crafts is a pleasant hobby amidst a ‘traditional life’ that would anyway be destroyed by the influx of ‘too much money’ (van Wyk, 2003). The result is a community that benefits economically not at all from the tourists who come to enjoy the conservation lands that it theoretically ‘owns’ and whose social relations have been substantively undermined, especially between men and women as a result of the development agency's assumptions about the appropriate roles for them in tourism projects (van Wyk, 2003). There may be examples of successful poverty alleviation projects based on tourist developments in South Africa but evaluations in such cases tend to rest on an assumption of their success and there is a distinct lack of long-term, in-depth exploration of possible benefits (Spiegel, 2004; Grobler, 2006; Mathers & Kruger, in press).

It is not our aim here to retrace the many arguments within tourism studies about just exactly what the impact is, positive or otherwise, of tourism on developing economies (Smith, 1977; Harrison, 1992; Brohman, 1996; Pattulo, 1996; Mowforth & Munt, 1998; Brennan & Allen, 2004; Cornelissen, 2005). What interests us is how official and public discourses about tourists versus migrants both seem, in at least some ways, to contradict the actual effect these groups have on the South African economy. Migrant labour has been a vital part of the South African economy for more than a century and continues to contribute to the economy in both the formal and informal sectors. Given the undocumented nature of migrants in South Africa, it is almost impossible to provide any accurate estimate of their monetary contributions to the South African economy. Whole industries, however, from commercial agriculture in the country's north-east to petty trading in the city centres depend on the presence and mobility of Africans from outside South Africa. Even among the relatively poor, foreign migrants appear to be generating jobs for South Africans faster than they are taking them (Hunter & Skinner, 2003; Landau & Jacobsen, 2004).

It seems, however, that the government's optimism about tourism's economic potential is based only on those people crossing the borders into South Africa who testify to hotel and airfare expenditure. As van Schalkwyk in the same speech quoted above says: ‘Lest we forget, in the two decades before 1990, we received less than one million annual foreign arrivals. Last year we shattered every target we set for ourselves, welcoming no less than 7.3 million international visitors’ (Pressly, 2006). The definition of an international visitor according to Statistics South Africa, however, is any documented arrival in South Africa from another country, the vast majority of whom, at least 70 per cent, arrive overland from neighbouring African countries (Lehohla, 2006).

4.1 Who matters? Shoppers and crafters

Most Africans are crossing the border to stay with family and friends and to shop (Rogerson, 2002). This important category of tourist, not found on the Tourism South Africa website, is in a very immediate sense at the mercy of the confusion that comes from being a black visitor in South Africa. A study of this category of cross-border travel and its impact on Johannesburg was recently released by ConMark Trust and describes the experiences of these border crossers:

Caroline from Harare comes to Joburg twice a month to shop. She does not like the place, but needs to come here to support her family. ‘I buy things here, so I can sell them in Zimbabwe,’ says Caroline, who buys mostly industrial goods, such as rubber, for making couches. Her reasons for coming to Johannesburg are a wider variety and lower prices. (Pelgrim, 2006)

These travellers, however, face many difficulties:

‘I don't feel safe here,’ says Caroline. As a result, she stays in Joburg for as short a time as possible. ‘I do not travel on the minibus taxis. I think they are dangerous,’ she says. Instead, she has struck up a deal with the driver of a meter taxi. ‘When I arrive in Johannesburg, the taxi driver picks me up. He drives me to all the places I need to go to buy my things. This takes the whole day.’ By the time Caroline has finished her round of the city, the total cost for transport is R600.

‘I share a two-bedroom flat with 40 people,’ says Betty from Zimbabwe, pulling up her nose. She pays R80 for a mattress on the floor in the Park Station area. ‘The place is unhygienic. It is a health hazard. People actually get sick from just staying there.’ But Betty, who has been coming to shop in Joburg for four years on a regular basis, has no alternative. ‘I would like to stay in a nice clean place with maybe one or two other people, but I cannot afford it.’ (Pelgrim, 2006)

Cross-border shoppers contribute substantially to the economy, as much as R9 billion just to the city of Johannesburg, according to ConMark (Pelgrim, 2006). Yet they receive little support either structurally through government programmes and policies or personally from the South Africans whose attitude in other contexts is extolled as friendly and welcoming to visitors.

Being black and a traveller in South Africa brings many trials. Cross-border shoppers have to face not only the common trials of travelling, such as seeking accommodation and safe transport, but also xenophobia and police harassment (Palmary, 2002; Rogerson, 2002; Landau, 2005). Such harassment is a direct result of the attitude towards migrants that suffuses government and public discourse and is part of the daily lives of many black African visitors in South Africa:

A friend from abroad was recently stopped by the police on what was supposed to be a routine check on the roadworthiness of vehicles and whether drivers have legitimate licences, carry contraband and so on. She accepted this as a necessary, if annoying, practice to improve the culture of driving, road safety and responsible driving in South Africa. Having been satisfied with her licence, the officer suddenly shifted his interest to her complexion. It was too dark, he seemed to think, to be that of a ‘black’ South African. This was a black officer nogal [‘no less’, Afrikaans]. She was thoroughly grilled about her immigrant status. The attitude displayed by the officer was utterly demeaning, contemptuous and unprofessional. (Tabane & Nkomo, 2005)

Being black and foreign in South Africa, whether legal or illegal, worker or leisure tourist marks one out for harassment, inconvenience and even violence, both psychological and physical. This may not prevent others from coming to South Africa, but there are few published accounts of these foreigners feeling welcomed by their South African ‘hosts’. Yet, ironically, a review of the tourism policies and developments meant to contribute to achieving goals of job creation, redistribution and development in the city of Johannesburg finds that one of the city's strengths in building tourism as a growth industry is the diverse migrant population of the city (Rogerson, 2002). The review suggests that the cuisines and music from all over Africa introduced into the city by migrants could be the basis of a generally neglected cultural tourism experience in Johannesburg (Rogerson, 2002).

In fact the impact of migrants on tourism is immediately apparent at the markets where overseas tourists buy their souvenirs (Hunter & Skinner, 2003). An important part of the ethnography of tourists is their consumption of local artefacts and products and the role of souvenirs in establishing the authenticity of a traveller's experiences abroad. The purpose of a ‘souvenir’, the term notwithstanding, is less about creating memories than about showing friends and family back home evidence of one's travels and adventures (Harrison, 2003). American tourists, for example, seek out artefacts that are clearly recognisable as ‘African’ (Mathers, 2004). South Africa does not always fit the mould of what foreigners expect from Africa, a continent that retains an image of primitiveness, wildness and raw emotional expression, and to some extent builds its tourist industry on this image (Hickey & Wylie, 1993; Keim, 1999). What this translates into in terms of what tourists want to take home with them is a search for typical markers of this primitiveness and a desire to buy drums, masks and, ridiculously, Masai spears. Even when it comes to less dramatic purchases, ebony spoons from Malawi and Shona soapstone sculptures from Zimbabwe take precedence over the fashionable and ubiquitous carved giraffes or Ndebele dolls as preferred souvenirs. One only has to stroll the markets that tourist buses frequent to notice that the vast majority of artefacts on sale are made and sold by Africans from anywhere but South Africa. Most tourists remain uncomfortable with buying the more syncretic arts and crafts made by South Africans using telephone wire or tin cans (van Wyk, 2003). Though aesthetically appealing, such items do not send the right message to folks back home about the traveller's genuine African experience. South African tourism, therefore, benefits from the willingness of migrants to risk crossing the border, often with artefacts to sell. These migrants have also contributed to creating a shopping experience that tourists to ‘Africa’ crave: the bargaining (Mathers, 2004). At the various craft markets the South African vendors can be clearly distinguished by their ‘fixed’ prices and disdain for bargaining, whereas the tourists flock to those who can offer them what they see as this ‘authentic’ African experience – the feeling that one has ‘put one over’ the sales person and somehow scored an incredible bargain. Such stories are as essential to the traveller's tales as are border crossings, at least to affirm an ‘African’ adventure.

5. TWB: TRAVELLING WHILE BLACK

But all migrants, regardless of their roles and contributions and in direct contrast to the supposed ‘African Renaissance’ South Africa is meant to be building, suffer from constant harassment simply for being foreign, as Alois Rwiyegura (2005) discovered:

Later that evening I was chatting to a Cameroonian friend, and I told him how some names could sound funny: ‘Imagine somebody called Makwerekwere. One guy in Time Square mistook me for his friend called Makwerekwere.’ Instead of the laughter I was expecting from him I got a concerned look and this answer: ‘Actually, Makwerekwere is you.’ ‘Me?’ I asked. ‘You, me, all foreigners … no, well, all black foreigners,’ he replied, surprised at my naivety. ‘The next time you hear this word, you must run away from the place,’ my friend warned. The next time somebody called me by my new name, I felt like running, but I didn't stand a chance because the bulky guy facing me was pointing a gun at me, urging me to get closer to him: ‘Come on, makwerekwere, come over here.’ He then asked me if I had a cellphone and if it could be his. The cellphone and money from my shirt changed hands and the guy, satisfied with my docility, told me: ‘Hamba.’ I did, toward the next police station in Hillbrow, to report the theft. The first policeman I talked to asked me if I was South African. I said: ‘No, I am makwerekwere.’ He burst into a loud laughter and went to call some colleagues, whom he discreetly asked to put the same question to me. They got the same answer and laughed uncontrollably. Thanks to the good mood, I got my affidavit quickly. When I was out I heard a mirthful ‘goodbye Makwerekwere’ echoing from inside. So did a policeman who was standing outside the building and who was not part of the hilarious team inside. He came up to me and asked if he could have a look at my documents. They were up to date, he handed them back and said: ‘Do you have a cold drink for me?’ The price of my ‘makwerekwereness’ was not so high.

The challenges of being foreign and black in South Africa are experienced at all levels of interaction with South African institutions and people.

The differences between being a ‘tourist’ in South Africa and a black foreigner are especially highlighted by contradictions manifesting themselves in the preparations for the 2010 World Cup. This much anticipated expected boost to South Africa's tourism economy is seen as both an essential test and a demonstration of South Africa's ability to play on the world stage in more ways than one. In an address to the Tourism Indaba in 2006 in Durban, Deputy President Pumzile Mlambo-Nguka (2006) stated that:

The 2010 World Cup is not a South African event; we have agreed with FIFA that it will be an African event. All of Africa is invited to showcase itself and to be part of the action (just as long as they concede some goals to us). Furthermore, we need an efficient and reliable visa regime. In our case, we are working towards a Southern African Development Community (SADC) uni-visa that will facilitate travel in all of the SADC countries. In 2004, already more than 60 per cent of our arrivals were from Africa, followed by Europe. All of which are great footballing nations.

Yet only a little earlier in the same year Butana Khompela, chairman of the National Assembly's sports committee, expressed concern about asylum seekers using the World Cup to take refuge in South Africa: ‘We must discuss the situation because the Nigerian people are going to stay here, the DRC, Zimbabweans, people from Sudan – all African people’, he said, noting that not only players but spectators might be involved (Webb, 2006).

The journalist reporting on these concerns underscores how ridiculous they are, given that most soccer players in African teams spend much of the year playing in leagues all over the world, including Europe, so are unlikely to find South Africa particularly attractive. Yet such fears are not generally considered ridiculous even alongside the insistence by the government that they are building a regional community.

6. HOW ‘AFRICAN’ IS THE RENAISSANCE?

Why is it that despite the national policy, and despite the rhetoric about the value and importance of continental initiatives and relationships, the anxieties about aliens and especially African aliens keep surfacing? The contradiction between the way tourists are courted and what black people who travel to and around South Africa experience exemplifies the tensions faced by the nation-state that wishes to participate in a global neoliberal economic order. Such governments need to make their borders as open as possible to people, currencies and goods while at the same time securing and regulating these flows so that they maintain value; they need to allow the ‘right’ kind of movement and crossings and prevent the ‘bad’ kind (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 636). This is an ethical contradiction that exposes the inherent incongruity of a global system that continues to be premised on the existence of national forms of authority and territorial control. In early 2000 fires devastated sections of the Cape Peninsula, giving rise to unprecedented and vociferous accusations against the alien vegetation that was blamed for the extent and uncontrollability of the blaze (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001). These accusations carried not so subtle undertones of a much more deep-seated anxiety about all kinds of aliens, especially ‘illegal immigrants’, a category in which almost all black travellers are included. This has led to a surprisingly efficient effort to eradicate pine forests and other alien vegetation throughout the Peninsula. The discourse is of a communal rebirth as everybody works together to ensure the eradication of the bad plants and the revival of the good ones, supposedly ensuring an African Renaissance (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001). This renewal of community through the eradication of aliens, however, ignores the dependence of many people on the alien plants for firewood, for income from selling the wood, and for keeping the sands of the Cape Flats at least nominally under control amidst the shack lands of Cape Town's townships.

If, as Jean and John Comaroff argue, the response of government and the public, especially white middle-class South Africans, to the fires revealed a ‘submerged landscape of terror and moral alarm’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 630), it is not incidental that part of their hysteria was driven by Table Mountain's growing status as an icon of Cape and South African tourism. Just as South African and African culture is more often than not frozen into a peculiar Disney-like version of its past and present, it has become imperative to freeze the Table Mountain flora into what appears to be an unchanging model of itself, despite its dynamic history. As with Sodwana Bay, the Cape's use of global discourses of environmental conservation in the face of local human disenfranchisement helps to build a case for the ‘naturalness’ and therefore legitimacy of the alienation. Tourism, like the overlapping environmental policy, possibly escapes a much needed critical eye on its local impacts because it is so positioned as a ‘global’ issue (Ferguson, 2006).

As with black travellers' inability to ever be quite ‘at home’ even in their own brand new vacation house, their value to South Africa and to the tourist industry in particular is subsumed by an overriding fear of the traveller who should not be in the house. It is where the divide between ‘good’ and bad' foreigner is at its most fluid and overlapping that the uneasy juxtaposition of a simultaneously open and closed border exposes and creates the most anxiety. Alongside all the possible identities produced by increasingly multicultural societies ranged around ideas of diversity, it seems that it remains essential for one to be autochthonous or alien, indigenous or other. Belonging and citizenship have become naturalised in such a way that it was possible to express fears about the economic devastation that ‘too many’ migrants might pose to South Africa through heated discussions about plant invaders. So why is this naturalisation of xenophobia possible? Jean and John Comaroff suggest that the campaigns by the government to deal with and, preferably, eradicate the ‘illegal migrant’ problem, even in the face of a determined rights-based neoliberal social agenda, create an illusion of effectiveness in a government with a severe branding problem (2001). It is, they suggest, part of the ‘mass-mediated ritual excess, directed to producing state power and national unity’ so essential to the second postcolonial age (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 648). Fighting aliens unites people but it is based on a new kind of racism, ‘a form of racism that, by concealing itself in the language of autochthony and alien-nature, has come to coexist seamlessly with a transnational culture of universal rights' (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 651).

It seems that the tensions resulting from the neocapitalist world's requirement for simultaneously open and closed borders does not simply divide the people trying to cross those borders into autochthon or into other, or, to use Zygmunt Bauman's (2000) social division, into tourist and vagabond. Not every tourist entering South Africa experiences the ease of movement from country to country that this ‘hero’ of postmodernity is meant to command. Black tourists' currency is not quite as acceptable as that of white tourists and the obstacles that they experience are not just the odd delay at an international airport. Borders, both those encircling the nation and those within South Africa, cannot be viewed by the black traveller in South Africa as merely aesthetic, and globalisation, even liberation and democratisation within South Africa, has not enabled them to move comfortably through territorial, cultural and technological spaces (Macklin, 2003). There is, then, clearly a discord between the language of friendliness and engagement that the government asks South Africans to offer foreign tourists and the general culture of xenophobia that pervades both institutionalised and personal interactions between South Africans and other Africans. The aliens seeking not sun, sex and surf but some of the promise of a democratic and affluent South Africa are seen as needing to be excised. If black travellers are doomed by the exigencies of postcolonial statehood, how can tourism be an ethical form of sustainable development?

Although Ndebele's discussion of the experience of black South Africans at game lodges is an important reminder of the impossibility of an ethical tourism in a country characterised by xenophobia and racism, he is hopeful about the possibility for change:

But there is a possible escape route. It is to engage the white leisure colonialist and the owners of the game lodge in a cultural contest, in which the cultural history of the game lodge is deconstructed and a new structure and content of leisure are bought into being as expressions in a new society. The liberation of leisure is an essential aspect of the new experiences of freedom. (Ndebele, 1998: Ch. 10)

Ndebele's thoughtful essay underscores the extent to which any African renaissance needs to begin at home. Poised, as South Africa is, to dictate regional politics and economics, it is inappropriate that it is building its postcolonial statehood on a very limited understanding of who belongs, who is allowed to be comfortable in the holiday house. The conversation that needs to happen is not just with the owners of game lodges but with the tourism industry as a whole and with the arbiters of who gets to cross South Africa's borders and how.

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).