Rock art tourism in the uKhahlamba/Drakensberg World Heritage Site: obstacles to the development of sustainable tourism

Abstract

This paper focuses on rock art tourism, a highly vulnerable heritage of broad public interest, only sustainable within an effective management framework. The paper explores tourism management in South Africa's uKhahlamba-Drakensberg World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2000 for its natural landscapes and its exceptional rock art heritage. In practice, nature dominates the area's tourism and management dynamics. Current tourism patterns, markets and frequencies, together with rock art's low place within tourist agendas, are described. This situation is shown to be a legacy of European Alpine romanticism, and the political rejection of indigenous cultural heritage prior to 1994, still expressed through visitor patterns and marketing policies. Despite rock art needing tourism to valorise its conservation, and being recognised by commentators and the state as a viable route to tourism development, heritage conservation, socio-economic regeneration and cultural empowerment, the failure to reform entrenched and ineffective tourism/conservation governance and management systems is exposed. The problems affecting rock art tourism have allowed the retention of unwelcome values from South Africa's pre-democratic era, risk the loss of World Heritage site status, the destruction of globally outstanding art works and waste an important opportunity to expand and diversify sustainable tourism in South Africa.

uKhahlamba-德拉肯斯世界遗产地的岩画旅游：可持续性旅游发展的障碍

该文章着重于岩画旅游，一种有着广泛公众兴趣而高度脆弱的遗产，它只能在一个有效的管理模式中呈可持续性。该文章探讨了南非的uKhahlamba-德拉肯斯世界遗产地的旅游管理，该遗产在2000年以它的自然景观和它的独特的岩画遗产而被提名。实际来说，自然占据了该地区旅游和管理方面。现今的旅游形态，市场和周期，并且和岩画在旅游目标中的缓慢的位置改变，都在文中提到。该情况被认为是欧洲阿尔卑斯浪漫主义的遗产，并且是在1994年前对本土文化遗产的政治化摒弃，这通过参观者的形态和市场营销政策中还能体现出来。尽管岩画需要旅游来体现它的保护价值，并被评论者和政府认可为旅游发展，遗产保护，社会经济复苏和文化重视的一种可行方式，改革的失败和无效的旅游/保护治理和管理系统都有体现出来。这些影响岩画旅游的问题已经使得南非民主前时期的一些非友好价值观保留至今，使之有失去世界遗产地名号的威胁，并有可能毁坏全球性的出色的艺术作品，对南非来说浪费了一个重要的机会来扩大和多样化可持续性旅游。

Keywords:

• rock art
• cultural heritage
• community custodianship
• stakeholder analysis
• Drakensberg
• South Africa

关键词:

• 岩画
• 文化遗产
• 可持续性旅游
• 社区管理
• 利益相关者分析
• 德拉肯斯
• 南非

Acknowledgements

We thank the Research Office of the University of Witwatersrand, the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the CNRS, the GDRI “STAR”, EKZNW and Amafa for supporting this research project, either financially or by providing permits and research facilities. Also we thank the custodians, tourists and other stakeholders who took much time and effort informing us about the key issues affecting rock art tourism in the UDP. Finally, we express our gratitude to the three reviewers for their valuable advice and comments. All errors and omissions are entirely our own.

Notes

1. All the data concerning the custodian system were collected during a series of interviews with Celeste Rossouw, Amafa's Senior Heritage Officer, carried out in November 2009 and July 2010. These interviews were combined with a detailed analysis of the regulatory documents produced by Amafa and EKZNW.

2. Field studies carried out between November 2009 and October 2010 included anonymous, unannounced systematic visits to the rock art sites.