While on holiday in Cape Town, South Africa, Jeanett Andrea Soderstrom was assured by operators of the benefits of taking a township tour. Unable to pin-down specific data, on returning to home she decided to research the claims as part of a Responsible Tourism Management MSc.
Her results are a worry to anyone who considers ethical travel an integral part of holiday planning. Interviewing operators and inhabitants, Soderstrom found that while operators were well meaning, evidence for a positive impact of their tours was difficult to find. Shockingly, none of the inhabitants she interviewed said they benefitted economically from the tours themselves, only receiving occasional donations from tourists themselves.
Soderstrom concluded that in their current form these tours hindered both economic and social empowerment, but believes with better regulation and awareness this could be reversed.
VOYEURISTIC TOURISM.
A whole book could be written on the the voyeuristic aspects of tourism, and how any form of strangers visiting an area affects both that area and its inhabitants.
Just think of what has happened since a certain Mr Thomas Cook took a party of temperance campaigners the eleven miles by train from Leicester to Loughborough on 5th July 1841. This was not just the first advertised railway awayday, but food for the journey was included – the first package holiday?
Since then it has become accepted as normal to go anywhere for days out, weeks away, months travelling; to visit other towns, other parts of one’s own country, other countries. And once there, to expect to find accommodation and places to eat – and things to see. Whole towns, resorts, transport systems have grown from next to nothing to enable this to happen.
Once at a destination, the excursionists, visitors, tourists, travellers – call them what you will – wander around, gawp at, look at, investigate, draw, paint, photograph, film, video what and who they see.
From “natives” in local dress, “native” customs, “native” buildings, “native” food to anything else that is “different”, all these things become part of the attraction of going somewhere “foreign”.
Whether it is to see a Welsh woman in a tall black hat and red cloak on the Ffestiniog Railway, a Scotsman in a kilt by Loch Ness, bowler hatted women in Peru, or Basotho wearing blankets and woven conical hats – such are the things that draw the tourists.
It is a too easy jump from just happening to see such people as one walks or rides around the tourist location, to the inhabitants deliberately dressing up in the way the visitors expect or want to see. Then come the taking of photographs, the filming/videoing – and too soon the expectation of being paid for what has become an act.
As world travellers, many Globetrotters will be familiar with the demand by “natives” to be paid for being photographed.
And this is where there is the perceived clash from the South African township tours. No one appears to find anything unethical in coaches, buses, minibuses driving nose-to-trail around parts of London, around Bath, around the area of Hollywood where the “natives” are film stars – the passengers pointing fingers and pointing cameras.
Yet paying to be driven through Soweto, etc is thought an intrusion too far.
Just consider one of the world’s most famous tourist destinations: Ayers Rock. When I drove out there from Alice Springs, along a dusty, bumpy dirt road in an Austin Maxi in 1977, there was one old outback hotel, a rough camping ground, and that was about it. When I climbed the Rock and visited the nearby Olgas, I was almost alone. I was alone when I walked the length of the top of the Rock and stripped off and swam in a rainwater filled hollow on the top.
When I went back in 2006, the roads were tar, there was a full size airport, a shopping centre, concrete and glass air-conditioned hotels. Plus highly controlled tours around the Rock, with highly contrived meetings with the “natives”.
On one “tour”, our European Australian “tour guide” translated questions to the two “professional” Aborigine women who just happened to be on hand, and then translated the answers back into English. The most questionable aspect of this was that the women, in 2006, did not speak English. Curiously one of the pair said she recognised me from my first visit nearly thirty years before, and that I had come by plane. In 1977 only light aircraft could land on the Ayers Rock airstrip. In fact, the companion I had with me flew back to Alice Springs in a Cessna or a Piper and I saw her off. So that perhaps was the source of her very real (?) memory. All this was translated by the “tour guide” – I am sure quite unnecessarily – yet another act put on for the tourists, just to increase the “strangeness” of what they were experiencing – and expecting to experience.
I felt both extremely uncomfortable about what I am sure what a complete sham over the language business, and the way there is a deliberate policy of keeping the tourists from even talking with the local Aborigines. To put it crudely, it is like going to a zoo, and seeing the cages but no animals.
And here we have another connection with the South African township tours: the fact that most of the tourists are European of one sort or another, coming to see an area where those visited are not. And, in the South African context, the zoo analogy might not be far wrong.
When I was in Thailand a few years ago, I had no qualms about travelling around on the mainland, by plane, car, taxi, bus, train. Even going to see the elephant shows did not worry me: atractions put on by the locals to bring in money. But a so-called cultural evening with performances of “historic reconstructions” did leave me feeling uneasy – just as the Maori haka is dragged out at every All Blacks rugby match, and most recently with members of the royal family visiting New Zealand. I worked with a Maori in the Christchurch gasworks when living in NZ, and he was just another bloke.
My Thailand boat trip to the Andaman Islands really did feel like voyeurism. The whole charade of scores of Europeans sitting down to a supposedly authentic local meal before wandering around to look at what they were expected to buy had me wondering why I was there. The scenery, the geography of the place – these I enjoyed, because I knew they were real. But the rest?
From all the above, I can see the reason for concern about tours of South Africa townships. It is quite horrifying that someone can be a Master of Science in Responsible Tourism Management, let alone become one by going round the world gathering material to write a thesis on the artificially invented degree subject. Give someone a title or letters after his or her name, and what that person says or writes is immediately treated as having authority. It’s frightening.
If there is money to be made out of something, someone will devise a way of doing so. John Maskelyne invented the first pay lavatory in the late 19th century. 1,900 years earlier the Roman emperor Vespasian placed a tax on urine collection.
So someone will want to charge for driving “tourists” around the townships, when those same people could quite easily walk around themselves. But walking around might create the fearsome situation of actually meeting ordinary township dwellers, having to have a conversation with them, having to explain why the visitors are there, gawping, looking, taking pictures or video footage.
Tourism has come a long way since that 1841 day out to Loughborough. At last the assumption that anywhere can become a tourist destination – regardless of the effect on those “natives” – is being questioned. And, I think, rightly so.
“Take only pictures, leave only footprints” has proved too much in some places. Look at the soil erosion from lines of ramblers on the Fells, in the Peak District, etc.
My parents had a guest house in Devon, for a decade in the 1950s and 1960s. “Twixt sea and moor”, the visitors could go swimming at Paignton, or have cream teas at North Bovey. My parents saw – and were partly responsible for – the growth in visitor numbers to the West Country that has now given us the likes of the M5. Later, with two seafront hotels in Eastbourne, they catered for the typical British family wanting two weeks on the beach and a show in the evening. For a while I ran a small country hotel in Lesotho, for visitors going on to stay in the Maluti Mountains. Just three simple examples of how tourism changes villages, towns, regions and countries.
Few things stay the same for long. I am sure the townships have changed since the end of apartheid. My first question would be what do the township inhabitants themselves want. Do they want to stay apart from the rest of South Africa, as the Australian government has decided for the Aborigines around Ayers Rock? Or do they want to say, “Come and visit us, but on our terms.” The enterprise to have tourists should come from within the townships, if that is what the people in them want. In 1974 I visited the lake village of Ganvié in Dahomey (now Benin). The villagers got on with living in their own huts on stilts while just two others were open to the tourists arriving in small launches. My travelogue records; “For all their contact with tourists, the villagers disliked being photographed, and only two huts – one selling souvenirs, the other a bar – were at all tourist-minded. A commendable compromise that kept the cultures apart, and helped keep theirs more or less intact. Perhaps Ganvié was one place where European values had not yet penetrated.”
Bearing in mind that the ancestry of most of those now in the townships goes back to that of the ordinary bush African (I know the apartheid system created townships for Coloureds, etc), the present inhabitants have come a long way from living in grass or mud huts and surviving off the land.
Perhaps they should be accepting yet any change: setting up a very limited number of places in the townships designed to appeal to tourists: places to eat and drink, to talk with the “natives”, to understand their needs, to act as bridges with the rest of South Africa, with the rest of the world. But that change should be driven by those there, not by some pretending-to-be-doing-good, outside commercial business.