What is Remembered and What Forgotten: A Decade of Redefining Culture and Heritage for Tourism in South Africa

By: Heather Hughes

Introduction

It is close on a decade since the official death of apartheid and the coming of majority rule to South Africa. In this time, there have been impressive achievements in redefining a set of culture and heritage [1] principles for the ‘Rainbow Nation‘. A new canon has begun to emerge, but has not yet acquired fixed dimensions: there is still debate over what should be included and what omitted. In the same period, a major initiative to reopen the ‘new South Africa‘ for international tourism business has resulted in vastly increased numbers of foreign visitors - over six million annually in the early years of the 21^st century. The two developments are linked: rethinking culture and heritage has in part occurred because the state has placed tourism at the centre of economic development strategies, and enthusiasm for ‘community tourism‘ is the means by which culture, heritage and tourism have been linked. This paper explores these relationships, focusing on two key developments: the rise of the cultural village and the popularity of the ‘township tour‘.

Developing a new approach to culture and heritage

Rethinking a sense of popular culture and heritage radically different to the official apartheid version began in the anti-apartheid movement, particularly through the 1980s, a time of enormous creativity in response to violence and oppression. There were a few attempts inside the country to experiment with revisionist interpretations, such as the KwaMuhle Museum in Durban, a local government initiative dedicated to the history of African people in the city. However, the struggle itself demanded new ways of presenting images and meanings, to be used as sharp rebuttals of government propaganda, and a number of international conferences provided forums for reflection and consolidation, such as the Culture and Resistance Symposium in Botswana in 1982. However, like many anti-apartheid organisations and projects, the nascent cultural thinking suffered something of a crisis of identity when political transformation ended the frenetic activities so many had been engaged in for so long. What should writers write about now? What would become of the crusading role of radical social history in raising awareness of black South Africans‘ past? And what sorts of artistic messages could replace the fierce spirit of resistance that had characterised so much of the best work for decades? Debates have continued through the 1990s and into the new millennium, and many exciting new projects have been born in answer to such questions. Despite the overwhelming difficulties of poverty and an out-of‑control AIDS pandemic, South Africa is experiencing a period of intense vibrancy in its cultural life.

This has not happened by accident. Cultural policy – conscious intervention in the process of deciding what to remember and celebrate, and what to let slip into the crevices of half-forgetting – entails a complex institutional framework of laws, state commissions, policy-making bodies, funding policies, and end users (museums, theatres, festivals, archaeological sites and so on) whose personnel must themselves demonstrate sensitivity to new policies in order to attract funding in the first place. (Fowler 1992: 81-93).

Funding is basic to what constitutes the culture and heritage ‘plant‘: every cultural and educational organisation in the country eligible for state grants has actively engaged in the process of considering what are appropriate responses to and presentations of cultural life and memory in post-apartheid South Africa and how the distorted bequest of the past might be dealt with. Presiding over all this, the state has been an enthusiastic shaper of culture and heritage meanings in pursuit of its nation-building project – even (or perhaps especially) in a deeply divided society like South Africa, this is an important mechanism in presenting a vision to which all may subscribe as their common inheritance. (Graham et al 2000: 12).

Tourism has become deeply embedded in this effort: it can provide jobs and therefore hope for the future, based on the one resource that poor communities are thought to possess in abundance: their past and present culture. The irony is that while substantial funding has gone into the promotion of community tourism, it has been exceedingly difficult for communities themselves to access funding for new initiatives.

Tourism and the freedom struggle

The freedom struggle itself has been at once the most urgent and in many ways least problematic subject for the ANC government‘s ‘nation-building‘ efforts. The flagship project – ‘the first official heritage institution of the new democracy‘ according to the web site (www.mayibuye.org) - has been the Robben Island Museum. Situated just off the coast of Cape Town, Robben Island served as apartheid‘s maximum-security prison for political offenders, was declared a National Monument in 1997 and a World Heritage Site in 1999, and houses the Robben Island Museum. [2] The Museum now receives over 300 000 visitors every year (about a third of them South African [3] ); many of the guides are themselves ex-prisoners. This has allowed different narratives to be told about the struggle and its goals, depending on which of the once-outlawed political parties the guide belonged to. The Museum also possesses explicitly educational and research functions, including a travelling exhibition for schools and undertaking the training of heritage professionals. Recently, the Museum has incorporated the key archival collection of papers on the freedom struggle, initially assembled in the United Kingdom under the auspices of the International Defence and Aid Fund. This collection was moved to the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town in the early 1990s, to the newly formed Mayibuye Centre. In 2000, the Centre merged with the Robben Island Museum, which now has care of the archives, although the collection is still housed at UWC. The Museum has also hosted a number of widely publicised and nationally symbolic spectacles, such as the announcement of Cape Town‘s bid for the 2004 Olympic Games, and hosting South Africa‘s premier Millennium Party, attended by Nelson Mandela and many other luminaries.

Another means by which the freedom struggle is remembered is by incorporating its story into existing collections. Perhaps the most striking example has been the National Military Museum in Johannesburg, long the ultimate symbol of white rule, with its comprehensive displays of heavy weaponry and strongly ideological narrative of ‘fighting the terrorists‘. The Museum has now not only recognised the historic role of black soldiers in South African military service, but has modified existing displays and added several new ones, recounting the history of the guerrilla campaigns that the banned organisations (principally the ANC and PAC) waged, leading to the negotiated settlement in 1992. The interesting aspect is that it has managed to achieve this without significantly dismantling too much of the old symbolism of white power: extension rather than revision. [4]

In cultural and heritage terms, the task of remembering South Africa outside of and beyond the struggle apartheid itself and further back through colonial and precolonial times - has proved far more problematic than creating a memory of the struggle, particularly with the growing importance accorded to tourism viability. An Apartheid Museum opened in 2001, actually part of a casino development – the winning consortium‘s offer to ‘give something back to the community‘. (The Guardian, 12 December 2001) The museum and casino adjoin Johannesburg‘s Gold Reef City theme park, already owned by the same consortium. There has been praise for the way in which the museum has presented apartheid oppression - displays include a police surveillance video playing inside an armoured vehicle, and 121 nooses to represent each of those hanged for political offences - although many feel there is a deeply disturbing element in the lack of state support: the association with commercial pleasure pursuits was the only way in which the museum could be funded. (Weekly Mail and Guardian 5 December 2001).

Government ambiguity is more evident in the presentation of popular culture and heritage. Before the change in government, less than one percent of some 4000 monuments related to the precolonial period of the region‘s habitation. (Deacon cited in Davison 1998: 150). Attempts to redress this imbalance have reinforced a sense of ethnic particularity, such as the restoration of the Venda walled settlement at Thulamela. (Davison 1998: 150).

Many of the so-called ‘cultural villages‘ that have sprung up in recent years would consider that they are adding to our knowledge of this past. At the heart of all these recovered memories is a conviction of ethnic uniqueness. The goal of apartheid was of course to foster ethnic identity in pursuit of the ‘separate but equal‘ fiction. Yet in the dramatically altered political climate, ethnic identity, certainly for tourist consumption – and it is argued in this paper that tourist viability is becoming a significant criterion of the very existence of many cultural sites – has found new life. President Thabo Mbeki might wish for a vision of South African culture that avoids ‘the notion of an Africa slowly condemned to remain a curiosity‘ (Mbeki, quoted in Witz et al 2001: 277) but the message from below is more ambiguous. Ethnic cultures (or more accurately, their brokers) continue to define themselves in competition with other ethnic cultures, through a stress on uniqueness, rather than revealing the features they share in common or their interdependence. As Davison observes, ‘accommodating ethnic difference without resorting to essentialist notions of race and culture remains a challenge.‘ (1998: 151)

There has been much opportunity for community representatives, sometimes democratically elected but more often self-appointed, to initiate new community tourism ventures. Two main kinds have emerged: cultural villages in the countryside, and township tours in urban areas. Both instances reveal that the target market is international. While some domestic tourists go on township tours and visit cultural villages, as part of a supposed learning experience about how other South Africans live, or to learn more about their own culture, the real demand for such products is from foreign visitors, especially on all-inclusive tours (Koch and Massyn 2001:160).

Ethnicity reinvented: cultural villages

Typically, a cultural village will be sited on or near to an established tourist route in a rural area, and will consist of a homestead to show living arrangements, an arena for dance, music and other live cultural displays, a restaurant and of course a craft/souvenir outlet. There might be add-on features, such as a game enclosure, museum display, historical video, or a visit to a ‘real‘ homestead nearby. Some have separate sections showing different ‘traditions‘, so visitors can take their pick: Lesedi cultural village near Johannesburg and the Shangaan village in Mpumalanga are examples. (Witz et al 2001:279) Tour operators claim that cultural villages are very popular with foreign visitors; there are now around forty villages open for business across the country.

Research into cultural villages has focused on the extent to which they represent new patterns of ownership and employment opportunities in deprived areas. (See Jansen Van Vuuren 2001). The picture that emerges is that while a few have been initiated by small business people and are yielding modest returns, most have required levels of investment far beyond the reach of local communities, rather giving the lie to ideals of small, micro or medium-size (SMME) opportunity. For example, a white ex-night club owner established PheZulu Safari Park near Durban. In the late 1980s he ‘bought a Zulu dance outfit in a small cultural village‘, later adding a crocodile farm, snake park, curio shop and restaurant, and built PheZulu into ‘the place to take foreigners‘. The latest improvement, in partnership with a local chief, is a safari park, in which, apart from the animals, are situated several homesteads and a shantytown. The occupants helped to prepare the land, act as guides and welcome visitors into their homes. The owner‘s view is that ‘this is what tourists want to see - Zulu life as it is‘. (Sunday Tribune 12 August 2001) A multi-million rand hotel complex is planned for the future.

Perhaps the pre-eminent cultural village in KwaZulu-Natal, the land of cultural villages, is Shakaland. Of all the precolonial leaders, the first Zulu king Shaka‘s name has most resonance in the minds of an international audience, not least because of the mythology that grew up around his state-building conquests and of the Zulu as a ‘proud, warlike‘ nation. Shakaland is housed in one of the specially built sets for the television series Shaka Zulu, starring Henry Cele (who also for a time appeared in promotional material issued by Tourism KwaZulu-Natal). The idea of two partners who regard themselves as ‘white Zulus‘, Barry Leitch and Kingsley Holgate, and later taken over by a large hotel chain, Shakaland offers visitors an insight into Zulu cultural practices in a way ‘that was more concentrated than the real thing, it was also more perfect.‘ (Hamilton 1998:197) Meticulously researched and scripted, it nevertheless eschewed politics and violence, thus lending to the experience an eerie unreality, since the destructive violence dominating provincial politics through much of the 1980s and 1990s was over the very issue of Zulu identity.

The manner in which provincial tourism authorities have chosen to represent their regions provides strong support to this essentialist notion of ethnic culture. Tourism KwaZulu-Natal, for example, is marketing its region as ‘The Kingdom of the Zulu‘, and has accorded the current Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelethini, a central role in the marketing strategy. (Mercury Highroad 2 May 2000; Bass 2003) Historians would be the first to point out that the present-day province was never wholly incorporated into the Zulu kingdom, and there are many in the province who feel that their own histories and contributions to culture and politics have been marginalised as a result. The Bhaca, for example, are a people living in the southern parts of the province who strenuously resisted incorporation in to the Zulu polity for decades through the 19^th century, only to find themselves labelled as belonging to it in the new South Africa. (To show their distinctiveness they too are planning a cultural village.) Similarly, there are those among the politically significant Indian minority in the region who feel that there is another tradition and identity to offer the rainbow nation - of pacifism and non-violent resistance, symbolised by one-time resident Mahatma Gandhi (see Tichmann 2000) - which has largely been written out of the current marketing drive. [5]  There are other factors that help to explain the ‘cultural village‘ phenomenon. In rural areas across South Africa, chiefly power continues rather uncomfortably alongside the notion of democratically elected representatives. Such power perpetuates strongly patriarchal relations between leaders and people, inhibiting the emergence of a real sense of citizenship and presenting culture brokers with an opportunity to negotiate at ‘the top‘ - not least about leasing communal land - no matter what local people‘s views. (Hughes and Vaughan 2000: 251)

Again, there is the mindset of established tour operators, whose cultural co-ordinates for years have tended to be ethnic ones, and whose tried and tested products continue to feature in their itineraries. Even in the old days of apartheid (and far fewer international visitors), there was always a stop at an ethnically specific souvenir market on the ‘grand tour‘ of South Africa.

One of the difficulties that cultural villages are likely to face is too much supply chasing too little demand. While it is clear that such attractions are popular for foreign visitors, in reality they are popular with only a small proportion of foreign visitors. The Head of the South African Tourism Authority recently challenged the received wisdoms of the country‘s tourism industry when she pointed out that two thirds of international visitors to South Africa are in fact from other parts of Africa [6] - and they are not consumers of cultural villages.

Another case that serves to underline the central role of tourism in fostering a sense of ethnic particularism is that of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. Built in the late 1940s after the Afrikaner National Party came to power and dedicated to their forebears who had colonised the interior of South Africa in the mid-19^th century in a process of violent conquest and displacement of indigenous inhabitants, the monument was long an emblem of Afrikaner power in modern South Africa. Its custodians were so anxious about what the new government would do with it that they effectively privatised it. It continues to receive a small state grant, but its considerable operating costs and upkeep have been met by international visitors: tourism has effectively saved the Monument. (Grundlingh 2001:106-8)

There have been some dissenting voices. The ¡Kung and ¡Khwe clans have rejected the notion of a Khoisan cultural village, arguing that their culture is constantly adapting to new circumstances. They prefer to talk, they say, of an oorkruisingskultuur (cross-over culture) rather than a static set of traditions. (Koch and Massyn 2001:161) While this does sound like the sort of response some tourism analysts cry out for, and does articulate a fresh approach to the representation of culture all too absent in tourism development, it is no more likely to be the view of ‘the community‘ than in the other cases discussed. In any event, other Khoisan groups have embraced the cultural village idea, their group identity having been strengthened as a result of land restitution claims. (Witz et al 2001: 281).

In a cultural village it is possible to find sensitive portrayals by professional historians, architects and anthropologists, alongside complaints by employees that they have to behave like ‘professional tribes‘ in elaborate reconstructions of homesteads, while not earning enough to move out of the mud and zinc shacks they live in. (Koch and Massyn 2001) Yet the issue here is not the degree of authenticity to be found in presentation and performance in cultural villages, but the kinds of policies that have permitted this rampant ethnicity to constitute one of main tourist attractions of the new South Africa. In a very real way, the growth in cultural villages and the ethnic culture they celebrate signals a legitimation of ‘tribalism‘, a concept hotly disputed by social historians and anthropologists over the past two and half decades. Many rejected the term ‘tribe‘, connoting as it did a sense of backwardness, stasis, primitiveness and fixity of membership. The preferable term was ‘chiefdom‘, signifying dynamism, political power, change. At the end of this ideological struggle, ‘tribes‘ and ‘tribalism‘ now seem to have been sanitised – or perhaps depoliticised (Zegeye 2001) – and happily reincorporated into the everyday lexicon of South African social life.

Another reality: township tours

Despite the criticisms that have been levelled at them, such as that they ‘ghettoise‘ townships and perpetuate the sense of spatial division so central to old apartheid, township tours in many ways subvert the ‘pastoral paradigm‘ of cultural villages. Most also explicitly stress ethnic diversity. Like their rural counterparts, they are now ubiquitous in South African towns and cities – the South African equivalent of an open-top bus ride in British cities. A township tour usually includes a visit to a tavern (shebeen), a cultural display, notable heritage/struggle sites, a crèche or welfare facility where visitors may make donations, and possibly a visit to someone‘s home. Thus, the choice of stops on township tours provides an interesting insight into how heritage and culture are being redefined on the ground. One operator who offers a tour to Umlazi, Durban‘s biggest township, takes visitors past the home of slain anti-apartheid activists Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge, the first church built in Umlazi, the original mission hospital, schools of note and a traditional healer. Another takes visitors to ‘Coloured‘ areas of Durban, showing them the Zanzibari mosque, World War 11 barracks and a parachute factory, apartheid-style housing, a Leonard Cheshire Home, and a visit to ‘real‘ home for refreshments. (Gailforce Tours, July 2000).

Some township tours are offered by established operators in partnership with local guides, but emerging operators offering such tours are arguably the most developed form of community tourism in South Africa to date. A few started out as small enterprises and have grown into large-scale ventures, such as Jimmy Ntintili‘s Face2Face Tours in Soweto. The overwhelming majority, however, remain fledgling micro-companies struggling to raise the capital to make their businesses sustainable. Many operators already had a base in the taxi industry, and have diversified into airport shuttle work and township tours as and when there has been demand. For one of the difficulties with township tours is that supply has been rather greater than demand: one of the most frequent complaints of emergent operators is that while they have responded with alacrity to the calls for community tourism initiatives, they have lacked custom in order to stay afloat.

There are a number of reasons for their precariousness that are worth examining. Unlike the cultural villages and their outside financial backers, these are operators who represent a far greater degree of direct local involvement in tourism, offering a potentially less mediated, more challenging view of cultural borrowing, dynamism, and shared experience. Often they lack a secure physical base, possess few promotional materials, must hire vehicles from others, and very rarely have access to electronic communication. Banks will not make loans to such small operations; notoriously, the only way to raise capital is go to the micro-lending sector, where interest rates can be up to forty percent. (Interview with Trevor Enniker, BETO, Durban, July 2000).

Many feel that the established operators, through industry bodies such as the South African Tourism Services Association, are using ‘standards‘ and high membership fees as a form of closure. Some within such bodies respond that new operators have an ‘entitlement mentality‘ which is unhelpful when ‘the industry is already flooded‘. (Magardie 2001: 44) This attitude would rather seem to confirm the accusation being made against the established sector – and those few new operators who have managed to comply, who are often the most vigilant of gatekeepers. Other complaints include that large venues, such as the big city hotels or International Convention Centre in Durban, actively deny access to potential custom. Hotels do not allow emerging operators to display promotional material, and the ICC prefers to deal with established operators that can handle large client bases. Finally, there is the problem of promotional lead-time: many small operators despair that the period between offering a new product and finding it featured in the main promotional sources for international visitors is too long a wait for business to be sustainable.

Only now are emerging operators beginning to define an organisational milieu for themselves. A significant development is the recent formation of community tourism bodies. In 2000, a number of emerging operators in the Durban area formed BETO, the Black Emerging Tour Operators Association. They have received assistance from the regional tourism authority, though their experience points to the difficulties of negotiating a way forward in the absence of traditional culture brokers such as chiefly figures. It may be that what is eventually incorporated into a canon of popular culture and heritage in many urban areas will depend on which of these operators survive to tell the stories of the past.

There have also been a number of public initiatives at local level – largely urban – to present a more dynamic, less essentialist, view of culture and heritage. The Durban tourism authority is developing a number of themed tours that challenge old separations; in Cape Town, there are similar attempts. Again, the level of take-up of such products will significantly affect whether or not such novel ways of looking at the past, designed to harmonise with the nonracialism of the new South Africa, will survive.

Conclusion

What this paper has argued is that consideration of what might best ‘work‘ as a tourist attraction has become an important determinant of what culture and heritage should be remembered and celebrated, and what is likely to be forgotten. Yet there are some qualifications to be made to this argument. Debates about culture, heritage and the role of tourism go on; this is after all a time of transition and fluidity, as noted at the beginning – one commentator went so far as to describe the tourism sector as ‘anarchic‘ (Addison 2001:13). It is more than that, however: it is about contests between old guard and new arrivals, and what will survive for presentation as a result of such contests. Perhaps a recent [7] definitive guide book to South Africa, endorsed by SATOUR (the national marketing body), is an indication of how difficult it will be to reorient the culture and heritage of the country. It manages to reproduce deeply traditional activities and sites for international visitors and fails even to mention Robben Island, let alone the many ‘community initiatives‘ that had already sprung up to capitalise on increased international numbers. The text and photographs, with very minor exceptions, could have been taken out of any South African guidebook over the last thirty years.

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Heather Hughes, University of Lincoln

Source: nottingham.ac.uk
Credit Photo: http://www.fugitivesdrift.com/

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