Coloured culture gap in the Cape tourism experience

My recent post announcing that !Khwa ttu San Culture and Education Centre was certified as a responsible tourism practitioner by Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa prompted a bit of contemplation (on my part) about why so few visitors and so little of the tourism industry take advantage of this amazing, authentic, local cultural experience right on the doorstep of Cape Town.

This is great stuff, right up the road, high quality and nearly impossible to find anywhere else in Africa. They've been around for enough years to be known to the industry, to locals, to visitors, but I find still they're relatively invisible in my engagement with tourism and tourists in the region. (and it's not for lack of involvement - I see their CEO, Michael, at nearly every relevant tourism event, workshop, meeting, etc.)

So why is the San experience not booming?

I find it intriguing that the "township tour" is more compelling to most tourists. Is it the peri-urban "vibe"? Do people secretly enjoy fetishizing the poor or the 'exotic other'? Is it better promoted and understood? Is it cheaper and easier to access?

It may be all or most of the above, but there's no doubt that commercially speaking the "township tour" as a commodified tourism experience is well-developed and marketed, with many years of trading in the tourism marketplace and a diversity of tour operators and guides who compete to take people into local communities - often their own communities - to share their cultures and experiences and to pay the bills along the way. It's a mature product category, not just a mature product.

So why not San culture too – couldn’t township tours be a model for the development of a new category of tourism products? One offering access to the coloured cultural experience?

Probably not. Because I also think a significant factor is that the experiences offered in townships are (overwhelmingly) black cultural experiences, and the “African experience” is fundamentally understood, packaged and promoted to tourists as a black experience. It isn't just South Africa - the nations from Ethiopia to Mauritania and north to the Mediterranean have lighter-skinned populations, and there are deep roots of Indians in Central Africa, of Arabs across East and Central Africa, and mixed-race lighter skinned Africans nearly everywhere the white colonial presence was established over 400+ years. However, ask a question about "Africans" to a tourist and the image leaping to mind will almost surely be that of a black man, woman or child.

Perhaps, then, it's no surprise that one doesn't see many "township tours" going into coloured communities (they're not generally referred to as townships) like Mitchell's Plain or Bonteheuwel - the tours tend to go into Langa, Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, Masiphumelele and so on. But in South Africa, I also feel there is something more to it as a township experience. Townships are liminal places, tied to the anti-apartheid struggle and linked to the mythology of Soweto (the most iconic township) as a site of resistance and renaissance. A visit to a South African township is credibly authentic, exposes the visitor to some of the sins of the past which are the roots of its transforming (and inspiring?) present, and the industry trades on these attributes to sell its product.

(there's an interesting digression into the "slum tours" of Kibera, Nairobi and informal settlements around Lagos, Maputo and other cities of Africa and how they're packaged as "pro-poor" tours as opposed to political or cultural tours, but that's a post for some other time.)

I also think that the South African liberation movement and the townships that were sites of some of the best-known (most iconic/mythic) events in the anti-apartheid struggle are commonly portrayed as the acts and places of African people, such as Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Sotho and so on, in triumph over the racist white state (here I'm shifting to the South African use of 'African' as referring generally to dark-skinned people whose languages are part of the Bantu language family -- the term "Black" having a different meaning). Neither the liberation struggle nor the post-apartheid era has been very inclusive of coloured South Africans at a national level in the shaping of the histories or even participating in the discussions about the present and future.

And who the term "coloured" actually refers to doesn't make things any simpler. Brown-skinned of some hue, not white not black, the term can encompass people of mixed race, descendants of slaves from Malaysia, Madagascar and elsewhere, more recently Chinese immigrants were officially designated such, and it also includes the indigenous local people who lived and still live in the Cape - the Khoekhoe and the San, the first people.

One of the implications of this from a tourism commodification and packaging perspective is that it's very difficult to engage with authentic "coloured culture" because it's so very diverse: Cape Malay cuisine, Muslim sacred sites, farm communities, bergies, Afrikaans folk songs, Cape Jazz and goema, Minstrels, fishing traditions, District Six, the Slave Lodge, rock art, and much more.

I could go on about the tiny minority that the coloured population is among South Africa’s 48 million souls and the political/socio-economic implications that result, or about the disparity between the African and coloured experiences historically and how that plays out today in misunderstanding, or about racial tensions far more complex than black/white, or about the intra-group tensions between Muslims and Christians or other sub-groups of people considered "coloured."

But it's unfortunate, at least to me, that an amazing, powerful and authentic Khoesan cultural experience like that on offer at !Khwa ttu will, in all likelihood, remain marginal. Not black, not African, complex to package, poorly understood even locally, and competing with other aspects of coloured culture for a share of the tourism pie, it's hard to imagine a San or Khoesan tourism experience ever cracking into the mainstream along the lines of township tours.

Some may argue that’s a good thing. Perhaps. But given that Cape Town is, from my perspective at least, a coloured city, this is a real shame. It's also an opportunity to assemble from the various dimensions of coloured cultures a mosaic of experiences that will help connect visitors to the deepest roots and most distinctive aspects of the Mother City.

Coloured culture gap in the Cape tourism experience