What would the South African tourist industry be selling today if it didn’t have the relics of apartheid to offer?
Matthew Krouse
Marketing brutality is good for tourism. The revenue a country can take from promoting understanding of its darkest hours can certainly rival what it can cream off its sex industry and its natural wonders.
An example is Thailand’s famed Bridge on the River Kwai part of a historical railway line traversing the jungle near the border of presentday Myanmar (formerly Burma). It is widely remembered because its construction during World War II became the subject of filmmaker David Lean’s classic work of 1957.
The bridge may be situated far from Bangkok, in Thailand’s rugged southwest Kanchanaburi district, but it’s hardly a country retreat. It literally swarms with Europeans and locals peddling anything from Tshirts to almonds fried in coconut oil.
This unlikely tourist Mecca, built in conditions of slavery, pulls crowds in pretty much the same way as Soweto and Robben Island have begun to do. And it offers similar insights, one imagines, as the ruins of Auschwitz for those seeking meaning from humanity’s savagery.
The railroad was built by indentured Asian labourers and by Dutch, Australian, American and British prisoners of war, enslaved by the Japanese. For the Japanese conquerors of the region, the 450km line, now only partially in use, created a strategic trade and arms link between Thailand and Burma.
Today the memory of the superhuman effort, suffering and death it took to build the railroad and bridge is still very much alive. In fact, because of the role it has played in cinema history, it retains great relevance, even though it barely relates to any episode in immediate memory.
In reality, though, the bridge doesn’t really exist and the Thai tourist authority has provided a startling example in the way it has almost reinvented it from scratch. Yet millions of tourists have been unperturbed by the fact that this plain concreteandsteel structure was largely rebuilt after being bombed by the Allies at the height of the war.
Also, the movie’s spelling of the river’s name is incorrect it’s really Kwae, affecting the pronunciation. More incredibly, the bridge wasn’t built on the Kwae river at all. It was actually built on a tributary of the Kwae called the Mae Klong, a detail overlooked by Lean when he filmed his great work.
After the film’s release Thailand renamed the Mae Klong the Kwae Yai, the “little Kwae”. So the place has come to fully reflect the fictional construct. And it has paid off.
South African tourism has learnt similar lessons to those gleaned from the postwar Kwai experience, albeit to a lesser extent. These days we market Soweto’s road to democracy, and its symbolic locales, in pretty much the same way as Thailand punts its famous bridge as a living relic of injustice.
But there are other things that Soweto and the Kwae river bridge hold in common. Both require indepth explanation if they’re to be of any relevance to outsiders. And like the bridge, Soweto has also made its way into international cinema history in A Dry White Season, Cry Freedom and Sarafina!.
So, though we may not like to admit it, like Thailand we can thank the movies for a sizeable portion of the revenue brought by foreign cash cows to our onceimpoverished township.
The similarities between Thailand and South Africa as tourist destinations came into focus this February when the Association of South African Travel Agents (Asata) held its annual congress in Bangkok. For four days the Siam City hotel one of Bangkok’s finest became an island of white South Africa, descended upon by hundreds of local travel agents.
It is these individuals who, in partnership with tour operators, sell South Africa at its grass roots, locally and abroad. Of course the majority at the Asata congress looked like they’d be more comfortable selling a tour to the Randburg Waterfront than a bus ride to the Hector Petersen Memorial. But our tourist industry is learning how to respond to what international travellers want.
The keynote address at the Asata congress was by TV personality Denis Beckett, titled There Will Be a Tomorrow. He attempted to hardsell the idea of South Africa as a part of Africa to the very people who do the same every day of their working lives probably with less aplomb.
Beckett spoke in the context of Bangkok where, as he observed, people have had the right sense of national pride needed to overcome the economic crisis in their recent past. “Are we facing our world, our future, our challenges with the basic confidence that will get them right, the way that they are doing here in Thailand?” Beckett asked rhetorically.
And in reply to his own question, he said: “We know that quite often we’re not. We know that there are a lot of people who have the address of the Australian consulate deeply embedded in their minds.”
Well, Beckett was obviously referring to white South Africa, which still owns most of the tourist pie. But things are rapidly changing because, in addition to the big five, world travellers also want to experience apartheid through the eyes of black South Africa.
The flourishing of apartheid as a tourist phenomenon was abundantly evident in Durban this week at the annual Indaba 2001, Africa’s major travel and tourism expo. Held at Durban’s famed International Convention Centre, it showcased some breathtakingly ornate kiosks belonging to game lodges only German millionaires can afford to visit.
But the Indaba also showcased hundreds of humble township tour operators, waiting for a little business to come their way.
An official media release noted a 400% increase in small, micro and medium enterprises since the Indaba last year. Most formed part of funded provincial displays and 50 were there care of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism.
From the outside it appears that our tourist industry is spreading itself very thin on the ground. In every corner of the country women are preparing indigenous dishes to be eaten by tourists who may never arrive. Everywhere township tour guides are being trained and a myriad of hillocks have become sites of overoptimistic “cultural villages”.
But there are some success stories. Pumlani Edward Ngwenya of the Crocodile Creek guest house in Ncotshane township in Pongola is a case in point. After leaving the teaching profession in 1998 he established his guest house with six rooms today he has 21 rooms going for R150 a person a night.
At dinner time local township folk who have formed themselves into the UmAfrika Cultural Ensemble do traditional dancing, and there is even a touristinclined drama and storytelling group. UmAfrika so impressed one overseas guest that he procured the dancers a tour to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver last year.
Ngwenya’s township tour includes traditional weddings (when they happen) and Zulu food and beveragemaking demonstrations.
But, apart from overseas visitors, Crocodile Creek is also beginning to net local black travellers who, Ngwenya claims, are beginning to visit his venture when they’re in the vicinity. This is the good news that Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa wants to hear.
At the Indaba, on April 21, Moosa launched the highprofile Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award with the promise that transformation would “seek to place historically disadvantaged people in firm positions where they can own and run tourism businesses, far beyond the current engagement in ‘soft spots’ “.
So, in this climate of intensified development, overseas visitors are in for a treat those on the lookout for apartheid stories, that is. One can expect that soon many relics of the evil past will become lavish tourist traps.
By 2002 Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront will sport an ultramod Nelson Mandela Gateway providing a “focal point for a pilgrimage to Robben Island”. The Old Fort in Braamfontein, where Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were once incarcerated, will become Constitutional Hill, with the promise of hotels, conference facilities and a museum nearby. And there is some talk of an apartheid museum as part of the multimillionrand Newtown Cultural Precinct development due to start next year.
Add to this the allure of existent locations such as Cape Town’s District Six museum and Umtata’s Nelson Mandela museum and you’ll get an idea of the degree to which apartheid has become big business today.
But it is always the small stories that are most heartwarming. In Victoria West, in the Great Karoo, in 1999 a fullyfunctional art deco movie house was found bricked up behind a women’s clothing store. Today, with funding from De Beers and the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, the Apollo bioscope is run as a communitybased conference centre that will soon be home to a festival of independently made local films.
And the apartheid dimension? The Apollo’s upstairs gallery is still divided in two: coloureds on one side and blacks over the wall. It is probably the last place on Earth where one can see how black cinemagoers sat on wooden benches, while the whites sat on the comfy seats downstairs.
Today the broader community of Victoria West has taken proud ownership of this painful aspect of its cultural past.
Visit the Thai Tourist Authority at www.tourismthailand.org and South African Tourism at www.southafrica.net