EMSIE FERREIRA, Cape Town | Monday
SOUTH Africa is luring tourists to view the whimsical side of a country known for its beaches and bush – visits to houses haunted by aristocratic ghosts and audiences with a rain queen.
Cape Town, if the brochures are to be believed, has several dozen ghosts that spook the surrounding hills, hospitals, grand homes, slave lodges, army barracks and even Table Mountain.
Their mostly sad stories are well known to locals, from the leper who plays a flute on the mountain at sunset and sometimes walks downtown to be near people, to the drowned nun who haunts a rock on Robben Island.
Cape Metropolitan Tourism, anxious to keep tourists coming to the city in winter when it gets miserably wet, has exploited the folklore and devised a Ghosts and Legends Route to stand alongside their whale and wine tours.
It starts at the Castle, the country’s oldest building, where World War II soldiers spotted a legless ghost believed to be a man who hanged himself in the bell tower 300 years ago, and goes out to Cape Point where the Flying Dutchman and his ship haunt the coast.
But nearby Simon’s Town claims the most ghosts – the derelict barracks has one, one walked into a navy garden party in 1998 and Admiralty House, now home to the local museum, has at least three.
Acting museum curator Cathy Salter-Jansen says the museum runs tours of its ghost corners, but she does not approve.
“There seems to be people knocking around here and I think it is best to let them be. These things are real.”
History has also been harnessed in the Northern Province where the tourism department has launched the Ivory Route, named after a novel based on 19th century elephant hunter Bwekenya Barnard who ran from the law in what is now South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
“He had to move from one camp to another and we have set up seven camps, some are safari camps where people can see elephants and lions; others are next to traditional (tribal) camps,” says tour operator Jeffrey Makani.
One of the visitors’ camps, with mud huts with dung floors, is close to the village of Queen Mokope Modjadji, the latest of a line of rain queens whose ancestor fled from what is now Zimbabwe 400 years ago.
“She did the rain ceremony three weeks ago because it was dry and really the next day it rained,” Makani said, adding that she sees visitors for a fee.
Whatever the truth, he adds, the tours are doing well. – AFP