A community tourism project on the Wild Coast offers a very different experience from that of a five-star hotel on its doorstep. It is a role model – kind to the community, its natural resources and its visitors – and business is booming.
The offices of Amadiba Adventures are within spitting distance of the Wild Coast Sun hotel in the Eastern Cape, but they offer tourists an experience that is worlds apart. The way Amadiba manages its business — with the Amadiba community owning it and benefiting directly from its proceeds — is also substantially different from the way the luxury hotel does things.
The four-day and six-day hiking trails offered by Amadiba begin at the five-star hotel: hikers walk past the casino, swimming pools, tennis courts and the golf course and on to the kilometres-long beach. After an hour of hiking down the beach, they mount their horses and head off into the green hills of Pondoland on the Wild Coast.
Amadiba Adventures not only offers paying guests hot bush showers and gourmet meals, it also offers them direct interaction with the people and the place they wander through — and business is booming.
The company won the 2000 Community Public Private Partnership Award for the best community tourism project in South Africa. Many tour operators luring foreigners to South Africa recommend Amadiba’s hiking trail as the one “must-do” for tourists hoping to see the “real Africa”.
The Amadiba Coastal Development Association, based in the Amadiba Tribal Area, had its first paying tourists in 1998. The process of setting up the organisation took more than a year — the Amadiba people feared their land would be stolen from them to start the business.
The Amadiba people own the land between the Umtamvuna and Mtentu Rivers. They live in the second-poorest province in South Africa. “Our people are the poorest of the poor. They are mostly subsistence farmers and the population is about 500 homesteads,” says Velaphi Ndovela, a local currently employed by the NGO PondoCrop, under the European Union-funded Wild Coast Community Tourism Initiative.
“About 80% of our people are illiterate and the community’s income comes mostly from a few migrant workers who toil on the mines or in the KwaZulu-Natal sugar plantations, and from government pensions. When I was at school, I left home at 3am to arrive on time. There is no clinic in the area — one has to walk 40km there and back. Our people still honour the old culture, and initiation processes and traditional dances are still very popular.”
The amakhosi (chiefs) and democratically elected councillors provide basic governance in the area. The Amadiba people still plough with oxen, and cattle are still the major measure of a man’s wealth.
“After the elections in 1994, Reconstruction and Development committees were formed in rural areas throughout South Africa. It was the same story in our area,” says Ndovela. “There were a lot of ideas from government officials about how we should develop our area. They said it was important because we needed roads, clinics and water. So they came and spoke to us about game lodges and hotels.
“The amakhosi are still the custodians of our land and while people were happy to hear about development, their next question was what was going to happen to our land. The only example we had of tourism was the Wild Coast Sun, where our people lost their land and became servants to the tourists.”
The Amadiba communities allowed free passage to hikers who crossed their land regularly. Ndovela says when he was a young boy tending cattle after school he would watch the hikers and couldn’t understand what they were doing. Because the hikers slept out in the open and ate “bad food”, the Amadiba believed they were poor people. They were called imbamba – wanderers.
“One day Wonderful [the current chairperson of the Ama-diba Coastal Development Association] met an imbamba and started talking to him. They ended up talking about development. The imbamba said our area was one of the most beautiful he had hiked in and we could make money from hikers,” Ndovela explains.
“We consulted the government officials about the idea and they were not enthusiastic. So we decided to invite this man to come and talk to us. He said we did not have to lose our land and we did not have to build any hotels.
“He was working for PondoCrop and all he did was brief us and leave. About six months later, our committee decided to invite PondoCrop to talk about the real issues involved in setting up a hiking business.”
PondoCrop told the Amadiba that the local homesteads could provide accommodation and services for the tourists. In this way, everybody could benefit from the project, not only those who were employed full-time.
“The people had lots of questions. They wanted to know if they had to buy beads to make crafts, if they had to learn new languages and change their behaviour. There were a few people who wanted to know how they could stop the umlungus [white people] from stealing their daughters,” Ndovela recalls.
He says people were so suspicious of the project they refused to sign attendance registers at the meetings because there were rumours that they were signing away their land. The amakhosi had to sign on behalf of everyone.
PondoCrop believed there would be a maximum of five workshops before the project was launched, but it took a year of meetings. “Now the project works beautifully. We use only our natural resources and existing facilities to service our tourists. The people at the homesteads set up campsites for our groups and dismantle them when they leave.
“The government officials still don’t understand what we are doing here. They complain they don’t see big houses and cars that we have bought with the money we make, which is their way of measuring progress.
“Our idea of business is not to make a few people rich, but to add to what people already have, to change their lives. When people have enough money to send their children to school, they change the lives of the next few generations.
“We have used the money in the community trust fund to build a dip for cattle, we have added two classrooms to an existing school and we are building another school.”
About 60 to 65 families benefit directly from Amadiba Adventures. A trust fund has been set up and 5% of the profits is deposited in the fund for community development. Every member of the community who offers services to tourists on the hiking trail — a horse, accommodation at their homestead, a meal or a traditional dance — gets a share of the tourists’ payment.
Amadiba has 10 full-time guides, whose lives have also improved dramatically. One of them has returned to the area from KwaZulu-Natal, where he worked in the taxi industry. He has since married and built a house for his family from money earned at Amadiba.
Lindile Mxhuma began working as a guide in August last year. He matriculated in 1999 and dreamt about becoming a teacher, but didn’t have the money to study further.
“For me, this is just a job until I save enough money to do further studies, but it is a very good job,” says Mxhuma. “I had to learn a lot more about the area I was brought up in, and how to facilitate the needs of the tourists. I now know all the names of the plants, the trees and the birds in the area. I am learning the names of the stars, because when we sit around the campfire with the tourists at night, we always look up to the heavens.
“I completed three months of practical training as a guide, but one has to learn all the time. Sometimes the tourists ask questions and I don’t know all the answers. I go and find out so when anyone asks me again, I will know what the answer is.
“My biggest problem is that some of the tourists don’t speak proper English and we struggle to communicate. My own English has improved a lot since I started this job. My favourite part of the hiking trail is the canoeing up the river to see the waterfalls and swim in the natural pools.
“The best part of this job is that it has shown me I truly love the area where I was born. We see it every day and take it for granted, but if you see it through the eyes of a tourist, you have to believe what they say — that they travel all across the world and this place is really beautiful.”
Mxhuma says despite his exposure to the outside world through his contact with the tourists on the trail — about 60% of them are foreign — he doubts that he wants to travel abroad. “I want to live here all my life. If people pay so much to come to my home and tell me it’s more beautiful than theirs, why should I pay money to go anywhere else?”
Yibin Chen, a medical student from Boston in the United States, is about to embark on a six-day horseback trail before heading back to Harvard University for his graduation. He recently completed an internship at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town and had two weeks of playtime in South Africa before returning home.
“I loved Cape Town, it was beautiful and the people were very friendly. But it could have been a city in any country. Whenever I asked people to take me out to the places where they hang out, they took me to places like the Waterfront and nightclubs that look just like the ones at home,” Chen says. “I began to feel that I was never going to see Africa. So I took a township tour with a group of German tourists. It was terrible!
“All the tourists did was jump out of the minibus every time it stopped to take a photo, then they got back in. They di not speak to anyone to find out more about the place they had just seen. So I began to feel like I was just intruding on people’s lives and not really getting to know them.
“I really wanted to see what African life was like, so I found a backpackers’ guidebook that recommended Amadiba Adventures as the best way of experiencing traditional life. I’m also excited because I’ve never been on a horse in my life.”
Like all the other Amadiba adventurers, Chen has to pack enough for six days in two small saddlebags. His dental floss fits in, but there isn’t enough space for his hair gel.
“What do I do? I want to look good for these people. I’ve been wanting to meet them for a long time,” he says.
Out comes a pair of jeans, making space for more toiletries in his saddlebag. Bags slung over his shoulder, he sets off down the beach with five French tourists, two guides and a trainee guide. He asks Mxhuma a seemingly inexhaustible list of questions.
Chen has found “the real Africa” and he is incredibly happy. But he isn’t saddle-sore yet, Mxhuma points out with a broad smile.
The European Union-funded Wild Coast Community Tourism Initiative is providing much-needed impetus for responsible tourism development along the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape. The anchor project of the programme is the development of a world-class Horse and Hiking Trail that will eventually traverse the 250km-long Wild Coast. With funding and management from the EU programme, this co-operative venture between government and local communities involves the construction of a number of community-run eco-camps at strategic locations along the coast.
Contact Amadiba Adventures at (039) 305-6455 / 7 or [email protected]