South Africa's Makeover

By Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town

Ten years ago, whites needed official permits to enter black townships in South Africa. Now township tours are included in the travel packages of major South African cities, and visitors are invited to spend a night or two with a local family. "It brings out the entrepreneurs in the travel industry," says David Moshapalo, who runs a Johannesburg travel agency. "Bed-and-breakfast operations can start by opening up the family home to tourists who look to experience life with a South African family as part of their holiday."

Since the dramatic changes of the 1990s that brought South Africa out of political and economic isolation, the country has succeeded in putting itself on the international travel-and-tourism map. After Nelson Mandela's election in 1994, the number of regional and overseas holiday visitors increased 50%, to more than 5 million a year. Tourism and related industries, which contributed an estimated $11 billion to the country's gross domestic product last year, expect to quadruple that figure in the next decade.

While the dynamics of postapartheid South Africa are part of the country's draw, both government and the private sector are aiming to put the travel industry in the big leagues. The government, which has underfunded tourism promotion and infrastructure in the past two years, has identified the sector as key to helping boost employment, support rural communities and conserve the environment. A government-business partnership, set up in late 1998, is injecting some $25 million into marketing, with the aim of 20% annual growth in international tourism. The government's streamlined tourist board--SA Tourism, or SATOUR--will focus on countries such as the U.S., Britain, Germany, France and Italy, each of which already provides more than 2,000 holiday makers a month.

South Africa's diversity--from spectacular wilderness to civilized viticulture, from the complexities of tribal life to the ease of luxury rail travel, from exotic safaris to brassy casinos--is the key to its allure. The primary tourist attractions continue to be game parks and an abundance of spectacular scenery, which draw at least one-third of all vacationing visitors. The menu is being broadened to highlight South Africa's unique heritage of European and African settlement, tribal and colonial wars, pioneer voortrekkers and legendary explorers--and its rich cultural mix.

In 1997 the government drew up a marketing strategy linking tourist developments with community-based tourism products and services. It is also offering tourism training and assistance, including loans and tax concessions, to small businesses. As a result, bed-and-breakfasts have become big business as well as a bargain for holiday makers. Stellenbosch, a historic settler community in a picturesque winelands region 30 miles from Cape Town, has 105 registered bed-and-breakfasts. SATOUR has issued a 254-page accommodation guide that lists 1,877 establishments. Some are luxury guest houses, but many are in the easily affordable $20-to-$30 daily bracket.

The country has redesigned its network of well-established walks, trails and camping facilities to bring backpackers into closer contact with community-based tourist services. Escorted tours extend even to remote cultural homelands where visitors can watch Ndebele potters and beadworkers create their wares or admire the sandstone and ironwood creations of Sotho and Zulu sculptors.

Another sign of change is found in many of South Africa's national game parks, in which travelers can take a walk in the wild under the supervision of trained game rangers. Near Vendaland, in the northern part of Kruger National Park, which marks its centennial this year, Chief Joao Makuleke and his tribe have reclaimed ancestral land on which they will be allowed to operate tourist lodges in cooperation with the private sector and the park's board. In a similar land-restitution deal in the northwestern Cape's Kalahari Gemsbok Park, descendants of the San, or bushmen, will soon be offering visitors the chance to accompany them on a game trail and learn the secrets of their legendary tracking skills.

Besides undertaking its community-based initiatives, the government is cooperating with the private sector to develop ventures that will maintain South Africa's position as a world leader in wildlife and environmental conservation. For dedicated and affluent wild-animal watchers, the $40 million Cape Wildlife Reserve, with more than 60,000 acres of the Klein Karoo, east of Cape Town, will open in January 2000. The luxury game reserve, which will include executive lodges, a resort and a conference center, is reintroducing Africa's popular Big Five--elephants, buffalo, rhinos, lions and leopards--from overstocked game parks elsewhere in the country to the Western Cape, where they have all but vanished.

But investments in environmental protection, community development and marketing will matter little if soaring crime is not brought under control. Even with a recently announced crackdown, travelers are still a good deal safer in the wide-open spaces than in South African cities, where muggings and more violent crimes are rarely out of the news. Despite plans to clean up Johannesburg and revive its commercial heart, the country's northern gateway remains economically distressed. The Carlton, the city's main hotel, closed down last year. To avoid the dangers of the former gold-mining center, many visitors begin their stay instead in the wealthy new Rosebank-Sandton area to the north, which offers luxury hotels, office blocks and shopping malls. From there they travel to the eastern game parks of Mpumalanga (formerly the eastern Transvaal), the casino resort of Sun City or the Indian Ocean beaches of Durban, which is host to the country's largest convention center.

Cape Town, in the south, remains the country's key tourist destination, visited by more than half of all foreign vacationers. Over the past two years, 30 new hotels have opened, doubling capacity. The city holds one of the most potent symbols of the new--and old--South Africa: a 30-minute cruise away from its Waterfront lies Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent most of his 27 years of imprisonment. It is now a museum and national monument. In the nearby hinterland, the Mediterranean-style wine lands provide travelers with more evidence of change: a growing number of wineries are run by workers descended from former slaves. Such black entrepreneurship is a beacon for the travel industry and the economy. "We can benefit by using our own culture for tourism," says Paula Gumede, who runs an agency that takes visitors on tours of Cape Town's black townships. "People at grassroots level need to claim tourism for their own."