Township day tours, South Africa

Our Sharpeville and Kathorus visits provide an authentic view of contemporary South African township life by bringing visitors in touch with local people. Our Sharpeville guide, Mirna, is a white woman who studied this aspect of South Africa’s history (a Masters degree on the memory and commemoration of iconic national events) because, as a 10-year old child, she was deeply touched by the Sharpeville massacre. It is significant that as a white woman, she has chosen to foreground this part of our past, when most white South Africans today have forgotten about this incident and its significance, or have never known about it.

Our Kathorus guides grew up and still live in Katlehong and are intimately linked to the community; Lefu Motanyane, is a musician artist who is himself part of a band and a poetry circle in the township. Visits to his area, therefore, not only give exposure to one of the lesser known – but nevertheless just as interesting and significant – townships in our country, but also allow him and his networks to share what they are doing.

In a country where formal education for black people was of such inferior quality, and is still often a stumbling block to self-development, it is our policy not to use this measure as a requirement for people to become tour guides.

Our commitment is to involving as many local people in these visits as possible; in any one visit there is not only a guide, but also a local driver, a family hosting lunch (or a home-stay), local community safety people (for longer stays) and a number of neighbours participating in intercultural discussions, depending on the size of the group. Everyone is paid for their time and contribution, unless someone wishes to join in voluntarily, over and above the allocated number of discussion partners. This is also encouraged, as often the resources of people from disadvantaged backgrounds – particularly if they are unemployed – prevents them from meeting people outside their own immediate community. Hence our Katlehong visits provide local people with a means of breaking out of the tedium of daily life, which often provides no stimulation and gives rise to hopelessness and helplessness. The secondary benefit of this kind of exposure is that people, who are not formally educated and believe they do not have anything to offer the world, begin to value their own lifestyles as something that other people want to know about and learn from. This, in itself, is a significant contributor to the building of self-worth, made more important by the fact that Apartheid systematically denied and eroded the value of African personhood, culture and life.

In the process of interacting with one another, relationships are built, some of which have been sustained over many years; in one case the visitor discovered that the young daughter of the hosting family enjoyed reading Harry Potter so regularly sent her a new Harry Potter release!

Our tours are also customised to cater for the interests of the visitors. Over the last ten years, we have had widely varied requests to visit such sectors of the population as small and medium-scale entrepreneurs, church leaders, people involved in nursing and health care, police workers, sangomas (traditional healers), people involved in the gay and lesbian movement, and community development projects. This has led to us forming links with an HIV/AIDS day-care project, which feeds 600 children per day, an old-age home and schools where visitors can volunteer their time and resources. In some cases, these links between visitors and local projects have led to visitors adopting a project and completing another phase of their support – repairing infrastructure of a crèche, painting, starting a food garden - with each returning visit.

Food is also largely bought from local, small-scale sellers, who often provide this service as the sole source of income for themselves and their families.

Above all, we are not simply a tourism enterprise. Within the context of the broader peace-building work we do, the resources gained from these tours are used to continue our Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) in prisons and schools. AVP is our social outreach work and since the South African government is unable to pay for this work, as are individual students and inmates, it is tours such as this that makes this work possible. So, every visitor who joins a tour is making it possible for one more person to participate in an AVP workshop, thus addressing the very high levels of violence in our country. Indeed, this has a very direct and positive, rehabilitative impact on inmates who participated in AVP while in prison, but who are now released and who continue to work with us. It is often extremely difficult to reintegrate into family and community after incarceration, and we provide one way of facilitating this process; not only does the released inmate experience a supportive environment when he meets visitors to his community who want to learn from him, but a powerful affirmative message is also given to his own family who witness that our company trusts him enough to want to work with him.