Entrepreneurship in South African township tourism: the impact of interracial social capital

Abstract

ABSTRACTEthnic entrepreneurship scholarship has demonstrated the importance of social capital for “minority” entrepreneurs, but these studies presume that social capital is co-ethnic. I complicate this assumption by investigating entrepreneurial black women and interracial social capital in South African township tourism, a niche market within the nation’s growing tourism industry. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two black townships in Cape Town, I spotlight black women who have established home-based bed and breakfasts and formed connections with white Europeans and South Africans during their entrepreneurial journeys. Employing Bourdieu’s theory of capital, I discuss how these entrepreneurs develop ties with whites to acquire social, economic, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital that have been systemically denied to them as black South African women. The interracial transference of these resources underscores the deep inequalities between blacks and whites, but also the agency of marginalized entrepreneurs to attain assets within constricting social structures.