Revisiting ‘township tourism’: multiple mobilities and the re-territorialisation of township spaces in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

This article explores themes of social space and mobility significant to tourism within the townships near Cape Town, South Africa. Research on the emergence of ‘township tourism’ has produced contrasting interpretations. Some authors describe essentialised notions of ‘Africanness’, ‘culture’, and poverty displayed for the consumption of European tourists as voyeurism. Others emphasize township tourism's grassroots potential for local development, and portray it as a form of reconciliation through the political and personal narratives shared between resident-guides and tourists. By focusing primarily on one family of township tourism ‘hosts,’ the findings presented here describe how those involved with township tourism utilized new avenues of social and physical mobility across socio-spatial boundaries that persist as legacies of apartheid. Flexible understandings of space and ‘multiple mobilities’ are considered here, and host agency is emphasized. Finally, by tracing public discourses of criminality and ‘common sense’ directed at international visitors to townships in 2010, this paper demonstrates how such narratives undermined efforts to reconfigure perceptions of township spaces. I conclude by arguing that township tourism carries the potential to map new cartographies of belonging, while also creating new exclusions.