Should I stay or should I go? Negotiating township tours in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article focuses on township tours outside Cape Town and Johannesburg during the past decade. By examining the subjectivities of guides and tourists, as well as public discourses about townships, I argue that township tours are ethically problematic and ambiguous, but do not go uncontested. Questions about voyeurism and development are negotiated during the tours in a number of ways. First, the morality of witnessing townships – not through the modality of vision, but through participating in contact zones – is asserted. Second, public discourses that valourize the creativity of the poor, and which harness history as a force for reconciliation and development, inform the tours. Third, tour guides attempt to reform charity and to highlight ethical consumption. An ethnographic and discursive analysis leads me to conclude that township tours are part of a larger post-apartheid project of re-imagining and remaking marginalized urban spaces.