The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

into a collaborative partnership with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) in
Cape Town, which had initiated a project to gather activist life histories “across
ideological confines” in the Western Cape. 128
During the 1990s, a biographic element also reared its head in the development of new
initiatives aimed at transforming South African tourism’s political and cultural economy.
The tourist industry had been given the responsibility of constructing, packaging, and
transmitting images and representations of the ‘new’ society and its past to a perceived
growing audience of international visitors. Tourism was seen as a system whose economic
and modernising benefits had the potential to trickle down to local communities, which
were previously marginalised. Under these circumstances in which community tourism
had become the buzzword of tourism’s democratisation, a series of localised initiatives
had emerged in different parts of the country to occupy the terrain of cultural tourism. 129
A new genre, township tours, came into existence alongside other initiatives in cultural
tourism such as ethnically‐based cultural villages and village craft project. For the most
part, as Leslie Witz and I have argued, these replicated the dominant discursive features
of the tourist gaze on South Africa, and in their varied attempts to present what they
maintained was ‘the other side’, they mostly got directed along similar routes that South
African tourism had traversed for a long time. 130 New tourism initiatives were ironically
also directed at the ‘rainbow people’ and their constitution as nation. The visit to the
cultural locality was presented as a way to know oneself and to learn about the other and
so become a nation. Acts of visiting, looking, taking in and learning in tourist
128 Omar Badsha, personal communication; ‘Memory and History’, .
See also Zubeida Jaffer (IJR researcher), ‘Honour the heroes of our struggle with something useful’,
Cape Times, 6 August 2003. To set an example of generating activist life histories, Jaffer put forward her
own narrated life in a book brought out by Kwela, publisher of women’s autobiography. See Zubeida
Jaffer, Our Generation (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2003).
129 For an extended discussion of the cultural politics of tourism in post‐apartheid South Africa, see
Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, ‘South Africa: A World in One Country ‐ Moments in International
Tourist Encounters with Wildlife, the Primitive and the Modern’, Cahiers d’Études africaines, 143,
XXXVI‐3, 1996.
130 Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, ‘South Africa: A World in One Country’.
235