My friend Nando Padros has travelled through Europe, South America, Asia and Africa on his bicycle, doing what he can to help some of the people he meets along the way (read about him – and help his cause – at www.gambada.com). And of the many things he’s said in the many hours that we’ve spent talking at Café Mario on Knysna’s Waterfront, the two sentences that struck me most were: “you don’t see any townships anywhere else in the world – not even anywhere else in Africa.

“Only here in South Africa.”

One of the reasons this go to me had something to do with my exploration of the idea and impact of colonial tourism (search this site – you’ll see that we’ve spoken about it often enough).

This nagging feeling that there might be something ethically wrong with touring in poor areas - was it, I thought, because of my apartheid-era upbringing and the preconceptions that come from having lived a privileged life? And was I projecting my own, perhaps misguided, sensibilities onto other people - for whom (heaven help me!) I was presuming to speak?

So it was good that I accepted an invitation from Paul Miedema of Calabash Tours to enjoy a Real City Tour the last time I found myself in Port Elizabeth.

Paul was careful not to call this a township tour and wisely so: it isn’t. Nelson Sebezela, my guide for the morning (a privilege: I was the only passenger), drove me past the main landmarks of the old part of town - including a building which personified one of the many sad ironies of apartheid: it was the old police headquarters, where Steve Biko was interrogated and beaten immediately before he was transported, naked and manacled, to hospital in Pretoria (where he died, according to his family’s lawyer, Sydney Kentridge, “a miserable and lonely death on a mat on the stone floor of a prison cell”) - the same building where BJ Voster had been held – also with trial - for supporting the Ossewa Brandwag during the Second World War (imagine if they’d shared a cell. They might have talked. Imagine…).

And this is what this article is all about: talk.

Because after we’d seen the City Hall, the Feathermarket Hall, the Settler’s Cottages, the Donkin Reserve and the Opera House, we drove into those other parts of town – the bits we in South Africa call the townships (why the hell can’t we call them suburbs – like they do everywhere else in the world? everywhere else in Africa?), where I spoke to a number of people who had their own perspectives on the impact of tourism on their communities.

Now let’s get one thing straight: the places we visited might have been suburbs, but they were very, very poor suburbs and many of the people I met there relied heavily (or, in the case of the artists in a collective we visited, totally) on the tourists that Paul, Nelson and their colleagues bring around. And they rely, too, on the philanthropy of those who choose to donate via the Calabash Trust – which the company was impelled to set up because of the number of offers of help it received (a few days earlier, the Trust had put out a media release about the arrival of its 100th container load – filled mostly with good quality, used school equipment. You’ll find it in my media room).

When I mailed Paul with some of my thoughts after I returned home, he wrote back to say, “I have two comments here. The first is really more of a question: is there a transformational element in tourism? Can it in fact be used as a weapon of good (good perhaps being the preservation of the environment, pro-poor tourism, etc.) - or by nature of its part in the capitalist superstructure, will it always have more negative than positive impacts?

“The second is related. When it comes to people – say in the township context - is it perhaps a western view of privacy and fear of confronting poverty that gives rise to all our ethical thinking in this regard? Are tourists – or journalists - not bogged down in their own conventions and right/wrong world views?

“I have no definitive answers. Our company espouses the view that tourism can be benevolent and benign – and be a force for developing a common humanity. I guess in-depth research would have to be conducted to verify that. But my anecdotal experience is definitely that it is the tourist – voyeur - in the townships that imposes the issues. Locals appear to have little issue with the subject – in our Port Elizabeth experience anyway.”

And he was right.

Nombulelo Sume is the head of the Charles Duna Primary School in New Brighton (if some of these place names are familiar to you, they should be – their people featured prominently in the struggle and they were often in the news in those days). We stopped there because Calabash has an arrangement with the school to provide mid-morning refreshments.

There are 983 students (ranging in age from 5 to 14 - grade R to grade 7) at Charles Duna – all of whom come from informal settlements in the area. And 20% of whom – 20%! have no living parents.

“Our major challenge is finances,” said Ms. Sume. “Our school fees are R40.00 per year and most of them aren’t paid because 80% of my parents are not working.” And most of the orphaned children, she said, were cared for by their extended families – the other 40 lived at the Sinathemba Home.

I asked her how she felt about tourism and how it affects her community.

“With us at the school it’s… we have a library because we work with Calabash Tours, we get the tourists and we charge twenty rand for people who come here. We offer coffee, tea, drinks and rosterie, which is our African bread (it was served with jam: delicious).

“We use that money to run the school because we don’t get funds from the department: what they do is they give us a paper budget and that is never enough. You don’t get funds to pay accounts like the telephone account – the school has to make sure that it has its own money to pay for that.” (The school’s allocation for stationery for the entire year – for 983 kids – is R20,000. And no, that’s not a typo: twenty thousand rand. i.e. R20,57 per child per year. For me, that’s three reporter’s notebooks).

Ms. Sume mentioned that Nelson advised his visitors to bring stationery if they wanted to offer gifts.

“We don’t wait for the department: we go out and do things for ourselves.”

One visitor, she said, was a teacher from Scotland – who went home and collected the books that now form the core of Charles Duna’s school library. There’s also a computer centre – with ten computers that came from Holland and ten from Germany - “and now you can see the massive impact that tourism has on the school.

“I would be sad if Calabash Tours was to withdraw its efforts.”

I asked her if there was any resentment of the tourist.

“Definitely not,” she said. “And even the community, they look after the tourists because they know. We have meetings with the community and we talk about the problems that we have - and the community benefits indirectly because it’s benefiting their kids.”

She said that the school makes products in its arts classes which are often sold to visitors - and when I asked what would happen if the tourism industry were to dry up, she said, “there’s no chance of that: the country’s very stable.”

But, she said, she saw very few South African visitors and she would obviously like to see more.

“And I would like to be a tourist, too,” she said.

At Jo Slovo Primary School, head teacher Thembelile Gqunda told me that his 925 pupils lived in the surrounding informal settlements and that the Calabash Trust has helped the school to plant trench gardens (which supply its kitchen), to start a commercial soap project (hand-made soaps for the hospitality industry) – and has brought groups of young people from England’s Reed College, who really put their sweat into building his pride and joy: a proper soccer field.

“We always look forward to having tourists at the school,” said Mr. Gqunda – and it’s no disruption, either, because “our timetable is flexible and we always know in advance, because Calabash Tours is very organised.”

I asked him if, from a human perspective, there was any feeling amongst the community that the tourists who they saw were nothing more than rich voyeurs.

“No,” he said, “there’s not that feeling… the feedback that we get from parents – because what benefits their kids becomes very important to them – is only praise.

“So we embrace the programme.

“ We don’t feel that it’s taking us astray, or that it derailing us from the programme that we normally have as a school.

“We have no uncertainty about their coming…”

And from an educator’s point of view, what would the lesson be that he’d like the average visitor to take away?

“I would want them to see how beneficial tourism is and not necessarily how the school benefits from them. I would want them to benefit from the school as well for coming here. They should learn something new that they were not aware of before – as we learn something new from them.

“And of course culture-wise and in terms of history it’s always interesting to meet people from somewhere else.

“As much as we gain a lot from them, we believe they gain as much from us as well.”

… And if anything, I think it was that last sentence which opened my eyes.

BJ Vorster and Steve Biko never had the opportunity to talk – but tourists and the communities they visit do. And talk that leads to understanding is the greatest benefit of all.

Thank you, tourism, for that…

What’s Martin Reading?

I’ve recently read Nelson Mandela’s remarkable Long Walk to Freedom, George Bizos’ autobiography and Desmond Tutu’s story (Rabble Rouser for Peace) - but I think none of them sensitised me to what happened in South Africa between 1948 and 1994 as well as this book did.

Read more at the BarefootBookshop…