Thinking race thinking tourism: a critical race approach to heritage and cultural tourism in KwaZulu-Natal.

Abstract

South Africa’s tourism industry continues to grow and has come to be part of the government’s developmental strategy which seeks to alleviate poverty and uplift previously disadvantaged groups. In the South African context, where there is a long history of colonization, which unfairly subdivided the country’s resources and economy, race is a crucial characteristic in the tourism sector. I use critical race theory to explore the unjust role of race and racism in the tourism sector which has ensured the failure of a post-apartheid transformation agenda by covertly perpetuating White domination. In this study, the focus is particularly on heritage and culture tourism, which encompasses even more elements of racialized exploitation. This way, the study examines the commodification of Black culture in a sector that is still largely owned by White people. The study samples a cultural village in the province of KwaZulu-Natal located in the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. The study uses a non-probabilistic purposive sampling method where the interviewed participants of the study were direct employees of the cultural village. Ultimately the study finds that there has been minimal to no change in the racial structure of the sector; which is that Whites own a lion’s share of the industry while Black people serve as employees, at times for a bare minimum wage. The study finds that the heritage and cultural tourism is racially exploitative and uneven. Worryingly, the White domination of this sector, especially in the case where Black culture is the primary commodity, is characteristic of how most industries can be argued to have functioned during the apartheid era; with Black people at the bottom.