A growing number of her fellow visitors to South Africa seem to agree. World outrage over apartheid sparked international sanctions that squeezed South Africa’s economy until the system fell in 1994. But the memory of apartheid lives on–thanks in part to thriving tourism businesses. In the last year interest in attractions that highlight the nearly 50 years of segregation has been growing rapidly. Last week Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners languished for decades in jail, announced that 300,000 people visited its prison turned museum over the last 12 months, a record. Private tours of Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg, are booming. Four museums devoted to the apartheid era have opened in the last year, one adjacent to a casino. In Cape Town, Peni caught on to the possibilities while working as a business strategist for the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, having been publicly forgiven by the victim’s parents. He led his first tour for the charity in June. “I saw an opportunity,” he explains.
Although apartheid was unique to South Africa, the idea of teaching people a little history and making a buck off the lesson is not. “It’s well known that tourists all over the world are more and more interested in culture,” says Mohammed Valli Moosa, South Africa’s minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism. “People don’t just want to bask on the beach anymore–they want to see things they’re not able to see anywhere else in the world.” So his department promotes South Africa’s multicultural, multireligious society, an ethnic stew in which there isn’t a single majority language. And Moosa’s department hasn’t shied away from exploiting the country’s segregationist history–or, as he prefers to describe it, “the heroic struggle against racism.” A Johannesburg native, he admits to being surprised by the depth of cultural and historical interest in South Africa internationally. “I never would have thought in all my dreams that people would find this place so interesting,” he said.
The biggest attraction among apartheid-related sites is undoubtedly the Robben Island Museum, a half-hour ferry ride from the Cape Town waterfront. A national monument since 1997, the museum logged its millionth visitor last December. Much of its appeal derives from its 30 tour guides: all are former activists who were arrested by the state and imprisoned on the island.
The popularity of Robben Island has inspired other projects, some of them unusual. Last year casino developers built the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg to fulfill a public-service requirement imposed by the municipality. It’s a squat structure built on a former prison. Visitors are separated by race at the entrance, and enter through separate doors. Inside, a ceiling hung with nooses symbolizes the political prisoners hanged during apartheid. Most people balk at walking beneath them. “I’ll remember this for a long time,” says Hillary Davidson, 61, a retired British librarian. Yet as visitors exit the somber museum, they also hear the screams of people on the roller coaster at the casino across the parking lot, punctuated by a recording of elephants trumpeting.
Another new venture will revamp Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, a suburb of Johannesburg, where police raided and captured rebel leaders from the African National Congress. (Mandela, posing as a chauffeur, slept in a shed.) The co-owner, lawyer Harold Wolpe, bribed his way out of jail and fled to London. His son Nicolas, a business consultant, now plans to add a conference center to the site, which is currently a hotel. “We’re leveraging off the historical interest,” he admits freely.
In the end, and not surprisingly, it may be Mandela himself who trumps everyone at this game. Two weeks ago a series of lithographs based on his drawings of Robben Island scenes went on sale at the trendy Belgravia Gallery in London. Nearly 200 of them already have sold at [Pound sterling]1,500 each, says the gallery’s Anna Hunter, adding, “We’ve been inundated with calls from throughout the world.” Mandela’s publisher plans more exhibitions soon in the United States. Mandela also plans to go on the road next year for a series of seminars with top-level U.S. executives–just as Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton have done before him. The organizer is calling it the “Mandela Legacy Tour.” Proceeds from both the tour and the lithographs go to the Mandela Trust, which supports several children’s charities.
Not everyone is pleased with the new tourist attractions. In July several of the black tour guides at the Robben museum accused the management of corruption; the director resigned, protesting his innocence. Nearly every Soweto tour includes a visit to the small “matchbox” house in the Orlando East neighborhood where Mandela lived briefly with his second wife, Winnie, while working as a lawyer in Johannesburg. Proceeds from visits are earmarked for a charitable trust. But this year a parliamentary ethics committee reprimanded Winnie Mandikizela-Mandela, now divorced from the former president, partly for failing to disclose a financial interest in the Mandela Family Museum. Police had charged her with stocking liquor on the premises–in effect, running a speak-easy. Her trial on assorted charges of fraud and theft is pending; Mandikizela-Mandela denies the charges. Most South Africans would agree, though, that the benefits of educating locals and foreigners about the country’s traumatic past far outweigh such stumbles.
