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How to cite this thesis

Surname, Initial(s). (2012). Title of the thesis or dissertation (Doctoral Thesis / Master’s Dissertation). Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/102000/0002 (Accessed: 22 August 2017). Cultural tourism and representation strategies in the South African context: a case study of the Baleni and Fundudzi cultural camps on the Limpopo African Ivory Route

Varona Sathiyah

Submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg in fulfilment of the requirements of a PhD in the Communication Studies Department

November 2019

Declaration

I, Varona Sathiyah (student number: 216091558), hereby declare that this thesis is my own original work, has not been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university, and that the sources used have been acknowledged by complete references. This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in the Communication Studies Department in the School of Communication in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg.

Signature: Date: November 2019

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to my supervisor, Prof Keyan Tomaselli and my co-supervisor Prof Pier Paolo Frassinelli for their tireless support and immense patience throughout this undertaking. This research would not have been possible had it not been for their exceptional generosity. They covered the costs of the fieldwork from their respective research accounts. I am indebted to them for their unwavering commitment to this endeavour.

My inclusion in Prof Tomaselli’s Rethinking Indigeneity project and the Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS) has been the most influential and immersive socialisation process. The project embodies the tenets of collaborative learning. I express my gratitude to my fellow field trip travellers and in-situ mentors, Dr Shanade Barnabas and Dr Vanessa Wijngaarden. Thanks go to my phenomenal colleagues at the Communication Studies Department at UJ. I am appreciative of the time that Prof Mariekie Burger created in my schedule by reducing my teaching responsibilities for 2018.

I am indebted to the National Research Foundation (NRF): Social Sciences and Humanities for their financial support through their award of a merit bursary. My thanks go to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg for their financial support. Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily shared by the NRF or the University of Johannesburg. Thanks to Transfrontier Parks Destinations (TFPD) for facilitating my research at the cultural camps on the African Ivory Route, and particularly to Glynn O’ Leary and Eleanor Muller for responding to my queries. I appreciate the assistance provided by the staff and community members at the camps, particularly, Personia Makhongele, Mapula Malatji, Nelson Maphaha and Tshifhiwa Khangale for accompanying me during the interviews and assisting as translators. I appreciate the emotional support and concern expressed by Lindsay Leslie, Collen Chambwera, Prof Nyasha Mboti, Antoinette Hoffman, Dr Itunu Bodunrin and Dr Julie Grant. I am also grateful for the detailed comments provided by the three examiners. My extended family is a community-of-practice when it comes to fostering educational attainment. Devona, you got me through this.

The final thank you goes to my parents, Vincent and Cheryl.

Abstract:

This undertaking investigated whether the success of cultural tourism ventures depended on the intangible mental representations of a destination as opposed to the tangible infrastructural and physical aspects of a space. The hypothesis was that the creation and proliferation of anchoring narratives imbues a sense of authenticity, mysticism and intrigue to differentiate one destination from similar offerings. The Tsonga community of the Baleni cultural camp and the Venda community of the Fundudzi cultural camp respectively, both on the African Ivory Route in Limpopo, South Africa were the communities investigated. It is maintained that the intangible value contained in the narratives centred around the people, animals and ecological phenomena at a particular place bolsters the efficacy and desire for cultural tourism.

The theory of perspectivism underpins how indigenous cosmologies incorporate natural phenomena and the mythology around sentient animals and plants into their worldviews and perceptions of reality. This theory was used in conjunction with Tzvetan Todorov’s literary theory of the fantastic—the liminal space between belief and disbelief—to delineate the scope of the investigation. Critical indigenous methods of inquiry were used to collect data through in-depth interviews of community members that resided close to the cultural camps. This method uses the worldview of the indigenous community as the starting point for the undertaking. Field notes derived from my participant observation were used to triangulate the data from the interviews.

The findings indicate that syncretic religious and cultural practices that merge indigenous beliefs with Christianity are pivotal in representing the performed sacredness of ancestrally sanctioned natural ecological phenomena such as lakes, forests, hot springs, mounds of compacted plant-material that wobbled when stepped on and the demonstration of traditional salt-harvesting practices at the Klein Letaba river. These myths incorporate tales of rare animals such as white lions and white pythons. The intangible aspects of creating a sense of place—as opposed to only representing a geographical space—is indispensable to the cultural tourism strategies identified in this case study.

Figure 1: Map showing the 10 African Ivory Route camps in Limpopo Province (www.africanivoryroute.co.za). (Adapted from Sheik 2013).

Fundudzi Camp

Baleni Camp

Contents Declaration ...... 2

Acknowledgements ...... 3

Abstract: ...... 4

Figure 1: Map showing the 10 African Ivory Route camps in Limpopo Province (www.africanivoryroute.co.za). (Adapted from Sheik 2013)...... 5

Chapter One: Introduction—it takes a village to maintain the African Ivory Route: origins of the route ...... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Problem statement ...... 10

Research questions ...... 10

Organogram depicting the ownership hierarchy of the AIR camps: ...... 11

Chapter Two: Establishing the parameters of study within the literature ...... 24

Cultural villages: from questionable beginnings to a legitimate present ...... 27 The myth of the African Ivory Route ...... 41 Place and space: the creation of a myth ...... 53

Chapter Three: Theoretical Framework...... 63

Chapter four: Methodology—off to the field we go ...... 73

The research team at the Mukumbani village at the Fundudzi cultural camp, November 2017. Photo 1 ...... 76

Research design and data collection and sampling process ...... 85 Methods of Data Analysis ...... 101

Chapter Five104 Data Analysis chapter—finding meaning in the chaos ...... 104 6

Access road to the Baleni camp. November 2017 Photo 2 ...... 105

Rondavels at the Baleni cultural camp. November 2017. Photo 3...... 106

Rondavel at the Fundudzi Cultural Camp. November 2017. Photo 4 ...... 106

A fenced-off garden plot at one of the houses in the Mukumbani village at the Fundudzi camp. November 2017. Photo 5 ...... 107

Table 1: Demographic details of staff members and people who opted to be identified by their names as opposed to using a pseudonym at the respective camps in May 2016 and November 2017...... 108 Figure 2: Map showing the villages in relation to the distance of the Baleni cultural camp…110

Figure 3: Map depicting villages in relation to the Fundudzi camp ...... 111

Table 2: Demographic details of respondents at the villages. Pseudonyms are used here as the respondents chose to remain anonymous ...... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Chapter Six: Conclusion—the “other” is not so othered after all ...... 154

Bibliography: ...... 159

Primary sources ...... 159

Secondary sources ...... 159

Appendices ...... 187

Appendix 1: Interview schedule and focus group discussion questions ...... 187

Appendix 2: Tsonga woman in a combination of modern and traditional attire. Photo credit (Siebert 2017)...... 188

Appendix 3: Informed consent form ...... 189

Appendix 4: Screenshot of the marketing material at the Fundudzi cultural camp...... 190

Appendix 5: Screenshot of the marketing material of the Baleni cultural camp...... 191

Chapter One Introduction—it takes a village to maintain the African Ivory Route: origins of the route

This chapter outlines the trajectory of the African Ivory Route (AIR) as a tourism venture initiated by the Limpopo Provincial Tourism Department in 1998 until the lease agreement with Transfrontier Parks Destinations came into effect in April 2012. The AIR was conceptualised around the idea of a “golden horse shoe” a reference made to the “diverse culture, wildlife, unique and exceptional natural features and archaeological sites based along a broad arc of land along the eastern, northern and western boundaries of the province” (AIR Operational and Development Plan 1999: 2; Sheik 2013: 3). The poor state of the rural roads and a lack of formally built structures made the route ideal for adventure-seeking tourists looking for a wilderness experience. This was perceived as a positive factor as the AIR Operational and Development Plan explicitly states that:

The limited and poor infrastructure that characterise these areas and which would generally be perceived as a major constraint for tourism development and utilisation, in fact suits the adventure tourism market and in particular the emerging 4x4 market, which does not require the provision of extremely expensive infrastructure, particularly roads of a high standard (1999: 2).

The Limpopo Tourism Department decided to make the route appear as rustic as possible. Of the ten envisioned sites, five were designed with East African-styled tented camps while the other five were to be rondavel (round)-styled traditional huts with thatched roofs. The camps were designed to be immersed in the character of the environment within which they were to be located. Water was to be obtained from boreholes using solar-powered pumps. No provision was made for electricity or telephone lines. The only means of communication would be through radio transmitter “walkie-talkies” provided to the camp managers (AIR Operational and Development Plan 1999: 4-6). The sites for the camps were chosen in remote rural areas, sometimes, within established Game Reserves or nature conservation areas. The remote nature of the camps was taken into consideration when decisions were made about their size and accommodation capacity as outlined in the AIR Operational and Development Plan:

Camps will be developed on state land (including communal land) or community-owned land, both inside and outside of protected areas. Camps will be kept small—10 beds per camp—to 8

minimize environmental impact….The areas include the Olifantsriver and Drakensberg escarpment, the ‘Big 5’ Lowveld area along the western boundary of the Kruger National Park, the Limpopo Valley, the Soutpansberg, Blouberg and the Waterberg (1999: 2-3).

The camps were to be built in the following areas respectively, at the Manyeleti Game Reserve, Letaba Ranch, Modjadji, Fundudzi, Makuya Park, Limpopo Valley, Blouberg, Masebe, Mokolo Dam, Baleni Salt Pan and Mafefe (AIR Operational and Development Plan 1999: 3). It was determined at the conception of the route that an external service-provider would be appointed to manage the guest reservation system. This was outlined in the development plan as: “a marketing and booking agent, responsible for central reservations, marketing and financial administration, will also be appointed by the board” (AIR Operational and Development Plan 1999: 7).This was emphasised as one of the development objectives as such:

To promote responsible tourism (for its contribution to economic growth and social upliftment) through sustainable utilisation of the natural, cultural and archaeological assets of the province…. To empower local communities and local entrepreneurs to become participants in and beneficiaries of the tourism industry (AIR Operational and Development Plan 1999: 2).

The management structure of the AIR stakeholder plan was designed to enable the respective communities who are adjacent to the camps to form the primary co-operative and have an input in the operation of the camps. This was followed by the overarching structure of the Limpopo Economic Development, Environment and Tourism Department (LEDET) that appointed the Limpopo Business Support Agency (LIBSA) to provide management support to the AIR co-operative. Transfrontier Parks Destinations (TFPD) entered this management collaboration structure in 2012 (AIR Management Agreement 2012: 4). TFPD is a tourism operating company defined as:

a private Black Economic Empowerment company registered in South Africa that specializes in managing, marketing and operating community-owned tourism accommodation establishments…. TFPD’s modus operandi is to “partner with communities to make a difference” (AIR Management Agreement 2012: 3).

TFPD is part of the AIR secondary co-operative. This legally constituted grouping: was established when the provincial government transferred ownership of the AIR to this entity representing the local communities. Provincial government took this step when, after 2011, several tourism camps ceased operation due to financial constraints and a resulting lack of maintenance. TFPD teamed up with the provincial department, and continued to work 9

together with all the communities…. To try and promote tourism as a viable livelihood strategy (Boonzaaier and Wels 2018 a: n.p).

The AIR secondary co-operative entered into a twenty-five year lease agreement with representatives of respective communities for the land on which the camps are situated. The secondary co-operative includes the members of the primary co-operative community representatives, enabling the individual communities to influence the operational functioning of the camps. The layers of interlinked management structures support the assertion made by the title of this section in that it takes a village to maintain the African Ivory Route.1

Problem statement

This study aimed to ascertain the influence, if any, that intangible heritage—namely narratives and cultural representations centred around people, animals and ecological phenomena at the Fundudzi and Baleni cultural camps—exert on cultural tourism. These two camps were chosen due to them both being cultural camps as opposed to safari camps as well for their relative proximity to Johannesburg, where I am based, in comparison to the other three cultural camps.

Research questions

1. To ascertain whether indigenous folklore and storytelling practices of the Venda and Tsonga communities respectively, influence the cultural tourism interactions with guests at the cultural camps. 2. To establish if and how these spiritual and ecological narratives affect representational practices of the two indigenous communities in their engagement with tourists. 3. To gauge whether popular, mediated depictions of the two communities, influence the expectations and depictions of intangible traditional practices such as the performance of cultural dances, salt-harvesting and storytelling, among other activities in the tourism enterprise.

1 This is a reference to Hillary Clinton’s phrase: “It takes a village to raise a child”. It is an old African proverb. 10

Organogram depicting the ownership hierarchy of the AIR camps:

1998- Limpopo Economic Development, Environmental and Tourism Department (LEDET) established the AIR with the Limpopo Business Support Agency (LIBSA).

2011- LEDET approached TFPD to enter into a 25- year lease

agreement to manage the AIR camps as the occupancy rates were low.

2012-until present: TFPD manages camps in collaboration with a

secondary co-operative constituted by representatives from the

communities surrounding the camps as well as a primary co-operative

constituted by the various NGO stakeholders, community representatives

and community mediators.

Rationale for study

These avenues of inquiry are undertaken with the aim of ascertaining whether, and if so, how intangible value contained in the narratives centred around the people, animals and ecological phenomena at a particular place bolsters the efficacy and desire for cultural tourism. Intangible heritage comprises of the knowledge and/or skills that are embodied in people through cultural practices such as storytelling, dances, and beliefs that are recognised as part of a shared culture. These practices are contained within the shared cultural memory of members of a community as opposed to being embodied in tangible objects. It is not static, but changes and adapts according to both societal and environmental needs. It is not anchored within a mythical, primitive past (Ruggles and Silverman 2009: 1-2). This is important because storytelling is an aesthetic expression of identity formation and a representation strategy that is employed by some indigenous communities (Lange and Dyll-Myklebust 2015: 1). It is of particular value to investigate indigenous knowledge systems as it is deemed as a subjugated knowledge (Foucault 1980). Delving into the histories and modes of culture transmitted through oral storytelling allows knowledge production to transcend positivist forms of knowledge that is reified by society (Agrawal 1995: 417). Narratives depicting the experiences, beliefs and worldviews of indigenous communities are often deemed less important than the narratives derived from a framework of positivist science by orthodox school systems (Smith 1999). This dichotomy between positivist science and indigenous knowledge needs to be diminished in order to integrate both modes of knowledge for a holistic understanding of the world (Dyll 2018: 334; Agrawal 1995: 417). Moreover, it falls within the ambit of the decolonisation movement to incorporate indigenous knowledge into knowledge production practices (Frassinelli 2018 a : 4; Lange and Dyll-Myklebust 2015: 5). The narratives of the Tsonga and Venda community members who reside close to the cultural camps examined in this thesis adds to the corpus of previously subjugated knowledge (Foucault 1980).

Methodological choices and limitations Both time and financial constraints curtailed the depth and scope of this undertaking. There was a limited amount of time spent conducting fieldwork (around 20 days in total). This is an admittedly short fieldwork period from which to draw conclusions. However, it should be acknowledged that researchers from the global south, conducting research in the global south, face a myriad of challenges that are not necessarily faced by researchers with adequate

financial resources. I worked as an assistant lecturer on a fixed-term contract while completing this thesis. My teaching commitments did not allow me to spend extended periods in the field. Fieldwork was conducted in intermittent “bursts”, as time and money allowed. I am an intermittent researcher (Barnabas 2018). This research draws from Zuleika Sheik’s (2013) Masters dissertation, entitled “Reviving ‘white elephants’- a culture-centred approach to the African Ivory Route tourism partnership”. Sheik’s in-depth analysis of the incorporation of the cultural stories, practices and norms of the communities within the camps’ marketing and development policies was used to complement this study. Sheik’s study laid the groundwork for this study by identifying the numerous stakeholders involved in the public-private-and-community partnerships on the AIR while emphasising how researchers had to “cobble together” different sources of information from various stakeholders in order to attain a holistic view of the operational structures at the camps.

Guests at the respective cultural camps were not interviewed. The fieldwork was conducted during times that the camps were under renovation so there were no guests at the camps when the research team visited. Conflicting teaching schedules of the research team had to be taken into account when planning the dates of the trips. The team was only available to stay at the camps for weeks at a time. The impressions of the camps were complemented by journalists’ reports of the camps and the surrounding areas as well as accounts from guests on online tourism accommodation rating websites, which included perceptions of tourism expectations from popular media sources such as books, television series, movies, websites and tourism marketing brochures. My personal impressions and experiences, as well as those of my fellow researchers2 on the fieldtrips were corroborated to bolster and add nuance to the veracity of the findings. The methods of autoethnography and self-reflexivity are used to analyse the data.

Autoethnography is a research method that uses the researcher’s subjective positionality as the filtering lens through which the phenomenon under investigation is interpreted. It relies on anecdotes, vignettes, and in the case of evocative ethnography, emotions and streams of consciousness to convey a perspective (Bochner and Ellis 2016: 47; Tomaselli et al. 2008: 347; Tomaselli et al. 2013: 479). In line with this methodological choice, personal reflections

2 The May 2016 research team comprised of my supervisor, Prof Tomaselli, my co-supervisor, Prof Frassinelli and my colleague Dr Barnabas who has conducted extensive fieldwork among the Platfontein artists in the Northern Cape. The November 2017 team was constituted by the previous researchers with the addition of Dr Wijngaarden, an ethnographer and anthropologist who conducts research with the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania. Members of the research team advised on how to conduct fieldwork within indigenous communities. 13

of my own experiences are interspersed throughout the thesis to illustrate theoretical concepts or arguments. The tenets of Critical Indigenous Qualitative Methodologies (Denzin et al. 2008)—in which the worldviews of the indigenous community is used as the starting point of the investigation—are used to delineate the parameters of the study. Members of the communities that resided closest to the cultural camps were interviewed to gauge their perceptions and level of engagement with cultural tourism at the Fundudzi and Baleni camps.

For the purposes of this study, the term community refers to Venda or Tsonga people who live in proximity to the cultural camps. It does not encompass all Venda or Tsonga people living in the villages around the camps. There is a distinction drawn between a cultural village and a cultural camp—a cultural village is a commoditised space used to depict an essentialised and often anachronistic version of a culture (van Veuren 2004), while cultural camps, like those on the African Ivory Route are established primarily to provide tourist accommodation. When there are cultural activities and engagements at cultural camps, they occur on a more social basis and within a less overtly commoditised framework (Boonzaaier and Wels 2018).

Theoretical parameters of the study Tzvetan Todorov’s (1975) literary theory of the fantastic is used to shape this study. In Todorov’s conceptualization of the term, the notion of the fantastic is not used to denote something that is fake or unbelievable. It has a very specific meaning—and in this case—is used to refer to the split-second moment of hesitation between belief and disbelief. Judgement has not been passed about the veracity of a phenomenon. This is a study based on investigating narratives and practices within an African cosmological framework, and it may seem to be counterintuitive to use a western-derived theory to make sense of African cosmologies, however, there is a precedent for this theory being used to explain the scientifically inexplicable in the global south (see Tomaselli 2015). Similarly, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2015) theory on perspectivism—an Amerindian belief that all the different lifeforms, be it ecological, human, or animal, are animated by a single life force—a single soul that sustains the universe is used in conjunction with Todorov’s (1975) theory of the fantastic. This combination is apt as this study interrogates issues around indigenous peoples’ narratives, beliefs and practices.

Public-Private partnerships: refuting allegations as the Trojan horse of neo-liberal capital 14

Public and private partnerships refer to collaborations between the private business sector and government departments at the national, provincial or regional level (Miraftab 2004: 89). These partnerships are sometimes viewed as governmental departments acting as a mediator to encourage community participation in order to collude with the needs of neo-liberal capitalism for the benefit of the business, not necessarily for the benefit of the communities (Ashley and Haysom 2006: 273). The concept of the Trojan horse, where something initially appears as a gift but is actually to the detriment of those who receive it, is used to illustrate this allegation (Miraftab 2004: 89). I became aware of the tensions and scepticism surrounding public and private partnerships when my lecturer at the time, Dr Lauren Dyll, was accused of being a handmaiden for big capital when she presented a study on ≠Khomani development narratives at a conference on Bushman studies at Pietermaritzburg in 2013 (Dyll 2014). The critic, a delegate at the conference, assumed that even the remote rural beneficiaries of public-private partnerships are somehow prejudiced when included into poverty alleviation projects (see Koot 2016; and Tomaselli’s 2017 reply.) I provide an outline of the strategic partnerships that are employed by the stakeholders on the African Ivory Route (AIR) in order to pre-empt any allegation with regard to this study. It is important that it be understood that the AIR was initially state-funded by the Limpopo provincial government.

The AIR was conceptualized as a potential tourism venture in 1998, by the Limpopo Provincial Tourism department, known then as Limpopo Economic Development, Environment and Tourism (LEDET) (AIR Operational and Development plan 1999: 2). The camps were built, training was provided to the camp staff and camps started operating in 2001 (field notes May 2016; interview with Nelson Maphaha, camp guide 20 May 2016). All the AIR staff were employed and trained by LEDET. However, by 2011, the occupancy rates at the camps had dropped drastically and financial constraints hindered the maintenance of the camps and the surrounding roads (Boonzaaier and Wels a 2018: n.p). This is when LEDET opted to introduce a strategic partner from the private sector to manage the AIR. TFPD signed the management agreement and took responsibility for the management of the AIR camps in April 2012 (AIR Management Agreement 2012). TFPD then leveraged existing business networks to work with CESVI, an Italian non-governmental organisation specializing in development processes to add solar panels and waste recycling facilities to the camps (Siebert 2017: 2). TFPD liaised with Peterson Phasha, a “community mobiliser”, to 15

serve as a mediator to represent the needs of the respective communities and to act as a link between TFPD, CESVI, and the respective communities.

An inclusive consultation process occurred between the AIR camp staff and TFPD management before the management transfer from LEDET to TFPD had been finalized. A camp manager at the Modjadji camp, Lazarus Mokoena explains his experience of events in 2012 as follows:

Any new thing makes you nervous, you see, so like immediately when TFPD came in to do partnership [sic] with African Ivory Route we wanted to know exactly what was going to happen here because it affects our wellbeing…. We can see that there is light…. Yeah, change is something else, but if you are informed in the right way, you won’t be nervous…. Here we have been informed in advance, we were told that 1, 2, 3 will happen so we were not nervous with the new management. Even before they [TFPD] could operate, we sat down, they told us their plans, we told them our plans and we combined it (Interview 16 May 2016).

Another guide at Modjadji, Adolph Makita, concurred that meaningful collaborative processes had taken place. He commented that: “TFPD asked us what plans we had for the camp and they took note of our advice” (Interview 16 May 2016). When working with community-based tourism enterprises, it is vital that the needs of the surrounding communities are considered in the operational and management aspects of the camp. In order for community-based tourism ventures to be sustainable in the long-term, community members and relevant stakeholders must be consulted (Okazaki 2008: 515; Jamal and Stronza 2009: 169; Dyll 2009: 41). The communities surrounding the camps were not consulted during the initial establishment of the route in 1999. It was a largely ‘top-down’ process that was implemented by LEDET to foster poverty alleviation practices (Mafisa 1999: 25). As both Adolph and Lazarus were from the community surrounding the camp, their contribution to the discussion was invaluable. Additionally, there is the secondary co- operative committee that is comprised of representatives of all ten camps, so some degree of community participation is always present in the management of the AIR. Moreover, TFPD does not own any of the camps. All the camps on the route are leased on a 25 -year agreement with the secondary co-operative (AIR Management Agreement 2012).

Tourism operators are not primarily development workers: the story of !Xaus Lodge !Xaus Lodge is a public-private-and-community owned tourism venture located in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in the Northern Cape. The lodge was conceptualized, funded, 16

and built under the auspices of a committee of stakeholders, which included the South African National Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT), the indigenous community landowners—the Mier and the ≠Khomani—and South African National Parks (SANParks)—the legal body responsible for maintaining the country’s national nature conservation parks. This committee signed called the !Ae ! Hai Kalahari Heritage Park agreement in 2002 which stipulated that a tourism lodge would be built on the imaginary central point that divided the Mier and ≠Khomani land obtained as a result of a successful 1999 land restitution claim. The lodge would be jointly managed by key stakeholders on the committee (Dyll-Myklebust 2012: 7; Dyll-Myklebust and Finlay 2012).

This is a very broad overview of the circumstances related to the establishment of the lodge. These shortcomings were encountered as a result of the poor design and lack of proper planning when constructing the physical infrastructure over the dunes. DEAT and the lodge’s builders ignored warnings that were identified by the ≠Khomani early on in the construction of the lodge about the inappropriateness of the design for desert conditions. In addition:

Mismanagement of funds by the Community Property Association (CPA) and lack of support from the government in providing funds for training…. was compounded by a lack of “buy- in” from the ≠Khomani community…. Community division, communal alcohol abuse….It is located far from the tourist route…. The Mier and the ≠Khomani owners had largely written off the project which they saw as being neglected for five years (Dyll-Myklebust 2012: 110- 111).

The “politically-correct” best practice decision to build the lodge as a symbol of reconciliation in an imaginary middle point of recently restituted land ownership of the Mier and the ≠Khomani communities respectively, translated into a very poor practical and logistical choice for the lodge. In a bid to make the lodge seem accessible to both communities, it had the unintended effect of making the lodge almost inaccessible to tourists. The infrastructure is built on a sand dune far from the established tourist tracks in the very remote Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. This has negative implications for logistical issues such as transportation to the lodge with tourists having to travel over 36 kilometres of sand dunes from the graded and maintained Park gravel road. Efficient refuse removal services do not exist, there is a lack of adequate food or water storage facilities and the sheer distance to shopping facilities to procure food and other necessities (750 km round trip), made the operation of the lodge very expensive and onerous to say the least (Dyll-Myklebust 2012: 115). The lodge would have possibly sunk into the sand and rotted without tourists as many 17

other ill-conceived, poverty-alleviation tourism ventures in South Africa have done had TFPD not intervened in 2007. The concept of tourism infrastructure dotting the South African landscape while lying empty is so commonplace in South Africa that the phrase “white- elephants” has been used in colloquial parlance to describe them. The term white elephant refers to something that is expensive to maintain but not necessarily of practical use (see Sheik 2013; Cowie 1892).

Our research team walked through a beautiful and majestic-looking tourism lodge called “Queen Modjadji the fifth” while on the fieldtrip to Modjadjiskloof in 2016. The lodge was gated and smothered by thick shrubbery. The lone security guard on being asked why the place was not open to tourists, responded that a dispute around who would run the lodge and who would benefit from it resulted in its closure until the matter was resolved. This is one of the consequences of the overcomplicated national, provincial and local structures, stratified by traditional structures and confusing ownership. This bureaucratic red tape leads to ‘white elephants’. The local contestations by different constituencies over these poorly located ventures wrecks the investment potential because of local conflicts. These are ‘development narratives’ also, but which result in failure and waste. Judging from the level of plant-growth enmeshing the never used, decaying physical infrastructure, one would presume that the dispute is perennial. Such was the threat facing !Xaus Lodge also, until the province advertised the lodge management tender, of which TFPD was the only bidder. When tourism operators partner with local communities, it does not necessarily lead to an exploitative relationship, as will be discussed below. Power relations are a fluid, diverse, and constantly shifting entity and indigenous communities employed in the tourism industry can and do exert a sense of agency with regard to matters that influence their livelihoods and wellbeing (Wearing and McDonald 2002: 197; Rossi 2004: 1). Some academic scholars focus so intensely on the development aspect of tourism in indigenous communities that they blur the functions of development workers and tourism operators. Stasja Koot—a tourism and development scholar—claims that Transfrontier Parks Destinations—the tourism operating company that manages !Xaus Lodge—is not doing enough to empower the community. The communities referred to are the Mier and ≠Khomani communities respectively. He explicitly states that: “managers with skills and expertise in tourism are not necessarily qualified as development field workers” (Koot 2016: 1212). Koot seems to work from a standpoint that the primary goal of tourism 18

operators is to provide development and empowerment to indigenous communities, and in his critique of !Xaus he actually ignores the audited financial statements that indicate substantial monetary benefits for the two indigenous owner communities. The rescued !Xaus—as small as it is—is indicative of the general argument that located tourism as one of the major economic drivers of job creation in South Africa (Ivanovic 2008; Allen and Brennan 2004; Saarinen and Rogerson 2015).

Indigenous communities sometimes damage their own prospects of success by unprofessional and inappropriate behaviour. Beneficiaries of tourism enterprises sometimes mishandle funds, or engage in drunken behaviour at work and insult tourists (Tomaselli 2012: 163). I had an experience on a fieldtrip in the Northern Cape in 2010 when a ≠Khomani man was visibly intoxicated while selling crafts at his roadside stall, making disparaging comments about tourists, myself included, when we stopped at his stall to buy crafts (field notes July 2010). As much as it is important to conduct critical indigenous qualitative research (Denzin and Lincoln 2008), and to hear the voice of local stakeholders to capture the complexity of the development process (Dyll-Myklebust 2014: 524), it should also be noted that the individual voices of stakeholders are not unproblematic and can be exploitative or self- serving. Some ≠Khomani Bushmen who sell crafts from roadside stalls at Witdraai in the Northern Cape often employ discourses of guilt and dispossession in order to persuade tourists to buy crafts from them. A researcher conducting fieldwork in the Northern Cape, Nhamo Mhiripiri, recounted an experience with a ≠Khomani Bushman, Silikat van Wyk, at a roadside craft stall. van Wyk engaged Mhiripiri in a conversation about how he (van Wyk) was exploited and had numerous difficulties in life, and indirectly implicated Mhiripiri in the chain of his exploitation by fostering feelings of guilt by association in the academic research enterprise. The playful accusatory narrative was completed with a plea for Mhiripiri to buy one of the crafts at the stall (Mhiripiri 2012). Although feelings of guilt are often used as a marketing strategy to incite tourists to buy crafts, it is not necessarily good for the tourism practice in the area as a whole (see McLennan-Dodd 2003; Dyll 2003 for descriptions of similar encounters). Development and poverty alleviation may be a positive by-product of the tourism enterprise, but a sense of clarity should prevail when evaluating the role of tourism operating companies in South Africa as they are not to be conflated with development workers.

TFPD aims to foster a mutually beneficial relationship with the respective communities. The company’s Chief Executive Officer, Glynn O’ Leary explains TFPD’s function and aim with regard to the collaborative nature of the tourism venture:

We embarked on this journey of “partnering with communities to commercialise their tourism assets” as a means of creating sustainable job opportunities and economic activity in what are generally poor rural communities (TFPD 2017: 13). This view of a partnership between the stakeholders would appear to foster an egalitarian mode of operation between TFPD—the tourism operating company—and the respective indigenous communities. Communities may own the tourism assets but they may lack the social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) necessary to appeal to and service the particular tastes of the subset of cultural tourists. The tourism operator often serves as a mediator to cater to the needs and expectations of culturally discerning tourists.

Self-appointed activists of the indigenous: we don’t need another hero3 Heritage and tourism scholars, among others, caution against the dangers of commodifying cultural heritage to the extent that it becomes kitschy (Marschall 2004; Cohen 1988; and Ivanovic 2008; Rogerson and Visser 2004). Marschall uses the example of the UShaka Marine world in Durban. 4 The theme park and aquarium uses traditional Zulu iconography such as shields, spears and circular thatched roofed structures to convey a sense of Zulu identity in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, dubbed “The Kingdom of the Zulu”, by the province’s tourism marketing campaigns (2004: 108). However, Marschall observes that far from being viewed as offensive by some people of Zulu heritage, the overt use of Zulu cultural motifs led to a sense of self-esteem and pride. She describes her belief-challenging experience at the 2002 South African Historical Association (SAHA) conference as follows:

While many of the contributions by white academics manifested a highly critical or negative attitude, “heritage” was clearly perceived as positive and empowering by some of the black African participants. For many previously oppressed communities, it represents a form of validation and acknowledgement—at long last—of their own culture as history (2004: 109).

This rejection of the scholarly perception of heritage items being viewed as tokenistic and exploitative, in contrast to the sense of pride that it garners in the lived-experience context, points to the complexity of relationships in postcolonial discourses (Marschall 2004: 110; see Barnabas 2014). The Khomani development narratives identified by Dyll work similarly,

3 Title of Tina Turner’s 1985 hit song “We don’t need another hero”. 4 See website https://ushakamarineworld.co.za Date accessed: 19 February 2019. 20

they have meaning for those who hold them and provide discursive frameworks that can shape actual project implementation in ways that make sense to the beneficiaries. Where such narratives articulate local ways of making sense of projects, for researchers who reference broader theories of explanation that frame their responses differently, there will always be dissociated interpretations. The issue is not to privilege one explanation as politically correct, but to understand how different narratives came about. This is precisely what Tomaselli (2017) did when he examined Koot’s neo-Marxist interpretation which misunderstood David Harvey’s (2002) theory of neoliberalism framework and found it wanting in the way it was applied, incorrectly assuming as he did that the 24 bed !Xaus was an exemplar of the negative machinations of global capital.

A similar phenomenon was found with regard to the representation of the Bushmen in The gods must be crazy (1980, 1989) movies by Jamie Uys. Many international scholars had deemed the films to be racist and demeaning to the Bushmen. However, when the actual Bushmen audiences and actors in the movie were asked about their perceptions of the films, it was found that they enjoyed the films. They appreciated the humour in the film without attributing any insidious intent on the part of the director other than a complaint about low wages paid to the Bushman actors (Tomaselli 1990, 2006). The ≠Khomani Bushmen of the Northern Cape are also used as examples to illustrate concepts or arguments due to my familiarity with members of that community as I conducted research there for my Honours treatise. Another film about the Bushmen called: Voices of our forefathers (2008) was viewed in a positive manner by the Khwe community members portrayed in it as opposed to it being seen as an essentialist depiction (Dockney 2011). When members of the Khwe community had watched the film in their local community hall, they were proud to see their traditional knowledge and culture depicted on film. The film had attracted criticism from scholars for essentialising the Khwe culture (Dockney 2011). However, the community members themselves had enjoyed and appreciated their identification in the film. This brings to the fore the question of who is authorised to represent and to speak for whom. Keyan Tomaselli maintains the following view: “Indigeneity is a contemporary performance of the self, enacting a restoration of relations for historical purposes. The notion assumes a genealogically-oriented idea of history where informants name themselves in terms of historical processes” (2012: 31). With regard to the Fundudzi and Baleni cultural camps, the community members who reside close to the camps and are involved in the cultural activities 21

at the camp have the opportunity to shape how they represent themselves as they often engage directly with tourists (field notes May 2016 and November 2017).

Kevin Kemper maintains that journalists who are from the indigenous community are best positioned to speak on behalf of indigenous peoples to represent the needs of the community (2010: 3). On a related note, Scott Lyons identifies how American Indian communities view the act of writing and recording their histories as a means of empowerment as opposed to it being a foreign practice that works in tandem to preserve their predominantly oral-narrative and visually-based heritage (2010: 447). In terms of identity politics and gatekeepers, it is problematic that only those people who reside in geographical proximity to the cultural camps are able to engage with tourists and exercise some agency when shaping their cultural representation. However, it is a common phenomenon that “these gatekeepers are usually the elite within a community and are more politically and socially mobile than others with less education” (Dyll 2018: 334). People who live in peri-urban as opposed to the deep rural areas are more likely to be better educated due to better access to educational facilities. Younger members of the Venda community residing closer to the Fundudzi camp were more likely to view cultural tourism as a positive phenomenon as opposed to the views of older, less educated people that resided in the deeper rural areas (Grobler 2005, Boonzaaier and Grobler 2012). Views around cultural tourism varies along age, occupation and education differences among the Venda community residing in the Tshivhase area close to the Fundudzi cultural camp (Grobler 2005).

Cultural tourism scholars Michael Hall and Hazel Tucker (2004) maintain that tourism does indeed exist within established colonial and postcolonial discourses which rely on the culturally-positioned terms such as the myths of “islands and gardens of paradise”, “sun, sand and sea” and perceptions of friendly, welcoming (usually non-white) communities. They acknowledge the reality, as Marschall alludes to earlier in this section that the relationship between the colonial and postcolonial is not clear-cut and it is not simply a matter of working within binary terms of “the oppressor and the oppressed”. People do have some form of agency and power is not an all-pervasive, monolithic entity. Relationships in the postcolonial setting are negotiated (2004: 3-6). This concept of the agency held by previously colonized peoples is highlighted in one of the seminal texts about post-coloniality, The empire writes back (Ashcroft et al. 1989). It was found that the Venda and Tsonga research participants felt 22

a sense of agency in being able to preserve a sense of heritage due to the enactment of cultural practices at the Fundudzi and Baleni camps.

In my own interviews with the Tsonga and Venda community members at the respective cultural camps, there was an overwhelmingly positive regard for the cultural activities enacted at the camps that the community members themselves saw it as a way to preserve their heritage to transmit it to younger generations. Morgan Ndlovu views cultural villages and the PheZulu cultural village in KwaZulu-Natal in particular as a site of exploitation that re-articulates stereotypical and colonial scripts of the European same and the African Other (2012: 50). His interviews with cultural performers seem to support that view but other studies on Zulu villages, notably Ntokozo Ndlela’s study at the Izintaba Zulu cultural village found that there is a discursive space of informality within the cultural performance that allows the cultural performers to re-interpret and re-frame their portrayals of what “Zulu identity” entails. Female guides tend to frame their discussions according to feminist discourses that countered the dominant patriarchal discourses (2002: 29-30). Additionally, another study on the PheZulu cultural village asserts, in a similar vein, that despite the portrayal of Zulu heritage and identity being articulated within colonial discourses, both the tourists and the cultural performers are aware of the fact that it is a reconstruction of events and not a depiction of reality (Tavener-Smith 2011: 135-136). There is a co-created portrayal and understanding between the cultural performer and the tourist. It is a transactional and negotiated practice. It is performance as a form of employment. This is not a mindless, staged act of a “performative primitive” (MacCannell 1992: 26) as Ndlovu asserts. On the contrary, indigenous communities are aware of the archetypal tropes of primitivity accorded to them and enact those tropes for financial gain (Mhiripiri 2008: 7). Creative and intellectual labour goes into ascertaining what resonates with tourists’ expectations. No activity, irrespective of the field of practice, lacks an intellectual component—whether or not it is either intellectual or manual labour (Frassinelli 2003: 167). Cultural performers at PheZulu village were capable of and enthusiastic about recording their lived experiences and issues of importance to them when they recorded snippets of their daily lives on cellular phone cameras. This process hinted at avenues of agency, which was embraced by the cultural performers (Watson et al. 2016: 32). Keyan Tomaselli and Lauren Dyll maintain that the ≠Khomani in the Northern Cape are co-producers of their representations and they issue a mandate for academics to de-colonize the relationship 23

between researchers and the research by engaging with research participants and allowing them to represent themselves in their own words in academic texts (2015: 358-359). There is a type of paternalism inherent in the perception that the indigenous communities cannot think for themselves, or compose their own narratives, in relation to how they engage with others, and that they need someone, usually an academic, to speak for them and champion their cause (Tomaselli 2016).

Chapter Two Establishing the parameters of study within the literature

This chapter identifies the constellation of concepts and factors that influence the cultural tourism industry on social, economic and political levels. Specific emphasis is placed on tourist practices and how the liminal psychological space of a holiday enables the tourist to temporarily abandon his or her usual behaviour and belief system in favour of a more immersive holiday experience. Narratives shape one’s perception of what a holiday experience should be (Urry 2002). These expectations and perceptions are conditioned within the individual by the worldviews and frameworks that are established from childhood. The concept of tourism itself is multifaceted and has several interdisciplinary paths that interlink to create a particular cultural product. The different inter-related components which influence tourism are unpacked. “Although complicated, cutting across sectoral categories, and fragmented, tourism is and should be viewed, as a single system comprised of interrelated parts” (Grobler 2005: 25). Tourists were not interviewed at the two cultural camps, as the camps were under renovation during the times of my fieldtrips in 2016 and 2017. I was only able to interview members of the community who resided close to the camps. Films, television series, fictional books, newspaper articles and tourism websites were used in addition to academic sources to create a semblance of a tourist perspective. Although the focus of this investigation is on how the Venda and the Tsonga communities attribute meaning to their own respective cultural practices, the dynamic and integrated exchange between guests and hosts in a cultural tourism setting makes it imperative to ascertain the needs of the tourists as well. “Cultural tourism is a sub-category of tourism: it refers to the forms of art (culture)in the urban and rural area of a region or country, and it is defined as the

movement of people to cultural attractions far from their normal place of residence aimed at assimilating information and cultural experiences” (Petroman et al. 2013: 385). Cultural tourism relies, more than other types of tourism, on the lived experience and expectations of the tourist themselves to be successful. “Cultural tourism expresses the way in which a tourist contemplates a series of contrasts between the present and the past, between one’s own country and other countries, between stereotypes of everyday life and the exotic”(Petroman et al. 2013: 385). There is an interplay between the beliefs and expectations of the tourist and the worldviews and expectations of the host. In light of this interplay, the worldview of potential tourist is taken into account. The starting point is the consideration of narratives that shape tourists’ perceptions.

Daniel Defoe, Jules Verne and Beatrix Potter: fostering a sense of adventure

Stories such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, Around the world in 80 days (1873) by Jules Verne, and even tales meant for toddlers such as Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) deal with protagonists leaving the safety of hearth and home to explore and conquer new places. Narratives are used to teach young children ways of making sense of their world and of appropriate ways of engaging with others. “We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative—stories, excuses, myths… narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally” (Bruner 1991: 4). Scripts or the rules for appropriate behaviour are taught using the story (Bruner 1991: 11). The themes of travel and adventure are ubiquitous in children’s literature. From being marooned on an island, to travelling around the world, to sneaking into a farmer’s vegetable plot, respectively, the three stories mentioned above are examples of broader themes. These stories are not universal to all cultural cosmologies and this cultural worldview pertains to a Western5 middle-class habitus. A habitus is a form of behaviour or a set of beliefs (Bourdieu 1984: 170), akin to the intangible values contained in narratives and practices that inform the cultural tourism practices at the two cultural camps. This frame of reference excludes African, Asian and other indigenous cosmologies as the guest books at the camps as well as the camp guides confirmed that the tourists were predominantly from countries from the global north such as Germany, Italy or America and the tourists seemed to ascribe to Western

5 This is an essentialising term, it is not meant to only represent the middle and upper class inhabitants of the global north, it incorporates people from the global south who share a similar value-system and economic level as those in the global north. 25

ontologies. There was no need to delve into understanding other cultural ontologies at this stage as the tourists themselves did not ascribe to other ontologies. These early transmissions of culture through narratives pave the way for the introduction of, and immersion within, complicated myths around place. The study focuses on tourists from Western worldviews, however, it should be noted that Western worldviews are not confined to particular racial or geographical boundaries. Tourists’ views about the camps were gleaned from online reviews on travel websites such as Trip advisor. Due to the ubiquitous nature of both narratives about travel experiences as well as tourism marketing, the study of heritage and tourism practices is sometimes perceived as superfluous (Tribe 1997). The discipline of tourism studies is considered to be nebulous in academic settings as well. The next section elucidates the validity of tourism studies as a legitimate academic discipline.

Tourism studies as a legitimate academic discipline

The inter-disciplinary nature of tourism studies makes it difficult to demarcate it as a clearly defined epistemological field of enquiry. Tourism studies incorporates aspects of the social sciences, humanities and arts, and sciences (Tribe and Liburd 2016: 48; Hollinshead 2006: 44). As the knowledge produced from tourism studies is often derived from “problem- centred knowledge” or “knowledge-in-practice”, a more empirically based and experiential, as opposed to theory-based or conceptual, form of knowledge production—it is deemed to hold less academic weight. This is in comparison to the more traditional academic disciplines in the social sciences such as economics, law or geography (Tribe and Liburd 2016: 48; Botterill 2001: 199; Darbellay and Stock 2012: 443). John Tribe’s seminal article on the topic, entitled: “The indiscipline of tourism” (1997), brought to the fore the distinctions drawn between tourism studies being viewed as a “service-subject”6 to cater to the marketing, management and the business needs of commercial tourism enterprises as opposed to creating legitimate knowledge worthy of academic scholarship. The word tourism, not being a particularly discipline-specific word, and it being used in colloquial speech, adds to its perception of being unscholarly (Tribe 1997: 639). “Tourism is what people are engaged in when they visit friends and relatives, or go skiing, or visit the three gorges [sic] in China” (Tribe 1997: 640).

6 A field of study that aims to find information or to teach skills imperative to the goals of an over-arching field of enquiry. 26

Tourism as a phenomenon seems commonplace to most people as marketing and promotional information proliferates via many outlets. The perceived distance from the so-called “ivory tower” of academia adds to the suspicion around tourism studies being a legitimate scholarly discipline (Tribe 1997). The discussion of the legitimacy of tourism studies in the academy is pertinent, as there were numerous concerns raised by the university’s research ethics committee regarding the validity of the study due to the inclusion of the tourism operator, TFPD, as a stakeholder in the public-private-and-community-partnership analysis. Any attempt to exclude a key stakeholder such as the hotel management operator would severely diminish the quality of the knowledge produced. It is difficult to impose the parameters required by institutional ethics review boards to all field research experiences (Tomaselli 2016: 804; Tomaselli 2017; and responses by Denzin 2017; Peters 2017; Fitzpatrick 2017; Sydnor 2017). Action-led research in tourism studies has led to changes in tourism and development policy in South Africa and has been imperative in the construction of tourism best-practice guidelines (Dyll-Myklebust and Finlay 2012: 127; Dyll-Myklebust 2012). “Currently across southern Africa cultural tourism is becoming more visible and important in the region’s tourism development, including for the region’s tourism policy-makers” (Saarinen and Rogerson 2015: 209). Despite tourism studies being a relatively newly established academic discipline, its far-reaching influence and implications for research in development studies, indigenous communities and marketing and management, among other areas, should be viewed as a strength as opposed to an indicator of “indiscipline”7. Cultural villages: from questionable beginnings to a legitimate present

Cultural villages are purpose-built structures intended to portray a particular time-period and lifestyle of a community. In South Africa, these communities are usually indigenous— meaning of black African ethnicity—but this is not always the case in cultural villages in an international context. The cultural villages allow for the tourists’ immersion in most aspects of the lifestyle, from living in the traditional building structures, to eating the local cuisine while being entertained by traditional cultural dance and music performances (Jansen van Veuren 2001: 139). “The first cultural village in South Africa was built as long ago as 1965 by a private entrepreneur in KwaZulu-Natal. During the 1970s and 1980s, the apartheid state

7 See Tomaselli 2015 for an account of how film studies was only accepted as a legitimate field of study in the Anglo-Saxon world after film theory had been made accessible through Saussurian terms of semiotics which created an entry point into narratological frameworks. 27

completely dominated the construction of cultural villages” (Jansen van Veuren 2001: 140; Boonzaaier and Wels 2018; Ndlovu 2014; Tavener-Smith 2011; Saarinen 2007). One cannot ignore the fact that there could be unsavoury elements to this practice of portraying “authentic” cultures, as was found with the case of a shanty-town experience being offered in a nature reserve in Bloemfontein, a province in South Africa. Tourists are offered the experience of staying in a corrugated iron shack with under-floor heating and wireless internet access (Buscher and Fletcher 2017).

This is unsettling because things such as the outside toilet or “long drop pit toilet” or the big drum which is used to build the fire to cook outside—both markers of a lack of basic amenities such as the municipal provision of water and electricity—are turned into props for a type of immersive “playing poor” game for wealthy tourists (Büscher and Fletcher 2017: 651). This is essentially a commodification of the representation and experience of poverty and this charge is often levelled at cultural tourism enterprises even as the venture may be result in income for the owners of the venture. However, the vital factor of land and business ownership changes the power dynamic in this sector. In most cases, the cultural heritage such as traditional healing practices; cultural dances and salt-harvesting processed at Baleni, for example, is the aspect marketed, not a romanticized view of poverty (Boonzaaier and Wels 2018 b: 181; Antonites 2005; Boonzaaier and Grobler 2012).

The concept of cultural villages is controversial in South Africa because up until the early 2000s the villages were predominantly owned and managed by white entrepreneurs (Rogerson 2004: 273; Jansen van Veuren 2001: 137). With the Tsonga and Venda communities at the respective cultural camps on the AIR, the primary purpose for the tourism establishment is to provide accommodation to tourists. Moreover, the camps are community- owned, staffed and managed, so this cautions allegations of members of the community being exploited.

In a bid to implement post-apartheid economic transformation8 practices, since 1996 the South African Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT) designed policies that aimed to re-structure tourism business ownership patterns by employing a host of

8 A shorthand term to indicate economic policies that aim for a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources between all race groups in South Africa (DEAT 1996). 28

strategies. These strategies comprised of ways to increase the participation of black9 business owners in the tourism industry. Entrepreneurs were encouraged to procure their goods and services from black-owned businesses, as well as to implement training initiatives for black people to participate in the management and operation of tourism ventures. Additionally, there had to be an element of benefit to the surrounding communities where the tourism venture was based (Rogerson 2004: 274-275). The ownership patterns for cultural tourism ventures have changed considerably since the early 2000s. The two cultural villages that pertain to this study, the Baleni and the Fundudzi cultural camps are both community-based, and more importantly, community-beneficiary ventures.

Community-based tourism (CBT) ventures necessitate that the community itself has a role in the operations and planning of the venture. This role in the operation of the venture could also include cultural performances or the use of the community’s heritage and folklore in the design and layout of the tourism enterprise (Okazaki 2008: 512-513). Community participation in tourism ventures is heralded as a positive attribute (Grobler 2005), however, it is imperative to note that the community as individual stakeholders do not necessarily participate to an equal degree. Some community members are better positioned to engage with tourism due to their higher educational qualifications, or by having a more astute understanding of what tourists expect to see when visiting the community, and are able to leverage that knowledge for an increased monetary payment (Boonzaaier and Grobler 2012; Dyll 2018). There are differences in power relations between indigenous community members who practice Christianity and those who practice indigenous worship practices at the Fundudzi and Baleni cultural camps. Cultural tourists tend to prefer watching indigenous religious practices as it is deemed to have a greater sense of authenticity (Field notes 2016 and 2017).

This difference in skills and aptitudes among different people leads to discrepancies in levels of participation (Tufte and Mefalopulos 2009; Cornwall 2008; Servaes 1989). Community participation does not equate to employment distribution among all community members (Taylor 1995: 487-488). Residents often do benefit from tourism enterprises in their area due to direct employment at the tourism venture itself, or indirectly due to increasing amounts of goods and services being purchased by tourists. However, this benefit does not necessarily

9 The term black here is inclusive of any non-white ethnicity, for the purposes of this study. 29

extend to all members of a community. Generally, the residents’ individual attitudes and perceptions of tourism depends on how closely they are aligned to the tourism venture and the benefit that they accrue from this association (Getz 1994: 256). It makes sense that one would look at something favourably if one benefitted from it. For example, if one sold bundles of wood and tourists bought the wood from you to use in their camp fires, one would be enthusiastic towards maintaining ties with local tourism establishments. For example, one of my research participants who resides close to the Fundudzi cultural camp, appreciated the presence of tourists for this reason (Field notes 2016). Granted, CBT does not address all the pitfalls associated with skewed power-dynamics in a capitalistic society (Büscher and Fletcher 2017: 653) but it does allow for a levelling process to begin. It begins to shift the locus of power to the community. The primary and secondary co-operatives in the case of the Public-private and community partnerships with TFPD on the AIR add to a sense of shared responsibility for the operation of the camps. Cultural tourism is not perceived as a neutral activity by the communities that engage in it. It may sometimes carry connotations of witchcraft and tribalism.

Day witches, night witches, witch burnings and the occult in Limpopo

Limpopo is one of the most economically impoverished provinces in South Africa. This is partially due to it being comprised largely of what was previously known as Bantustans and homelands. These were areas demarcated by the apartheid regime as independent of South Africa and were ruled by tribal authorities and chiefs along ethnic and linguistic group affiliations (Jensen and Zenker 2015: 940; Khunou 2009: 81). The Separate Development and Self-Determination Act was passed in 1959 and provided the legal framework that set in motion the forced removal of the black population from what was geographically deemed as white South Africa to the newly established self-governing homelands and independent territories (Ramutsindela 2007: 44). The tribal authorities and chiefs were co-opted into implementing the apartheid regime’s geopolitical vision. The chiefs were installed as the ruling elite in a “divide and conquer” strategy in which divisions were intentionally created among different ethnic groups within the independent territories to prevent a coalition of forces from opposing the National Party government (Khunou 2009 : 81; Ramutsindela 2007: 46; King and McCusker 2007: 7).

The systems of power along tribal authority structures was patriarchal and usually benefited older men. This cursory overview of the political milieu in the homelands sheds light on the correlation between established power-structures and how this led to the highly controversial practice of witch burning in Venda, a homeland in Limpopo, in the 1980s and 1990s (Tshamano 2005: 1). Venda was one of four independent homelands demarcated for self-governance. The other three were Transkei, Ciskei, and Bophuthatswana, all established in the 1960s (Jensen and Zenker 2015: 941). The homelands did not receive adequate financial resources for development as they functioned under the veneer of a seemingly benevolent concept of separate development in which each ethnic constituency had the “freedom” to practice their culture and agricultural practices as befitted them (Ramutsindela 2007: 47).

The pressure-cooker-like environment of poverty, underemployment and hardship gave rise to feelings of animosity and resentment among the youth in the homelands, the majority of whom were unable to gain access to systems of power. Systems of patronage, which gave rise to identification via ethnic affiliation, has a long-standing history in South Africa. People were encouraged to agree with their village chiefs on political and ideological matters purely by virtue of ethnic affiliation (Guy and Thabane 1988: 258). Vestiges of this tradition has had implications for how TFPD had to re-negotiate employment practices in Mpumalanga at their Ndhzaka camp as those Tsonga employees did not want to work with Tsonga employees from Limpopo (field notes 2016; 2017). Elderly women, usually widows, were deemed as the ones that were using spells, curses, and dark magic to bring about the misfortune faced by the youth (Khaukanani 2012: 81). In societal systems with patriarchal leadership, women are viewed as the cause of the misfortune. It is important to note that there were distinctions made with the practice of witchcraft. Moreover, charging a person with allegations of witchcraft often served political and ideological means of negating and discrediting possibilities of dissent. It was common practice for tribal chiefs to level charges of witchcraft against people who disagreed with them. This allowed for seemingly just executions or banishments. This was similar to how the orthodox Christian church of the middle ages labelled dissenters as heretics (Wallace 2015: 24; Parrinder 1956: 143; Davison and Mahashe 2012). It is not perceived as an unequivocally negative practice. Day witches, predominantly men, are those who use witchcraft and medicinal herbs for healing. Night witches, in contrast, are predominantly women who allegedly rely on 31

malevolent spirits and practice their magic at night to cause women to become barren or to die during or after childbirth. If the night witch targeted her spells at a man, he would become infertile or he would die suddenly and inexplicably (Khaukanani 2012: 84-85). It is important to note that the healer can be of either gender. “ The nganga is the medicine-man proper, whose main function is the cure of disease, and the mungoma is the diviner….The vhaloi are the wizards or witches whose evil machinations are responsible for most misfortunes and nearly all deaths” (Stayt 1931: 263).

There was a spate of witch burnings in Venda in the late 1980s and 1990s where mobs of people, usually younger men, would storm the house of a woman accused of being a night witch. They would stab her, then douse her with paraffin or petrol, and literally set her alight. The police, who were black in the homelands, were also afraid of witchcraft and very seldom intervened (Tshamano 2005: 15; Khaukanani 2012: 86).

The history of witches and witch burning is relevant to cultural tourism practices as some Venda people in Limpopo who have become Christians equate traditional cultural practice and ancestor worship as equivalent to practicing malevolent witchcraft. This is elaborated on in the data analysis and findings section. Psycho-spiritual practices and beliefs in Venda are often used as indicators of whether or not one is aligned with Christianity and by inference, modernity, or whether one practices ancestor-worship and is perceived as traditional and “backwards”. Cultural tourism practices are a performed and highly negotiated performance in light of the historical associations of the traditional practices. When tourists go to the Fundudzi cultural camp, they do not necessarily want to hear about witch burnings; however, the association of tribalism and the occult is an implicit allure for tourists due to the sense of exoticism and “otherness” (Urry 2002). This is not to imply that rituals of the occult are performed at the Fundudzi camp. Traditional performative religious displays are based on pre-established 19th century discourses about the depiction of people in Africa (Cohen 1993: 39). One of the key authors who shaped the global north’s perception of the exotic other was Henry Morton Stanley.

Henry Morton Stanley: the man who launched a thousand dreams

Stanley’s account of his travels through Africa created an enduring trope of “Africa” as a

place of adventure, danger and intrigue. His two-volume book Through the dark continent (1878) was a commercial success and inspired the imaginations of young children across North America, Europe and Britain. He cemented the view of Africa in the hearts and minds of the European masses as a landscape of wilderness, natives, superstition and magic. This mental construct of Africa formed the basis for its popularity as a holiday destination, as overtones of the colonial narrative are still pertinent in the present-day tourism marketing strategies (Hickey and Wylie 1993: 93; Bulpin 1954: 10; Finlay 2009).

Tourism refers to travel undertaken away from one’s place of residence for business or leisure purposes for a period of under a year. It is a valuable economic driver in developing countries and a major contributor to those countries’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (World Travel and Tourism Council 2013: 15). Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion that research is the dirtiest word in the indigenous vocabulary (1999: 1) will have to be challenged if the claim about tourism being the new handmaiden of global capital is to be believed. The new curse word of the indigenous would be “tourism”. The tourism industry in the global South is wracked by allegations of exploitation, profiting from, and propagating, colonial discourses, and contributing to commoditisation of indigenous cultures among other things (Koot 2016; Ndlovu 2014; Fletcher 2011: 443; Büscher and Fletcher 2017: 651; Harvey 2004). However, this stance does not take into account those economic and cultural benefits that accrue in a region due to tourism that might outweigh supposed negative effects (Dyll-Myklebust 2014; Timothy 2014: 32; Sathiyah 2013; Tomaselli 2017; Dunn and Dunn 2002: 26). “An ever- increasing number of destinations worldwide have opened up to, and invested in tourism, turning it into a key driver of socio-economic progress through the creation of jobs and enterprises, export revenues, and infrastructure development” (United Nations World Tourism Organisation 2017: 2). The reach of international capital in reproducing global relations of exploitation is simply not a factor in TFPD’s operations due the unique structures of ownership that characterise TFPD’s partnerships with local communities (Tomaselli 2017; Dyll 2014).

The involvement in neo-capitalistic tourism enterprises does not thus automatically lead to the exploitation by global tourism enterprises of indigenous communities involved in South African tourism to the national peripheries. Even so, major conglomerates in the global north do also invest resources into heritage tourism infrastructure to meet their Corporate Social 33

Responsibility (CSR) obligations (see Wells et al. 2016: 1). Critics, however still claim unequal relations and exploitation.

Tourism is arguably the world’s fastest growing industry, but some detractors maintain that this is as a result of international tourism, particularly, from the global north to the global south being a new iteration of capital expansion. Tourism is deemed to be a mechanism that tour operators and large financial corporations use to increase the circulation of capital over a global expanse (Harvey 2002: 95). While all enterprises, no matter the sector, are enveloped in exchange relations of one sort or another, this may be too broad an indictment of specific peripheral tourism as one does need to take into account the opportunities provided for infrastructurally underdeveloped areas to generate income via ecotourism. Admittedly, expecting indigenous communities to be motivated purely by economic incentives is ideologically problematic; however, there is no doubt that commercial tourism enterprises do play a vital role in ecotourism conservation strategies. Moreover, it is patronizing to presume that indigenous communities are not culturally equipped to engage in the world capitalist markets due to an inherent “backwardness” (Fletcher 2009: 270-271). The !Xaus Lodge experience actually opened up new ways for locals to take control of their self-imaging and to actively represent themselves to visitors as they themselves wished (Tomaselli 2015).

Tour operators are implicated in the promotion of capitalism by reifying travel as an indispensable experience in one’s life time, as travel also becomes a marker of social class and status. This is construed as a cycle in which middle-class workers consume the tourism- related services offered by generally low-paid staff in the hospitality industry, where the ultimate winner is the owners of the tourism ventures that benefit from the cycle (Fletcher 2011: 443). This may be a too narrow view to hold, to merely equate tourism with the expansion of capitalism without taking into account the benefit accrued to impoverished indigenous communities (Tomaselli 2016; Tomaselli 2012). When community members are asked about their opinions on tourism, they often highlight the economic and social benefits that have accrued because of their engagement in tourism. The Tsonga salt-harvesters in Baleni, Limpopo, are especially proud to have the opportunity to show-case their ancient tradition of salt-harvesting (Kolkman 2002: 69-70). However, some local communities are still perceived to have a peripheral role in the decision-making processes regarding their land (Stone and Nyaupane 2018: 307). The validity of this claim will be interrogated in the 34

course of this literature review. The Tsonga and Venda communities play an active role in the management of communally-owned land on which the cultural camps are built though the AIR primary and secondary co-operatives which represent the interests of the community members. Tourists may initially be drawn to the rural location and rustic nature of the camps before they have an awareness of the cultural activities offered at the camp. “Southern African tourism has been characterised by representations which refer to (empty) natural landscapes … In many respects, the imagined Africa has been strongly linked to wild environments and wilderness” (Saarinen and Rogerson 2015: 208). Africa thus serves as the playground and the Garden of Eden of the wealthy (Hickey and Wylie 1993) However, the increasing industrialisation of so called “pristine” areas has led to clashes between global hegemonic conservation ideals and the needs of local communities ( Saarinen 2019: 742). This disjuncture is elaborated on in the next section. This discussion is pertinent to this study as tourists visit cultural camps in remote areas specifically to re-enact the tropes of a “wild Africa” which includes the rugged landscape as well as the dark- skinned and primitive “other”. Cultural tourism dress, narratives and dances provided at the Fundudzi and Baleni camps cater to these expectations. (This is elaborated on in the findings chapter).

Social class, nature conservation agendas and neoliberal capitalistic values

A back-to-nature movement in North America cautions against the dangers of nature-deficit- disorder (Louv 2005). This disorder, while not mentioned on any psychological health grading scale, is commonly perceived as the propensity of both children and adults to experience high levels of stress and spiritual disillusionment when lacking meaningful immersion in natural spaces. While this view of nature as a space of psycho-spiritual healing may seem unproblematic, the trajectory of such thought is aligned with the higher socio- economic class perceptions of refined taste (Brockington and Duffy 2010: 470). “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects…distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly….In which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (Bourdieu 1984: 6). In other words, one displays the dominant sensibilities and values aligned with one’s socio-economic (or aspirational socio-economic) class when espousing one’s preferences. Exhibiting a sense of refinement displays one’s internalisation of the values encouraged by a particular class 35

(Bourdieu 1984: 2). Social class is one of the key attributes that influence identity formation: “Social class…can have a broad and diverse influence on one’s way of being a person (that is an agent, a self, an identity) in the world” (Markus and Fiske 2012: 3). One’s social class may also influence one’s views about nature conservation. Nature conservation movements are often adopted by the higher socio-economic classes as being environmentally-responsible. Members of the middle and upper classes are the people that can afford to be tourists at the cultural camps. The high cost of travel is a prohibitive factor affecting the type of vacations taken by the working classes. However, the correlation between capitalism and conservation is usually obscured: “capitalist interests strongly advocated for the first national parks in North America, and the first conservation NGOs” (Brockington and Duffy 2010: 470).

The perceived need to preserve the wilderness of Africa is reflected by the fact that: “a variety of conservation, particularly from the West, actively frame (italics used in original text) Africa’s nature as a global commons that deserves protection for all of humanity; and…that the practical operationalisation of this tactic, increasingly revolves around “neoliberal conservation” (Büscher 2013: 85).

Africa is viewed as a place of innocence and as a respite from the fast-paced lifestyles in more bureaucratised societies. “Particular representations of an ideal “African nature”, then become the lubricant of the circulation of this “globally convertible capital” (inverted commas used in original text) that manifests itself interchangeably as money and other types of symbolic, political capital” (Büscher 2013: 87). The links between social class, capitalism and conservation, although not immediately apparent, are important considerations to bear in mind when interrogating the often unproblematised agendas promulgated by nature- conservation organisations: “analysts of conservation are observing an increase in the intensity and variety of forms of capitalist conservation. Underlying that is a shift in the conservation movement’s own conception (italics used in original text) of these practices” (Brockington and Duffy 2010: 470). One must be cognizant of the fact that even social movements that seem to have a positive effect on society, such as the back-to-nature movement, have their own ideological histories obscured. The rustic appeal of the small- scale, non-mechanised ancient salt-harvesting techniques employed by the women at the Baleni spring may add to the feeling of being in touch with nature (Antonites, 2013). The 36

feature-length, Venda language film, Elelwani (wa Luruli 2012) could be used to add intrigue to the rural areas in Venda. Film-induced tourism may be mobilised to encourage tourists to visit the Fundudzi cultural camp pin order to experience Venda culture.

Film-induced tourism as a theme park experience: props and extras needed

Film-induced tourism depends on much more than merely convincing people to visit the places that they see on the silver screen. There has to be a host of both infrastructural and intangible goods made for consumption in addition to the film in order for the film-induced aspect of tourism to be successful. The sale of brochures, maps, branded clothing, and other merchandise combined with meet-and-greets with actors, interactive studio tours, and marketing strategies must be employed in order to induce tourism (Riley, Baker and Van Doren 1998: 919-920). The theme parks of Disneyland, and the Harry Potter and Universal studio market rides, merchandise, food and activities based on films. If there are no accompanying attractions to the film location, it is likely to fail as a business venture. The film set of the fictional planet Tatooine of the Star Wars series was constructed in Tunisia. However, due to poor marketing of the area and a lack of maintenance of the infrastructure, the set is being consumed by desert sand (Hoffmann 2015: 96-97). Film-induced tourism does not only show case the so-called “primitive other” to a Western viewer, it also portrays a version of the Western population to the West. The film Gomorrah (2008) and the spin-off TV series of the same name (2014-present) depicts the city of Naples in the Campania region of southern Italy as a place of organised crime and moral decay (D’ Alessandro et al. 2015: 182).

In another example, the perception of the Lord of the Rings franchise film, The Hobbit, increasing tourism in New Zealand by a large margin has proved to be false as this is not verified by tourism tracking data. The partially disassembled film-set does not offer other related activities and has only been found to have influenced nine percent, a relatively small amount, of the tourism to the area (Beeton 2006: 183). Film-induced tourism needs props or people to sustain the narrative of the film universe in the geographical place (Tomaselli 2001 a: 173). Film-induced tourism is an exercise in fantasy and desire. “The tales told in movies and on television contain many of the traditional elements of storytelling through myth, such as good versus evil, man and the supernatural, and classic morality/cautionary tales” (Beeton 37

2006: 182). As discussed earlier in this chapter, narrative shapes one’s understanding of the world.

Tourism is a way of imagining and enacting the tactile and sensory enactment of those fantasies in the real world. “Physical place only provides the raw material for commercially customised media representations” (Jansson 2002: 431). Much of the desire to engage in tourism is fostered by the media. “Modern tourism has never involved any pure first-hand gaze, and is today governed and measured against mediated representations created by the tourism industry or by the culture industry at large” (Jansson 2002: 431). Similarly, the Bushman myth mobilised in Jamie Uys’ film The gods must be crazy (1980) created a tourism market in Botswana and Namibia to cater to tourists’ quest to see the Bushmen from the film (Tomaselli 2012: 33-34). “Desire moves us towards that which is different, unknown and other to the self. It is also a relation that constitutes a desired otherness through the metaphors of a western, and specifically post-colonial, imagination” (Fullagar 2002: 57). The desire to see the Bushmen functions along the lines of this desire for the other. The 2012 feature-length film Elelwani (wa Luruli 2012) could be mobilised to appeal to the same desire for the other in the form of the Venda other, but there is not enough accompanying merchandising strategies available at present at the Fundudzi cultural camp to use this avenue of tourism marketing. The mental representations of the intangible aspects of Venda culture such as the storytelling, folklore and customs are depicted in Elelwani (wa Luruli 2012). In the film, the Venda “Other” is portrayed as mystical and unknowable (see Frassinelli 2016).

Creation of the primitive other for the esteem of the self

Johannes Fabian asserts that “the other is never simply given, never just found or encountered, but made” (1990: 755). He maintains that: “our ways of making the other are ways of making ourselves” (1990: 756). Different indigenous communities around the world sometimes have visually striking dress or decorative adornments that signify their “otherness”. From the Burmese (now known as Myanmar) indigenous women using brass neck rings to elongate their necks, to the intricate signification system of Maori tattoos, the greater the dress and cultural deviation from the Euro-American hegemonic norm, the more “experience” value it has for the tourist: “the commercialization of the touristic encounter

extends to the point of commodification not merely of the handicrafts and the photographic image, but to the person of the ex-primitive” (MacCannell 1990: 15).

Tourists search the globe for the primitive other in order to highlight the contrast to themselves. Cultural tourism in particular can be likened to a type of partial ethnography. This is because “ethnography evokes the exotic….In more prudish times it promised (and delivered) bare bosoms and frightening fetishes; today it satisfies a new aesthetic of the fantastic and imaginary among some, and the need for “inside knowledge” of the third world among others” (Fabian 1990: 757).

Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous leisure to explain the prestige derived from leisure practices. He explains it as follows: “in order to gain and hold the esteem of merit it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence” (1899: 19). Veblen emphasises that engaging in leisure activities is imperative to the enjoyment of life: “from the days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and of exemption from contact with such industrial processes…has ever been recognised by thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even blameless, human life (1899: 19). According to these stipulations for the garnering of esteem, it makes sense for the conspicuous leisure practices to occur in far-off lands and in terms of bringing back souvenirs as evidence of having been there, the more primitive, the greater the cultural cache. The more fierce or bloodthirsty the protagonist of a cultural narrative is, the more tantalising the travel experience. For example, in colonial discourses, Shaka Zulu is portrayed as a militant archetype of primitive masculinity. He was seen as a “black Attila” (Tavener-Smith 2011: 52). British tourists flock to Zulu cultural villages in KwaZulu-Natal to experience the mythical construction and performance of Zulu culture as the ultimate dichotomy to the civilised self (Tavener-Smith 2011). By this logic, the Venda cultural performers style themselves as exoticised others for the tourists’ consumption. Even if they ascribe to Christian religious values, they enact traditional Venda rituals for the tourists’ consumption.

Tourist 2.0—Creative tourism and micro-travel as marks of discernment

Packaged “all-inclusive” holidays are sometimes viewed in a disparaging manner as 39

something that is mass-produced for an undiscerning populace: “when many people from the same “community” visit a particular tourism attraction, the behaviour is less likely to be considered prestigious because the rarity is lost with the increased frequency of people undertaking the behaviour” (Riley 1995: 632). I watched a few episodes of Benidorm (2007- 2018), a British situational comedy (sitcom) that pokes fun at the coarse behaviour of working-class holiday makers at a fictitious “all-inclusive" seaside resort in Spain called the Solana. The humour derives from the interactions amongst the guests and the staff at the resort. The characters are caricatures of marginalized identities. There is a chain-smoking grandmother who appears to be orange-tinged due to her excessive reliance on sun tan products, a sexually-swinging couple, homosexual hair-dressers, a flirtatious barman and a host of unusual characters. 10 The sitcom is used to illustrate the perceptions surrounding cheap holidays marketed for the working-class. This is contrasted with the “micro-travel” of supposedly more discerning travellers. Micro-travel is also known as curated vacations (Orr 2017: n.p).

Curated vacations are planned by the individual tourist and the itinerary depends on the specific whims of the tourist, not on what is deemed to be sight-worthy by a tour-operator. It challenges the institution of mass-tourism. People who embark on micro-travel trips are considered to be more interested in the experiences that they accrue rather that mindlessly ticking off destinations on a pre-structured list. George Hill writes about the independent bookshop as being a place to display one’s cultural capital and knowledge in a highly stylized and performative manner in an ambient setting as opposed to the fairly commercialized and impersonal transaction of book-buying that occurs in a book chain store (2013: 10-11).

This distinction of being a stylized performative agent versus being a mindless consumer in the independent bookstore with character versus soulless chain store can be used in the tourism context with the example of an “all-inclusive” holiday package versus a carefully curated holiday itinerary. “Some leisure travel is worthy of prestige because travellers use rare or specialized skills and knowledge to their benefit … The possession of particular knowledge and skills allows travellers a differential advantage over other people” (Riley 1995: 632). When the tourist is an active agent in planning and engaging with the tourism

10 See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benidorm_(TV_series). Accessed on 19 February 2019. 40

offering they become the co-producers of creative tourism. “Creative tourism involves not just spectating, nor just being there, but reflexive interaction on the part of tourists … The onus is on the tourists themselves to actively learn about their surroundings and apply that knowledge in order to develop their own skills (Richards and Wilson 2006: 1218).

Tourists are more discerning in their search for meaning and personal resonance as opposed to visiting overtly commercialised destinations (Orr 2017). Tour-operators should take note of the trend and adjust their marketing material accordingly: “facing the threat of locally distinctive products becoming “commoditised” and indistinct, cities and regions have begun to adopt a series of strategies aimed at creating a distinctive place image in an increasingly global marketplace” (Richards and Wilson 2006: 1210). The distinctive marketing strategies used to differentiate the Baleni and the Fundudzi cultural camps, from similar offerings are based on the book by T.V. Bulpin entitled: The African Ivory Route (1954).

The myth of the African Ivory Route

There is no doubt that myths of The African Ivory Route are as chronicled in the book, The African Ivory Trail (1954), are steeped in colonial discourses. The swashbuckling, intrepid traveller, Cecil Barnard, also known as Bvekenya, is a white male hunter who makes his fortune from the ivory trade. The story is begins during the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902 but spans until the late 1950s. The practice of engaging in tourism is, in a sense, an immersion of the self in a virtual reality or alternative universe. Holiday spaces are suspended in a state of liminality in which one is not constrained by the behaviours, spending-practices or routines of one’s daily life. The environment, people and expectations provide a blank slate for the re-inscription or re-invention of the self, even if it is only a temporary change (Urry 2002: 7). When one considers a holiday destination, tourists are already drawing on their pre-existing set of narratives or mythologies that are associated with the places to be visited). Many of these mental associations between places are created by popular literature, films and marketing. The film Elelwani (wa Luruli 2012) and T.V. Bulpin’s book the African Ivory Trail (1954) are two such instances of generating an interest about the cultures and landscapes in the Limpopo province. Bulpin’s (1954) book encourages the romanticised notion of “the great white hunter” who is the epitome of rugged masculinity, an identity that is supported by the remote and rustic locations of the

camps on the AIR. The next section discusses how tropes of masculinity are merged with the narratives around the African Ivory Route. Ideals of masculinity on the African Ivory Route: the myth of Bulpin’s Bvekenya

The African Ivory Route marketed by Transfrontier Parks Destinations is steeped in discourses highlighting ideals of hegemonic masculinity. Bulpin’s (1954) novel The Ivory Trail, recounts the hagiography11 of Cecil Barnard dubbed Bvekenya or “the one who swaggers when he walks” - a moniker given to him by a Shangane community in Limpopo. The novel’s timeframe spans the late 19th through to early 20th century. “From the point of view of tourism there are usually different categories of tourists with different intentions regarding the development of a place on the basis of existing identity” (Nilsson and Blom 2018: 3). The travel myth of the Ivory route is entwined with the legend of Bvekenya who embodied the identity of a fearless hunter: “ myths are socially mediated representations which are connected to a place and which interact with a tourists’ own fantasies and prior knowledge to create meaning and an understanding of the place in question” (Nilsson and Blom 2018: 6). It would be reasonable to presume that the rugged terrain of the Ivory trail would appeal to a tourist eager to enact and display an identity of an adventurer. Bvekenya is not overtly linked to the AIR marketing due to the character’s involvement in ‘black birding’, a process of recruiting black men from the villages to work on the gold mines in the Witwatersrand (Sheik 2013).

Hegemonic masculinity is performed by the display of several embodied and characteristic traits. Self-reliance, bravery, emotional stoicism in the face of emotional and physical distress as well as heterosexual normativity are attributes accorded to hegemonic masculinity (Hoonaard 2009: 71). Bvekenya was described as physically imposing and as rugged as a buffalo. He had faced many assailants ranging from local indigenous men trying to murder him and loot his goods, all manner of predators such as crocodiles, venomous snakes, charging elephants and even angry hippos while the police try to arrest him on charges of poaching and human trafficking as he is a recruiter of black labour for the mines in Johannesburg. His physical strength, courage and sheer determination help him to evade capture and death despite his perilous exploits. Bvekenya’s diet consisted of meat from the

11 Cecil Barnard was represented as hero due to his hunting prowess and skill in evading capture by the police as well as his ability to live off the land. 42

animals that he hunted and cooked over a fire and roots and berries foraged from the bush. He salted the remainder of the meat and dried it to make biltong. This aligned with the perception that: “masculine foods are plain and often include foods that are high in fats, sodium and sugar” (Hoonaard: 2009: 72). His attire as a hunter followed a similar sense of simplicity—he wore jerseys and green corduroy shorts with the pockets cut off so that nothing could snag on the shrubbery and make a noise to alert animals of his presence.

Emphasis is placed on the type and efficiency of the guns that he acquired. The gun is described in great detail: “if he was to live in the bush, then he was to live with his gun as his only friend … He invested every penny he could spare in a vicious, short-barrelled, 9.5 Mannlicher-Schonher, with 500 cartridges” (Bulpin 1954: 52). This form of violent masculinity was contrasted with the seemingly ineffectual masculinity of the local men. Bvekenya was touted as a hero after he saved a village from starvation by hunting and providing meat for a broth during a time of drought and widespread famine. The narrator’s estimation of the local community in comparison to Bvekenya is disparagingly described as follows: “the Shanganes behaved as obsequiously as whipped curs. At every kraal he passed the people fawned on him, shouting his praises because of his gifts of meat and the renown of his strength and adventures” (Bulpin 1954: 99). This description sets him up as a masculine figure because: “hegemonic masculinity was distinguished from other masculinities, especially subordinated masculinities … It embodied the currently most honoured way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 832). Bvekenya’s identity, dress, diet and behaviour all ascribe to the archetype of a fearless hunter. Depictions of physicality and brute force are glorified as such: “Bvekenya strode into Garakwe’s village, with a revolver, his fists and sjambok12 as his allies” (Bulpin 1954: 92). He then ties up and proceeds to whip the men who robbed and attempted to murder him and then burns down their village as a symbol of retribution. Bvekenya is positioned as a figure of emulation in the quest for dominance and success. The detailed description of Limpopo invites the male reader to enact their performance of masculinity by exploring the route. Bvekenya was a man who found peace in natural surroundings and revelled in the great outdoors. Bulpin’s (1954) African Ivory Trail novel highlights the healing qualities of being in remote and natural surroundings.

12 A whip made out of dried and cured animal skins. 43

Spiritual rejuvenation in nature: a vestige of romanticism in postmodernity

The concept of revelling in nature and immersing oneself in the visceral and sensory indulgence of the outdoors is prominent in the creative offerings of the Romanticism movement (Remak 1968: 41; 43). The Romanticism movement developed in resistance to the previous epoch of Classicism, which extolled the traits of modesty and restraint in an attempt to rein in the emotions in favour of displaying one’s rationality (Gide 1929: 324).

The Romanticism movement, which started in the 1750s and lasted until the 1850s in Western Europe (Germany, France, England, Spain and Italy), created the demand for natural scenic beauty, and a sense of nostalgia that exists in the present (Burgum 1941: 479). The vestiges of the Romanticism movement in the present day influence dominant ideas around city versus rural lifestyles. The densely-populated, traffic-congested and highly polluted cities are deemed to be psychologically-exhausting as opposed to the perceived tranquillity and slower-paced lifestyle of the rural, sparsely populated areas (Simmel [1903] 2002: 11-12). Nature is viewed as the antidote to the frenetic pace of the city: “empirical studies consistently identify being in nature, whether in the backyard or in a remote wilderness setting, as an important component that influences the spiritual outcomes of nature-based recreation” (Heintzman 2010: 78). The African continent ties in to this discourse about nature because it is viewed as wild and primitive, a lost Eden of sorts: “Africa (or Eden) became synonymous with a European sense of authenticity concerning both nature and the way that people should relate to and blend into nature” (Wels 2004: 78). When international tourists visit the African continent, they usually expect to see people living in harmony with nature because that is the perception that tour operators create: “the tourist gaze is increasingly signposted. There are markers which identify what things and places are worthy of our gaze” (Urry 2002: 32). These signposts have been part of how tourists have been socialised to see a place, as illustrated by the quotation below:

Europeans want to see Africans and the African landscape in the same way as they were taught to see them in the formative years of image moulding during the colonial period. Therefore, Europeans long for immaculate African landscapes with picturesque thatched roofs dotted and merging into it, and expect to hear the drums the minute they arrive in Africa, with Africans rhythmically dancing to their on-going cadenza (Wels 2004: 90).

As much as this depiction highlights most tourists’ expectations of their visit to “Africa”, it is

a problematic depiction as African communities may be seen to be objectified and their culture essentialised. “Though Africans have recovered their political autonomy, through tourism they now sell back to the West those very stereotypical images by which the West perceived the continent in the first place” (Mhiripiri and Tomaselli 2004: 249). The camp staff and the research respondents concurred that predominantly international tourists from Europe stayed at the Fundudzi and Tsonga cultural camps. They very seldom if ever, had guests of colour (field notes November 2017). This tourist and host relationship can be re- negotiated if power shifts to the favour of the host in terms of sharing knowledge: “from the earliest forms of animism and indigenous spirituality to present day institutionalised mainstream religions, the reverence of nature reflects the spiritual importance of societies’ very life support systems” (Verschuuren 2012: 62). There is a transfer of psycho-spiritual knowledge: “the new ethnospiritual/ecoscience integrates the mystical, the empirical and the theoretical” (Tomaselli 1999: 186). In an age of postmodernity where uncertainty, instability and a sense of de-centeredness reign (Harvey 1990: 31), the spiritual connection with nature may provide a respite to current anxieties. One’s immersion in nature may induce a self- reflexive contemplation. This contemplation affects the process of identity formation. The Scouts movement, the television adventure celebrity, Bear Grylls, and the fictional TV agent MacGyver are all examples of typified identities.

Scouts, Bear Grylls and MacGyver: identity construction through tourism consumption practices

Acquiring the “props” needed for a successful tourism experience seems vital to the enactment of identity construction. “The culturally-bound technologies of tourism are enmeshed in diverse, embodied dispositions, organised for instance, around which clothes, styles of movement, modes of looking, photographing and recording, expressing delight, communicating meaning and sharing experiences are appropriate in particular contexts” (Edensor 2007: 203). According to this logic, the culturally-bound technologies of tourism need to be purchased and consumed, displayed or used in order to create a particular persona or experience. A personal example is provided to highlight the link between consumption practices and identity construction in a tourism scenario. As a pre-school child, I spent many hours watching MacGyver (1985-1992), an American television series that featured a secret agent who used scientific knowledge and his trusty Swiss Army knife to create sophisticated

pulley-systems and other gadgets out of material such as carabiners, fishing tackle, and electronic devices to evade capture. This, in addition to reading adventure stories of children running away to an island in the wilderness, foraging, and living off the land (see Enid Blyton’s 1938 book, The secret island) fostered the imagined identity of an adventurer. I subsequently kept a small metal box filled with an assortment of string, buttons, cords and paperclips to aid my enactment of the adventurer identity. Now, as an adult, a tent, sleeping bag, thermal blanket and ground sheet have replaced my metal box “adventure kit”, and the location of my travel has extended from a make-shift blanket-and-pillow constructed fort in the living room at home to actual camping sites. This vignette serves to illustrate the link between needing the right props to enact an identity and its associated tourism practices.

These props are formally known as a “consumption set”: “when a tourist creates a consumption set, nobody knows in advance how successful it will be in creating a good experience. However, it may be assumed that a tourist chooses items for the consumption set that, at least hypothetically, will combine to generate experiences that, at that moment, will address the needs of the tourist” (Andersson 2007: 47). It is important to note that the “consumption set” is not only constituted of tangible material things, but also of intangible skills such as the ability to read a map, use a compass or have the knowledge to successfully navigate through different social milieus: “a consumption project is defined as an activity that is carried out with the purpose of generating an experience” (Andersson 2007: 48). Cultural tourists search for authentic and informative experiences (Petroman et al. 2013). Knowledge of an indigenous community’s language, sacred spaces and social norms would serve as the consumption set for the cultural tourist. I did not ask the research participants about this aspect of their engagement with tourists, however, the older ladies who sold the colourful traditional outfits for women mentioned that the white tourists loved to wear the traditional Venda outfit (Field notes 2017). In this instance, the traditional Venda dress could form part of the consumption set for the cultural tourist. A consumption project will require resources known as a concept consumption set and consumption sets … are made up of four generic elements (i.e. time, skills, goods and services) (Andersson 2007: 47). When using the items in a consumption set such as the penknife, rope, tents and sleeping bags for an overnight camping experience, one also draws on previously acquired skill-sets such as navigation and map reading, first aid and setting up camp: “both a theme and a story can be used to promote products, services and brands if all the signals communicated to customers are well- 46

coordinated. A good story needs to have an arena, characters, and a structure…. The characters can be both the personnel, but also other tourists consuming simultaneously” (Mossberg 2007: 69).

Adventure tourism operates along themes created by organisations such as the Boy Scouts and the television personalities like the adventurer, Bear Grylls: “tourism is constituted by an array of techniques and technologies which are mobilised in distinct settings. Thus, when tourists enter particular stages, they are informed by pre-existing discursive, practical, embodied norms, which help to guide their performative orientations” (Edensor 2007: 202). While this section illustrated the link between consumption practices in tourism and identity formation, the next section will unpack the issues surrounding tourism and immaterial labour.

Cultural tourism performers as white-collar workers

The white-collar worker is defined by his/her exchange of the labour of energy, time and personality for a salary. In this role, a positive smiling persona is vital to persuade the client of sincerity, kindness and interest. Human emotions and personality traits are commodified. Repression of animosity and anger is imperative to this role as well as the ability to be punctual and courteous (Wright Mills 1951: xvii). In the case of cultural tourism performers at roadside craft stalls or those that harvest salt at dried riverbeds, it is sometimes difficult to hide the anger and disillusionment with tourist’s behaviour from the frontstage, the “front region”, where behaviour and actions are moderated for the benefit of the tourists (Goffman 1956: 66). In the absence of a place of privacy or a “backstage”, cultural tourism performers who are inebriated or upset, lack the space to regulate their behaviour before being in contact with tourists. In addition to the material labour of creating the crafts such as necklaces, ostrich eggshell ornaments or bows and arrows, or in the case of the Baleni salt-harvesters— producing the salt—a whole host of immaterial labour practices are occurring simultaneously. Immaterial labour is: “the labour that produces the informational and cultural context of the commodity…. [It] involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as “work”…. The kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, taste and consumer norms” (Lazzarato 1964: 132).

By this definition, the friendliness of indigenous community members at cultural tourism

sites, their attitude toward the tourist and their portrayed visual appearance and identities all form part of the “package” that tourists encounter when visiting a destination. As elaborated on later in this chapter, the cultural tourism performers add to the sense of “place”. This regulation of mood and feeling to reflect a positive countenance is the undertaking of emotional labour: “this labour requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others…. This kind of labour calls for a coordination of mind and feeling” (Hochschild 2012: 3). In rural areas of extreme poverty and difficult living conditions, it may be difficult to maintain a cheerful façade to entertain the tourists. Moreover, viewing the conspicuous wealth displayed by others may induce feelings of envy and hatred in the worker, while causing them to feel humiliated by their own lack of wealth (Wright Mills 1951: 174). The emotional labour needed to smile and be friendly to people who are sometimes dismissive of one’s cultural practices and that possibly objectify one as an exotic curio exhibit can be taxing indeed. Taking into consideration the need for white-collar “soft-skills” of professionalism such as punctuality, courtesy and the constant regulation of emotion in the face of adversity, it would take a substantial amount of training and investment of immaterial and emotional labour on the part of the cultural tourism performers’ presentation of self for the cultural tourism enterprise to be successful. One’s socio-economic class can influence how well one is able to mitigate the effects of performing emotional labour.

Gender and race relations in cultural tourism Cultural tourism is a contested practice as some find it to be an exploitative practice that maligns the dignity of the indigenous population (Fletcher 2011; Harvey 2004). However, the alternative view is that cultural tourism provides a much-needed avenue of income- generation in impoverished communities (Sathiyah 2013; Sehume 2012: 99; Dyll-Myklebust 2011; Saarinen and Rogerson 2015; Boonzaaier and Wels 2018).

Admittedly, working in the hospitality industry as a whole does sometimes require a greater amount of humility and self-restraint than would be required in other professions. These instances range from air stewards who have to remain courteous in the face of chauvinistic behaviour, to hospitality managers who are forced to remain calm after an especially pernicious guest has complained about the myriad of perceived faults with housekeeping practices. The Travel channel should launch an accompanying show to Hotel impossible 48

(2012-2017) where fault is found with the hotel, called Impossible guests to bring to the fore the poor behaviour exhibited by guests. Tourists need to be briefed by tour guides or tourism operators on how to engage in a respectful manner with hospitality staff.

Tourists also have a social responsibility to not treat hospitality staff, or any workers in the tourism industry for that matter, as commodities (Allen and Brennan 2004). The hospitality industry relies heavily on the immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri 2000) and emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) of staff to maintain the welcoming ambience of the facility. This requires an immense effort on the part of the hospitality worker and this is to the benefit of the tourism facility. Anne P. Crick outlines this dynamic as follows:

Friendship is usually carried out in a personal context but when introduced into a business relationship may have powerful effects for the organization. If a service provider and customer are friends the customer may be willing to be more tolerant of mistakes…. Friendship connects individuals at a level beyond the transactional one that may have brought them together and may not only benefit the individuals concerned but also the organization (2002: 101).

This relationship is a bit disconcerting as the power-dynamic is skewed in favour of the guest from the outset. This still seems like a transactional endeavour cloaked under the guise of friendship. A similar phenomenon occurs in host communities where cultural tourism is the main attraction (Ndlovu 2014). In fact, one could argue that more important than the physical environment, the attitudes of the community hosts and their enthusiasm towards the guest affects the tourist’s perception of the experience. This is outlined by Hopeton S. Dunn and Leith L. Dunn in relation to the hospitality industry in the Caribbean as follows:

Each territory offers sun, sand and a wide range of good quality hotel accommodation. What will distinguish one destination from another will be not so much the physical infrastructure, but the special warmth of the people and the uniqueness of the cultural, culinary and environmental attractions. For people to be happy with visitors, they have to be happy with themselves and their social environments (2002: 26).

The quotation above highlights the need for the host community to be in agreement with the goals of the tourism facility. As the lodges relevant to this thesis are community-beneficiary lodges, though professionally managed, there is a greater incentive on the part of the host community to ensure that the venture is a success (Boonzaaier and Wels 2018 a). To steer the discussion back to the vast amount of immaterial, biopolitical (Hardt and Negri 2000:

23-24; Frassinelli 2011: 120) and emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) that indigenous communities expend when engaging with guests, attention is drawn to John Urry’s depiction of the tourist as a child. He illustrates his reasoning as such:

One interesting game played by the tourist is that of “child”. This is especially clear in guided coach tours. One is told where to go, how long to go for, when one can eat, how long one has to visit the toilet, and so on…. And yet such tours seem much appreciated even by those who understand that they are “playing at being a tourist”, and one of the games that has to be embraced is that of “being a child” (2002: 91).

In terms of gender, race and class relations, the performance on the part of the tourist as a child at play is problematic for several reasons. It implies that the indigenous community hosts become the caregivers of the tourists. “Biopower is a type of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23-24). It would be interesting to gauge the effect, if any, that the tourist’s behaviour has in shaping the cultural rituals of the respective communities. Nelson Maphaha, the guide at the Fundudzi cultural camp mentioned that he chose to explain either a supernatural reasoning for a phenomenon or a scientific reasoning depending on what he thought the individual guest would be more likely to appreciate (Interview November 2017). If a change can be attributed as a result of the tourists’ presence, that would be an illustration of the biopower of tourism. The sense of ritual and rules surrounding the ancestral land at the geo-thermal hot spring at the Baleni cultural camp may add to this feeling of playfulness for the tourists. One’s shoes must be removed before the sacred site is entered and pseudonyms must be used for the things in the natural environment such as the reeds and the clouds. The camp guides explain that to call something by its true name would anger the ancestors. One gets the impression of this being an elaborate performance for the benefit of the tourist as the camp guides follow Christianity and do not worship the ancestors (field notes 2016; Sheik 2013).

It is as though this entry into a magical, spiritual place of the ancestors provides the tourist with the feeling of transcending the ordinary. This relationship echoes the age-old trope of women-of-colour being portrayed as the nanny-figure and spiritual compass of an emotionally naïve person (see Falkof 2016: 24). It is important to note that this sense of entitlement is also exhibited by women-of-colour who are of a higher socio-economic class than the indigenous community visited. 50

A black female American feminism scholar, Cynthia B. Dillard, wrote about her trip to a village in Ghana and her subsequent welcome into the village in the tone of a pop anthropologist. Granted, she was not writing in the genre of travel writing, nor did she visit the Ghanain village as a tourist but the tone in which she spoke about “endarkened feminist epistemology and African cosmology” (2008: 278) sounded as though she had essentialised spirituality and African religion as something esoteric and mystical that one had to experience. Her positionality as an educated black female may have influenced her seemingly patronizing depiction of a cultural ceremony. The section below highlights the author’s inadvertent essentialising of the Ghanain villagers:

I arranged for this pilgrimage for a group of educators and educational professionals from across the United States who participated in a traditional African ritual ceremony of sacred inclusion: my enstoolment13 as Queen Mother of Mpeasem, a West African village in Ghana’s coastal Central region (2008: 281).

Dillard is writes about the legitimization of the place of African indigenous ontologies and spirituality in academia, however, it reads like a tourist relating a tourism encounter. Later in the chapter, she describes her quest for authenticity (Knudsen et al. 2016), in order to unearth a sense of intimacy and connection that she, as an African American, for which she was searching.

This phenomenon of economic expectation is illustrated in what Lauren Dyll-Myklebust termed the “Kruiper currency”, where members of a highly media prolific ≠Khomani family in the Northern Cape, the Kruipers, expected to be paid to speak to or informally engage with tourists, even during informal encounters on the roadside. They actively commodified their Bushman identity in their encounter with tourists (2011: 175). Financial leverage that plays on socio-economic, class, racial and ethnic differences has always been an intrinsic factor in tourism. Similarly, the !Xun and Khwe communities in Platfontein, Northern Cape, market their artwork as “Bushman art”, using stereotypical tropes such as an eland or a figure hunting with a bow and arrow—thus linking the art with an “authentic” Bushman identity (Barnabas 2010: 427-428). The similarly intangible currencies of the Venda and Tsonga cultural performances and narratives are investigated in this study. Tourism was originally confined to the elite sectors of society. Travel for one’s health,

13 Enstoolment refers to the ritualistic process of inaugurating a woman as a guardian mother of the village. 51

educational edification and pleasure was commonplace and expected of the European aristocracy from as early as the seventeenth century. Travel became a means of conspicuous consumption and a means to demonstrate one’s social status (Veblen 1899; Urry 2002). It was viewed as a way to convert one’s economic capital into social and cultural capital by visiting different places, learning new things and expanding one’s social network by forming alliances with new people (Bourdieu 1986: 48; Urry 2002). Travel has now become accessible to the working- and-middle classes of society due to the relative affordability of ground and air travel (Urry 2002 ; Heppenheimer 1995). Travel has become so ingrained in the modern lifestyle of the individual that:

If people do not travel, they lose status: travel is the marker of status. It is a crucial element of modern life to feel that travel and holidays are necessary. “I need a holiday” is the surest reflection of a modern discourse based on the idea that people’s physical and mental health will be restored if only they can “get away” from time to time (Urry 2002: 5).

Moreover, women are most often employed in the domestic roles such as cleaners and cultural performers in the tourism facilities, thus adding a gendered dimension to the situation (Adkins 1995). Within established colonial discourse, not only is Africa set up as the playground for the tourist, the nature of the exchange obliges the community hosts to show case their cuisine, rituals and sacred dances and landscapes in a way that is geared toward providing an engaging spectacle (Ndlovu 2014). The danger of marketing culture as a product is that indigenous communities may be tempted to keep their cultural practices bound and static according to what tourists prefer (Sehume 2012). The quotation by Gayatri Spivak below highlights the necessity of communities being self-governing in terms of the delineation of their belief system:

Culture is a package of largely unacknowledged assumptions, loosely held by a loosely outlined group of people, mapping negotiations between the sacred and the profane, and the relationship between the sexes….On the level of these loosely held assumptions and presuppositions, change is incessant. But, as they change, these unwitting presuppositions become belief systems, organized suppositions. Rituals coalesce to match, support and advance beliefs and suppositions (2006: 359).

The previous quotation suggests that culture is constantly in a state of flux. If a culture is exposed to and influenced by too many outside influences, the so-called indigenous culture may transform into a caricature for the tourists’ consumption. This bleak perception does not take into account facets of indigenous empowerment. !Khwa ttu is a non-profit organisation 52

based on a farm in the Western Cape. The San Bushmen who live on the farm are involved in the decision-making processes regarding the farm. This is an example of the self-reliance and self-governance of indigenous communities as the farm is co-owned by the community themselves and the Swiss anthropologist Irene Staehelin, who bought the farm (!Khwa ttu website).14 Although indications from Asia, Africa and Latin America show that indigenous peoples are often connected precariously to the formal economies (Hall and Patrinos 2012: 1), this is not always the case. As illustrated by Kolkman (2002), some indigenous communities can and do derive an immense amount of pride and satisfaction from interacting with tourists and sharing their culture.

Place and space: the creation of a myth

The concept of space denotes the geographical location as co-ordinates on a map. It is void of deeper signification or meaning. Place, on the other hand, conjures up the mental associations of the narratives and beliefs imbued in an area. It has layers of mental concepts attached and layers of overlapping systems of signification (Massey 1994: 1-2; Larsen 2007: 9). The systems of signification anchors a place in a specific social, political and temporal frame. The tourist is actively engaged in this process of meaning-making. It may seem like a contradictory notion, but the tourist contributes intellectual labour to their holiday experience:15 “place is understood to be a cultural text that people read and recognize directed by the particular intentions of a producer or promoter” (Crouch 2000: 64). The advertising material of a destination provides the script for the intended experience of the tourist. It provides the easel upon which the tourist has to inscribe their own fantasy of their holiday. There is a negotiated process combining what the advertising promises and what the tourist can envision. “Place becomes the material of popular culture which is worked, re- worked and negotiated” (Crouch 2000: 64). For example, the Dracula myth may position Romania as a hub of pseudo-heritage and cultural tourism based on the dangerous yet arresting persona of Bram Stoker’s depiction of the nefarious Count. The medieval architecture of Romania provides a suitable backdrop for this experience (Candrea et al. 2016: 84). Tour operators are mobilizing the myth to encourage tourism.

14 see https://www.khwattu.org. Date accessed: 10 September 2018.

15 See Causey and Tomaselli Critical Arts special issue 26(3) of the journal: “Academics as researchers and travellers”. 53

It may seem a bit far-fetched but “place becomes understood as something through which and with which lives are lived and identity and myth made” (Crouch 2000:64). The Tsonga women who harvest salt by using ancient practices at the Baleni camp have incorporated the myth of the sacred salt into their identity construction and ways of being (Antonites 2005: 33). This depiction of an ancient ritual is a constructed practice that is re-created for commercial gain. Tourists tend to search for “authenticity”, itself a contested term, to appreciate their holiday experience. However, the cultural artefacts purchased, “sacred sites” visited and heritage attractions engaged with all depend on the tourists’ temporary suspension of disbelief in order for the artefacts and experiences to be deemed as valuable and authentic (Jamal and Hill 2004: 354-356). The domba or python dance that is performed by Venda women at the cultural camp or in the villages for the benefit of tourists is a contrived performance. “Staging of contrived experience to compensate for the lack of authentic cultural experience in a development has become an accepted outgrowth of contemporary tourism” (Grobler 2005: 32). The tourist is an active collaborator in this activity. “The background, the context, and the symbolic rendering of places as abstract meanings for popular consumption are enlivened in a more active process whereby people make their own sense of things and places…. The individual is neither completely free, nor only a receiver of the second-hand” (Crouch 2000: 64). I was informed that I could request to watch the domba dance during the 2017 fieldtrip if I wanted to witness the initiation dance, however research conducted in the area surrounding the camp in 2005 maintained that the dance should be reserved for initiation purposes only and that its performance should be sanctioned by a traditional leader. Jan H.F. Grobler advises on how to avoid the commodification of a traditional ritual by using the example of the domba dance as follows: For example, if tourists should demand to see the domba dance in the Fundudzi-Tshivhase camp, it should be explained that it can only be performed once a traditional leader has called such an initiation ceremony. Staging the sacred dance for the tourists can offend some of the local people and can lead to cultural commodification and degradation (2005: 33).

One should be cautious about assuming a correlation between cultural degradation and the performance of the dance for tourists. Often, a cultural aspect or tradition may be maintained precisely because tourists choose to experience it. Although not ideal, this is preferable to the custom being abandoned altogether (Drumm 1998: 12). The tourist is an active participant in the construction of the leisure experience. The identity and “vibe” of a place is always in a state of construction, the holiday and leisure experience becomes a way of 54

making knowledge (Crouch 2000: 65). The domba dance is now performed as requested by tourists by women of all ages as opposed to only being performed by pubescent women as it was initially intended (Van Warmelo 1932). This should not deter one from its sense of authenticity as the concept and parameters for what constitutes an authentic performance in tourism is open to negotiation (Cohen 1988: 376). The tourists are aware that this is a performance. TFPD’s marketing material acknowledges that this is a commodified experience and a performance of cultural practices. The metaphors used, crafts, artefacts, natural environment and people all serve as props in the area to contribute to the leisure immersion experience. Even one’s life experience and friends may add a layer to an individual’s perception of the place. The mental conception of a place occurs within the framework of the tourist’s imagination but this does not make the worldview any less important than the physical artefacts.

Similarly, whether or not one believes the cultural significance attributed to the white lion as the guardian of the “sacred forest” in Venda does not personally detract from one’s enjoyment of the mysticism of the place (Tucker 2003: 31). The tourist is complicit in creating their own expectations and experiences of a place based on their prior mediated encounters with the place via marketing material or popular culture references. As mentioned previously, if one watched the film Elelwani (2012 wa Luruli), one would arrive at the Fundudzi cultural camp with a preconceived notion of what constituted the intangible facets of Venda culture.

The creation of destination images at popular tourism sites

“Tourism destinations are culture-bound products which generate associations and meanings that are influenced by the cultural background of the tourist” (Therkelsen 2003: 134). However, despite the nuanced view that each person will experience when visiting a place, depending on their cultural background, some features of the destination will be universal due to advertising, films, photos or stories that portray a particular reality: “core elements of the image are recognisable world-wide leading potentially to a consistent and strong image” (Therkelsen 2003: 134). The images are so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that they seem natural. These images are circulated to such an extent that they eventually attain the taken-for-granted status of a myth (Barthes 1972: 10). People usually upload photos of 55

their trip on their social media platforms after going on holiday. Some photos of optical illusion poses at landmark sites seem almost mandatory. A selfie with the Eiffel tower in the background, posing with the Sphinx in Egypt and holding up the leaning tower of Pisa are a few examples of this phenomenon. “An overall definition of the concept of destination image can be divided into two intertwined sub-categories, mental images and media images, where the former aims at a consumer perspective and mental perceptions of reality and the latter includes a producer perspective and media representation of reality (Lindström 2005: 2). In this way: “a tourism destination may generate certain internationally-shared meanings which can constitute a standardized platform from which a culturally-differentiated market communication can take its point of departure” (Therkelsen 2003: 134). The potential mental representation maps of the tourist has to be considered in order to anticipate how to package the intangible heritage of the Venda and Tsonga folklore and practices in a way that appeals to the tourist. In a similar vein, Paris is metonymically synonymous with the Eiffel Tower while London’s Big Ben clock tower and the city’s vibrant red telephone booths are commemorated in postcards, fridge magnets and keyrings as the epitome of Parisian and British culture, respectively (Tomaselli and Scott 2009: 13).

In addition to curating perceptions of a place, tourism may also foster a curation of the self. A holiday can be compared to a grand theatre production where one needs the perfect setting, lighting, props, timing and actions to enact the script of one’s ideal holiday experience. “The tourist is an active agent that shapes the tourism process” (Andersson 2007: 47). Tourists often engage in tourism for the experience of it: “tourism goods and services are produced to yield experiences. Be it hotel rooms, rental cars, or a music performance, the final purpose of the production of these goods and services is to yield tourism experiences” (Andersson 2007: 47). The image and place production practices related to particular destinations are engaged in controlling the representations of a place. “Representation connects meaning and language to culture … It is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged by a culture” (Hall 2013: 1).

In this way, tourists have to engage with their surroundings as: “tourist experiences can’t be bought. They can only take place in the mind of the tourist” (Andersson 2007: 46). Tourism experiences only have as much resonance as the tourist is able to perceive and appreciate as 56

an individual. Flora and fauna offer cosmological sign vehicles through which a sense of magic and mysticism become real. The representation of the python god through the domba dance is a practice that uses mysticism and dance to signify fertility rites in the Venda custom. These fertility rites and narratives constitute part of the intangible traditions and practices that add nuance to the representation of Venda culture at the Fundudzi cultural camp.

Propitiatory rites for fertility: appeasing the white python of Lake Fundudzi

Issues of fertility are of immense importance in pre-industrialised agrarian communities. The culmination of a bountiful harvest depended on a large pool of human, and animal, sources of labour: “at low population densities, the conquest of land could bring neither wealth nor power. Political communities and productive communities could be built up only by a deeply attentive construction of ties of personal dependence among people” (Bledsoe and Cohen 1993: 70-71). In patriarchal societies a man’s wealth and social status was directly proportional to the number of wives he could procure and subsequently, the number of children sired: “marriage started a man’s autonomous career of building up his own “wealth in people,” and it followed a clear accumulative dynamic. Wives brought with them skills in farming and advantageous political connections, and they bore children who themselves could eventually contribute to the family’s name and strength” (Bledsoe and Cohen 1993: 71). In line with the reasoning of viewing children as a source of wealth—fertility rites are considered sacred.

The domba or python dance is a prominent cultural performance offered to tourists at the Fundudzi camp. It is part of a Venda coming-of-age ceremony. It consists of the rhythmic beating of drums while bare-breasted women connect their arms and dance in a swaying motion like the slithering of a python. This dance demonstrates to young women the roles expected of them in adulthood and conveys the importance of the conception, gestation and birth of a child (Siebert 2017: 24; Munyai 2016: 64). Moreover, the python carries particular significance in fertility rites. If a woman is unable to fall pregnant, in addition to herbal medicine made from plant extracts: She may also be given a python’s skin to wear around the waist or neck; it is believed that a small snake resides within the womb of a woman, whose function it is to carry the semen into the womb and here build up the child. Often her barrenness is considered to be due to the 57

malevolent designs of one of her family spirits (Stayt 1931: 83).

If a woman cannot bear a child it is considered to be unnatural and a curse. It is a source of embarrassment to such an extent that in most African societies it is preferable for an unmarried woman to have a child out of wedlock if they cannot get a husband rather than to remain childless and to be labelled as barren (Bledsoe and Cohen 1993: 73). The dance is also an appeasement of the white python, a mythical great snake believed to live at the bottom of Lake Fundudzi. This python influences the fertility of the land, animals and people. If proper obeisance is not offered to the python, the result could be drought and famine (Munyai 2016: 64). As much as the dance has a commercial value in terms of entertaining tourists, it also keeps the knowledge of fertility rituals alive in an increasingly industrialised environment.

Festivals and folklore around seasonal cycles and fertility used to proliferate in pre- industrialised European societies. However, rapid industrialization and the mechanization of labour on farms forced people to move to the cities to find employment in the manufacturing and service sectors. This led to a diminished reliance on and dissemination of fertility rituals (Testa 2017 a: 19-20). A south-central Italian village, Castelnuovo al Volturno still holds an annual festival that depicts a man disguised as a deer who is symbolically hunted, killed and resurrected. At the end of the play, the “deer-man” throws a handful of wheat grain into the village square to signify the continued fertility of the crops and people of the village. Tourists and locals observe this final act in reverent silence (Testa 2017 a: 20). The performance of a play and dance respectively, of the “deer-man” and the white python illustrate the intrinsic value of fertility to these communities. Despite labour forms being largely mechanised as opposed to relying on human labour, the underlying prestige the siring of children, particularly sons, in patriarchal societies is a vestige of pre-modern agricultural modes of production (Munyai 2016: 65).

The Domba dance encapsulates a myriad of socio-economic and gender-role expectations. Tourists may be able to get a condensed idea of the cultural norms of the Venda community as imbued in the dance itself. Traditional prescribed gender-roles are promoted and maintained through these rituals. Whereas fertility and child-bearing are seen as traits synonymous with a feminine identity, hyper-masculinity is the ideal depiction of males in a

patriarchal society.

The next section discusses how tropes of primitivity are merged with the narratives around cultural tourism in Africa.

Cultural tourism on the “dark continent”

Hollywood represents Africa as a place of savages and intrepid travellers pitted against each other and wild animals in the jungle. It is represented as a place of magic, mystery and intrigue. Representations of Africa depict a blank landscape that provides the site of dreams, fantasies or nightmares. The continent is portrayed as the lost Garden of Eden, a tranquil, unspoiled place of bliss while simultaneously being a place of danger. The contradictions are evident (Hickey and Wylie 1993: 59-60).

Cultural tourism embodies a type of spiritual and religious overtone that lends itself well to the needs of tourists who are in search of a deeper psycho-spiritual engagement with the host community. These tourists are in pursuit of life-altering experiences that they believe can be found at the sites of tourism engagement. The land and the indigenous communities are imbued with a sense of mysticism and otherworldly powers (Norman 2004). These expectations tie in with the search for the authentic and the lost Garden of Eden in which the ‘true-self’ can be regained. A search occurs for something that transcends one’s ordinary life that is thought to be present in the tourist’s encounter with the indigenous. Cultural tourism occupies a dubious place in post-colonial contexts. Cultural tourism can be considered a new way of viewing the other in a safe, and controlled setting. The “other” in Anglo-American anthropological literature is shorthand for the primitive, savage and uncivilized. The group, the other, is constituted by the Western same, as is the creation of anthropology’s object under the guise of tourism (Brown 2013: 176; MacCannell 1973; Hickey and Wylie 1993: 29; Fabian 1990: 140). Tourists are on a search for the authentic other: “where authenticity operates as a question of value it is viewed by those who buy into it as part of an economy of cultural politics in which signs, as measures of value, circulate for the production of cultural commodities” (Ellis 2014: 507).

Tourism and cultural enchantment as play

Melissa Siebert, a journalist, wrote a visually-beautiful coffee-table book filled with high- resolution and appealing photos of animals, people, and landscapes. The book is entitled: African Ivory Route Experiences and was published in 2017 under the auspices of the European Union African Ivory Route project. It flags the usual issues of the importance of responsible tourism in helping local communities enter into the formal economy in a move away from subsistence living off the land (Allen and Brennan 2004). It also extols the benefits that the funding from the European Union has brought about in creating a “greener”, more environmentally-friendly route by adding solar-powered geysers, and waste-recycling initiatives among other things (Siebert 2017: 5). Copies of the book are displayed at the camps for the tourists’ perusal. The images used conform to stereotypical depictions of what is expected of tourism in Africa. The cover is a photograph of a herd of elephants, walking in single file. The photographs feature happy, smiling indigenous people displaying their crafts, cultural dances or traditional cuisine. The book aims to promote cultural awareness and environmental sustainability.

Granted these are worthy aims to strive toward; however her cavalier tone when describing the ancestral rituals and her consultations with the diviners seemed as though she was embracing a novel and exotic encounter rather than seeking spiritual assistance. Her experience at the consultation was recounted in an inside-joke, suspend-your-disbelief tone. The book is effective in conjuring up narratives of the proud histories of noble peoples and it is written in a highly engaging way. With headings like “religion and beliefs”, “arts and crafts”, “eat and drink” and “speak local”, it has a Lonely Planet guide—meets-budding- anthropologist—feel to it. I was reminded of the orang-utan King Louie’s song in the Jungle book (1967) animated film: “I wanna walk like you, talk like you, too....” This does not deter from its effectiveness as a text, however it does bring to the fore the simulation of play as leisure: “playful recreational tourism is an “as if” substitute for serious ritual in a secular modern world for which God is dead. Serious, ritualistic experiential tourism to the Reality [sic] of others characterises those moderns who are alienated from their late modern world, as it increasingly inclines towards centerlessness” (Cohen 1985: 301).

In other words, in the absence or disbelief of organized religion, people engage in tourism activities to attain a sense of meaning and connection with a ritualistic and spiritual realm 60

through interaction with the more spiritually-grounded “other”: “western modes of thinking are usually associated with logic, reason, rationality and the positivist scientific paradigm. This is juxtaposed against “spiritual” ways of perceiving the world and different world views as associated with non-western contexts” (Tomaselli 2015: 109).

People who feel disenfranchised in their current modes of existence seek to gain a temporary respite from it by immersing themselves in the psycho-spiritual beliefs of another culture. There is an overt sense of childlike-wonder and joy in the playful aspects of Siebert’s experience. Her account of events reads like a guide on how to get your toddler introduced to tactile, visual and kinaesthetic play, respectively. She describes sitting on the floor with buckets of paint and large paintbrushes painting her own Tsonga-inspired cloth (Siebert 2017: 101), of sitting on the ground in the Mukhondeni village moulding clay into pottery with her hands (Siebert 2017: 105). It is a messy and tactile experience and the photos look like she was having fun at child’s play. The vivid colours of traditional attire are captured in numerous photos and she expresses her delight at being pulled onto the “dance floor” and being included in the traditional dance by the dance troupe in the Makwarani village (Siebert 2017: 43). I re-iterate the point that all of these features of inclusion are imperative for a sense of engagement in the tourism activity: “the playful attitude of the recreational tourist creates a predisposition to believe, akin to that found in a theatrical audience which is wholly involved with the action on stage. Both involve a suspension of disbelief, a readiness to give oneself up to the experience” (Cohen 1985: 298).

When Siebert engages with and enjoys the activities on offer, she becomes a co-creator of her experience. “The tourist “believes” not because he is ignorant, superficial or cheated, but in order to playfully experience that apparent reality” (Cohen 1985: 298). The suspension of disbelief related to tales of python gods, half-humans and spiritual drumming at Lake Fundudzi illustrate this suspension of disbelief (Siebert 2017: 41): “in whatever they are doing, wherever they are, individuals are experiencing encounters. It may be appropriate to consider this in terms of the individual “making” the encounter, even “doing” leisure and tourism, in order to focus on the human individual. These encounters take a variety of forms, but space always plays an important and ever-present role” (Crouch 2000: 64). This quotation emphasises how activities and experiences are anchored to particular spaces. This interconnected nature of people, culture and space incites the tourist to visit Limpopo to 61

replicate Siebert’s experiences.

Siebert’s book serves as a prime example to highlight the enchanting role of ritual, myth and engagement in the role of tourism and cultural enchantment as play. When tourists immerse themselves within the cosmology of the indigenous, in this instance, in the Venda or Tsonga narrative and belief system, they use the intangible aspects of the culture to enact their tourism experience. The intangible aspects of the indigenous culture becomes assimilated as part of the consumption set of the cultural tourist (Therkelsen 2003: 134). It also mobilises visually and aurally arresting discourses of the exotic “other” as juxtaposed against normative “western” culture. As alluded to in the heading of this section, if one feels alienated from the spiritual beliefs of one’s own culture, there is always hope for a connection with the exotic other. Return to the innocence primordial origins before the fall in Eden (Tomaselli 2012).

Cultural tourism: the search for a meaningful connection

Greater levels of technologically-driven interaction in the global north has gradually led to a shift in levels of connectedness and feelings of emotional closeness that people experience in their communities of residence (Helliwell and Putnam 1995). Tourists may embark on holidays to cultural tourism destinations on order to feel a sense of sacredness and human connection in a bid to escape from their rational Cartesian frames of life. People in the global north engage in tourism to escape the perceived alienation of their daily lives confined by bureaucracy and rigid temporal structures. Their search for authenticity in the tourism spectacle fulfils their need for engagement within the fantasy to fuel their escapism from the mundane activities of their lives. The tourism venture is viewed as a liminal space that eschews the rules governing their usual lifestyles, it a place of opportunity, revitalization, and perhaps spiritual reflection. Tourists become pseudo-pilgrims in foreign lands (MacCannell 1973; Knudsen et al. 2016; Norman 2004).

Chapter Three Theoretical Framework

The scientifically inexplicable: priest-craft versus science

Indigenous communities often cite a wealth of folklore and mystical tales that defy Cartesian rational modes of explanation. One such tale is an anecdote conveyed by a documentary filmmaker, Lionel Friedberg, who with anthropologist Peter Becker had visited Lake Fundudzi in the late 1970s to shoot a documentary on a Vhavenda spiritual ceremony. One of the film crew on The Tribal Identity (Becker 1976) had stubbed his toe and his grimaces inadvertently caused the rest of the crew to laugh. The ancestral spirits were thought to be angered by their disrespect. The consequence was that the camera and tape recorder stopped working. Only after the crew had apologised to the priest at the lake did the equipment miraculously switch on again (see Tomaselli 2015). This dichotomy between the Western ontological belief in rationality and Cartesian modes of thought are juxtaposed with the practice of ancestral worship. This allure of magic and priest-craft may attract more tourists in their hope to have a more spiritual experience beyond the bounds of western normative values. Priest-craft is defined as a pre-modern, spiritual and religious way of making sense of the world. It is often contrasted with the natural laws of positivist science (Shepperson and Tomaselli 1999: 48). This belief in the noumenal16l—the scientifically inexplicable—ties in with the tourist’s need to escape from the pressures of daily city life.

This is not to say that African ontologies are equated with mysticism and priest-craft while western ontologies are equated with Cartesian rationality. Neither mode of experience is mutually exclusive and there is a combination of mysticism and rationality in both modes of thought. Scientific thought is equated with rational and Cartesian modes of thinking. Priest- craft is associated with the noumenal (Tomaselli 2015) and the spiritual (e.g. rain dances, trance dances).

Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro coined the term perspectivism (1998) to describe how indigenous communities incorporate myths, ancestral worship and spiritual

16 The noumenal is defined by Immanuel Kant as a thing in and of itself, which is outside of, and independent of human perception (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016. N.p.) url: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/ Date accessed: 29 October 2019. 63

beliefs into the daily lifestyle practices and overarching cosmologies. Viveiros de Castro holds the indigenous communities’ worldviews as the starting point for his investigations of social phenomena. Similarly, Dyll-Myklebust’s (2014) study links narratives offered by Kalahari indigenous communities, the ≠Khomani and Mier respectively, to their spiritual belief system in the cultural tourism context. This trajectory of inquiry does not conflate indigenous communities with colonial discourses of primitivity, as when the Kalahari Bushmen were portrayed as scientific originary zoological specimens in Jamie Uys’ The gods must be crazy film franchise (Tomaselli 1990). Rather, it aims to interweave theories that challenge the premise that equates technological innovation and economic advancement as indicators of modernisation and development (Servaes 1986) by taking into consideration the diverse preferences of individual community members’ intangible aspects of ontology such as the noumenal beliefs and practices that add to the quality of life of the indigenous population (Gumucio-Dagron 2009).

Both the Baleni and Fundudzi cultural camps present a wealth of ecological and cultural artefacts that can be used to promote tourism at the respective camps. From ancient salt- harvesting practices at the Baleni natural heritage site, to the healing properties of the Lake Fundudzi, this study intends to analyse how the strands of science and spiritual narratives are used by guides and promotional materials to construct explanations for different tourist communities (local, national, international).

Ancestors, Spirits and Christianity

Cartesian modes of thinking are known to be incompatible with the creation stories of the indigenous (Lange and Dyll 2015: 3). From the Maori belief of the sky father and the earth mother (Smith 1999), to the dream-time of Aboriginal Australians these stories are scientifically disregarded as folklore and myth. However, these stories are no more fantastical than the Judeo-Christian belief that God formed man out of clay and formed women from the man’s rib (Watts 2013). The intentional undermining of some cultures in relation to others occurs because “colonization is not solely an attack on peoples and lands; rather, this attack is accomplished in part through the purposeful and ignorant misrepresentations of indigenous cosmologies” (Watts 2013: 22).

A clear hierarchy was established in which Western modes of knowledge production was viewed as superior to indigenous cosmologies: “western modes of thinking are usually associated with logic, reason, rationality and the positivist scientific paradigm. This is juxtaposed against “spiritual” ways of perceiving the world and different worldviews associated with non-western contexts” (Tomaselli 2015: 1).

In a country like South Africa where the histories of race and oppression are indelibly entwined, it is difficult to work through the complexities of the power dynamics between the different race groups. The very term “South African” is seen to be problematic and is not necessarily only dependent on one’s claim to a particular nationality, there are queries as to whether certain race groups are more South African than others (Vice 2010: 323; Chipkin 2007: 2). In this contested space cultural tourism can be viewed as yet another form of economic exploitation of vulnerable indigenous groups window-dressed as poverty alleviation initiatives. These relationships are ensconced within colonial matrices of power (Quijano 2000). Instead of improving the living conditions of indigenous communities, the indigenous at upmarket tourist ventures are just touted as novelties for the tourists’ benefit. Instead of improving their lifestyle, tourism aims to keep them impoverished to maintain an authentic experience for tourists (Koot 2016). Members of indigenous communities participate in the cultural tourism industry out of economic necessity, not necessarily for any sense of intrinsic cultural revitalisation (Grant 2011: 247; Sathiyah 2013: 66).

One may question the emphasis of race relations in the discussion around tourism ventures; however, race is a pertinent aspect in any discussion about power-relations in the South African society. This country still bears the scars of years of oppression. This view is supported by the ex-Chancellor of the University of the Free State, Professor Jonathan Jansen as he asserts that:

We were the last country in post-colonial Africa to taste freedom and democracy. The sheer duration of colonialism and apartheid over centuries stripped us of our dignity and so much of our humanity….A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was not going to undo this damage; what we need is a national trauma unit (2011: 5).

Viewed against the backdrop of past oppression—tourism, especially cultural tourism can be

a very uncomfortable topic in the current South African milieu. Cultural tourism is fraught with contention as it can be seen to reproduce essentialised colonial stereotypes of indigenous groups (Ndlovu 2014: 13). Indigenous culture becomes a packaged commodity to be consumed by tourists, as capitalism in a benevolent form (Koot 2016, Ndlovu 2014).

However, indigenous communities do exert agency in how they choose to represent themselves to researchers and tourists. Admittedly, although some indigenous communities are living in abject poverty while working at tourism lodges, it should be acknowledged that engaging in cultural tourism provides alliterate communities with employment and an income when there are very few other options. Moreover, indigenous community members are aware of the scripts regarding colonial exploitation and land dispossession that identify them as being victims in a capital structure so they sometimes use those stories to gain pity, and sometimes financial payment from researchers. This “anthrospeak” (see Mhlanga 2012, Ellis 2014: 510), is a type of profitable negotiation in which indigenous community members try to dupe researchers into paying them for providing information in the form of interviews or conversations. The catch is that these community members have learnt from years of engagement with other researchers, what the current researcher most likely wants to hear. By sticking to a theme of victimization and exploitation, a status quo is maintained. This may not necessarily be the truth of events but it conforms to an expected narrative (Dyll 2003: 137; Tomaselli 2012; Tomaselli 2017: 1183).

William Ellis, a researcher who lived at Welkom—the settlement on which many ≠Khomani Bushman live, recounts his experience with anthrospeak. Dawid Kruiper, ≠Khomani traditional leader, playfully tried to convince Ellis that a beetle found in the yard was used to eat the lice from one’s hair. Kruiper was aware of the expectations and scripts that tourists and researchers had of their interactions with Bushmen and he attempted to leverage this knowledge by using anthrospeak—telling Ellis what he thought a researcher would want to hear. Unfortunately for Kruiper, Ellis had lived in the community for enough years and he also spoke Afrikaans—the language used by the Bushmen—so he could understand the nuances to which other researchers are not privy. Ellis saw through the farce immediately. Therefore, there was no opportunity for Kruiper to leverage a “noble savage” script (Ellis 2014: 510).

It would be erroneous to presume that indigenous communities do not have agency in how they are represented. It is also presumptuous to assume that indigenous communities do not enjoy their interactions with tourists. The villagers of Ngadha in Indonesia welcome tourists to their rituals and anticipate their arrival: “villagers were not only happy for tourists to attend rituals, they actively sought them to take part. It was common for guides to be informed of rituals ahead of time so that they could bring the tourists” (Cole 2007: 954). It is also paternalistic to hold the belief that tourists exploit indigenous communities, as though the communities themselves are incapable of having any feelings about or influencing the interaction. This view infantilises indigenous populations. The indigenous communities themselves do have strong and valid feelings about tourists. To draw from the Indonesian case study once again: “the villagers of Ngadha like tourists for a number of reasons: they provide entertainment, bring economic benefits and service provision, provide friends from far-away places, and are a source of information. Importantly, they make the locals proud of their heritage” [Italics are my emphasis] (Cole 2007: 954). Researchers sometimes become so determined to prove cultural commodification and exploitation that they fail to take into account how the indigenous communities themselves interpret their engagement in the tourism enterprise (Cole 2007: 943; Dyll-Myklebust 2014). This thesis attempts to ascertain the meaning that indigenous communities themselves attribute to their own traditional practices.

Although tourism is a vital economic driver and source of employment where jobs are scarce, it is also fraught with racial and class power-dynamics especially within the decolonization debate (Ivanovic 2008, Ndlovu 2014). Cultural tourism is sometimes seen as the “performative primitives” show casing their culture in a tokenistic manner for wealthy, mostly white, middle-to-upper class tourists. This also happens in a western context in the international arena (Ndlovu 2014). Morgan Ndlovu also speaks of the “non-voluntariness of seemingly voluntary actions” (2014: 47). Tourists sometimes get the added benefit of feeling like good Samaritans when they support community-owned cultural ventures. This is supported by Stasja Koot’s observation that: “as consumers, therefore, tourists can now feel good about themselves; they have supported the poor” (2016: 1218). It should not necessarily be a point of contention about whether the tourists feel gratification after visiting a country. If the tourists benefited socially or psychologically and they have contributed to the economic circumstances in a region, then so be it. Africa is still constructed as a place of danger and 67

darkness in the collective psyche of the global north (Hickey and Wylie 1993: 23). One perspective is that communities provide the immaterial labour for their own objectification (Negri and Hardt 2000). Morgan Ndlovu asserts that:

The idea of cultural villages is problematic, because the staging of what is supposedly culture in these villages takes place in the environment of a colonial encounter where an external agency has the power to impose its own imaginations of being and becoming insiders. Thus, the fact that the cultural workers are just “workers” who seek to obtain their income through their actions means that they are coerced by circumstances to dance to the tune of their (mostly white) employers (2014: 6).

The asymmetrical power dynamic that is intrinsic to the relationship between the host community and the tourist was alluded to in a pun on the words cultural villages in title of a Masters dissertation: “Cultural pillages of the leisure class? Consuming expressions of identity” (Tavener-Smith 2011: 1). It is by no means advocated that impoverished communities in rural areas should “sell” a re-packaged version of their culture to wealthy tourists, however, one should be cognizant of the fact that in remote areas where other avenues of employment are scarce, participation in tourism is often the only avenue for employment of exploitation without tangible benefits being accrued to the host community (Harvey 2004; Fletcher 2011). The quotation below by Stasja Koot reflects this unease:

In Southern Africa, do we not simply need to acknowledge that the colonial heritage is perpetuated in tourism? And if private operators market themselves as do-gooders, is it not also their responsibility to create the capacity to “do good”? (2016: 1222).

Cultural tourism built up in this manner can be construed as exploitation within paternalistic colonial discourses (see Koot 2016). This thesis attempts to provide an alternative view. Tourism ventures at the cultural camps being studied are conducted for the mutual benefit of all stakeholders. Cultural tourism is a survival strategy in an economically impoverished rural area. The income generated has multiplier effects throughout the community. Tourists not only spend money at the actual camps but they also buy crafts from roadside vendors or support local businesses along the route to the lodge (Dyll-Myklebust 2011; Okazaki 2008). The private operators have been “doing good” by outsourcing the hospitality jobs at the lodge to local community members (Sathiyah 2013). This begs the question of whether cultural tourism is a socially acceptable iteration of a colonial trajectory under the guise of economic empowerment. As Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni notes that “Africa has experienced the slave 68

trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism…and today globalisation. Taken together, these processes constitute coloniality as a global power structure that sustains asymmetrical power relations between the Euro-American World and the Global South” (2013: 11). Public-private-and-community-partnerships can be used for poverty alleviation initiatives (see Dyll-Myklebust 2011). Cultural tourism could be an incentive for indigenous communities to transmit their traditional knowledge to younger generations. The knowledge can be imbued with a sense of value. These aims move the discourse away from the stringent views of exploitation and colonialism to incorporate nuanced ways of making sense of the tourism enterprise. This study views the tourism enterprise from the perspective of the indigenous worldview and adds to the counter-narrative to positivist scientific knowledge.

Perspectivism in indigenous cosmologies: from priest-craft to performance

The theory of perspectivism is derived from the worldviews of the Amerindians of the Amazon. It conveys the belief that the world consists of co-existing roles and points of view which one individual may experience at different times. It is linked to the term “multinaturalism”, which espouses a belief that the universe and everything in it comprises of a single soul, which is housed in many different material bodies. According to this belief, a shaman’s17 affinity with the natural world could be so powerful that they could channel the spirit of an animal if they wished to do so (Viveiros de Castro 2015: 55-56). This framework sets the parameters for this study by placing emphasise on the intangible heritage practices of the Venda and Tsonga that have a psycho-spiritual component to it. Although the indigenous cuisine experiences offered at the camps do have an indigenous cultural aspect, it does not have as strong a psycho-spiritual emphasis as the domba dance for example. This added criterion of a psycho-spiritual dimension of experience placed limits on the selection of the intangible cultural activities and there was a subsequently stronger focus on religious syncretic themes.

According to this cosmological framework the earth, and objects which are considered as inanimate from a Cartesian perspective, has a soul and has a sense of consciousness. The theory of Amerindian perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 2015) works in conjunction with

17 An indigenous spiritual healer. 69

Critical Indigenous Qualitative Methodologies (Denzin et al. 2008) because both the theory and the methodology recognise the worldview of the indigenous as a starting point for the investigation (Guimaraes 2011:140). Amerindian perspectivism theory is also used to make sense of indigenous views from Africa, Asia and Oceania (Guimaraes 2011: 140). The researcher is encouraged to work within a framework of autochthonous ideas (Guimaraes 2011: 140). “Amerindian perspectivism emerged as a theoretical-methodological answer to challenges in understanding systems of thought in cross-cultural comparisons of cosmologies, philosophies, and mythico-histories” (Rasmussen 2011: 161).

The belief in multinaturalism is not confined to the Amerindians of the Amazon. The Tsonga community at the Baleni cultural camp also exhibit a similar sense of reverence for their sacred ancestral land (Antonites 2005; Antonites 2013). Proper reverence has to be observed as the natural environment of that area is considered to be imbued with a sense of consciousness (Sheik 2013: 100; field notes May 2016). The practices and rituals are described in detail in the data analysis and findings chapter. Similarly, the Domba python dance was originally performed to imitate a spirit-possession by a mythical python of fertility. The version performed for tourists at the Fundudzi cultural camp is a dance without the element of spirit-possession (field notes November 2017).

There is a juxtaposition of worldviews when tourists from a scientifically-positivist framework abide by multinaturalism-influenced rules. Perspectivism influences one’s interaction with the people, environment and animals. However, one should be wary of having a fixed idea of indigenous peoples being in a state of “ecological suspension” (Tomaselli 1999: 189). Ecological suspension occurs when well-meaning developers choose not to improve the living conditions for indigenous communities because they erroneously believe that they are interfering with the natural way of how the indigenous interact with nature. The international development agencies were reluctant to provide financial aid to the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of Namibia because they were hesitant to disturb their way of life (Tomaselli 1999: 189). The impoverished San community needed development aid just like the other surrounding rural communities. Although the Tsonga community at the Baleni cultural camp and the Venda community at the Fundudzi cultural camp do engage in a level of perspectivism by displaying their awareness of their co-existence with the natural environment, they are also reflexive about the element of performance that is incorporated to 70

assuage the tourist’s expectations (Field notes 2017).

Suspension between belief and disbelief: Todorov’s theory of the fantastic

The fantastic is a literary theory that describes the reader’s hesitation to attribute the cause of an event or phenomenon to positivistic laws of nature or to supernatural powers, respectively (Todorov 1975: 25). The fantastic only exists within the state of hesitance before a decision is made. If the reader decides to attribute the cause of events to natural positivistic laws then the event becomes the uncanny. Alternatively, if the reader attributes the cause of the event to supernatural powers then the event becomes the marvellous (Todorov 1975:30). The theory of the fantastic is used to frame phenomena and narratives at the Fundudzi cultural camp. I had read about a camera crew that had inadvertently disrespected the ancestors while filming a religious ritual at Lake Fundudzi in the 1970s. Their electronic devices inexplicably switched off while they were recording and only switched on again after they had asked the priest to offer their apologies to the ancestors (Tomaselli 2015: 113-117; Tomaselli 1996: 181-184). This prior knowledge and expectation of the camp led me to experience a mildly unsettling event during a fieldtrip to the Fundudzi camp in May 2016. I am still uncertain about how to attribute the cause of the event recounted below so it falls within the fantastic. The incident is recounted in the vignette below:

I shared a chalet at the camp with a fellow researcher, Dr Shanade Barnabas. We had watched the movie Elelwani (2012) on the evening that we reached the camp. The portrayal of spiritual white lion and the depictions of Venda spirituality had intrigued us. Later that night we heard the beating of drums and the chanting of religious groups in the community just before we could fall asleep. We commented that it felt a bit eerie but we brushed it off as us being paranoid after watching the film. We awoke in the early hours of the morning because we were convinced that we had heard slow, measured footsteps outside our door. Shanade asked that I lock the door as my bed was closer to the door. I locked the door with a sense of trepidation. I reasoned that if there was a supernatural presence lurking about, a locked door with a wire-mesh window was not going to keep it out. I am not usually superstitious nor particularly religious, but I asked Shanade to pray for us—she is the spiritual one—then we fell asleep. The next morning we asked one of the camp managers if it was possible for intruders to walk around the camp as we had heard footsteps. They laughed and responded that when the big leaves from the tree next to the chalet fell to the ground it sounded like footsteps. We were assured that the camp was safe and that it was only the leaves making the sound. Shanade and I laughed at ourselves for being silly but when the camp manager mentioned that they kept their paraffin lamp burning the entire night, we were doubtful again because if there truly was nothing to be fearful of, why would a person who lived at the camp keep their lamp burning unless there was something to be wary of? (Field notes 15 May 71

2016).

We returned from the fieldtrip without giving much thought to whether it was the leaves or a supernatural presence. However, this self-reflexive vignette provides an illustration of how a slight sense of fear and uncertainty can lead to a sense of intrigue around a place. It jarred me into considering the folklore of the “half-men”—men with their body split vertically—where one half was tangible and made of flesh while the other half was comprised of spiritual matter.

According to the legends recounted by the camp host, Nelson Maphaha, at Lake Fundudzi, these half-men played on spiritual drums that were comprised of boulder-like rocks on the edge of the lake. This, in addition to the mythical white python, mentioned earlier in the chapter, adds to the narrative of spirituality around the camp. These narratives counter the dominant Cartesian framework of understanding that western modes of thinking are associated with (Tomaselli 2015: 109). The theory of the fantastic provides the framework to ascertain the ways in which, if any, to which cultural folklore is used to persuade tourists to engage with and immerse themselves within the spiritual milieu of the Venda community. Cultural folklore is comprised of narratives that are transmitted from one generation to the next via oral traditions of storytelling (Ben-Amos 1971: 8).

This chapter considered the hypothesised expectations of potential tourists to the cultural camps by using popular media forms—books, television and film among others—in the absence of primary data (interviews, focus group discussions). The boundaries were demarcated in terms of the theoretical framework by using the psycho-spiritually inclined sources of intangible cultural heritage such as cultural folklore, ancient salt-harvesting practices, spiritual dances and spiritually-attributed ecological phenomena to the exclusion of the more pragmatic aspects of the intangible culture such as the traditional cuisine. The next chapter outlines the methodological choices that shaped the data collection and analysis process.

Chapter four Methodology: embarking on an adventure—off to the field we go

Fieldwork was conducted initially during May 2016 and then again during November 2017. A team of four researchers stayed at the Modjadji, Baleni and Fundudzi camps from May 15th until May 24th spending three nights at each camp. Professor Keyan Tomaselli, my supervisor, Professor Pier Paolo Frassinelli, my co-supervisor, and Dr Shanade Barnabas, my field research mentor, made themselves available for the trip. Professors Tomaselli and Frassinelli covered the fuel and food costs for the fieldtrips from their respective research accounts. In November 2017, the research team was joined by another researcher with vast experience in conducting fieldwork in indigenous communities, Dr Vanessa Wijngaarden18.

The 2017 fieldtrip was split between the Fundudzi and the Baleni camps only as these camps had been chosen as the focus of the case study. It would not have been feasible in terms of time and financial resources available to undertake research at all five cultural camps (Modjadji, Fundudzi, Baleni, Blouberg and Mafefe) on the AIR. The Fundudzi and the Baleni camps were chosen on the basis of practical considerations—the distance of the camps from Johannesburg, and the distinctive cultural offerings of the respective Venda and Tsonga communities. The Modjadji cultural camp also offered cultural dances and a visit to a cycad forest as well as a museum documenting the history and lineage of the Modjadji “Rain Queen” a title from which the Modjadji cultural camp takes its name. However, this cultural entity did not seem to be as ingrained in public awareness as the psycho-spiritual narrative of the sacred lake and the holy forest of the Venda community at the Fundudzi cultural camp or the Tsonga salt-harvesters at the Baleni cultural camp19. I split my time from 12-17 November 2017 between the two camps. Most of the roads to reach the cultural camps require some hair-raising 4x4 off-road driving. I do not have a vehicle nor can I drive on urban roads, let alone 4x4 terrain. Had the Professors not been available to drive in extremely volatile off-road conditions—this research could not have been undertaken. The researchers on Professor Tomaselli’s Re-thinking Indigeneity Project all conduct research in a collaborative manner. The origin and implementation of the project is explained in the

18 Wijngaarden, V. (2016). Dynamics behind persistent images of “the Other”: the interplay between imaginations and interactions in Maasai cultural tourism. Berlin: Lit Verlag. 19 This perception was gained by searching for the terms: Venda, Tsonga and Lobedi in a search engine and gauging the number of articles in different media related to the respective communities. 73

following section.

The Rethinking Indigeneity Project: cultivating free-range researchers

The Rethinking Indigeneity (RI) Project is a collaborative-learning initiative that was implemented by Tomaselli in the late 1980s. The project focuses on how indigenous communities form their own sense of identity, representation, developmental and tourism strategies (see Tomaselli 2012). The project involves an ensemble of components and paradigms ranging from the post-positivist (Nielsen and Tomaselli 2010) on a spectrum ranging towards analytical and evocative ethnography (Dyll 2007) and (McLennan-Dodd 2003). Teams of students and research affiliates enter and exit the project in terms of their own topic interests and theoretical expertise.

Nearly 100 Honours, Masters, and Doctoral students registered at the University of KwaZulu- Natal were involved in the research collaboration since its inception (Finlay 2009: 1). Finlay’s estimate of the number of students involved was as of 2009, one could estimate that this figure—including research associates from other universities—would now be around 200 collaborators or so: “the paradigm developed by CCMS20 largely followed a participatory communication action research approach that explains how the researchers are viewed as research intermediaries by previously sceptical hosts/subjects/co-researchers” (Tomaselli 2016: 817). I want to draw attention to the largely collaborative nature of the research endeavour. Contrary to depictions in popular culture, the researcher is not a lone creative genius, holed up in a remote cabin in the mountains somewhere. Research is a group- oriented, joint process. “Cultural myths exalt lone heroes, but in fact most great achievements probably emerged from groups. This is true in science and technology, business and trade, exploration and more” (Baumeister et al. 2017: 237). The RI project fosters a socially interactive learning process. Researchers do not work in isolation: “even the brightest young writer will find it difficult to work in a vacuum and establish an argument ab initio. He must find a foothold in past scholarship” (Eco 2015 [1977]: 15). The RI project fosters collaborative learning.

Collaborative learning refers to an instruction method in which students at various

20 The Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS) established by Prof Tomaselli at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 1985. 74

performance levels work together in small groups toward a common goal. The students are responsible for one another’s learning as well as their own” (Gokhale 1995:22). In this way, learning becomes a socially engaged and mutually constructed activity. We have established a community of practice: “communities of practice are groups of people who…deepen their knowledge and expertise in an area by interacting on an ongoing-basis….They become informally-bound by the value that they find in learning together” (Wenger et al. 2002: 4-5).

Collective problem solving is feasible in practice: “social interaction and social learning can lead to cognitive development ... At times when some people knew more, and others knew less, the roles of mentor and apprentice reflect guidance and collaboration” (Leshem 2007: 295). When I conducted my fieldwork, I was part of a research team that comprised of two professors, two doctoral graduates and myself. I benefited immeasurably from the guidance and mentorship of more senior academics who had already conducted research in the field, including one of whom—Tomaselli—who had conducted previous research during 2013 with his MA student, Zuleika Sheik (2013) at my two study sites, in the context of the route as a whole. The research team provided practical guidance on how to conduct interviews and engage with research participants and, on occasion, provided a much-needed figurative wake- up call when I veered off track. Group-focused, collaborative teaching and learning practices are found in other educational settings. The RI project implements a similar structural basis within which students collaborate under broad-based supervision conducted by lecturers, affiliates and even former students who, on occasion, have mentored their replacements on that particular thematic track.

The research team at the Mukumbani village at the Fundudzi cultural camp, November 2017. 21

Photo 1

Group-focused learning in other educational settings

The zone of proximal development is a term coined by Lev Vygotsky. This concept, colloquially known as “scaffolding” occurs when children are taught to perform tasks interdependently with guidance from those who are more accomplished in the task. The starting point for the level of instruction occurs at the level at which the child is currently proficient (Pratt et al. 1988: 832).

This allows for teaching and learning to occur at levels that are comfortable for the student, it challenges without being overwhelming. Incoming Honours students at CCMS were advised by Tomaselli to interact with their peers in the shared student offices as the first port of call, the course lecturer as the second port of call and to contact him in the final and most dire instance, as a resource to be consulted when they encountered problems.

21 All photos were taken by Prof Pier Paolo Frassinelli.

The design and space-allocation of the students’ study offices at CCMS in Durban was conducive to interactive modes of teaching and learning. Simple resources such as a communally placed table in the foyer, surrounded by several chairs encouraged students to hang about after classes and engage in informal learning. In that way, peer-to-peer learning was entrenched in the structure of the learning process: “students embedded in learning communities result in more beneficial academic experiences and outcomes” (Goldman 2012: 1). Tomaselli incorporates new students within the collaborative cohort that is already established within the RI project. The new students are engaged in a socialization process with the other students while they learn about acceptable scholarly practice on an informal basis. This peer-to-peer transfer of skills occurs organically as CCMS students generally shared study spaces on campus and spent lots of time interacting outside of formal class sessions. We often used the moniker of the “CCMS family” to describe ourselves, and the large but interlinked cohort of academics that worked in an inclusive, collaborative manner under the auspices of CCMS.

The CCMS family of researchers conducts field work in a similarly collaborative manner. The first couple of days on the annual Kalahari field trips are unstructured, informal and interactive with the local community. In RI terminology, this would be equated to “hanging out” with host communities. The hosts in the Kalahari had more time to spend with us as very few people had formal employment. In contrast, the time and financial constraints, in addition to the fact that we were occupying guest chalets, made our stay on the AIR more structured.

The camp guides who spent time with us had incorporated us within their work and leisure activities: we were able to join them at church, on guided walks, and we visited natural attractions, taking at least one AIR guide with us. Research in this instance was a largely unstructured endeavour—conducted in a manner similar to the wanderings of free-range chickens.

The concept “free-range” generally refers to chickens or other livestock that are left to roam about without being enclosed within strict boundaries. This led to the use of the term “free- range parenting” a practice espoused by a mother, Lenore Skenazy, who promoted the practice of letting children make decisions and do things for themselves so that they can become self-reliant (Gibbs 2009: 3). Free-range parenting developed in response to 77

“helicopter parenting” where parents hovered over their children, infantilised them and took charge of all decision-making processes to the extent that it caused young adults to behave as though they were helpless without guidance from their parents (Gibbs 2009: 2). This behaviour impacts higher education institutes as young adults are ill-equipped to take responsibility for their own learning processes and their parents feel entitled to intervene in the teaching and grading process (Vinson 2013: 424-425). This dynamic results in students displaying symptoms of learned helplessness (Peterson and Seligman 1983: 104), whereby students feel paralysed and unable to do anything before they get instruction from an authority figure. We have to “kill” the teacher figuratively, as Nyasha Mboti explains, to take responsibility for one’s own learning. Mboti highlights the need for students to get “lost”—to deviate from prescribed texts and to venture off on paths of self-directed learning (2018: 71-72). We encourage the establishment of “free-range researchers” who revel in the processes of play, collaboration, and self-directed learning. It may seem counterintuitive to link play with learning, but learning occurs more effectively when done within the framework of play.22

In the Kalahari, students interacted with the children, played soccer against the villagers, and went on tracking forays with ex-hunters, and a few plucky students engaged in the trance- dancing rituals (Tomaselli 2012, Reinhardt 2003: 107). One year on one of the fieldtrips to the Kalahari a Drama graduate took a mask used for theatrical performances to foster engagement with the children in the community, however, instead of inculcating a sense of play, the children were petrified of the mask. This was because the student had mistakenly affixed the wrong mask, the angry rather than the happy one. The children all ran away, but returned when the mask was changed. This illustrates the point that in order for play to be fun, it has to be directed by the children themselves. Developmental psychologist, Peter Gray, elucidates the similarities between play and self-directed learning: “play is self-chosen and self-directed … It is intrinsically motivated and done for its own sake” (2013: 274). Gray argues that children learn more effectively when authority-figures loosen the reins of prescriptive teaching and allow children the freedom to engage in their own exploration of

22 I am aware of Singhal and Rogers’ concept of Entertainment-Education (1999), but it is beyond the scope of the argument made here. 78

concepts.23 He sums up the loss of enthusiasm for prescriptive, rigidly defined modes of teaching and learning as follows: “children generally lose motivation when they lose choice—when adults are in charge” (2013: 274). The efficacy of play as a means of self- directed learning is supported by studies observing the actions of pre-school children in a classroom setting in Sweden (see Samuelsson and Carlsson 2008, Walker 2017: 43). In light of this understanding, students at the postgraduate level within the RI project are encourage to foster and pursue their own research interests within the broader framework of the topics of indigenous issues of development, tourism, identity, representation or any related topic.

The project forms the overarching structure but students have the freedom and are actively encouraged to practice self-directed learning. Therein lies the fostering of free-range researchers. Similarly, teenagers are sent to gender-specific initiation schools to learn the respective social roles that are expected of adult females and adult males of the Venda and Tsonga cultures. The domba dance, performed by Venda woman, is a particular socialisation process that teaches pubescent girls about the expectations of marriage and motherhood (Stayt 1931).

To conclude my thoughts on the RI project, I enact the key processes of self-directed and collaborative learning. Purely theoretical undertakings serve their purpose in terms of refining a field or adding rigor to research. Now that the rationale for the team-constituted fieldwork practice has been established, the research approach will be unpacked.

Magic, mysticism and keeping confidences: sacred knowledge and the researcher

When I collected data for my thesis, I joined the ranks of other information-collectors. The in-depth interviews with community members were for the overt purposes of knowledge production but one cannot deny that the process of collecting information is not a neutral endeavour in indigenous communities. “Colonial administrators, travellers, and some anthropologists have been the most active collectors of oral tradition” (Curtin 1969:140). My research is the most closely aligned with the goals of an anthropologist—to understand the purpose of the rituals within traditional practices. When discussing the sacred burial practices

23 One of the RI subprojects involve the study of how over-imitation occurs within interactions in 3-to-6 year old pre-school children in a comparison between western (Brisbane) and indigenous Australian and Southern African communities (see Nielsen and Tomaselli 2010). 79

of the Netshiavha clan in the Thathe Vondo sacred24 forest, the guide Nelson Maphaha, was careful to conceal prohibited information. He discussed how a person from the clan was buried and he outlined the process for an elder of the family and a traditional healer to offer snuff25 and traditional beer in the forest so that the spirit of the deceased person from the Netshiavha clan could communicate with the living using signals. These signals were conveyed either by the trees or by the screaming of monkeys but even then, there was still some information that was considered too personal to reveal to outsiders. When I queried about the final resting place of an exhumed clan member I was admonished as follows:

Some of the things are deep secrets, where they will not even tell you….Even now nobody from that family will show you it’s here, but it’s in this bush (Nelson Maphaha 22 May 2016: guided tour and interview at the Thathe Vondo Holy Forest). The message was clear: certain things were only knowable to certain privileged members of society. Being a PhD student conducting research does not excuse undue curiosity or invite people to share confidential information. This experience is echoed by the anthropologist Philip Curtin’s observations about oral traditions in African cultures. He notes that:“ structural aspects of some societies may define certain traditions as the private possession of a particular social grouping—not to be recited to strangers, much less recorded for public deposit” (1969: 143). The researcher is often acknowledged as an outsider, irrespective of the level of rapport built with the community.

There is a greater amount of reluctance to share private information in light of the strained relations between different ethnicities and linguistic groups in South Africa. People do not just offer information unreservedly just because a researcher from a university inquires about something. Anthropologist, David Coplan encapsulates this distrust and attitude as follows:

In South Africa, the intimate politicisation of anthropological concerns such as self- representation, cultural and historical claims in resource allocation, the production of power and knowledge, and even micro social processes have begun to shake the foundations of empiricism and “common sense” (2017: 217).

Adherence to good ethical and research practices dictates that one respects the wishes of one’s informants irrespective of the potential value of the information divulged. I was

24 In this instance, the official name is the Holy forest but community members also refer to it as the sacred forest. The terms are used interchangeably. 25 A type of tobacco. 80

prohibited from adding the details of a ritual at the Lake Fundudzi as the request from the respondent, Nelson Maphaha, was unambiguous:

Now, some of the things I will tell you, you will have to edit it or you will not tell people this (22 May 2016: guided tour and interview at the Thathe Vondo Holy Forest). As riveting as the next five minutes of information was, the fellow researcher who accompanied me during the fieldtrip switched off the recording device as requested. I did not include the information in the analysis due to the need to respect the wishes of the respondent, however, this incident did prompt a deep reflection about the perceived power- dynamics inherent in the researcher-researched relationship. The allocation of authority and power does not rest predominantly with the researcher as was the case with research conducted in indigenous communities in previous decades.

Research approach and paradigm: reverse cultural studies

Employing reverse cultural studies: a move from the text to the context

Academics from the more positivist-leaning social sciences regard the field of cultural studies with suspicion. It is viewed as a wishy-washy “anything goes”26 field where transdisciplinary is often read as being synonymous with “we’ll take whatever we can get” (Winter 2014: 247). Granted, it is difficult to pinpoint what undergirds the field due to the range and complexity of topics covered. However, this does not mean that the field is not shaped by specific parameters. Rainer Winter, a cultural studies theorist, observes that “cultural studies…applies itself to the analysis of lived experiences, social practices and cultural representations, which are considered in their network-like or intertextual links, from the viewpoints of power, difference and human agency” (2014: 247).

The concepts of power, difference and human agency have been used to demarcate the field, but once again, there are countless configurations under which these aspects could be investigated. It is not within the scope of this study to outline the historical trajectory of cultural studies as a field or its development in southern Africa. This has been recorded by

26 Tomaselli (2016) sardonically labels this “empty-signifier” type of cultural studies as “red panty cultural studies” because the theories are applied with scant regard to context and could thus signify anything faddish, irrespective of how trite the topic is. 81

other academics in the global south (see Tomaselli, Mboti and RØnning 2013; Tomaselli and Mboti 2013). The suspicion around the work conducted under the banner of cultural studies is articulated in a similar manner to current discourses around “fake news” (see Rodny-Gumede 2018). Arnold Shepperson and Keyan Tomaselli articulate their misgivings as follows:

Though cultural studies emerged in Birmingham in the 1960s from an impeccable lineage that drew on both the critique of theory and a body of focused empirical research, some post-1990 variants reflect an ambiguous relationship with empirical methodology, factual accuracy, and the relational nature of material reality. Cultural studies was originally concerned with the study of power relations and democratization (2004: 257).

There is a now a cluster of common themes emerging—those of power relations and democratization, difference and human agency. Linked to the aspect of human agency is the concept of literally “doing” cultural studies—working in the field, getting sunburnt, speaking to real people and getting interrogated by research informants, as opposed to sitting in an air-conditioned, sanitized office and writing about cultural studies. The process of acquiring the worldviews of the research participants is one of the key aims of spending time with people in a quasi-ethnographic manner (Sydnor 2017). I did not spend enough time with the research participants for this research to be considered as ethnographic. However, this emphasis does not negate the importance of academy-bound research (see Eco [1977] 2015: 7). The field of cultural studies relies on the lived-experience and the specific historical, geographical and political context to draw its conclusions, therefore, “doing” cultural studies is better suited to the needs of the field. Keyan Tomaselli and Nyasha Mboti illustrate this need as such:

Cultural studies suggests two forms of doing: desk-doing via texts and/or doing it in the field of lived contradictions. Textual doing appears most rewarding in forging a career in terms of institutional requirements. Research, however, is much rougher and messier in the field (2013: 6).

This study incorporates aspects of the field work lived-experience in the text. The research participants from the Venda and Tsonga communities respectively, were treated with human dignity and as co-producers of research. Keyan Tomaselli asserts that the key component of doing reverse cultural studies takes into account that:

Detail, immediacy and self-reflexivity are as important as textualised theory, in which human agency is described and recognized, and in which voices from the field, our “subjects’ of observation” are engaged by researchers as their equals (in human dignity and as co- 82

producers of knowledge) (2003: 858).

I use the method of “thick description” (Geertz 1973) to capture the nuance and the experience of conducting research in the field. As the study is concerned with the meanings that indigenous communities attribute to their cultural practices, the detailed descriptions assist in capturing the significance of particular psycho-spiritual practices. I do practice self- reflexivity when considering my interactions with the community members as my research positionality and worldviews affect the interpretation of the data. Merely relating what I had heard and experienced was not enough to add a sense of the lived-experience of the research. I then engaged in a “thick description” of the context to add texture and nuance to the research narrative in the resulting thesis. The term “thick description” went through a series of iterations starting with Gilbert Ryle (1971), who used the term to describe how the observations of social interactions and events could be made sense of by adding contextual information about a behaviour or occurrence. Clifford Geertz then adapted the term to describe the interpretation of the meaning behind actions using keen observational skills (1973: 312). A holistic definition of the term is offered by combining the aforementioned definitions. “Thick description accurately observed social actions and assigns purpose and intentionality to these actions, by way of the researcher’s understanding and clear description under which the social actions took place” (Ponterotto 2006: 543).

I describe the weather experienced during the fieldtrip, the physical environment that I walked through, and observations about the livestock in the area. This seemingly inconsequential information adds to the overall perception of the cultural camps in order appreciate the nuance, context and lived-experience of that created the narratives and intangible heritage of the Venda and Tsonga people that resided close to the cultural camps. It allows the reader to experience the fieldwork through my perception of it: “interpretive interactionism seeks to bring lived experience before the reader. A major goal of the interpretive writer is to create a text that permits a willing reader to share vicariously in the experiences that have been captured” (Denzin 2001: 104). In addition to the nuanced description, “thick description evokes emotionality and self-feelings” (Denzin 2001: 105). I invite the reader to enter the narrative with me and to feel and experience the fieldwork. This is necessary to reveal and to make explicit the social context within with the text was produced. This preference is echoed in the quotation below:

With the poststructural understanding that our social context affects what we write, we have an opportunity—perhaps even an ethical duty—to extend our reflexivity to the study of our writing practices. We can reflect on and share with other researchers what I think of writing-stories, or stories about how we came to construct the particular texts we did (Richardson 1995: 191).

I did encounter challenges during the fieldwork, I did not understand the language and people were initially reluctant to speak to me. However, I intentionally chose to demystify the process of conducting fieldwork by unearthing the behind-the-scenes activities of conducting the research: “rather than hiding the struggle, concealing the very human labour that creates the text, writing stories would reveal emotional, social, physical, and political bases of the labour” (Richardson 1995: 191). Rainer Winter concurs that it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a sense of objectivity in cultural studies research. He maintains that:

Cultural studies shows that research questions, methods and interests are characterised by social, political and historical contexts. In the research, reality cannot be analysed “objectively” but rather research is part of the reality that it (co-) generates and (co-) constructs socially. Because the researcher’s methodologies and writing styles do not reflect reality it is reasonable that different methods will produce and present different data and perspectives on reality as well (2014: 249).

This point is elaborated on later in the chapter in the discussion about the un-replicable nature of research in cultural studies. Personal attributes such as a researcher’s race, appearance, age, gender and personality among other factors has an impact on how they are perceived by others, and consequently, the types of interactions that they have with research participants.

Winter argues that the researcher plays a vital role in shaping the research as:

The central characteristic of qualitative data analysis in the context of cultural studies is the theoretical and empirical examination of the relationship between experiences, practices and cultural texts in a specific context. The researcher has to construct or reconstruct this context (2014: 248). Related to the topic of context, there is an acknowledgement that this research is undertaken in Africa, in the global south. As such, Shepperson and Tomaselli posit that:

Crucial to the unfolding of cultural studies (plural) in Africa will be the philosophical difficulties inherent in, and the rhetorical force required for, remaking traditional concepts and understandings of African societies as being as dynamic as those in highly industrialised societies (2002: 57).

I acknowledge that this study is undertaken in Africa, and that theories and ontologies from the global north cannot be unproblematically super-imposed in this specific context. The theory of the fantastic (Todorov 1975) does derive from the European literary studies discipline, however, this positionality has been diversified by the use of a Brazilian, ideologically global south, theory of perspectivism which uses the indigenous worldview at its starting point (Guimaraes 2011; Viveiros de Castro 2015; Rasmussen 2011). The next section of this chapter identifies the criteria used to shape the data collection and analysis process.

Research design and data collection and sampling process

This research is guided by qualitative data collection and analysis practices: “the major aim of qualitative data is to provide materials for an empirical analysis of a phenomenon” (Flick 2018: 30). The data collection process was structured within a case study research design.

Different methods of data collection were employed to get an in-depth and holistic view of one phenomenon in one study area and/or its sub-units (Schreier 2018: 119). Intangible cultural practices and the meanings attached to them by the indigenous communities was the particular phenomenon under investigation. The intangible culture was explored in relation to their use in tourism strategies at two cultural camps on the African Ivory Route. Despite the data collection process being conducted at two geographical sites, at the Fundudzi and Baleni cultural camps, the investigation is still considered as a single case study as the cultural tourism strategies of indigenous groups is the concept being studied. It is not a phenomenological study as the investigation is confined to two specific geographical sites or case studies. Qualitative research fits the needs of this undertaking as it: “intends to understand, describe, and sometimes explain social phenomena “from the inside” in a number of different ways” (Flick 2018: 29).

The philosophical bearing of the study is influenced by critical realism and epistemological constructivism. With critical realism, subjectivity is not treated as something to be negated. In contrast, the researcher’s subjective positionality is deemed to add depth and a sense of veracity to the actual process of understanding (Maxwell 2018: 46). Epistemological constructivism works in tandem with critical realism in that it requires that the researcher be aware of the socially-constructed nature of knowledge and to acknowledge how one’s 85

worldview influences the research endeavour (Maxwell 2018: 46). “Researchers themselves are an important part of the research process, either in terms of their own personal presence as researchers, or in terms of their experiences in the field” (Flick 2018: 30). In light of this, I have provided substantial reflections on the issues of reflexivity, subjectivity and my own potential areas of bias in the undertaking. Critical Indigenous Qualitative Methodologies (Denzin et al. 2008) and the theory of perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 2015) are used to place precedence on the worldviews of the Venda and Tsonga research participants in this study. Epistemological constructivism highlights the collaborative nature of qualitative research as follows:

In order to obtain data about the settings or participants that qualitative researchers select, they need to establish relationships, both with potential participants and with gatekeepers or other influential persons who may control or facilitate access to settings or participants (Maxwell 2018: 46).

My study stems from a long-standing strategic research collaboration between a tourism operating company: Transfrontier Parks Destinations, and the Rethinking Indigeneity Project, a research track developed by my main PhD supervisor, Professor Keyan Tomaselli (see Tomaselli 2012). This pre-existing collaboration did not frame my research findings, it just facilitated my access to the research field and participants. As noted above in terms of epistemological constructivism being built on relationships, there would not have been any research site or set of relationships to study had access not been granted to this site.

Triangulation is employed to bolster the validity of the study. Data and methodological triangulation refers to the use of multiple sources of data and the use of multiple methods to obtain a holistic understanding of a phenomenon (Roulston and Choi 2018: 280). I engaged in participant-observation and recorded my observations as field notes, conducted approximately twenty four semi-structured interviews and three focus group discussion during my field work conducted in May 2016 and November 2017. I was fortunate enough to have the research team (comprised of myself, Dr Barnabas, Prof Tomaselli and Prof Frassinelli) join in on focus group discussions with the camp guides about the purpose of my research. Dr Wijngaarden joined the research team in 2017 so she was not a part of the focus group discussions which were held in 2016. The team contributed substantially to the discussions: “focus groups are a unique, perhaps somewhat peculiar, form of social

interaction. A number of people come together to discuss some issue under the guidance of an interviewer, whose questions introduce topics and provide direction, and perhaps tone, of the conversation” (Belgrave and Smith 2011: 250). Additionally, “Focus groups are a form of group interview that capitalises on communication between research participants in order to generate data. Although group interviews are often used simply as a quick and convenient way to collect data from several people simultaneously, focus groups explicitly use group interaction as part of the method” (Kitzinger 1995: 299). The method is useful to gauge perceptions and experiences that are generated and expressed in a collaborative manner as “group processes can help people to explore and clarify their views in ways that would be less easily accessible in a one to one interview” (Kitzinger 1995: 299). As this study is concerned primarily with the perceptions and experiences around two cultural camps, the methodology of focus group discussions was an apt choice for data collection.

Three focus group discussions were held at the Modjadji, Baleni and Fundudzi camps, respectively with the research team and two camp guides on the first evening that we stayed at the each camp in 2016. Prof Tomaselli initiated the discussion by recounting his previous fieldwork experiences that he encountered when conducting research with Zuleika Sheik (see Sheik 2013).

This array of data collection methods provided a multi-faceted understanding of the cultural tourism strategies and perceptions at the two camps: “a major part of qualitative research is based on text and writing—from field notes and transcripts to descriptions and interpretations and finally to the presentation of the findings and research as a whole” (Flick 2018: 30). Vignettes from the field notes are interspersed within the chapters to add nuance and texture to the overarching narrative of the thesis. My observations of the daily activities of people going about their everyday life, included my feelings, perceptions and tactile experiences of events. “What social scientists typically aim for is to gather data on groups and people in their everyday lives … To collect observational data is to generate first-hand reports: to see, hear, feel and “be there” personally” (Wästerfors 2018: 361).

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with people whom I encountered while walking through the villages closest to the cultural camps. This was a convenience sampling method: “convenience sampling (also called ad hoc sampling, opportunistic sampling) …uses cases 87

based on availability” (Schreier 2018: 116). I was only in the field for short amounts of time and I did not get the opportunity to establish any meaningful sense of rapport with community members so I had to make do with interviewing the people who were available and willing to speak at that time. The interviews were framed within a semi-structured format: “the semi-structured format works in a question-and-answer sequence and allows for follow-up and free-ranging questions. It resembles everyday conversations”27 (Roulston and Choi 2018: 272). The semi-structured format provided the space needed to clarify questions and to engage in conversations that I had not necessarily considered while designing the interview guide: “formulating interview guides involves generating a list of questions and topics that are likely to elicit descriptions that speak to the research questions posed” (Roulston and Choi 2018: 275). I did not anticipate the syncretic merger between Christianity and the traditional indigenous belief systems initially so this aspect was not included in my original interview guide. However, the tension between beliefs in Christianity and indigenous beliefs kept cropping up in the interviews so I included questions about the perceived tensions in religious beliefs from the second day of interviews. The interviews were phenomenological, these type of interviews offer: “detailed descriptions about a phenomenon—feelings, perceptions and understandings” (Roulston and Choi 2018: 273). Research participants—either Venda or Tsonga residents that resided within walking distance of the respective cultural camps—shared their feelings about cultural tourism in a comfortable manner as the interviews maintained an informal, conversational element. My questions interrogated feelings, perceptions and narratives—aspects of intangible cultural heritage. The interviews did not focus on accruing purely concrete and factual information. Dr Vanessa Wijngaarden, one of the experienced anthropologists who joined the November 2017 fieldtrip, helped me to “break the ice” when approaching possible research participants. She acknowledged people in the Venda villages by laying prostrate on the ground and saying “aah”—the greeting that women are supposed to use in the Venda language. I am not sure whether it was the novelty of a white woman being respectful in this manner or whether it was just the curiosity of speaking to new people that made people amenable to being interviewed. The interview process depends on many inter-related factors for it to be successful. Seemingly inconsequential traits such as one’s race, level of friendliness, gender or even physical appearance could influence the outcome of the interview. An example of how one’s race could influence respondents’ perceptions is provided below.

27 See appendix 1 for interview schedule questions. 88

The complex power-dynamics inherent to racialised access to research and information in the field in South Africa is discussed later in this chapter. In a study conducted on second-home ownership, Indian and black postgraduate geography students who attempted to interview older, white, Afrikaans-speaking males about second-home ownership were viewed with suspicion and shunned while white, Afrikaans-speaking students were able to conduct the interviews with the same interview questionnaires. The authors of the article—Gijsbert Hoogendoorn and Gustav Visser made the following observation:

an Indian female fieldworker experienced particular difficulty when speaking face to face with owners of second homes and permanent residents who were nearly exclusively white and male. In her experience, very uncomfortable experiences arose when she enquired about their personal income and expenditure patterns. Moreover, permanent residents expressed their discontent with her asking “nosy” questions about the occupancy habits of second home- owners. There was no hint of researcher privilege; in fact she was by virtue of the racial, social, economic, political and historical context of South Africa, certainly at a disadvantage in gaining information (2012: 261). If the second-home owners were perturbed by the perceived inquisitive nature of the questions as was indicated by the term “nosy” they would have refused to answer those questions under any circumstances. The researcher’s ethnicity is of importance in South Africa and I benefited from the embodied cultural cache of having a white woman accompany me during the fieldwork. I did get a significantly more casual and relaxed response when accompanied by a researcher of South-Indian extraction like myself, Dr Shanade Barnabas, and a more reverential response when accompanied by Dr Vanessa Wijngaarden. Theorising these observations forms part of my analysis.

Conducting the interviews: working out the kinks

Approximately 24 interviews were conducted at the two cultural camps. The word ‘approximately’ is used because at times another person tagged on to an initial interview after it had commenced, thus adding depth to the discussion but could not be counted as an individual interview. It is important for researchers to be flexible when conducting interviews as working in the field is seldom smooth sailing (Tomaselli 2012: 32).

Preparation does assist the researcher to have contingency plans but sometimes even those go awry: “preparation also involves getting in touch with participants to arrange a suitable meeting-place—preferably a quiet place without distractions—which will allow for good quality audio-recordings” (Roulston and Choi 2018: 277). People were recruited for

interviews who sat outside in their yards at the villages surrounding the respective cultural camps. It was important to speak to Venda and Tsonga people who resided close to the camps so that I could gauge a sense of how members of the cultural groups themselves interpreted and portrayed their own cultural folklore and heritage. This is in adherence to the tenets of critical indigenous methodologies (Denzin et al. 2008) and the theory of perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 2015) that started from, and relied on, the worldviews held by the indigenous communities. This face-to-face recruitment on the spot did not allow for the establishment of any sense of rapport. However, a staff member from the cultural camp accompanied me to serve as a translator and, in most cases, happened to live in the village in which I conducted the interviews. This benefitted me as I was granted access to the private space of the research participants’ yards due to my being accompanied by a resident of the village.

I gained trust by proxy due to being accompanied by the staff member from the camp/resident of the village. In terms of interviews going awry, as was alluded to earlier, a pitfall of conducting the research in the participants’ yards was that we were subjected to the noise and activities of what was going on at the time. I practiced due diligence and tested my audio-recording equipment in advance as is necessary for interview preparations (Roulston and Choi 2018: 276). However, I did not anticipate having a clutch of chickens gate-crash my interview.

This incident is expanded on in the data analysis section, where I describe how a clutch of chicks and a mother hen decided to scratch in the sand and chirp really loudly right where we sat during one of my interviews. I cannot hear the recorded interview during that time because the chickens are so noisy. The research participant had to chase the chickens to another part of the yard before the interview could resume. At other times, the women were bathing their babies, cleaning the yard or preparing meals while answering my questions. They were willing to speak to me while attending to their daily tasks. The interview process does intrude on the time and of the research participants, however, research participants were not paid for their time. The participants were selected based on a convenience sampling method. All the participants were asked the same questions from the interview schedule. A form of payment could have affected their answers and influenced whether people opted to be interviewed or not. Payment for interviews can have an impact on research in a negative 90

manner (see Dockney 2011: 70). Requests for food, transport, or donations should be considered on a case-by-case basis (Memo of the CCMS fieldtrip protocols).

There are also ethical implications involved in offering a financial compensation for conducting interviews: “before conducting interviews with people, researchers must gain permission to conduct research from the ethics review board/s with which they are affiliated” (Roulston and Choi 2018: 275). I stated in the ethical application to the University of Johannesburg’s ethics review board that interviewees would not be paid for their participation in the study and on a more practical note, I did not have funds budgeted to pay research participants.

Interviews were conducted with Venda and Tsonga speaking individuals. I do not speak those languages so AIR staff members from the respective camps accompanied me to the villages and acted as interpreters. This was imperative as I did not speak the same language, nor was I of a shared ethnicity. The need for additional preparation is elaborated on below due to my “outsider” status:

Some researchers conduct interviews with participants of cultures to which they do not belong. Cross-cultural interviewing may involve further steps in preparation. This might include the involvement of a translator within the interview, or a collaboration with a researcher native to a participant’s culture (Roulston and Choi 2018: 277).

In these instances, the guides from the cultural camps were invaluable in assisting me to get the purpose of the visit across to the research participants. I had to learn the basic greetings of the respective languages and I had to be more aware of how I dressed. I had to dress more conservatively, as these are very patriarchal communities and I did not want to offend any of the community members. I had to rely on other researchers who had conducted fieldwork previously and use their behaviour and examples as a guide for my actions. Staff members from the camps explained to the research participant the purpose of my visit before I asked permission to enter their yards or to conduct the interviews: “prior to beginning an interview, researchers explain to participants what the research is about, and gain their informed consent for participation in the research” (Roulston and Choi 2018: 277).

I could not speak directly to the participants other than greeting them so I stood awkwardly

and smiled while the camp staff member explained the purpose of my visit. I tried to look as unimposing as possible because some of the older women seemed sceptical when they looked at my typed-up and printed sheets of paper. One older woman called her teenaged granddaughter to listen to the conversation before she agreed to be interviewed (field notes November 2017). This did not cause offense, as it is understandable that people would be suspicious to sign something when asked to complete the informed consent form. Older research participants were unnerved when presented with the informed consent form. I found that it was better to present the form after verbal consent had been granted and the initial rapport had been formed during the interview itself. I am aware that this was not the best way to have obtained the informed consent but I had to be flexible and allow for the participants to sign the forms once they felt more comfortable. This flexibility is necessary when conducting fieldwork (see Tomaselli 2012): “from a researcher’s perspective, “good” interviewing practice is commonly seen to involve appropriate preparation, demonstration of respect for interviewees, intensive listening by the interviewer … and the ability to help participants tell their stories” (Roulston and Choi 2018: 278). I had read up in advance to acquaint myself with the proper cultural protocol of the Venda and Tsonga cultures, but I felt re-assured to have other researchers and people from the respective villages with me. In terms of the number of interviews conducted, I reached a saturation point after about 12 in-depth interviews at each village. Sampling saturation occurs when there is a repetition of data obtained from the interviews and no new knowledge is obtained. It is then superfluous to continue collecting data when the main points have been discussed several times by a similar sample composition (Schreier 2018: 117). I decided to have informal chats with passers-by to get a deeper understanding of the place: “there are no rules for how many interviews are sufficient, since individual researchers must examine their fields of expertise, the design for their study, and consider it and when they believe that they have sufficient data with which to answer their research questions” (Roulston and Choi 2018: 281).

I am a human, not a robot: acknowledging subjectivity in ethnographic research

The researcher is a human with the accompanying thoughts, prejudices, desires and jealousies that are inseparable from oneself. “Qualitative researchers commonly speak of the importance

of the individual researcher’s skills and aptitudes. The researcher—rather than the survey, the questionnaire, or the census tape—is the “instrument” (Richardson and St. Pierre 2005: 690).

As such, one cannot shed their personalities before entering the field as a researcher. Merely choosing one topic of study from a particular angle as opposed to another reflects one’s subjectivities. Whether one chooses a topic for pragmatic reasons— because there is funding attached to the project or due to more whimsical reasons—because it is a personal passion, does not deter from the intertwined nature of the research and the self. This aspect of research is often obscured in a bid to make the research enterprise seem more objective; however, in promoting the notion of objectivity, one is enacting a farce. I learned this through the analogy of the “fly-in-the-soup” (Tomaselli 2012: 7-8; Crawford 1991: 9) which emphasises that the researcher’s very presence in the field changes the nature of the research encounter. One influences the context and reality of one’s subject community if one is conducting empirical research. Tomaselli uses the analogy of the “fly-on-the-wall” (2012: 7) to explain the stance of being an objective, positivist researcher. This detachment is not possible in either the Humanities or in the positivist sciences (Engineering, Actuarial Sciences, Mathematics etc.). All data, whether quantitative or qualitative, is interpreted by humans. Humans, despite what some may pretend, are products of their culture and therefore inherently biased (Tomaselli 2012: 7; Tomaselli 2018: 193). However, there are ways to mitigate and to disclaim one’s biases in the research. One way to do so is to employ self-reflexivity: “self-reflexivity brings to consciousness some of the complex political/ideological agendas hidden in our writing. Truth claims are less easily validated now; desires to speak “for” others are suspect (Richardson and St. Pierre 2005: 964).

It is important to note that even though one cannot separate oneself from one’s ingrained values, beliefs and perceptions, self-reflexivity allows one to consciously interrogate and to bring to the fore how those perceptions influence one’s research. My research borrows methods such as participant observation in the field and interviews from ethnographic research (Tomaselli et al. 2013). However, as I am not immersed in the field for a long time, I cannot claim to be conducting an ethnography. Nevertheless, my borrowing from ethnographic research methods entails that I highlight my subjectivity in the research:

The ethnographic life is not separate from the Self. Who we are and what we can be—what we can study—are tied to how a knowledge system disciplines itself and its members and to its methods for claiming authority over both the subject matter and its members (Richardson and St. Pierre 2005: 965).

In light of the fact that one cannot separate oneself from one’s ethnographic research, I use the tool of “writing stories” or vignettes to illustrate the lens and nuances through which I interpret the fieldwork: “writing stories…offer critical reflexivity about the writing self in different contexts as a valuable creative analytical practice. They evoke new questions about the self and the subject and remind us that our work is grounded and contextual” (Richardson and St. Pierre 2005: 965). The writing story includes the self as implicit in the account of events.

The vignette is more open-ended in terms of its source material. “Vignettes are stories generated from a range of sources including previous research findings. They make reference to important factors in the study of perceptions, beliefs and attitudes” (Hughes 1998: 381). The decision to include and to make the distinction between writing stories and vignettes is due to the understanding that although my interpretation of events is inherent in the research, I am also mindful of the importance of the stories of the research community. It is imperative that their views are given precedence in the analysis. My views are important but subsidiary to the study.

This study stems from a poststructuralist approach. Poststructuralism draws attention to one’s subjectivity in research, it “permits—even invites or incites—us to reflect on our own method and to explore new ways of knowing” (Richardson and St. Pierre 2005: 962). The new way of knowing in this instance is the mode of “writing stories”. The act of: “nurturing our own voices releases the censorious hold of “science writing” on our consciousness as well as the arrogance it fosters in our psyche; writing is validated as a method of knowing” (Richardson and St. Pierre 2005: 962). In order words, this relatively new way of knowing the world jostles positivistic scientific quantitative methods off its perch as being perceived as the only valid and reliable way of knowing the world. Constructivism is also inherent in this approach as the construction of meaning is co-created with the research community (Tomaselli 2018: 117). The vignettes are comprised from interactions with, and observations of, the respective communities. These provide the scaffolding for the co-creation of meaning with the research participants by employing the constructivist approach.

Data collection methods

In the social sciences, the researcher is an instrument of both data collection and the lens 94

through which the data is interpreted. If one were working in the positivist sciences, one would not be able to get accurate or meaningful readings in experiments where the calibration of the measuring device is unknown. Similarly, if the worldview of social sciences researcher is not highlighted, then this is akin to using a measuring device without calibration. In this view, the researcher has a place in research, and obscuring or overlooking this distorts our knowing. The researcher interprets events and creates texts, consciously or unconsciously imprinting themselves upon them. The researcher is not removed from the research process, the place, the context, and co-researchers; the researcher is herself part of, as well as able to learn from, the research community (Keane et al. 2016: 166).

However, as much as it is important for the researcher to name and acknowledge themselves in the research write-up, too much of self-disclosure could lead to narcissistic writing, where the text becomes self-referential to the exclusion of the research community (Kemmis 1995: 151). One has to intentionally practice reflexivity when writing: “reflexivity is thus understood as involving an ongoing self-awareness during the research process which aids in making visible the practice and construction of knowledge within research in order to produce more accurate analyses of our research” (Pillow 2003: 178).

The process of being reflexive acknowledges that there are multiple versions of the same event depending on whose perspective is given precedence. It destabilises the notion of an absolute truth, and it problematizes the concept of knowledge as being irrefutable in all circumstances (Keane et al. 2016: 166). “A reflexivity that pushes toward an unfamiliar, towards the uncomfortable, cannot be a simple story of subjects, subjectivity, and transcendent or self-indulgent tellings (Pillow 2003: 192). As much as researchers may want to portray a sense of distance from their research investigations, this is not always possible in social sciences research. Even being self-reflexive does not erase the factor of one’s subjectivity, all it does is confront and highlight one’s possible biases so that one can attempt to safeguard against potential pitfalls.

Self-reflexivity does not overcome one’s biases. The biases are still there, it is just that the researcher is made aware of them and is able to take steps to interrogate their assumptions instead of just accepting them as is. Self-reflexivity, as with autoethnography requires a level 95

of disclosure and vulnerability on the part of the researcher which differs from the protected stance of classic anthropological research where the researcher dispassionately observed the people to be researched without disclosing anything about themselves. The concepts of validity and rigour, as well as reliability that are used in the positivist sciences cannot be used as methods of triangulation in this type of research. The researcher’s positionality such as their race, class and gender, among other variables, affects the answers obtained. This is elaborated on in the analysis section in terms of how the research participants reacted to me as a researcher dependent on whom I was accompanied by during the interviews.

Autoethnography as method

“Autoethnography attempts to cast a wide net of consciousness—personal, political, spiritual and moral. Evocative autoethnographies can’t hide from their consciousness” (Bochner and Ellis 2016: 47). Autoethnography is not a method for the faint-hearted. It requires a brutal honesty when being self-reflexive and entails turning a mirror to oneself to unearth and confront one’s own prejudices. “Feelings, emotions, and the lived experience, largely ignored in positivist approaches, however comprise one layer of autoethnographic accounts” (Tomaselli et al. 2008: 347). Evocative autoethnography, unbridled self-disclosure, encompasses a rawness and vulnerability that goes against one’s instinct for self-preservation (Bochner and Ellis 2016). I vacillate between writing in the first and third person in an attempt to protect and to distance myself from what I write. I have been grappling with this unease and guilt since the beginning of the PhD undertaking. Research is messy and unpredictable (Mboti 2018: 70; Tomaselli and Dyll 2018: 297). This is an attempt to peel back the veneer of order and structure to reveal the messiness within, to provide a peek into the “backstage” of the writing process (MacCannell 1973).

South Africa is currently ensconced in an era of decolonisation movements. In a time punctuated by social movements encapsulated by twitter handles #everythingmustfall, #Rhodesmustfall, #FeesMustFall (see Frassinelli 2018: 5-6; Habib 2019) that serve as metonyms for the prominent mood of the time. This study adds to the corpus indigenous knowledge literature. One of the aims of the decolonisation movement is to valorise previously subjugated forms of knowledge (Foucault 1980) to academic literature. One of my supervisors, Prof Keyan Tomaselli, writes an autoethnographic reflection about his role as

an “anti-apartheid activist on a state hit squad list and under constant surveillance” during the 1980s in the apartheid era (Tomaselli 2018: 168). Elsewhere, he and others write autoethnographic accounts of how students in the Rethinking Indigeneity28 (RI) project find a meaningful connection to the communities with which they work: “unlike student work on other topics, these students tend to dedicate their research to their host/subject communities” (Tomaselli et al. 2008: 348). Lauren Dyll and Michael Francis, both participants in the RI project go on to espouse that: “ethnography is not simply a collection of the exotic “other”; it is reflective of our own lives and cultural practices even when discussing other cultures. Autoethnography involves the use of cultural richness for self-reflection and understanding the nature of the encounter” (Tomaselli et al. 2008: 348).

I reflect on an excerpt of an article reflecting on who benefits from Indigenous Knowledge (IK) systems. The authors highlight the contradictions in the research process as follows: “research is essentially written for other researchers—an incestuous dialogue within an academic club” (Keane et al. 2017: 13). The authors go on to elaborate that: “in IK research, especially research focused on science education, researchers usually are still very conservative. The scientific paradigm is the usual framework and the product, an academic paper published in a peer-reviewed journal” (Keane et al. 2017: 13). In light of this end-goal within a Euro-centric, positivist framework, it is difficult to maintain a sense of altruism. This does not imply that if one publishes a research article that they are not interested in the welfare of their research participants. I am aware that social activism and academic publishing are by no means mutually exclusive. Indigenous knowledge is currently a popular avenue of research in South Africa. The decolonisation movement promotes research that incorporates indigenous worldviews into mainstream research (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013).

Recording field notes while engaging in observation

Researchers need to hone several skills while on the field, that of blending in with the host community, establishing a rapport with informants and to be able to construct detailed notes of the experience without jeopardizing the flow of the interaction (DeWalt and DeWalt 2010). I was fortunate to be accompanied by a team of researchers who offered practical advice on

28 The project, funded from 1994, but which had its origins from the early 1980s (see Tomaselli 1996), is still running at present, headed by Tomaselli, focused on issues of indigenous representation, cultural tourism and development. This thesis falls within the project (see Finlay 2009 for more information). 97

how to navigate through the complexities of observing without unnerving people. The most practical, and some of the easiest to implement was simply to learn and use the greetings and to say thank you in the language of the community that I was working with. These gestures indicate a willingness to learn about a culture and the expression of gratitude falls under good practice. It follows that if someone was kind enough to sacrifice their time and to share their knowledge with the researcher without any reward, the least that the researcher could do is thank the person in their own language. My ethnicity marked me as an outsider from the village, there was no way that I could blend in unnoticed. However, I learned, watched and listened to the interactions going on around me while being as unobtrusive as possible. Knowing the views of the community members is imperative as this study is ensconced within a critical indigenous methodological framework.

Alternative ethnography: replicability not guaranteed

One of the tenets of conducting empirical research in the social sciences seems to be the reification of the replicability of the study. Single occurrence events are thought to have no use to science because of their non-replicable nature (Popper 1959: 64). The positivist scientific community refers to the non-replicable nature of experiments as the “crisis of reproducibility” and it is associated with unreliable results and poor research practice (Leonelli 2018: 3).

The social sciences should not be held accountable to the same standards of replicability as it incorporates a more subjective stance: “it is not understood that social scientists are not aloof, objective observers of cultures and their processes. Rather, social scientists write culture; they create culture through the process of writing. Writing is an interpretive act” (Denzin 2001: 102). However, most social scientists tend to downplay the interpretive nature of research in a bid to appear more academically legitimate: “in the social sciences, we have never overcome our insecurities about our scientific stance. In our hearts, if not in our minds, we know that the phenomena we study are messy, complicated, uncertain and soft” (Bochner 2011: 261). To be subjective entails confronting one’s feelings and beliefs. This process of embracing one’s subjectivity is vital for the writing of one’s lived experience as: “feelings and emotions occupy a primary discursive space in our daily and collective lives. We experience our lives as personal, emotionally meaningful, narratively knowable and tellable [sic]” (Richardson 98

1995: 194).

Conducting ethnography in its classical form was viewed as conducting a scientifically objective form of research: “doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on” (Geertz 1973: 311).

Due to both financial and time constraints, I was not able to establish deep rapport with my research participants due to the fleeting nature of my time in the field. I spent three nights each at the Modjadji, Baleni and Fundudzi camps during May 2016 and I spent a week divided between the Fundudzi and Baleni camps during November 2017. I am aware that spending under three weeks conducting fieldwork is not conducive to building rapport with participants, however, these constraints are common when conducting research in the global south. The term for conducting these short bursts of research while borrowing elements of ethnography has been described as intermittent research (Barnabas 2018: 119). Most researchers in the global south lack the time and resources to conduct an ethnographic study as it is understood in its classic sense. We have to make do with snippets of time spent on the field: “the myth of the Lone Ethnographer [sic] depicts the birth of classic ethnography. The texts of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson are still carefully studied for what they can tell the novice about fieldwork, taking field notes, and writing theory” (Behar et al. 2011:3). This study does not follow the conventions of classic ethnographic research, it eschews the persona of an objective, en-distanced, neutral researcher and revels in notions of subjectivity instead. This study employs a reflexive ethnography: “reflexive ethnography…is that ethnographic form that privileges the presence of the writer in the text” (Behar et al. 2011: 2).

In this instance, the inclusion of the writer in the text is imperative as the time spent with research participants was too short to be able to form definitive conclusions without input from the researcher’s experience. The reflexive ethnography may be viewed as a type of triangulation in order to bolster the data obtained from the research participants (Behar et al. 2011). I had to include myself as both an instrument of and simultaneously a contributor to the research in order to generate a substantial amount of data. This is the enactment of an intrusive description, a substratum of ethnographic research: “in an intrusive description, the 99

researcher allows his or her interpretations to enter into and shape the description as he or she reports it” (Denzin 2001: 129).

It is a useful mode of analysis for those researchers that cannot immerse themselves in long periods of ethnographic observation. Ethnographic observation and interpretation is time- intensive. This is illustrated as follows: Interpretation is a temporal process. First it takes time for a researcher to learn the language of the group he or she is studying….The researcher must learn the biographies of the persons who speak the language. This knowledge takes the researcher further into the social structure of the group being studied (Denzin 2001: 131).

I used the mode of “writing stories” as a means to transmit my experience to other researchers: “writing stories are stories of how texts are constructed” (Richardson 1995: 201). Moreover, having time to reflect on the fieldwork experience after returning to the university allowed me to deepen and clarify my thoughts and observations about conducting the fieldwork: “the call of narrative is the inspiration to find language that is adequate to the obscurity and darkness of experience. We narrate to make sense of experience over the course of time. Thus, narrative is our means of fashioning experience in language” (Bochner 2011: 263).

I highlight the difficulties encountered when conducting the research and revealed the compensatory measures used to counter the lack of a long-term immersion in the community to “own up” to the difficulties of conducting fieldwork under time and financial constraints. However, the use of alternative ethnographical methods illustrate that all modes of data generation can be used to support one’s findings despite it being highly subjective and non- replicable. As the information was being filtered through my interpretation and worldview it is unlikely, if not impossible, that another researcher would be able to replicate my particular narratives or experiences. Even the focus group discussions held by this specifically- constituted research team (comprised of Dr Wijngaarden, Dr Barnabas, Prof Tomaselli, Prof Frassinelli and myself) could not be replicated: “when our ways of looking are incommensurable, we can look in the same places, at the same things, and see them differently” (Bochner 2011: 257).

Granted—the replicability of this study is nearly, if not completely, impossible. However,

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this does not mean that research in the social sciences should be held up to the same set of criteria as used in the positivist sciences to be deemed valid.

Methods of Data Analysis

I listened to the audio-recordings several times during the transcription process. I transcribed the interviews as the translator provided the research participants answers in English during the interview itself. Certain topics recurred during the transcription process. The themes of “Ancestral worship versus Christianity”, “The performance and retention of traditional culture” and “Supernatural myths and the occult” were prominent in the interviews. All three themes related to the aspects of intangible heritage that was the main topic of investigation in this study. A thematic analysis seemed to be the most logical way to make sense of the data. Thematic analysis methods use a thematic network to delineate the hierarchical importance of the themes discovered as follows:

Applying thematic networks is simply a way of organizing a thematic analysis of qualitative data. Thematic analyses seek to unearth the themes salient in a text at different levels, and thematic networks aim to facilitate the structuring and depiction of these themes (Attride- Stirling 2001: 387).

It was overwhelming to deal with the data from the focus groups and the interviews so I looked for information that made the process of data interpretation clear and explained the instructions to do so in manageable portions. Once again, thematic networks were apt as: “what thematic networks offers is the web-like network of an organizing principle and a representational means, and it makes explicit the procedures that may be employed in going from text to interpretation” (Attride-Stirling 2001: 388).

The analysis starts with establishing the basic themes: “basic themes are simple premises characteristic of the data” (Attride-Stirling 2001: 389). The discussion of one basic theme is not enough to draw any meaningful conclusion. Several basic themes need to be considered and interwoven together in order to make a substantial deduction. Examples of basic themes emerged when I read my field notes taken in November 2017 during a visit to a local church in Venda and the Pastor likened the practice of engaging in ancestral worship to sending one’s children to the graveyard. Other basic themes emerged when some women described 101

not being able to attend ancestral worship practices held by their husband’s families as this was frowned upon by the church (T2 interview respondent 11 November 2017). Theoretical analysis occurs when a researcher inductively forms hypotheses about what they are likely to find in the data and then tests this postulate against the findings of the data. If there is a strong correlation between the postulate and findings then that hypothesis can be used as a theory (a rule of prediction to explain phenomena) (Jasso 1988: 1). Inductive thematic analysis, in contrast, depends on the researcher finding patterns in the data and forming hypotheses based on what the data reveals (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006: 2). A theoretical thematic analysis was employed in this study because I did have enough information at the start of this study to form a hypothesis about the research findings. The themes emerged as a result of the data obtained from the interviews and focus group discussions.

These examples of the Christian church holding ancestral worship practices in disdain began to coalesce under a broader organising theme. Organising themes are: “ a middle-order theme that organizes the basic themes in clusters of similar issues….They are more abstract and more revealing of what is going on in the texts” (Attride-Stirling 2001: 389). The complete analysis of these themes are in the data analysis and findings chapter. A few examples demonstrate the coding and process of categorisation that the data underwent. The largest over-arching framework in the hierarchy of the thematic network is the global theme: “global themes are super-ordinate themes that encompass the principle metaphors in the data as a whole….Global themes group sets of organising themes that together present an argument” (Attride-Stirling 2001: 389). The global theme in the example provided is “tensions within syncretic religion”. This is discussed in detail in the data analysis and findings section. I made sense of this system of organisation by thinking about Russian nesting dolls of various sizes that fit one inside the other. The smallest doll is the basic theme, then that fits into the middle doll—the organising theme, and then the biggest doll in which the small and medium dolls fit within is the global theme. The theories of the fantastic (Todorov 1975) were used to suspend the judgement between belief and disbelief when considering the interview data that recounted narratives of supernatural occurrences. The existence of disembodied voices emanating from Lake Fundudzi and tales of religious priests catching alight when going to pray at a sacred site inhabited by the ancestors at the swamp area at the Baleni cultural camp was considered as intangible cultural folklore. The theory of perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro) was used to understand the worldviews of the Venda and Tsonga communities. The 102

next chapter presents the findings of the study.

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Chapter Five Data Analysis chapter—finding meaning in the chaos

This chapter interrogates the cultural phenomena and perceptions held by the community members who resided close to the respective camps. The topics discussed during the interviews interrogated how the research participants perceived the tourism and cultural activities. Some of the questions on the semi-structured interview schedule enquired about whether the research participant had been to the cultural camp, and, if so, what did they think about it? How did they feel about tourists? How did they feel about tourists learning about their culture? How did they feel about their own culture and what aspects of the camps or activities offered at the camp would they change had they the opportunity to do so? These questions aimed at fostering a conversation that was broad enough to ascertain the topics of interest as well as contention that the research participants held around cultural tourism and the camps. Quotations and field notes from both research sites are interwoven under the relevant themes.

Two fieldtrips, two communities and a host of research participants

Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick description (1973) serves to set the scene for the fieldwork. The first trip commenced on a crisp Sunday morning on May 15th 2016. There were minimal difficulties encountered with packing the roof-rack of Tomaselli’s Nissan Patrol as the research team consisted of four veteran campers and off-roaders who had kept within the luggage constraints of one airline carry-on sized suitcase and sleeping bags. This was seldom the case with previous field trips with students going to the Northern Cape to work with the ≠Khomani Bushmen. Students, particularly the females, tended to try to sneak electrical appliances such as hair-dryers and electronic hair-irons on the fieldtrip in addition to bulky blankets that were not conducive to keeping warm in sub-zero temperatures. This usually resulted in the loss of an hour’s driving time as students engaged in negotiations with Tomaselli with regard to the packing guidelines that were circulated before the trip and what items were to be left behind (see Peters 2011). The drive from Johannesburg to Limpopo was punctuated by comments on the changing landscape as we moved from a bustling metropolitan area to a rural area. The road signposting to the Modjadji camp was unclear so we had to stop and ask the local people for directions. The people were friendly and willing

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to assist. Some of the people wore T-shirts with amusing slogans. These caught our attention as one T-shirt declared “Bossy Girl”, while another read “Almost Single”. These quirky slogans elicited a laugh and added to the atmosphere of the place. The people themselves added a distinctive nuance the place. When we arrived at the Modjadji camp on the evening of the 15th, we spent the first evening, as was replicated at the other two camps—Baleni and Fundudzi—getting acquainted with the camp staff and explaining our reasons for being there. There were no guests at the camps as all the camp structures were under renovation at the time (field notes May 2016). The orientation process initiated a focus group discussion between the two camp staff at each camp and the research team. The camp managers/operators served as the entry-point for discussions about the cultural activities offered by the communities.

Access road to the Baleni camp. November 2017 Photo 2

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Rondavels at the Baleni cultural camp. November 2017. Photo 3

Rondavel at the Fundudzi Cultural Camp. November 2017. Photo 4

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A fenced-off garden plot at one of the houses in the Mukumbani village at the Fundudzi camp. November 2017. Photo 5

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The staff at the camps were comfortable with being identified by their names, as opposed to pseudonyms, in the research. The staff members at the camps were enthusiastic about the research undertaking due to their collaboration with Zuleika Sheik, a Masters student in the Re-thinking Indigeneity project, in 2012 and 2013 (see Sheik 2013). The orientation process on the first evening entailed the discussion of the findings of Sheik’s study which provided an opportunity for me to introduce my research aims. Being embedded within a long-term research project provides a sense of continuity for research participants even if the individuals within the project change. I benefitted from the rapport that Sheik had shared with the staff at the camps. The demographic details of the TFPD staff that served as key informants and participated in the focus group discussions are tabulated on the next page. The research participants who agreed to be interviewed preferred to use pseudonyms. Those demographic details are tabulated on page 106. All the research participants were asked the same questions (See interview schedule in the Appendices).

Table 1: Demographic details of staff members and people who opted to be identified by their names as opposed to using a pseudonym at the respective camps in May 2016 and November 2017.

Camp Name Gender Age29 Modjadji 1. Adolph Male Mid-30s Makita 2. Lazarus Male Mid-30s Mamacheu Mokoena 3. Peterson Male Late-40s Phasha Baleni 4. Mapula Female Early- Malatji 40s 5. Personia Female Late-20s

29 This is an estimate based on conversations, I did not enquire about their age as it would be considered to be invasive and rude. 108

Makhongele 6. Eric Sambo Male Early- 50s 7. Fannie Male Mid-30s Mathebula 8. Nemhla female Late-30s Mbona 9. Thabo Male Mid-30s Hlongwane 10. Colleen Female Late-20s Silima 11. Eddie Ubisi Male Mid-20s M’wa Xisengana 12. Maria female Early Ngoveni 60s Fundudzi 13. Nelson Male Late-50s Maphaha 14. Tshifhiwa Female Mid-30s Khangale

The contributions of these staff members formed the springboard for my interactions with the community members in the villages surrounding the cultural camps. All three camps are situated in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The Modjadji camp is located in the Greater Letaba Municipality. The six villages that surround the camp are the beneficiaries of the camp’s income. When tourists want to see traditional cultural dances, camp staff recruited the dance groups from each village on a rotational basis so that all the villages get a chance to send their dance groups (Adolph Makita and Lazarus Mokoena 15 May 2016, focus group discussion).

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The Baleni camp is surrounded by four beneficiary villages. They are Shawela, Shikumba30, Vuhehli and Mbaula, respectively. I conducted most of the interviews at the Shawela village, as it was easiest to access this village from the camp. I did get a few interviews from Shikumba and Vuhehli but Mbaula was too far for me to travel to from the camp. I did glean from the camp guide that the people from the Mbaula village are usually brought to the camp to prepare the cultural cuisine of Mopani worms and termites for the tourists.

Baleni camp

Vuhehli Shikumba

Shawela Mbaula

Figure 2: Map showing the villages in relation to the distance of the Baleni cultural camp.

The Fundudzi cultural camp is located in Thohoyandou in the Vhembe municipality. There are three beneficiary villages, Makwarani, Mukumbani and Tshidzivhe, respectively. I only conducted interviews at the Mukumbani village as the other two villages were further away from the camp and I did not have enough time to conduct interviews there.

30 Sometimes spelled Xawela and Xikumba. 110

Fundudzi camp

Mukhumbani Tshivhase

Figure 3: Map depicting villages in relation to the Fundudzi camp

The first set of interviews were conducted in May 2016 and was followed by the second set of interviews in November 2017. Most of the interview respondents were women who ranged in age from their mid-thirties to their late-sixties. The reason for interviewing predominantly women is due to most of the men being away from the villages during those months. The lack of employment opportunities forced most of the younger, able-bodied men to travel to Johannesburg, a metropolitan area, to find jobs as security guards or as labourers in the building construction sector (Personia Makhongele 18 May 2016 focus group discussion; field notes 2016; 2017).

When I walked around the village with the TFPD tour guide who was from the Shawela village, we generally approached women who were sitting or working outside in their yards. We asked whether the women would be willing to speak to us about the camp and how they felt about it. I realise that this may be viewed as problematic as I went to the village with a staff member from the camp who was in her TFPD camp uniform at the time. I do not believe that this hindered or affected the quality or veracity of the interview responses as the guide did not indicate which houses we should go to, we literally approached anybody to happened to be outside in their yard as we walked by. Convenience sampling was used due to the need to recruit people who lived close to the camp and who had knowledge of the camp’s 111

existence. The camp guide did not attempt to curtail or influence my approach of any of the individuals. I acknowledge that this is not an ideal circumstance as the answers that I received may have been affected by the presence of the TFPD staff member. Respondents were assured of the total anonymity of the interview and I assured them that nothing of what was shared in the interview could be traced back to them.

They were thus free to discuss whatever was on their minds. I think that this did help to assuage any fears that the respondents may have had because I did get a few less-than- savoury remarks made about the camp in terms of it being built too close to sacred ancestral space. The fact that the TFPD camp guide lived in the Shawela village also helped as people responded to her as an individual from their community rather than as solely a representative of the camp. It is possible that people allowed me into their yards and domestic space because of her presence. She helped attain an “insider status”. All research participants were asked the same questions. (See interview guide in the appendix).

Table 2: Demographic details of respondents at the villages. Pseudonyms are used here as the respondents chose to remain anonymous

Pseudonym Gender Age 1. A male Late-40s 2. T1 female Late-60s

3. T2 female Mid-60s

4. T3 female Early-50s 5. T7 male Mid-70s

6. T11 female Late-40s

7. ZT1 male Late-60s

8. NN1 female Early-60s

9. M1 male Mid-30s

10. AM1 male Late-60s

11. G1 female Early-60s

12. F1 female Mid-30s

13. TM1 female Late 60s 14. LR 1 female Early 60s

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Stories around the Baleni cultural camp

The Baleni cultural camp is located within the Greater Giyani local municipality in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The municipality—established in 1969—was the centre of the Mopani district and was the former capital of Gazankulu, the previous homeland demarcation under the apartheid government (Census 2011; Statistics South Africa, n.p). Due to the area being part of a previous homeland, it lacks sufficient basic amenities such as clinics, adequate tarred roads and utilities such as electricity and piped water from municipal sources. There is a 47% overall unemployment rate, while the youth unemployment rate is at 61.2%. Moreover, 25% of the population over 20 years old do not have any formal qualifications from a school (Census 2011; Statistics South Africa, n.p). These statistics may seem dated as they are from a 2011 census survey, however, it is the most recent data that is available as South Africa only conducts census surveys every ten years. It is difficult for people in this municipality to gain employment in the formal economic sector due to their lack of school qualifications. The Baleni cultural camp employs some members of the community to offer cultural activities at the camp such as traditional salt-harvesting demonstrations, ancestral worship dances and drumming performances, as well as the cooking and serving of cultural cuisine. Community members are employed in non-cultural activities that are linked to the operation of the camp such as being tour guides or being contracted to wash the linen at the camps. These opportunities create a ripple effect for income generation in the area where there are scarce employment opportunities. The camp staff have to have a minimum educational qualification of a grade 12 (matric) certificate. Interviews are conducted with candidates and offers of employment are made on a meritocratic (as opposed to a patronage system) (Interview, Personia Makhongele May 2016).

The interview setting: sitting among a clutch of chirping chicks, gurgling infants and smoke from wood-fires

The Shawela village is rural and only has a few tarred roads. The rest of the pathways are sandy and dusty. The houses are predominantly small, two-bedroom brick-and-concrete houses with an additional round thatched-roofed structure in the yard. The thatched-roof 113

structures in the yard are used to store food items to ensure easy access when cooking on wood-fires in the yard. When my colleague and fellow-researcher, Dr Barnabas and I walked through the village with the camp guide, Personia, our clothes got dusty and we sometimes coughed when we were caught in the slipstream of dust swept up by one of the few cars passing by. The area had been experiencing a dry season during May 2016 and November 2017 so it was always dusty when we were there. November should have been the usual time for rain but there was less rain than usual in the area in 2017 (field notes November 2017). It is fortunate that Barnabas and I are fairly dark-complexioned Indians descended from South Indian ancestors. We both got burned a few shades darker by walking around in the sun during the fieldwork. I mention this trait in reference to our researcher positionality, as well as to explain how this helped us to be treated with a sense of familiarity. A few younger members of the Shawela community in particular, had been welcoming as they had been taught by a dark-skinned Indian accounting teacher and we were told that there were dark- complexioned shop owners in the area who were from Bangladesh so our physical appearance was not particularly exotic or interesting to them.

In fact, there seemed to be an assumed familiarity that seemed to blur the boundaries between being a researcher and being treated as a normal guest to their house because we were dark- skinned, there was no sense of reverence or special treatment because we were researchers. We were just spoken to as regular visitors. I am able to draw this inference as I had also conducted research while accompanied by a blonde, Dutch female, Dr Wijngaarden, at a village in the Fundudzi area there were marked differences in how we were perceived. These differences are discussed later in the chapter. I make mention of this to flag the importance of racialized and gendered identities and positionality when conducting research in South Africa (see Hoogendoorn and Visser 2012). This is discussed in greater depth later in the chapter.

To go back to the interviews at the Baleni camp, Barnabas and I were treated as normal guests, we sat on overturned cool-drink crates, or on the floor on woven-grass mats or on plastic chairs when there were chairs available. The interviews were conducted in a very conversational, meandering way. The interviews were semi-structured. Women often stopped in the middle of the interview to tend to the cooking or to entertain restless babies that were usually playing alongside their mothers or sleeping swaddled in a blanket on their mother’s back. We went into the yard, we were offered tea and then the women spoke to us while 114

continuing with whatever they were doing.

These interactions felt less like a formal interview, they felt more like a conversation. There were chickens running about in some of the yards. We were sometimes approached by a mother hen looking for food scraps, while she scratched on the ground. Some of my interview recordings reveal the loud chirping of a clutch of chicks that decided to sit right where we were we the conversation was being recorded. In one interview, I can hear the respondent chasing away the chicks so that she can be heard over their chirping. In another interview, I had made the mistake of sitting in the direction in which the wind was blowing the smoke from an outside wood-fire used for cooking. My eyes were smarting from the smoke and I sniffled. I did shift my position on the ground, but heard my unusually nasally voice for the rest of the interview, so the effects lingered. There was a sense of camaraderie fostered while Barnabas, the camp guide and I sat with the women in their yards in the sunlight while they bathed their babies in little plastic baths outside, or cooked or threaded beads to make crafts.

I am trying to convey the nuanced sense of normalcy that prevailed. Moreover, some of the women were around Barnabas’s and my age, and they were tending to their babies while they spoke. They asked whether Shanade and I had our own babies and then enquired as to why we did not have any children at our age. We both responded that we were still studying. This answer was met with amusement and a slight shaking of their heads. There was the usual commiseration of bad hair days in the dry weather and my frizzy, curly hair was commented upon with much sympathy and mirth. I had not had access to an electric plug point to straighten my hair with an electric hair-iron as I usually did. The result is bushy, to say the least. One of the younger women offered to plait my hair into cornrows to make it more manageable. This offer was not made in some skewed-power relation dynamic of the researcher and the researched. This offer to braid my hair was made by one woman literally pitying the state of my unruly hair. We were interrogated about the reason for us being there and were asked numerous questions as well.

I thought of the ethnographer David Coplan’s experience when I was questioned during an interview. Coplan recounts his experience while conducting research in Lesotho. He approaches an elderly man and addresses him respectfully before asking his questions. The 115

man cuts off the question bluntly by enquiring whether Coplan could get him his job at the mines back, and then brushed Coplan off when Coplan admits that he cannot do anything about the job (Coplan 2018: 216). Nearing the conclusion of one of my interviews, I asked as I always do as part of the research inquiry, what would the respondent like to have provided in the community. Usually I got the answer of more tarred roads or a clinic. I did get the answer of a clinic in this instance, however, the elderly woman looked at me appraisingly asked me a question in Tsonga, which was translated by the amused guide as:

She wants to know why you are asking her what she wants, she has now said that she wants a clinic in the village, are you going to do anything about it if you are concerned to ask?” (respondent T1 : interview November 2017).

I was caught off-guard and so surprised by the question that I literally had to spend a few seconds going “um and uh” until I responded in an unconvincing manner that I would write this information down and then someone with the power to do so would hopefully read it and make the recommendation. Barnabas piped up valiantly in my defence and concurred that I was writing this down so that someone could do something about it. Conducting fieldwork is an uncertain process as one cannot always predict how a research participant will respond. I did not mention who would, it was left as an undefined someone. We certainly could not say that TFPD would build a clinic, we could not make false promises. I cringed when listening to the interview and the half-hearted way in which I admit my inability to do much. “I’m a student”, I left the implied impotence unsaid as I trailed off into silence.

Contradictions in the South African economy: navigating through bureaucratic red tape

The unemployment rate in the formal employment sector in South Africa is currently at 27.2 percent of the working-age population (18-65 year-olds) (Statistics South Africa website: date accessed: 14 November 2018). This number is a benchmark figure and is not entirely accurate as the census system used to collected data does not reflect people living in informal settlements, the homeless, migrant labourers and other people in transitory movement patterns. The lack of employment in the formal economy often gives rise to a bustling informal economy. The practice of begging, otherwise known as “panhandling” is so entrenched at South African metropolitan cities that motorists almost reflexively roll their car

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windows up at intersections and traffic lights to avoid the beggars (Ndlovu 2016: 126). People dancing with cool-drink crates as props at traffic lights, or displaying a prominent physical deformity is commonplace. These beggars are not as intrusive as the “squeegee bandits” who offer to wash your windscreen and adamantly spray liquid soap on your windscreen despite protestations that the windscreen is clean: “matters of poverty, unemployment, disability, education and homelessness are specific factors associated with street begging” (Stones 2013: 159).

This culture of begging even extends to remote rural areas. The ≠Khomani Bushmen31 in the Northern Cape are notorious for begging: members of the prolific Kruiper family would demand payment for have roadside conversations with tourists. They attempted to commodify casual social interactions (Dyll-Myklebust 2011: 4). Another large segment of informal employment occurs at the metropolitan inner cities where street traders offer an assortment of goods and services, from African ethnic-themed clothing, to roadside hairstyling or even charms, amulets or enchantments to bring back lost lovers (Mokgobi 2014: 23). There are numerous instances of contradictions and inconsistent governance policies at both the municipal and provincial level that makes it nearly impossible to adhere to the laws of governance enforced in the informal economic sector (Pezzano 2016: 500). I encountered a similar failure of governance at the provincial level when on the 2016 fieldtrip to Limpopo.

My research team and I came across a beautiful but derelict guest lodge in Modjajiskloof, 18 kilometres north of Tzaneen. This lodge had been built by the Limpopo provincial tourism department as part of a poverty-alleviation project in the mid-2000s but the lodge stood empty because there were conflicts about which community members would manage the operation of the lodge. Thus the lodge, christened Queen Modjadji the fifth, lay in ruins. This practice of tourism structures being built by South African provincial tourism departments without due consideration being taken of the feasibility of such enterprises has led to the proliferation of so-called ‘white-elephants’ in the tourism sector (see Sheik 2013).

This discussion about the inconsistencies of the workings of the South African economy both

31 Bushman is the term that the research participants prefer to use for self-representation. No disrespect is intended by the use of the term here. 117

in the formal and informal sector speaks to a different set of practices and unofficial rules that one encounters in this context. Tomaselli encapsulates this state of being in the phrase, and article title: “Blue is hot, red is cold: doing reverse cultural studies in Africa” (2001: 283).

Neither I, nor Tomaselli’s article intends to propagate racist essentialised discourses of Africa being a “backwards” place. All I intend to do is to draw attention to the fact that things do operate differently in South Africa, at least. This is not a value-judgement, it is merely a statement. Apartheid’s homeland legislation of “separate development” has riven great divides along ethnic and linguistic affinities (Jensen and Zenker 2015: 937-938). The vestiges of this spatial reformation has implications for current employment practices. Cultural tourism and the intangible heritage and narratives conveyed in the tourism sector forms part of the livelihood strategies used by indigenous communities to generate an income (Sehume 2012). It is difficult for some segments of society to gain access to formal employment so cultural tourism is often a respite from unemployment (Ivanovic 2008).

The divide between ancestral worship practices and Christianity

These days it is not good to worship the ancestors because people may think that you are doing something, maybe they will say that you are a witch (respondent T2 interview, 16 November 2017).

Being identified as a witch can be a matter of life and death in the Tsonga and Venda communities (Khaukanani 2012). Witches are presumed to have ill intent toward the community and any suspicion around delving into occult practices could have dire repercussions. Older women in particular, are vulnerable when it comes to having claims of witchcraft lodged against them.

I only encountered the incompatibility between ancestral worship practices and Christianity during my second day of interviews at the villages around the Baleni camp. As a result of this, I do not have the religious views of the respondents that I interviewed on the first day. The concept of witchcraft has been viewed as synonymous with ancestral worship and many of the respondents asserted that they were Christians and that they went to church and did not participate in ancestral worship. The strong dichotomy drawn between ancestral worship and

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Christianity puzzled me as all the respondents from the Greater Giyani municipality were unanimous in their views that the traditional dances, beating of the drums and traditional cuisine should be showcased at the Baleni cultural camp. There was also a pervasive sense of pride at the thought of the Tsonga traditional culture being shared with tourists from around the world. One of the respondents (T3 interview 16 November 2017) suggested that the children in the village should learn the traditional practice of “kuphata” - an act of praising the ancestors of their clan by reciting the meaning of their surname and the stories associated with their paternal forebears. There does not seem to be anything inherently sinister about this. She summarised this skill as follows:

The young children need to know their heritage. They must be taught the stories of their ancestors. If children do not know where they come from then they will be lost. In order to know their culture they must know their elders. If they know their culture then they will know that it is necessary to respect their elders (T3 interview 13 November 2017).

The quotation above explicitly highlights the connection between one’s lineage in terms of the ancestors and equates that lineage with one’s culture. Respect for one’s elders is viewed as inherent to Tsonga cultural practices. This stance was echoed by two others, who lamented the fact that the children did not always respect their elders (T5 and T6, Interviews 13 November 2017). In this instance practicing one’s culture and respecting one’s ancestors is conflated into a single endeavour. Members of the Tsonga community who are Christian, make every effort to separate themselves from ancestral worship. This is illustrated in the view expressed by a respondent T2 in the quotation below:

I have a difficult time because my husband believes in ancestral worship but I go to church. I cannot attend any ceremonial functions that his family has because they slaughter animals and worship the ancestors. I do not believe in that. (Interview November 2017).

This tension is also exhibited in this woman’s professional life as a salt-harvester at the Baleni riverbed. She describes her discomfort with the role as follows:

I have to pretend for the tourists when I go to harvest the salt. I have to kneel down at the ancestral tree with the offering of snuff and traditional beer. I pray that God must forgive me because I do not work anywhere else, I only go to harvest the salt so I have to pray under the ancestral tree so that the tourists can see what I am doing (T2 interview November 2017).

This performance of the self for the tourists’ benefit is aligned with Dean MacCannell’s concept of the backstage and the frontstage (1973: 589). In the frontstage, under the ancestral 119

tree where the tourists watch this respondent, T2, leave an offering to the ancestors and hear her speak in Tsonga, the camp guides and the respondent herself is privy to her true plea of asking for forgiveness for feigning to participate in ancestral worship of which the church disapproves. Only those who could understand Tsonga would be privy to the backstage or the hidden aspects of this performance.

This pretence is not ideal, however, it is pivotal to keeping the tourists happy and for T2 to keep her job of demonstrating how to extract salt. Most of the respondents interviewed were highly aware of the fact that the tourists wanted to experience their traditional Tsonga culture. A refrain in most of the interviews went along the lines of: “I’d be willing to teach the tourists the traditional dance and how to prepare the traditional cuisine if they wanted to learn”. This was stated with a clearly visible sense of pride and determination. All the respondents were ecstatic that the Baleni camp was there to accommodate tourists. Everyone was aware of the income-generating effect of the cultural camp which includes the national marketing and sale of the salt. The only point of contention seemed to arise between those who perceived themselves to be traditionalists who worshipped the ancestors and those who considered themselves to be aligned with Christian values and with modernity by proxy. I found it interesting that a similar sense of discord existed between the ≠Khomani Bushmen in the Northern Cape and the Mier community, both of whom work at TFPD’s other cultural tourism venture !Xaus Lodge (Dyll-Myklebust 2012: 11-12). This division is similar to the traditionalist verses the Christian at the Baleni camp. The church sermons espouse that these identities are mutually exclusive. One cannot worship the ancestors and simultaneously profess to be a Christian. The contradiction here is that the community’s livelihood largely depends on the performance of ancestral worship but this goes against the majority of the respondents’ Christian beliefs. The community also seems to ostracise female traditional healers as they also associate them with the practice of witchcraft. The section on day witches and night witches in the literature review chapter elaborated on the gendered perceptions of indigenous healing practices. A respondent who is a female traditional healer, T7, describes her discontent with the community’s perception of traditional healing as such:

I am a traditional healer. I use plants from the forest to make medicine for healing. Now people do not want traditional medicine, they want western medicine. Some people from the community are offended if I have a ceremony to praise the ancestors. They feel as though I am doing something wrong. They do not treat me like a human being. I respect people who go to church, they have chosen to do that, but they do not respect my choice (T7 interview 120

November 2017).

The choice of religion between ancestral worship and Christianity also has a correlation between traditional lifestyles and building practices as opposed to modern or western lifestyles. An elderly male respondent, T8, recounted tales from his youth when he and two other boys had seen a huge snake when they were playing by the sacred hot spring. The snake is described as a creature of mythical proportion. He describes it’s size as such:

It’s eyes were as big as tennis balls, and it’s body as thick as that tree trunk (He pointed to a big tree close to where we stood). You could watch it slither past from morning until the evening and still, you would not see its tail (T8 interview November 2017).

The elderly man cautioned us against taking any reeds or items from the area of the sacred hot spring as this would anger the ancestors. He also reiterated the importance of using the special metaphorical language of using pseudonyms to name things when in the area of the sacred spring. “Spears are used to describe the reeds while clouds are called blankets and stones are called beds” (Sheik 2013: 100). Conversely, a few respondents who were Christian were afraid to visit the sacred hot spring because they had heard of the special language that had to be used and were fearful of it. The two elderly respondents, T7 and T8 respectively also had similar negative views about the use of modern construction materials such as wire and concrete in the construction of the camp infrastructure. T8’s lament about modernity was articulated below:

There are not supposed to be any structures built so close to the hot spring. It is a sacred place. The ancestors must be upset because there has not been a lot of rain here. When they started building the camp the grass was burned there. It was vandalised, there was a fight (interview, November 2017).

The fight alluded to in the quotation above is a “spiritual fight”. Respondent T8 maintains that the grass was set alight by the ancestors due to their displeasure over having the camp structure so close to the sacred hot spring. This recount of the burning of the grass by the ancestors as well as to the lack of rain falls under Todorov’s (1975) concept of the fantastic as it is in that liminal space between as plausible and implausible explanation. The theory is used to delineate the space between belief and disbelief in literary texts. Here it is used for events. Viveiros de Castro’s (2015) theory of perspectivism is used to understand the worldviews of indigenous peoples when conducting fieldwork (Rasmussen 2011). The

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combination of the two theories: the fantastic and perspectivism bridges the pitfall of the theory of the fantastic being a literary theory of European origin. The lack of rain and the grass catching fire could be attributed to a plausible scientific reason of drier weather conditions due to global warming and climate shifts. Alternatively, the lack of rain and the fire could also be attributed to the ancestors’ anger and retribution. It depends on which worldview one subscribes to: a positivist stance or a mystical, spiritual stance.

Respondent T7 complained about the fact that modern building materials were used in the construction of the camp. She voices her displeasure as follows:

Modern building materials like cement and wires are not allowed at a sacred place. Something bad may happen (T7 Interview, November 2017).

It is worth noting that only one respondent, T8, believed that the cultural camp was built too close to the sacred hot spring. Everyone else, including T7 who is upset about the use of modern building materials, feels that the camp is situated an adequate distance away from the sacred hot spring. This discussion on Christianity/modernity versus ancestral worship/tradition highlighted the tension between people’s beliefs and their lived- experience. The next section evaluates the recommendations that community members suggested for the improvement of the cultural activity offerings at the camp.

Christianity is a monotheistic religion that is often incompatible with the beliefs and practices of indigenous African religious practices. Ever since 1737, missionaries have been travelling to South Africa to civilize32 African communities and to claim their souls for Christianity (Bae 2007: 13-14). The values of Christianity do not lend itself well to merging with other religions as there is an explicit instruction to worship no other deity other than the Christian God. When missionaries sought to introduce Christian belief and practice to South Africa, they found that in order to gain any measureable traction, some inclusion of indigenous practices was necessary. This merger of Christianity with other religious practices is known as syncretism (Richard 2014: 209). Although my research participants claimed to be set apart from African ancestral worship and the perceived “backwardness” of traditional practices, they nevertheless espoused the value of cultural performances to attract

32 This is a controversial point, however, this was reflected the dominant perceptions of the time. 122

tourists. The notion of indigenous African practices as being inferior to western Christian practices has been around since the arrival of the missionaries. Traditional practices revolved around weather patterns such as droughts and seasons of rain and worked in cycles following the agricultural seasonal patterns. Additionally rites-of-passage such as young women’s first menstruation signalling their burgeoning fertility and the initiation practices of young men were also given precedence (Davison and Mahashe 2012: 52-53).

In contrast, missionaries were known as the purveyors of Western education and superior living practices. This led to Africans who had converted to Christianity developing a sense of superiority and a condescension towards those who still practiced ancestral worship (Davison and Mahashe 2012: 54). This view was borne out during the interviews when respondents maintained that they did not even attend religious ceremonies that were held by their husband’s family if it involved ritual animal sacrifice.

A respondent in her late 40s grapples with the incompatibility of traditional religious beliefs and Christianity both in terms of how to relate to tourists as well as how to navigate through personal relationships. She says that:

Some tourists don’t believe in the ancestors. You can see that it does not make sense to them. When they are at the hot-spring and at the little magic mountain they listen to the rules out of respect, not because they believe it….

She goes on to comment that:

If you believe in God, nothing at Baleni will make sense to you. Sometimes it is a problem if I believe in God and I am married to someone who believes in the ancestors. It is a problem because there is no balance between the two (T11 interview: 14 November 2017). This respondent is astute in gauging the tourist’s behaviour as she is aware that tourist’s may abide by the impositions enforced at the hot-springs at the Baleni camp due to a sense of respect and not necessarily belief. However, her insistence that there is no mid-point between ancestral worship and Christianity is unfounded as the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) is an example of African indigenous religion and Christianity combined.

There is a major point of contradiction that the members of the ZCC either did not perceive or refused to mention. ZCC is a large African-initiated religious organisation in South Africa. It is estimated that it has a membership of over three million people. Members of the church 123

can be identified by the rectangular dark green felt badges that they pin on their clothing. The badges either have a silver metal star, or in some instances, a silver metal bird, depending on the denomination of the member. The contradiction alluded to earlier, is that the ZCC is syncretic and allows for ancestral practices to be followed in conjunction with Christianity. It is highly attractive to people from the lower economic strata as the sermons focus on social ills such as poverty, illness and unemployment. It also acknowledges and delves into animistic beliefs and mysticism by exorcising demonic spirit possessions and worshipping animal totems (Anderson 1999: 285-286; Nyikana 2017: 1). This merger of indigenous religions is not exclusive to African practices. Evidence of syncretism has also been found in large Māori spiritual churches where their ancestral beliefs are merged with Christianity (Mathiesen 2006: 5). Similarly Mary Lange and Lauren Dyll draw attention to the syncretic nature of indigenous and Christian religious worship practices among the ≠Khomani Bushmen in the Kalahari (2015). I find it unusual that members of syncretic churches do not see the inherent contradictions in the written religious doctrine of the Bible and their lived- practice, however I am aware that even in churches in the urban areas of Johannesburg, pastors are attempting to integrate bride wealth practices into the mainstream Christian belief. There is an attempt to merge the traditional “white” western wedding with the tenets of ancestral worship and practices (Mupotsa 2014: 11-12). There is evidence that my respondents that aspired to upward social mobility professed to be Christians. The religious syncretism is mobilised in the cultural tourism strategies at the Fundudzi camp because we did attend a Church service with members of the community that resided close to the camp during a fieldtrip in November 2017.

The contested space of cultural tourism in the South African tourism sphere

Some scholars equate the concept of cultural tourism with the sale of one’s culture (Coronado 2014: 12-13; Wijngaarden 2010: 99) or as blatant exploitation in which poverty-stricken communities are exploited by being observed in a voyeuristic manner by wealthy, privileged tourists.

Cultural tourism is viewed as a means of generating an income, where poor people are photographed, especially in so called “slum” or township tours as though they are wild animals on a safari tour (Scarbrough 2018: 552-553). While I do not disagree that there is an 124

element of discomfort in cultural tourism ventures, I am fully aware of the high levels of unemployment in South Africa which some estimates place at 25 percent of the working-age population (18-64-year-olds). One cannot deny the stark poverty that is prevalent in the South African context (Simkins 2004: 54). Tourism as a mechanism of employment may be a feasible tool of development in this economic milieu: “the promotion of tourism has been identified as a key strategy that can lead to economic upliftment, community development and poverty relief in the developing world” (Binns and Nel 2002: 235; Boonzaaier and Wels 2018). A specific strategy used to alleviate poverty in the tourism context is known as pro- poor tourism: “pro-poor tourism is defined as tourism that generates net benefits for the poor. It is not a specific sector or product. Benefits may be economic, but they may also be social, environmental or cultural, and affect livelihoods in multiple indirect ways” (Ashley and Roe 2002: 62). One of the ways that pro-poor tourism has benefited the Baleni community has been in a resurgence in the popularity of their cultural dances and practices. The emergence of value in cultural heritage practices has been one of the benefits accrued from tourism in the area. The importance of cultural tourism in ensuring the continuation of a community’s heritage is outlined as follows:

Cultural tourism is important for various reasons; it has a positive economic and social impact, it establishes and reinforces identity, it helps build image, it helps preserve the cultural and historical heritage. With culture as an instrument it facilitates harmony and understanding among people, it supports culture and helps renew tourism (Hinsberg et al. 2004: 9).

As can be extrapolated from the quotation above, tourism has multi-faceted and pervasive benefits to communities. It is not an ideal solution, nor is it problem-free as the issues of voyeurism and exploitation are elements of which to be wary. However, with all other things considered in terms of South Africa’s fragile economy and precarious employment rates of the rural poor, cultural tourism is the most palatable solution in a less-than-ideal situation. I argue that engaging in what is essentially a role-play in a controlled setting is not as exploitative and undignified as enduring harsh poverty: “poverty is not only a lack of income. The poor often suffer vulnerability, ill-health, lack of opportunity, disrespect and limited access to public and private assets” (Ashley and Roe: 2002: 73). Being poor in South Africa, or anywhere in the world for that matter, exposes one to far more indignities and humiliations than playing a role while working in the cultural tourism sector would.

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The responses from the community members interviewed at the cultural camps attest to how they benefited from the multiplier effects of tourism in both tangible and intangible ways. The excepts from the interviews are used below to substantiate these claims.

Perpetuating colonial myths in an era of decolonization: the performative nature of cultural tourism

The entire enterprise of cultural tourism hinges on the promotion, re-articulation and selling of mental representations or myths surrounding a place and culture. The veracity or authenticity of the narrative is not important, there just has to be a perception of authenticity and the narrative should conform to tourists’ expectations (Tomaselli and Wang 2001: 1-2).

Cultural tourism is anachronistic in the current decolonization movement that is sweeping through universities in South Africa (see Frassinelli 2017). As the crux of cultural tourism depends on it ascribing to and re-enacting colonial fantasies of the other—one has to weigh the benefits against the costs of engaging in this elaborate colonial role-play. South Africa has an unemployment rate that hovers at around 27 percent (Statistics South Africa website. Date accessed 24 November 2018). There are not enough jobs in the formal employment sector to absorb all the unskilled or semi-skilled workers. Involvement in the cultural tourism sector allows unskilled workers to gain access to employment when they would not have had the opportunity to do so via other means. There is a distaste toward this form of work as it is perceived as the latest iteration of cultural exploitation in a neoliberal capitalist environment (Koot 2016: 1212).

“Africa” from a colonial cultural tourism perspective “Africa” as a continent is often viewed by the occidental West (both literally, the west and those that ascribe to the ideological mind-set) as the antithesis to the enlightenment values of rationality, logic and order. During the 19th century, writers and travellers of that time created and perceived a dichotomy drawn between ‘us’ of the occidental global north and ‘them’, the superstitious, irrational Other (Fabian 1990 : 753). This trajectory of setting up a straw-man 126

other in order to glorify and emphasise the virtues of the self is not a new process. The oriental other served as the original exoticised other to stand in stark contrast to the European same.

The Oriental and the African Other respectively, became the scapegoat for all the perceived ills of the hedonistic excess that was portrayed in novels, imperial policy documents and travel diaries of the time. Intoxication, licentiousness, and slovenly behaviour was attributed with a sense of moral indignation and righteousness to the “dark” other (Said 1978; Hickey and Wylie 1993). This mind-set may have been prevalent in the late 1980s or so but the current generation of cultural tourists are much more aware of their impact on the environment and they are cautious about the possible changes that they may unintentional foster in a community (Allen and Brennan 2004). This socially-aware tourist does not travel the earth in search of the primitive other. They are travelling in a bid to learn more about other cultures in a sincere and benevolent way as opposed to enacting colonial scripts (Urry 2002). The stereotype of the other as morally dubious, according to Christian ideals, lost most of its cultural cache as tourists began to have more informal interactions with people from other races in other spheres of their live outside of the tourism setting (Urry 2002).

Some old constructions of race and identity still existed but it was viewed as a relic of a bygone age. It was not taken serious in current-day perceptions of reality: “the Orient was almost a European invention and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experience” (Said 1978: 1).

The truth of the lived reality countered the colonial construction and representation of the lived experience. It is the myth, the mental construction and representation of a place that holds the cultural and economic value in the case of cultural tourism (Tomaselli and Wang 2001: 2). The reality of the culture is irrelevant in the cultural tourism industry (Urry 2002; Crouch 2000). The aspect that is vital to the success of the tourist venture is to ensure that the cultural offering matches the expectations that the tourists’ hold (Wels 2004).

Tourists’ expectations have transformed dramatically since the late 1940s. A travel-writer Jasper More, displays an ethnocentric sense of superiority in the quotation below:

There are only two good reasons for going abroad. The first is for the satisfaction, during the journey, of pointing out the deficiencies of foreign countries as compared with one’s own. 127

The second is for the satisfaction, after returning home, of describing to less travelled acquaintances the unique attractions of the places one has seen [Italics are my emphasis] (1949: 1).

An important need for the tourist to have met while on holiday is to assuage their yearning to experience the unique and out-of-the-ordinary (Petroman et al. 2013). The tour guides at the Fundudzi cultural camp are well aware of the tourists’ thirst for intrigue. The tour guide, Nelson Maphaha, tailors his stories accordingly. He explains as follows:

I know that tourists get excited to hear about the half-people, zombie-like creatures with only half a body, half the body is physical, the half is spiritual, it cannot be seen. The body is split vertically, they only have one arm and one leg. During ancestral rituals at the lake, the half- people amble down to the lake and beat the boulders at the side of the lake like drums. No one has ever seen the half-people but we have heard legends about them and even now, people from the surrounding village say that they sometimes hear the beating of drums here. I have heard that up until the late 1980s when this place was still the Venda homeland under traditional rule—people used to sacrifice a virgin maiden by throwing her into the lake to appease the white python that lives in the lake. This was done in order to appease the ancestors so that they could ensure the fertility of the people, plants and animals in the area (interview 23 May 2016).

These tales of zombies emerging in the dead of night to beat boulders as though they were drums alongside a mystical lake, and rumours of a monstrous python devouring young virginal maidens fits into western narrative archetypal tropes. It ties in with Todorov’s theory of the fantastic because one can never be certain about whether these events did, in fact, occur. Tomaselli applied Todorov’s theory of the fantastic to make sense of a scientifically- inexplicable occurrence at lake Fundudzi in his article entitled “Virtual religion, the fantastic and electronic ontology” (2015). Africa becomes the place to play out and to exorcise the primal fears of the western collective psyche. It becomes the Garden of Eden before the fall (Tomaselli 1993). The prospect of witnessing a state of altered consciousness also seems to be something that appeals to tourists. It is important to note that not all tourists arrive at the cultural camps with expectations of seeing a “performative primitive”. Some tourists are more concerned about the transfer of cultural knowledge and the understanding of an alternative cosmology that there is no overt drive to conform to colonial stereotypical depictions. When interviewed in another study tourists were enthusiastic about thinking through and manoeuvring within the established stereotypes both at !Xaus Lodge and at some of the other cultural camps (Finlay 2009).

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An old woman living close to the Fundudzi cultural camp explained how tourists wanted to see the trance state occurring in the python dance. The old woman explained to me that going into a trance state was reserved for ancestral rituals and was not exhibited to tourists because it was a private thing. They navigated the quandary in the ingenuous way that she describes below:

The domba, or python, dance is taught to young women as part of the process to initiate them into the expectations of married life. The women learn how to serve their husbands and to be respectful to their husband’s family. This is taught through dance. They don’t get into a trance when they are performing for tourists as the trance only happens when it is linked to ancestral rituals and that is a private thing. The women pretend to go into a trance because that is what tourists expect to see (interview respondent 3F: 13 November 2017).

This interview excerpt highlights the fact that community members find ways to protect their privacy, in this instance by only pretending to go into a trance to meet the expectations held by tourists while still respecting the sacred quality of their ancestral worship which is conducted in privacy. It may not necessarily be authentic, but at this point, it is highly unlikely that either party cares. It is all a highly choreographed performance (Urry 2002). One can think of this performative nature of the self and other as it plays out in anthropological research as well. Vanessa McLennan-Dodd’s 2002 article entitled: “They lie, we lie, getting on with anthropology” succinctly describes this performative process in the tourism industry. Jeffrey Sehume writes about staged authenticity in the cultural tourism industry as something that is necessary and implicit in tourists’ expectations. The sense of the carnivalesque excess is imperative for the cultural tourism encounter to be deemed worthwhile (2012: 102).

Outside of the re-enactment of the domba dance for tourism purposes, the dance and initiation ceremony for young women would have only occurred around every four years or so, or as soon as there were enough pubescent girls that warranted the vast preparation for the ceremony. A ceremony of this significance requires extensive preparation and has major ramifications for the usual routines of the community as is elaborated on as follows:

The domba does not take place regularly. Its occurrence depends largely on the number of girls ready to participate and on the result of the harvest. It is essential that there should be plenty of food to enable the members of the [iniation] school to have the necessary leisure. It usually lasts about three months, but is often protracted to eight or nine months and sometimes continued for a whole year (Stayt 1931: 111). 129

It is evident that the current portrayal of the dance for the benefit of tourists is a diluted version of a highly specialised training about the expectations of marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. As mentioned in the literature review chapter, gender-specific initiation rituals are imperative to the Venda as gender roles and expectations are clearly delineated from birth. This is evident in a ceremony conducted when a baby is around two months old. The purpose of this ceremony is two-fold, firstly, to introduce the baby to the members of the village, and secondly, to serve as a re-enforcement for the mother and the community with regard to the socialisation of the child according to its gender-specific role. The quotation below highlights the ritualistic aspects of the gender socialisation process in Venda cultural practices:

In the evening the mother, carrying her new baby, repairs to a chosen spot just outside the kraal; she is accompanied by some of the old women of the kraal, who, if the child is a girl, take with them a handful of seeds, representative of the different crops. They hoe a small patch of ground and order the mother to suckle her child and to plant the seeds in the prepared ground, after which she returns to the kraal with her child, carrying a miniature bundle of wood. If the child is a boy he is taken out with a small axe. Instead of sowing and hoeing the garden, a miniature cattle-kraal is made, and a small bush carried back to the kraal. These rites are symbolic of the child’s future activities (Stayt 1931: 89).

These gender-specific practices have relevance to the current tourism practices enacted at the Fundudzi camp as the depictions of Venda culture conform to these gendered-roles in terms of women being in charge of the food preparation.

It is a misconception to treat all members of a community as a homogenous mass. Even within one community within a specific geographical area there are potentially vast differences in socio-economic attainment, cultural beliefs and ethnicities (Boonzaaier 2007). It is not inaccurate to assert that identity-based struggles and cadre affiliation affect power and social capital and influence in South Africa (Ballard et al. 2006: 460). Those with more access to political power and institutionalised modes of power in a society would hold more influence to mobilise the community’s actions. Members of the Venda community that resided in the Tshivhase area, held different perceptions and attitudes around tourism at the Fundudzi camp depending on various factors such as their age, occupation and level of education (Boonzaaier and Grobler 2012; Grobler 2005). Overall, the younger and more

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educated respondents (between the ages of eighteen and fifty; with some post-matric education) articulated the benefits of tourism and espoused the value of engaging with tourists while being able to preserve their traditions and culture (Boonzaaier and Grobler 2012: 65). However, despite the claim to want to preserve Venda culture, the younger respondents did aspire to a “western” lifestyle, described in largely materialistic terms such has having large houses, expensive cars and fancy clothes (Boonzaaier and Grobler 2012: 65). Older respondents, less-educated respondents (In their sixties, with the equivalent of a grade 4 level of education) tended to prefer what they deemed a more traditional lifestyle with little to no interaction with tourists. These respondents expressed a desire to return to “their own culture” where the young took care of the elders in the community (Boonzaaier and Grobler 2012: 65). In addition to the older respondents general discomfort with engaging with tourists, they were reluctant to be photographed as they were embarrassed about their poverty (Grobler 2005; Boonzaaier and Grobler 2012: 68).

The cultural camps on the African Ivory Route were commissioned and built by the Limpopo provincial tourism department. The local communities surrounding the camps were envisioned as the beneficiaries of the camps. As a researcher listening to the interviews, it was difficult for me to grasp the reasoning for community members to damage their own resources. A borehole pump and a solar panel had been stolen from the Baleni camp— presumably by someone from one of the surrounding communities (field notes May 2016)33.

Where there is poverty and dire economic circumstances, individuals often choose to act in ways that benefit their short-term needs in seemingly selfish as opposed to altruistic ways as the uncertainty of their lived-experience makes it necessary to gain all that can be attained from the present as opposed to planning for an uncertain future (Briedenhann and Wickens 2004: 72). Dire circumstances induce people to think only of their immediate short-term needs. It seems to be a sound survival strategy in the context of uncertainty and poverty faced by the communities.

In terms of the Baleni cultural camp, the villagers from the surrounding Shawela and Shikumba areas were not happy about the fence and gates that were erected around the camp

33 Some community members in South Africa tend to stage protests or vandalise, loot or burn assets in order to get the attention of government officials who do not acknowledge their plight (Jinnah 2019: n.p). 131

as it curtailed the space in which their cattle could graze. The employee at the camp— Personia—outlined the friction between the surrounding communities and the camp as follows:

The villagers come for water and to graze [sic] their cattle here. 34 The donkeys are also brought to graze here. The communities were not happy with the gate and fences (interview, 19 May 2016).

It appeared as though this problem was resolved as cattle and donkeys were walking around the camp and grazing during the time that the interview was conducted. As though on cue, the donkeys began rolling in the sand and creating a dust storm while the bells tied around their necks chimed in a cacophony of metallic tones. The respondents caught my perplexed expression and explained that the donkeys were cooling and cleaning themselves by rolling in the sand. The donkeys created quite a dust storm. This practical example of the complexities inherent in how the needs of the community needed to be considered in the operational procedures of the camp, in this case—allowing livestock to graze on the land, was articulated by another researcher during the focus group discussion as follows:

It is complicated, you know….There are so many things happening in this space that you need to be aware of. You need to know how the communities from the different villages relate to each other, what is the potential impact of erecting a fence here, there are so many variables that influence whether the place is viable or not. You can’t just have the big picture and not know the details…. (15 May 2016 focus group discussion respondent A).

The “big picture” referenced in the quotation above alludes to the formal directives and policy that guide the management and operation of tourism ventures. However, as is evident by the conflict recounted earlier, it is not as simple as following the tenets of the official policy. It is imperative to the success of the venture that one is aware of and plans for the conflict of interest and nuances of power dynamics at play at a particular region. It is clear that in terms of management strategies, one uniform approach is not applicable to all circumstances. It should be noted that the interview sometimes took on the semblance of a focus group discussion as other employees and researchers joined the discussion or left to attend to tasks and returned to the discussion. There are many facets of operating a cultural camp in public-private- and- community collaborations that are not initially considered and there are actions that do not seem to make sense from other perspectives. This highlights the

34 The cattle owned by the villagers drink water and graze on grass from the swamp-like area behind the accommodation structures at the camp. 132

need for introspection in order to understand the reasoning behind seemingly counterintuitive survival strategies.

The frisson of fear: adrenalin and the sensation-seeking tourist

Some tourists intentionally seek out destinations that they perceive as dangerous or novel. People who have a high need for intense physical and biochemical sensory stimulation chase the adrenalin rush that fear produces (Lepp and Gibson 2008: 741; Zuckerman 1990: 314). Evolutionary psychologist David Buss posits that some people are genetically predisposed to seek out novel, and simulating experiences because their bio-chemical sensory receptors need intense triggers in order to be activated (1990: 12). This desire for adrenaline-inducing experiences is hypothesised to be an evolutionary adaptation that was passed down from our progenitors. Our nomadic forebears lived in groups that competed for resources and mates.

Those communities with more developed proclivities for travel and exploration had greater access to resources and more opportunities to procure mates. Thus the drive for intense sensory experiences for novelty could be biologically influenced (Kock et al. 2018: 181). The need for high levels of sensory stimulation in the face of imminent danger have been conveyed in the earliest myths such as that of Icarus, the youth who flew too close to the sun in his need for exhilaration and plunged to his death once the glue from his wings melted (Hamilton 2013: 187). Some tourists relish the thought of being immersed in a place of witch-craft and legends, as is the case in Venda. Others enjoy eating the novelty of eating Mopani worms at the Baleni camp. Thrill-and-novelty seeking is a prominent driver for tourists (Kock et al. 2018: 181).

Part of this quest for the vicarious experience of danger could be explained by the popularity of the horror genre of films and novels (Tudor 1997: 443). Film-maker and academic, Philip Brophy, explains the popularity of the horror-genre as such: “the pleasure of the text is, in fact, getting the shit scared out of you—and loving it; an exchange mediated by adrenalin” (1986: 5). The stories related by the camp guides at the Fundudzi cultural camp sent tingles down my spine and left me with goose bumps. I was torn between belief and disbelief while listening to the interviews, but the overarching sensation was one of low-level fear. Todorov’s theory of the fantastic exists in the liminal space between belief and disbelief. The 133

cultural camps of Baleni and Fundudzi, seem to be full of encounters with spirits, ghosts and ghouls. The specific expectations and narratives conveyed through the intangible aspects of Venda heritage and folklore is what creates a sense of place.

Nelson Maphaha, the camp guide, relates a tale that his father told him that occurred at Lake Fundudzi. Nelson narrates the tale below:

My father had gone to visit his relatives on the other side of the lake to collect marriage cattle.35 When he passed the side of the lake it was during the evening and everyone feared the spirits of the lake during that time. He drove the cattle while he walked with a woman who carried a child. The child started to cry. My father tried to hurry past the lake so that they could find a place for the woman to breastfeed the child. Then a voice came out of the water and said: “why are you hurrying? Stop. Worry not about the cattle”, and immediately when it said worry not about the cattle, the cattle stopped, standstill, just to stop [sic]. The voice instructed the lady to breastfeed the child. And, terrified as they were, the child was breastfed. After that the voice said: “now that the child is laughing and playing, you can continue”. Then the cattle started to walk (interview 22 May 2016 Fundudzi camp).

This tale about a benevolent disembodied voice speaking from the lake in order to soothe a hungry child is heart-warming and mildly entertaining but is not really fear-inducing. Tshifiwa, the other guide at the Fundudzi camp, recounted a tale that was so scary that it still unnerved me when I transcribed the interview. Tourists do ask about supernatural events at the camp because they have an idea of the folklore and legends of the area. The camp guides tell them about the supernatural occurrences around the camp (field notes November 2017; interview Nelson Maphaha; November 2017). Tshifiwa mentioned that she had stayed at the Baleni camp for three months since April the previous year. Her story starts fairly innocuously then strays toward the grotesque. She relates the incident in the except below:

We were sitting at the camp around the fire, it was winter. At around 11 o’ clock during the day a guy came to the camp wearing a long gown and carrying a bag. He must have been a priest.36 He went to the reeds, he went there, and he didn’t come back. Those people who harvest the salt there throughout the night, they brought him to the camp at 6 am the following day, when they found him there. He was burnt all over the body, only his trousers were left. His skin was falling off, his bag was burnt. When we had asked him what had happened, he said that he was praying during the night and this old lady came with a big tummy and her tummy exploded and then he got burnt. I think he lasted for six months and then he died (interview 22 May 2016).

35 This is cattle meant for a Lumalo payment. Lumalo is a ritual where cattle are presented as a gift from a potential groom’s family to the prospective bride’s family as a token of appreciation. 36 This priest was most likely from the Zionist church as it is a syncretic mix of ancestral worship and Christianity that has a large following in Limpopo. See url: https://www.africanivoryroute.co.za/african-ivory- route-experiences/religion-and-belief. Date accessed: 6 January 2019. 134

Tshifhiwa was not keen to work at the Baleni camp after witnessing that. There are several other incidents witnessed by Nelson, Tshifiwa and other guides at the camps that describe wind moving the Mopani trees at the Baleni camp when there was no breeze elsewhere, as well as accounts of the hot-spring behind the Baleni camp expanding and overflowing overnight. There are hints of rational explanations in most of these instances. A hot-spring is sourced from underground water, perhaps there was a build-up of pressure underground that caused the surge of water. Similarly, fatigue and hunger may have caused hallucinations that resulted in the perception of supernatural occurrences such as a voice speaking from the lake or the appearance of an old woman with a protruding stomach.

I encountered a team of researchers that arrived at Baleni to conduct an environmental impact assessment of the wetland area behind the camp. There was a researcher from the South African Biodiversity Institution—a woman by the name of Nemhla Mbona—who explained that her team had to ensure that the tourists that were visiting the area did not alter the ecosystem of the area. She did note that the cattle were overgrazing in the area and that this was contributing to soil erosion. Her research team also comprised of Thabo Hlongwane and Colleen Silima, both from the provincial Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT). Eddie Ubisi M’wa Xisengana from the South African National Parks (SANParks) accompanied the team and took notes while the rest of the team evaluated the wetlands.

The environmental impact assessment team explained that the wobbling mound of earth known as the “little magic mountain” was actually tightly compacted plant material that emitted highly flammable sulphurous gases. Personia did mention that if one jumped on the mound, it would give off biogases. It is not a stretch of the imagination to conclude that the priest went to pray in that area specifically because it is considered sacred to the ancestors and that the flammable sulphurous gas ignited when he lit a match. This still elicits the feeling of the fantastic though because one could argue that if the place was a religious location, surely other priests would have caught alight previously had they tried to light a match in the presence of a flammable gas.

This occurrence in itself would have prohibited other priests from going there to pray. One is unable to ascertain what made this particular instance different from others for the priest to

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burn to that extent. This is the conferring of ontological significance on measurable physical events such as the escape of biogas from the “little magic mountain” being identified by the scientists as sulphur. However, the cultural guide with the broader cosmological frame of reference interprets the “little magic mountain” as being wobbly and unstable because it is inhabited by the ancestors. This is the story that is told to tourists at the Baleni camp.

Esther Eidinow (2016: 50) posits that communities create myths around certain ecological phenomena to transfer ecological wisdom in an easily-understandable narrative form. Prohibitions around certain areas, under the guise of “sacredness” may serve to convey practical ecological wisdom. In this instance of the “little magic mountain”/mound of compacted plant-materials, the emission of highly flammable sulphurous gases may have served as the original reason for the area being declared as sacred. Once a place is declared as sacred, there are restrictions placed on visitation of the site. Perhaps the need to show guests the unusual behaviour of the wobbling mound, disregards the indigenous cultural norms that are in place to prevent the unnecessary emission and exposure to sulphurous gas.

Both sets of interpretations are based on witnessing the same phenomenon, however, divergent ontological perspectives led to different explanations. This alludes to the aforementioned concept of science versus priest-craft that are related to the same event (Tomaselli 1999). The purpose of placing these stories within the liminal space of the fantastic allows for a safety outlet so that the tourists could temporarily suspend their disbelief and immerse themselves in the tales while reverting to rational explanations afterwards. It is the best of both worlds. The surge of adrenaline and dopamine released through sensation and thrill seeking can create a reward for experiencing fear (Pendery 2017: 148). Telling ghost stories while toasting marshmallows around a campfire is a staple of camping trips in American culture (Garst et al. 2010: 90). The practice of storytelling is a tool used to create meaning out of the lived experience (Baldwin 2007: 3). These stories of the paranormal told at the cultural camps probably serve the tourists’ need for novelty and sensory stimulation. The frisson of fear surrounding the perceived physical and social risks encountered when staying at a reputedly haunted place could heighten the tourists’ enjoyment of the destination (Lepp and Gibson 2008: 740). De-commodifying social relationships to maintain a sense of authenticity at the Fundudzi cultural camp

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Guests were not interviewed at the Fundudzi cultural camp as the camp facilities were being refurbished during the dates of the fieldtrips. However, a cursory search on the travel booking website, Trip Advisor, yielded several positive comments around the authentic nature of the cultural experience encountered at the camp and the surrounding areas. Some of the guests’ reviews are included in this section under pseudonyms to provide an overview of the prevailing perceptions of the camps. A traveller from Belgium calls the Fundudzi camp “Authentical” [sic] (Review on Trip advisor 2017)37. Other reviews obtained on a Google search38 had enthusiastic responses such as: “spent two fantastic days here, meeting the local Venda community and exploring the surrounding areas. A truly unique cultural experience” (tourist review on the Fundudzi cultural camp 2017). The perceived authenticity of a culture and a place is important to the enjoyment of the tourism experience: “authenticity, it is argued, can be achieved either through environmental experiences, people-based experiences, or a joint interaction of these elements” (Pearce and Moscardo 1986: 125). The spontaneity and the genuine nature as opposed to a commodified nature of the encounter is what adds to sense of worth for the tourist.

The authenticity on display at the camps is paradoxically a result of a carefully-curated social process. It does not occur organically as tourists seem to believe. A theorist with an emphasis on issues of tourism and authenticity, Ning Wang, highlights the constructed nature of the concept of the authentic below:

By constructive authenticity it is meant the result of social construction, not an objectively measurable quality of what is being visited. Things appear authentic not because they are inherently authentic but because they are constructed as such in terms of points of view, beliefs, perspectives or powers (1999: 351).

The tourists are not necessarily concerned with the constructed nature of the authentic experience, they are enthralled with the end-product—the cultural experience. Another tourist summed up their experience as such: “Perfect place to visit if you want to get an authentic understanding of rural Venda life. The team working in the camp area were friendly and accommodating and took us on a guided tour of the area … A real eye-opener” (tourist review, 2017).

37 See url: https://www.tripadvisor.co.za/Hotel_Review-g679661-d9722858-Reviews-Fundudzi_Camp- Phalaborwa_Limpopo_Province.html. Date accessed : 19 March 2019 38 See url: https://www.google.com/search?q=fundudzi+cultural+camp&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox- b#lrd=0x1ec5c24cd3c122a5:0x682fb4f106e1971f,1,,, 137

The members of the Venda community seem to play an important role in making the guests feel welcome at the camp and in the surrounding area. Meeting members of the community in a non-commoditized setting seems to be a prime need of tourists when they interact with community members. A non-commoditized encounter with some indigenous communities is not necessarily possible. The ≠Khomani Bushmen in the Northern Cape, for instance, have adopted strategies to leverage their encounters with tourists for monetary gain. A cultural studies scholar, Lauren Dyll, recounts her experience of a ≠Khomani bushman, Silikat van Wyk, using learned discourses around land dispossession while supposedly playing a game with her while drawing lines in the sand to foster a misplaced sense of guilt in the tourist/researcher in order to get money off her. He asks for help, and when a further enquiry is made about the nature of the help, Silikat asks for 10 Rand (Dyll 2007: 117-118). This type of engagement between tourists and indigenous communities detracts from the pleasure and sense of “realness” and worth obtained from the trip because it feels as though the human interaction has become a transaction. In contrast, a cursory survey of the comments at the Fundudzi cultural camp emphasises a sense of genuineness with the interactions between the tourists and the community members and the camp guides.

During the November 2017 field trip, camp guide Nelson Maphaha, took us to his church service on a rainy Sunday. It was quite an ordeal to get there as the roads were muddy, slippery and we were prone to skidding in the muddy roads under these driving conditions over a short but very precarious pass. Nevertheless, Tomaselli drove us to the church and we all arrived intact. We (Dr Barnabas, Dr Wijngaarden, Prof Tomaselli and I) were made to feel welcome by the church congregation without any expectation of a financial transaction. Dr Barnabas offered a reciprocal prayer for the community from the pulpit. This difference in reception in two different encounters either brings to the fore the transactional nature of the human exchange as was the case with the ≠Khomani bushman in the Northern Cape. Alternatively, a positive exchange can make the guests feel a sense of warmth and authenticity behind the small, but thoughtful, gestures such as incorporating tourists into the church service by welcoming us individually by name to the congregation at the end of the prayer service. At no point after the prayer service did my fellow researchers, or I feel a sense of expectation to pay anyone for the informal conversations that we had. There was a prevailing atmosphere of friendliness and curiosity rather than a speculative and financially- 138

expectant one. Tourists are more likely to want to re-visit a place where they feel welcome. The Belgian tourist who called the camp “authentical” [sic] mentioned a feeling of friendship that would influence his decision to return to the camp. They articulate this as follows, the minor grammatical errors are in the original entry on the Trip Advisor website:

We left the camp the next day with the awareness that the time we had planned at the camp was defiantly [sic] too short and to [sic] much too [sic] see, leaving behind new made friends. Thank you Tshifhiwa and Nelson for your warm hospitality and excellent guidance during our (too short) stay. We defiantly [sic] will come back some day (Review on Trip Advisor 3 January 2018). The point of emphasis is that this tourist feels as though they have made new friends and this social interaction serves a factor in influencing a repeat visit to the camp. An interview respondent, a male in his late sixties expresses a sense of genuine concern for the welfare of the tourists when he laments about the poor condition of some of the roads leading to the camp. His voices his concern as follows:

The African Ivory Route must fix the road leading to the camp. They must buy cement and sand. I will fix the road. People come from as near as KZN39 and as far as Holland. They can’t drive on these roads if it is dangerous. I would fix this road myself but I don’t have enough cement (AM1 interview 15 November 2017). It is this sense of concern from a community member that does not have any direct gain from the camp that adds to a positive encounter.

Perceptions held by a selection of Mukumbani villagers about the Fundudzi Cultural camp The Mukumbani village is situated directly below the Fundudzi cultural camp. The perceptions outlined here about the camp are from a selection of community members that were interviewed and are not necessarily the views shared by the Mukumbani community.

Any attempt to speak for a community as a whole would be a partial depiction of reality as the term community itself is problematic. Communities are heterogeneous social groupings and this stratification is emphasised by Ruth Liepins as follows:

People (through their multiple identities and groupings) are seen as “central” to the constructions of a “community”. Then, attention is drawn to the meanings, practices, and spaces through which “community” is articulated and negotiated. These latter three elements are considered separately to highlight cultural and material forms of “community”; however,

39 KwaZulu-Natal, a province in South Africa. 139

their mutual interplay and their interconnections with the contexts and people of any given “community” are remembered (2000: 24).

As the quotation above illustrates, the concept of “community” is a construct created to investigate a cluster of themes around meanings, practices and space. My in-depth interviews and observations focused on older men and women in the Mukumbani village, the information cannot be viewed as an all-encompassing overview of what everyone in the village prefers.

As was the case with the villages surrounding the Baleni camp, the younger men were in the metropolitan regions of the country employed in semi-skilled labour. Despite this being a partial view of the community’s preferences, it nonetheless provides an overview of the perceptions of the Fundudzi cultural camp.

The respondents who were interviewed were generally very happy with the cultural camp as it provided a source of income and added to a sense of pride when guests from Europe participated in the dances.40 A male respondent in his sixties voiced his approval as follows:

It is good to promote our culture. I saw guests from Belgium do the Domba dance. People need money and meat. They need to promote their culture, even the young ones—the guests will pay them (ZT1 Interview 14 November 2017).

There seems to be a great sense of importance attached to tourists learning respect for Venda culture. Culture is a multi-faceted concept, but Tomaselli’s definition is appropriate for the parameters of this study: “culture is how specific groups of people encounter, make sense of and ascribe meaning to, the respective social, mental and physical worlds into which they are born, in which they live, and where they usually die” (1996: 29). In other words, culture is an ensemble of practices that convey meaning to the lived-experience. It is not necessarily something esoteric or foreign, it is merely a collection of practices specific to a cultural grouping. Respondents were particularly concerned that foreign European guests learn about the Venda culture and join them in respecting the ancestors. This was conveyed as such by a woman in her early sixties:

I like it when the guests come and perform the Domba dance. I am happy with the things that

40I will not problematise the issue of guests from Europe being the gold standard when it comes to cultural pride as that concern is not within the scope of this thesis. 140

are happening. I am happy to perform everything related to the Venda culture. These dances are connected to the ancestors. Especially the Malombo and the Vhagona dance connects you to the ancestors and honours them (NN1 Interview: 14 November 2017).

A male respondent in his mid-thirties reiterates the importance of respect and tradition in the practice of honouring the ancestors. He articulates this as such: “Tourists learn respect when they watch the dance. It repeats the tradition” (M1 Interview 14 November 2017).

An older male in his sixties also speaks of the need to be sensitive to the needs of tourists when the dance is performed. He espouses a more puritan view with the need to alter the traditional dress by having both the men and women use tights under the traditional clothing so that the tourists’ sensibilities are not offended. He explains the need for modesty as follows:

They must show the tourists the basic dance. They must put the tights under the traditional clothes instead of the g-string….They need to have more cover when the guests come (ZT1 Interview 14 November 2017).

There seems to be a consensus among the respondents that the participation of tourists in the dance is vital to the endeavour. Another respondent, a woman in the late sixties shares her enthusiasm for the Domba dance by reminiscing, articulated as follows:

I love the traditional dance. I love the dance even though I am not a dancer. Long ago I used to do all the dances but then I got sick. It is very nice to show outsider people, show the tourists so they can get jealous and join the dance (TM1 Interview 14 November 2017).

Members of the community also prefer that tourists visit for much more pragmatic reasons other than just the transfer of culture. The economic benefits of having tourists at the camp is explained by an older woman in her 60s as follows:

It helps a lot when guests buy firewood from me. When the guests come here, we can show them the minwenda41 [the traditional dress]. The guests also come to the camp and ask for the traditional food like the mopani worms to be prepared (G1 Interview 14 November 2017).

The quotation above highlights the importance of the economic multiplier effects, those are: services peripheral to the actual accommodation that add value to the guest experience while providing economic benefit to the indigenous hosts (Dyll-Myklebust 2011: 248). These

41 The minwenda is the traditional Venda attire only used by women. 141

peripheral activities include the dance troupes and the preparation of traditional cuisine, as well as the basic services provided by members of the community like the laundering of linen at the camp etc.

A woman in her mid-thirties from the Shawela village laughingly admitted that she wanted the male dance troupe to return as well as to have the re-introduction of the beating of the traditional drums as opposed to using a radio. When probed for the source of her amusement she mentioned that: “I enjoy the energy of the drumming. It feels more intense. It is also nice to watch the men dancing” (F1 interview 13 November).

This interaction emphasised the point that certain things are valued for their own sake. This respondent enjoyed the dancing from a purely aesthetic perspective. It would be incongruent to attribute her desire to watch the dancing as the expression of a deep-seated cultural need. The concept of the show-casing of culture to international guests as a recurrent theme emerges in the discussion about the sale of the minwenda. An older woman is also an astute business-woman who explains her marketing and promotional strategy as follows:

I like to show the guests the traditional clothes. Especially the minwenda….The colours used depend on your own personal preference. I don’t get angry if other cultures use the attire. I know that white people like to use it and take photographs (TM 1 Interview 14 November 2017).

However, despite the recurrent theme of show-casing the culture and clothing to tourists, there is still an element of secrecy maintained with regard to guarding certain cultural practices. This is evident in a quotation from an old woman in her sixties below:

It is okay to show the tourist but in other dances where there is a spirit possession only Venda should dance that dance….If you are possessed and outside people are watching it, that is not good (NN1 14 November 2017).

Another woman in her sixties says of the tourists: “even so, we don’t show them everything, some parts are secret” (TM1 Interview 14 November 2017). The healing aspects of a spirit possession are described as follows:

They dance all night until the person falls down. And when they fall the ancestor comes to them. When you get sick and if you go to the hospital and they can’t heal you there you then

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go to the nyanga [traditional healer], then the nyanga says to dance Malomba (LR1 Interview 14 November 2017).

This aspect of spirit-possession through dance as a healing practice is echoed in Viveiros de Castro’s theory of perspectivism (2015). This theory posits that all beings in the universe are animated by a single soul that is split into component parts. By this rationale— we are all linked, plants, animals and people (Viveiros De Castro 2015: 55-56). The concept of spiritual connection is highlighted in the interviews about the traditional dance, spiritual possession and healing practices. The importance of the dance for the Venda culture is explained by an older woman in her sixties as such: “The dance connects people. All the people will dance, but the spirit only chooses to inhabit one person” (NN1 Interview 14 November 2017).

Trance dances are linked to broader discussions on perspectivism theory as people seem to be able to channel ancestral spirits and the spirits of animals. This indicates that there is a belief in a unified soul which may inhabit different bodies as it chooses (Viveiros De Castro 2015: 55). Within the tenets of critical indigenous qualitative inquiry (Denzin and Lincoln 2008), these practices are viewed as imperative aspects of the investigation. It is vital that there is an exploration of what the cultural practices symbolise to the community themselves as well as applying a focus on what the activities mean for tourists.

The Domba dance as a gender-socialisation process for Venda women

Gender socialisation was the prominent theme that emerged during the interviews conducted at the village below the Fundudzi camp. “Femininity is a relational category, one that is co- constructed with other racial and cultural categories” (Espiritu 2001: 416). The cultural norms and expectations for Venda women are prescribed along specific norms elucidated in the Domba dance. The interviewees highlighted this process as follows:

From the time a girl is about 11 years old, she learns the dance. It teaches her how to respect the family. You learn it when you start to menstruate. You will get punished for being disrespectful. You learn how to manage your family and to look after your man (Respondent M1, 14 November 2017). 143

The time of a woman’s first menstrual cycle serves as a rite of passage in some indigenous cultures. A study with the !Xoo Bushmen at the Ngwatle settlement in Botswana revealed a similar pattern. A female respondent in that study emphasised the importance of the first menstrual cycle as such: “when girls get their period (menstrual cycle) for the first time, all the women of the community take the girl around to the different houses in Ngwatle and give her medicines and sing, and celebrate the beginning of womanhood for her life” (Balkian et al. 2012: 318). The introduction to the expectations of womanhood is important for continuing the established norms of family life and the promotion of the culture: “as the organisers of family rituals, transmitters of homeland folklores and socialisers of young children, women have been crucial for the maintenance of family ties and cultural traditions” (Espiritu 2001: 423). Another respondent highlighted the importance of the chief choosing a wife from the selection of girls that performed the domba dance as follows:

When you do the domba dance you learn how to take care of your man. The chief used to choose a wife during the dance. When the chief chooses a girl, they have to investigate the girl’s family to see if they use witchcraft if the girl is not from a royal family (G1 14 November 2017).

One of the cultural offerings at the Fundudzi cultural camp is the option of watching the domba dance. The concerns around witchcraft surface here. This is discussed later in the chapter. The woman of the household, especially the royal household has to be free from all accusations of moral impropriety: “because the moral status of the community rests on women’s labour, women as wives and daughters, are expected to dedicate themselves to the family” (Espiritu 2012: 423).

There is strong social censure directed towards young women who do not conform to the cultural norms. An older male respondent in his late sixties voiced his displeasure at the perceived disrespect of the young women as such:

They [the young women] are more interested in watching Nigerian movies than in learning their culture. They are used to wearing western attire so they don’t want to show the body. People don’t want the culture. They are too proud now …. The older women do the domba dance for the tourists when the young girls are supposed to do it (ZT1 14 November 2017).

This respondent is particularly grateful to TFPD and the Fundudzi cultural camp for

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preserving the culture. He views TFPD as something of a saviour as he has lost faith in the integrity of the traditional leaders. He laments the perceived greed of traditional leaders and articulates it as follows:

The Ivory Route [TFPD] is trying to do the job that is supposed to be done by us. If the chief takes over the AIR, the project will go down. The chief will take the money and want the women to be his women and not his workers (ZT1 14 November 2017).

My Masters dissertation investigated how the Batlokoa community at the Witsieshoek Mountain Lodge operated after TFPD took responsibility for the operational management. In this particular instance of a public-private and-community partnership, an elite group of people who were connected to the chief did have exclusive access to the tourism facilities before TFPD took over the operational management of the facilities. Hiring-decisions were not made based on a meritocratic basis, but rather on who was connected to the chief (see Sathiyah 2013: 71). The fears mentioned by respondent ZT1 are not irrational nor unfounded. There is the fear that women will be reduced to the status of the chief’s concubines as opposed to having the cultural prestige accorded to his wives.

Respondent G1, an older woman in her late 60s, did state that young men were also becoming “too westernised” in that they choose to have their circumcisions performed in hospitals as opposed to “going to the mountains” and undergoing the traditional initiation ceremony. She mentions that:

People are too western—getting boys circumcised in the hospital. When they do it in the mountains, they learn the sacred initiation knowledge. They learn how to be men (G1 14 November 2017).

Out of the all interviews conducted, various versions of: “a young woman does the Domba dance to learn how to take care of her man” was expressed while just two respondents mentioned in passing that young men no longer wanted to uphold the cultural tradition. One can infer from the intertwined nature of the domba dance and a young woman learning her place as the custodian of the home, her husband, and her family is that the woman is responsible for keeping the cultural norms intact. The Venda culture is steeped in patriarchal practices and this is illustrated in practice through the large emphasis placed on a woman’s fertility and her ability to tend to the household and be confined to activities in the domestic

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sphere like childrearing and being subservient to her husband (Mudau and Obadire 2017: 71). The cultural dances at the Fundudzi camp are performed by women and the dance itself signifies the importance of a woman’s role as a wife and the importance of her fertility.

The Phiphidi Waterfalls: a place of contestation The Phiphidi Waterfalls are located in the Thulamela Municipality within the Vhembe42 district. It is surrounded by a small tourism resort with chalets, and a braai and picnic area along the banks of the Mutshindudi river. It is one of the leisure spots on the itinerary when on a guided tour with the Fundudzi camp manager, Nelson Maphaha. The waterfalls are considered to be a sacred space to the Venda people. A journalist for the Mail and Guardian newspaper, Lucas Ledwaba, describes the area in overtly psycho-spiritual language as such:

In another time the area around the Phiphidi Waterfall was a zwifo, a sacred space. Only a few select members from a lineage of healers in the Ramunangi clan of VhaVenda were allowed to meet there to perform rites to summon and give thanks for the rains. The waterfall is surrounded by towering forest trees that poke into the sky like antennae of the Gods … But the wise ones from Ramunangi go there no more. They have not been for a while. It is possible that they may never return there ... What can be heard now is the easy-going chatter of tourists (2018: 14).

There is a tension in the way that this article is written in that it simultaneous uses imagery of sacredness and natural beauty that is evoked in tourism brochures and thus forms part of the dominantly-constructed discourse around the place while lamenting the loss of sacred ritual. Belinda Kruiper a woman who was married to the bushman artist, Vetkat Kruiper, also used discourses of psycho-spiritual imagery such as communing with nature and being cleansed by the sand in the Kalahari desert as a means of maintaining her identity as part mystic, part custodian of the “old ways” of the Bushmen (Tomaselli 2012: 25). One needs to interrogate who stands to benefit by maintaining these discourses as Belinda’s claim to Bushman authenticity was often contested due to her being an educated woman of mixed-race descent and not a Bushman (McLennan-Dodd and Barnabas 2012: 139). I did not discern any tension around issues of cultural legitimacy and belonging at the Baleni and Fundudzi camps.

Another journalist at the Mail and Guardian, Shoks Mzolo, invokes common tourism iconography in the title of his article about the Vhembe district in Limpopo, he calls it “in the

42 The terms Venda district and Vhembe district are used interchangeably by the local people. 146

heart of Africa’s Eden”. This language is steeped in commonly articulated discourses around tourism. Tourism theorists, Antoni Cantallops and Jose Cardona explain the Garden of Eden myth as follows:

The desire to return to a paradise from which we were once expelled at the beginning of humanity is an element present in the mythologies of civilizations from different cultures. The common elements of this myth coincide with common elements in the promotion of many holiday destinations: isolated lands, spring-like climate- land of plenty (2015: 171).

The Vhembe district is certainly perceived as a land of plenty as good the rainfall in the area ensures lush greenery. The ferns and trees against the backdrop of the hills reminded me of the Jurassic Park movie.43 Residents also farm their own plots of land and have subsistence fruit and vegetable gardens so one could easily be convinced that this was a land of plenty (field notes May 2016).

A PhD student, Mpatheleni Makaulule, who is studying indigenous knowledge at the University of Venda, laments the commercialization of sacred areas for tourism purposes. She is the founder of a nature conservation group called Dzomo la Mupo with means “to speak for nature”. She maintains that Venda’s sacred sites should be protected and that tourists should not be granted access to those sacred sites. Her impassioned views are expressed as follows:

All the sacred sites are vulnerable to the greed of men. How do you destroy a whole ecosystem to build a hotel? When they [developers] see a river, they just want to block it….Human beings are destroying their own habitat (Makaulule quoted in Ledwaba 2018: 14).

Makaulule is so committed to her cause that Dzomo la Mupo went to court in 2010 to get an interdict against the Tshivhase Development Foundation Trust to prevent them from building the resort at Phiphidi waterfalls, the interdict was granted but the development went on regardless (Ledwaba 2018: 14). One should exercise caution when considering the views of eco-activists as their enthusiasm for the preservation of natural resources can sometimes cloud their perceptions of the lived experience around a place.

Additionally, psycho-spiritual discourses can be used by those who use it to leverage power

43 A movie which depicts dinosaurs living in a jungle. 147

in the communities as they appoint themselves as the custodians of cultural knowledge. In the article by Shoks Mzolo mentioned earlier in this section, he describes the scorching heat of the day and writes about the how villagers themselves and not necessarily just tourists have access to the recreation facilities at the Phiphidi waterfalls. He observes that: “Villagers find respite [from the heat] at rivers, such as the Mutshindudi River at the Phiphidi waterfall. The forest, rocks and pool are sacred to the Venda” (2018: 8). Mzolo writes about the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane in a more measured stance. For him, the two modes of interpretation can co-exist. I visited the Phiphidi waterfalls in May 2016 with Nelson Maphaha and two other members of our research team. I saw a lot of children and teenagers from the local villages who were in the leisure area and playing in the river. They did not seem perturbed that we were there. They greeted us if we happened to make eye- contact and then that was the end of the interaction. To link this experience back to how social interactions are not commodified by the villagers in this area, this is an example where young children as well as teenagers could clearly ascertain that we were tourists, but there was no begging or a sense of expectation. As tourism theorists, Antoni Cantallops and Jose Cardona, maintain that:

Cultures that are predisposed to being hospitable towards tourists without any expectation of a financial payment are more likely to create the right atmosphere in the area which makes it conducive to tourism (2015: 171). There are tensions expressed between those sectors of Venda society who believe in preserving the sacred sites and those who promote tourism. These points of contention are prevalent in indigenous communities with regard to issues around the stewardship of the land. The ≠Khomani in the Northern Cape have a long-standing division in the community between the Bushmen who choose to engage in cultural tourism and those who choose to engage in farming on their communally-owned land (Tomaselli 2012: 25). These contractions can be negotiated and an agreement can be reached as was done in the Northern Cape.

I would be remiss in this analysis of the Phiphidi waterfalls if I do not mention an incident that highlights lack of maintenance of the infrastructure at the waterfalls. In light of the fact that academics can be both tourists and researchers simultaneously (see Tomaselli and Causey 2012), my thesis supervisor, Tomaselli and another researcher who served as my field research mentor, Dr Barnabas, joined Nelson Maphaha and I on the trip to the waterfalls. Our first signal of apprehension should have been the disclaimer notices that dotted the area 148

emphasizing that entrance to the Phiphidi waterfalls area was at one’s own risk. We did not take much notice of the signage as it is fairly commonplace at tourism ventures in South Africa. However, within 15 minutes of us reaching the waterfalls, Tomaselli stepped on a rotted plank on a bridge while crossing the Mutshindudi river. The plank snapped and his leg went right through the bridge. He hovered precariously over the river while he’d just missed his hand being impaled by sharp nails protruding from the bridge by a few inches when he gripped the side of the bridge. I panicked as Nelson, the guide had already crossed the bridge and was ahead of us. There was nothing else to do but for me to haul Tomaselli up from the bridge. He had sustained two cracked ribs because of the fall. As serious as those injuries were, it could have been fatal had he fallen into the river. This incident has resonance with cautionary tales told to travellers with regard to the sacred waterfall.

The stranger and the traveller must also exercise care and discrimination when visiting the Phiphidi Falls and Gubukuvho, the large pool into which the falls drop. The spirits of the BaNgona people, the first inhabitants of Vendaland, live there, and during the night these spirits can be heard dancing in the falls. The sounds of babies crying and women stamping and of the big war drum are also sometimes heard. In the old war days, when a big fight was in progress, the water in the river was turned to blood. A particular sound coming from Phiphidi is a certain prophecy of rain (Stayt 1931: 238).

The near-fatal nature of this accident was not reflected by the concern shown by management of the Phiphidi Waterfalls lodge staff. When they were informed of the accident, we were merely offered a refund of the entrance fee after Nelson had berted them on the lack of maintenance of the foot brdge. Tomaselli and TFPD made several follow-up phone calls to the lodge management when we returned to Johannesburg to alert them of the poor state of their infrastructure but no apology or acknowledgement of the incident was offered. In this context, the commoditised nature of the leisure space took precedence over the perceived authenticity of the spiritual significance of the space (Cohen 1988).

The phone numbers provided on the brochure just went unanswered (field notes May 2016). The inclusion of this incident in the analysis serves to highlight the problems faced with community-managed ventures in terms of professionalism, courtesy and modes of communication protocol to follow when dealing with customers (Mbaiwa 2005; Mbaiwa 2008; Jamal and Stronza 2009). On a lighter note, the researchers on the trip—myself included—still joke within the discourse of psycho-spiritual ecoscience (see Tomaselli

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1999: 189), that Tomaselli had offended the ancestors so he fell through the bridge.44 TFPD as the maestro of the cultural tourism performance: translating the subaltern

Cultural tourism in South Africa is indelibly tied to discourses around colonialism. A cultural tourism scholar, with an emphasis on Zulu cultural villages, Morgan Ndlovu asserts that:

representations of indigenous African cultural identities face a barrage of criticisms levelled against the manner in which they portray cultural identities of local communities and how their tourism income is distributed between “white” managers and “black” performers within the tourism destinations (2012: 52).

Ndlovu posits that the performance of essentialised identities of primitivity in cultural villages is akin to black performers being exploited by white managers. TFPD, a black economic empowerment company, has had similar charges levelled against it as being white managers exploiting black workers (see Koot 2016). TFPD is merely the hotel management company. It does not own the camps themselves, though it is an employer of the staff whose job security and conditions of employment have improved under its remit. Numerous studies explain how and why community-based tourism ventures fail after the initial donor funding runs out (see Mbaiwa 2003; 2005; 2008; Lepper and Goebel 2010; Dodds et al. 2018). Collaborative partnerships between relevant stakeholders is necessary for the sustainability of tourism ventures and do not foster dependency (Jamal and Stronza 2009: 169).

It is necessary to form linkages or networks where all stakeholders contribute their respective skills and knowledge to aid the success and sustainability of the tourism venture (Murdoch 2000: 407). TFPD has formed strategic partnerships with the respective indigenous communities on the AIR. These public-private-and-community partnerships deal with “community mobilisers”—selected members of the community who serve as mediators to represent the desires of the community to the other stakeholders. TFPD also liaises with the Limpopo Tourism Agency and CESVI, an Italian-based human rights non-governmental organisation that contributes to the development of the facilities and the cultural camp under

44We are being flippant about ancestral discourse here but this is within the good-natured jibes that occurs within research teams that forms a sense of camaraderie. No disrespect was intended towards the Venda ancestors. 150

the auspices of the European Union (see Siebert 2017: 2).

It may be deemed as unpalatable to many in the current global climate of decolonisation that accepting aid from the European Union is akin to fostering dependency and reinforcing narratives of superiority (Grant 2015: 316). While the power-dynamics inherent in this exchange is not ideal, it is imperative for the sustainability of the tourism venture. The respective indigenous communities lack the management skills and social capital required to market the camps to an international tourism market until trained up to do so (see Sathiyah 2013; Sheik 2013). The process of tourism is ensconced within particular myths and ways of representation (see Tomaselli and Wang 2001) and this is a highly culturally-specific means of communication.

Stemming from the romanticism movement, a sunset is viewed as “sublime” or a forest is seen as “pristine”. The social capital needed to create such a narrative is not accessible from the lived-reality of the rural poor (Helliwell and Putnam 1995). The difficulties of living in a rural area without most modern amenities is too physically and emotionally taxing to recreate the image of a rural idyll as is circulated in tourism brochures (Matthews et al. 2000: 141). The view and representation of culture by a specific lens is entwined with a class-based view of perceiving the world and is not neutral, it is a set of shared meanings that are created and ascribed to (Bourdieu 1984: 2). Gayatri Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern cannot be heard or understood unless they are able to understand and speak the language of the hegemonic elite still rings true more than 30 years after the original publication of her article that espoused that sentiment (1988: 70). TFPD serves as the mediator/translator that is able to orchestrate the relationship and interactions between tourists from the global north and the members of the indigenous community.

Development benefits accrued to communities due to the AIR camps

Although development aims are not always the main goal of tourism initiatives both direct and indirect financial benefits can accrue to communities that engage in tourism. Multiplier effects (Kincaid and Figueroa 2007) are financial benefits that filter through a community via established business ventures. An example of this phenomenon at the Fundudzi cultural camp is described by the guide Tshifhiwa Khangale as follows:

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There is this tavern that has a pool table that you pass just around the corner before you get to the camp. It’s called “Kid’s Corner Tavern”. The tourists always laugh and ask us why a tavern is called “Kid’s Corner”. I don’t know why, but that’s the name. The tourists go there to eat fish and chips, or Russian sausages and chips, they like to play pool, and have a few drinks and talk to the local people (22 May 2016, interview).

The presence of a tavern close to the camp allows tourists to mingle with local people while having a chance to eat the local, while not necessarily indigenous, foods. The local owners of the tavern benefit financially although they are not directly involved with the camp. The inclusion of the local communities is one of the key aspects that affect the long-term sustainability of the camps. Gareth Butler and Christian Rogerson maintain that:

Tourism is embedded as one of the core principles of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals. Arguably, it is stressed that tourism development can be inclusive and assist towards poverty-reduction only if a broad array of stakeholders contribute to the creation of opportunities as well as share potential benefits from tourism (2016: 265).

The Midi45 tea plantation in the valley below the Fundudzi camp attracts a lot of visitors as the tourists are enchanted by the greenery of the tea plantations and they visit the plantation and buy teabags to take home as souvenirs (field notes May 2016). Additionally, the Baleni cultural camp offers tourists the chance to watch the water filtration system created by the local Tsonga women to see how the salt is harvested at the Klein Letaba River. “Salt- extraction from the mineral spring in Baleni (also known as Sautini) dates back approximately 2000 years. Baleni is the last remaining spring where small-scale, unmechanised salt production still takes place in the southern African interior” (Antonites 2013: 105; Antonites 2005; Kent 1986; Witt 1966). Salt harvesting is low-intensity, seasonal work, carried out over a long duration (Antonites 2005: 3). The salt harvesting demonstration process takes about two hours and the local women often speak about their daily concerns which provide at insight about their lived conditions. A lot of informal banter occurs during this process as one research respondent, a woman in her mid-sixties told me after I enquired whether the salt-harvested process was allowed to be done only by post- menopausal women and not men or young women. I asked this question because I had only ever seen older women doing the salt-harvesting. The woman laughed and replied that:

45 Midi is the name of the teabag brand. 152

Men could also do this job if they are taught properly. It is not sacred knowledge that can only be done by women. But men are too lazy, they don’t have the patience to wait for the long process for the water to evaporate and for the salt to be harvested. Also, the women here wake up very early in the morning to prepare the filter. Men won’t wake up so early and do so hard work. They prefer to drink and have an easy life. Women, we do the backbreaking work. We don’t mind because we get to teach the tourists and to sell the salt. I don’t think that young women should harvest the salt if they are menstruating. It will not maintain the sacredness of the salt. There is the belief that we will not be able to harvest enough salt if there is a women who is menstruating with us (Respondent Maria Ngoveni46 interview: 20 May 2016).

I had presumed that there was a cultural taboo around only having women at the harvesting site when the real reason was much more pragmatic. The men in the community were not keen to do the harvesting. Three groups of women from the three surrounding communities, the Shawela, Shikumba and Vuhlehli villages respectively, negotiated access to the salt harvesting space. The salt production process is time-consuming: “salt producers at Baleni collected the salt crust around the swamp and placed it in a basket type filter and leached with water to produce brine. The last production step was to reduce the brine over an open fire at the salt-working site” (Antonites 2005: 2). Maria Ngoveni explained that there was enough space for all the women who were interested in salt-harvesting to get a chance to do it. She also mentioned that:

It helps that TFPD markets the benefits of the ancient salt overseas. TFPD also buys the salt directly from us47. It helps us a lot financially, we sell the salt to the local people but we especially like to sell the salt to the white people that visit here, they have a chance to experience our culture. Also when the tourists want to see the salt demonstrations, we get money for transport to get here and we get paid for the demonstrations as well as the salt (Interview: 20 May 2016).

The establishment and management of the camps provide the potential to generate income for the local communities. Eric Sambo, chairman of the board of the AIR secondary co- operative had this to say about the collaboration between TFPD and the camps:

Everyone could see that there was a problem with the low occupancy rates at the camp. Something needed to be done about it because the camps were going down. It is good that we leased the camps to TFPD for 25 years because they are turning the business around with their management. They are bringing tourists here. They know how to market the place for overseas tourists to bring them to stay at the camps so that we can show case our culture (Interview 23 May 2016).

46 This respondent was comfortable with me using her real name and not a pseudonym. 47 TFPD was instrumental in marketing the sacred salt to the Slow food movement for biodiversity which increased the sales of the salt as well as increased the price that the salt-harvesters could charge for the product. See: https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/slow-food-presidia/baleni-salt/ date accessed: 29 October 2019. 153

Moreover, the camp guides at the Baleni camp, Personia Makhongele and Mapula Malatji lamented the fact that there were very few opportunities for employment in the area. Personia studied finance at PC Training, a post grade-12 education and training establishment in Pretoria. Personia explained that:

Most people go to Johannesburg to find work. There is hardly any work for people here. I used to be a book keeper in Giyani in 2011 but I prefer to work at the camp here so that I can be close to my children. I live 9 kilometres away from the camp — at the Shawela village so I am close to my two daughters and I spend time with them on my week off. I work for three weeks at the camp then I get one week off. My sister looks after my daughters when I am at the camp. She doesn’t work (Interview 20 May 2016).

Similarly, Mapula Malatji the other guide based at the camp said that she had been working at the African Ivory Route camps since the year 2000. It had been 16 years that she had been working at the camps at the time of the interview. Mapula concurs that there are no employment opportunities. She says that: “as much as you may have skills and training to do different types of work here, the only opportunities are to be cashiers for the stores. There are no big companies based here to provide employment” (Interview 20 May 2016). These answers indicate that the cultural camps provide much-needed sources of employment in a region with scarce opportunities. The intangible cultural heritage transmitted during interactions with tourists serve as a livelihood strategy in the cultural tourism sector.

Chapter Six Conclusion—the “other” is not so othered after all

This research set out to establish what was unknowable or untranslatable (Frassinelli 2016) about the cultural tourism strategies employed by the Venda and Tsonga communities at the

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Fundudzi and Baleni cultural camps. The motivations for embarking on tourism are unpacked in order to ascertain what intangible cultural heritage the respective indigenous community members who resided close to the cultural camps offered. The tourism enterprise depended on many interlinking factors in order for it to be successful. In light of this understanding, although the focus of this study was on how indigenous communities represent themselves to the tourists, there is also much emphasis placed on how tourists search for and interpret the indigenous other. The needs and expectations of tourists do shape the representation practices of the host communities. This is not a negative attribute; it reflects the actions of astute service providers who tailor their product to the needs of the market. Although much emphasis is placed on the exploitative nature of cultural tourism enterprises, it was found that the exploitation was tempered by strategic livelihood strategies, which enabled indigenous communities to generate an income.

From an indigenous cultural tourism perspective, it is necessary for the communities to portray themselves as exotic and different from cultures in the global north. This is the different “other” which is the product in cultural tourism (van Beek 2016). However, it is more accurate to assert that elements of the fantastic (Todorov 1975) and overtly indigenous cosmologies (Viveiros de Castro 2015) are intentionally fostered to create an anchored and fixed perception and atmosphere of “place”.

The sense of place is indelibly entwined with the indigenous communities around the cultural camps. This cluster of narratives and actions around spirituality, mysticism and towards the production of the “authentic” atmosphere is vital to the tourism enterprise (Cole 2007). These economic survival strategies, although window-dressed as mysticism and indigenous knowledge is actually a rational and highly curated response to the economic needs of the community while simultaneously meeting the expectations of tourists. TFPD has been invaluable in this endeavour as it serves as the mediator between tourists and the community. The company is the cultural translator that creates the image and desire for the experience of “place” at the cultural camps while the respective communities work in tandem with TFPD to deliver on tourists’ expectations. The findings confirmed the hypothesis of the main research question of the study. The success of cultural tourism ventures does depend on the intangible mental representations of a destination. The value contained in the narratives, cuisine, dress and dances of the respective communities at the camps did play a substantial role in bolstering the desire for tourism on the AIR.

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The community members are largely welcoming and supportive of tourist groups in the area as tourism is viewed as a means of income-generation where there were scarce opportunities in other sectors of society. Cultural tourism workers engage in a performance to foster the enactment of tourists’ expectations. These performances are shaped by the marketing material, which promotes particular narratives about the community and area. Far from being inherently “indigenous” or spiritual, community members engage in practices that would appeal to the sensibilities of tourists as well as to themselves. These actions stem from a sense of practicality rather than of mysticism. People are trying to eke out a living in most cases. There are no inherent ties to the ancestors or to religious practices. The members of the community that practice Christianity ostracize the people who participate in ancestral worship. Ancestral worship practices still holds connotations to witchcraft practices.

A substantial amount of attention focuses on the power-relations and race-relations within South African society itself. These issues are indelibly entwined with the research, as the data collection process is not a neutral and objective undertaking. It is a highly subjective undertaking as I was one of the instruments of data collection and interpretation. My interpretation of events influences the research findings. The research participants and I are all products of the South African society with all the implications that being a South African entails.

The tourists themselves engage in intellectual and emotional labour in order to think, feel and experience the intended outcomes espoused by the promotional material of the tourism operating company (Crouch 2000). In addition, the host communities perform vast amounts of immaterial labour to make the tourists feel welcome and have a sense of belonging while obscuring the transactional nature of the venture (Lazzarato 1964; Negri and Hardt 2000). There have been numerous studies that point to the failure of community-based and operated tourism ventures due to several factors, not limited to the following reasons:

• A lack of sufficient social and cultural capital necessary to engage successfully with tourists; • Insufficient business and management acumen necessary for running an international tourism enterprise; • A lack of financial capital needed to refurbish and maintain the physical infrastructure of the camps, access roads and put up signage necessary to attract and retain tourists.

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These deficits hinder indigenous communities’ ability to manage and operate their own cultural tourism ventures in the current socio-economic climate in South Africa. This does not rule out the possibility that an adequate transfer of skills during TFPD’s 25-year lease of the camps will enable beneficiary communities to manage the camps in the future.

This study concludes that TFPD serves as a necessary scaffolding mechanism to link the various stakeholders such as the primary and secondary co-operatives, the government departments, and NGOs such as CESVI, in addition to orchestrating the interactions between the tourists and the host communities. Moreover, the use of indigeneity as a means to validate and support a cultural performance is not perceived by the beneficiary communities as farce or the exploitative commodification of culture. The beneficiary communities view engagement in cultural tourism primarily as a means of income generation and cultural exchange, and secondarily as a means of cultural preservation for younger generations. A factor that is often overlooked in cultural tourism studies is that the host communities themselves find value, entertainment and pride in engaging with cultural practices. Despite the performance being enacted primarily for the tourists’ consumption, there is a sense of pride and satisfaction experienced by the host communities as well.

Moreover, indigenous communities in rural areas are motivated by economic imperatives, as are communities in urban areas. Any attempt to ensconce cultural tourism practices within ancient mysticism discourses encounters the pitfalls of essentialising the indigenous community. The narrow lens of cultural tourism as an inherently exploitative practice (Koot 2016) negates the importance of the lived-experience and agency of the cultural performers and their ability to use their skills to earn a living. This paternalistic view in itself reflects a skewed power-dynamic between the researcher and the researched in that the academic researcher purports to know and feel the experience of the indigenous community better than the indigenous community themselves know it. Members of the indigenous communities often re-enact cultural tourism tropes so that they themselves can preserve their tradition, as is the case with teaching young children their clan lineage through the practice of the Kuphata—the reciting of clan names—at the Baleni camp. In addition, the preservation of the Sacred forest and Lake Fundudzi as restricted areas also helps the local communities to restrict access to land with spiritual significance. Although cultural tourism is enacted for the benefit of tourists, this does not negate the value of the practices as in terms of enabling communities to exert a sense of agency in preserving traditions. Moreover, tourists’

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expectations of cultural tourism practices does affect how the culture is portrayed to tourists. Cultural performers at the camps aim to conform to and replicate expectations as illustrated where the Tsonga salt-harvester pretends to pray to the ancestors while she is in actuality, asking for forgiveness from a Christian god for pretending to worship the ancestors. Cultural tourism is a highly nuanced phenomenon. In terms of implications for tourism policy development on a national scale, emphasis should be placed on recording and transmitting indigenous intangible heritage and practices.

Limitations of the study and avenues for further research

I acknowledge that the limited time spent conducting field work is to the detriment of this study as I may have obtained the “popular” answers that the research participants may have thought that I wanted to hear. It has to be noted that intangible heritage is not restricted to religious matters, but includes the meanings attached to natural phenomena and other cultural practices. As such, the evening programmes presented at the two camps could have received more attention.48The indigenous cuisine offered at the camps also hold intangible cultural value, but time-constraints limited my choice of intangible cultural offerings to those activities with psycho-spiritual significance such as narratives, the domba dance at the Fundudzi camp, and the salt-harvesting practice at the Baleni camp. Had there been more time available to conduct fieldwork, the difference dances could have been investigated along with ascertaining the meanings attached to them. These are avenues for future research.

48 This observation was used verbatim from the anonymous examiner’s report. 158

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Interviews and participant observations were conducted during 15-24 May 2016 and again between 11-19 November 2017 in the communities surrounding the Modjadji, Fundudzi and Baleni cultural camps. I have identified the respondents by name when permission was granted for me to do so; otherwise, pseudonyms were used to maintain the anonymity of the research participants. My observations are referenced as ‘field notes’. A focus group discussion was held at the Modjadji, Baleni and Fundudzi camp, respectively with the research team and the camp guides on the first night that we stayed at the each camp in 2016. All photographs used in the thesis are provided by Prof Pier Paolo Frassinelli.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Interview schedule and focus group discussion questions

1. Tell me about the spirits, ancestors and cultural beliefs in this area? 2. Is this information shared with tourists? If yes then continue to Q.3, if not, go to Q. 4. 3. How do you feel about sharing this information with tourists? 4. Tell me about your experiences, if any, with tourists at the cultural camp? 5. How do you feel about engaging with tourists? 6. Have you been to visit the cultural camp? If so, what was your perception about it? 7. How do you feel about tourists in general? 8. How do you feel about tourists learning about your culture? 9. How do you feel about you own culture and the aspects of the camps or activities offered? 10. What would you change at the camp had you the opportunity to do so?

These questions aimed at fostering a conversation that was broad enough to ascertain the topics of interest as well as contention that the research participants held around cultural tourism and the camps.

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Appendix 2: Tsonga woman in a combination of modern and traditional attire. Photo credit (Siebert 2017).

Modern / traditional attire

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Appendix 3: Informed consent form

Informed consent form

My name is Varona Sathiyah and I am a PhD candidate at the University of Johannesburg. I am conducting research about how traditional cultural practices are used in the marketing of the Baleni and the Fundudzi cultural camps managed by Transfrontier Parks Destinations. You can choose to withdraw from this focus group at any time without any negative repercussions. The decision to participate is completely voluntary. There will not be any reward offered for participating in this study. A pseudonym can be used if you prefer to use one. All information shared will be kept strictly confidential. This information will be locked in a secure location for five years and will be destroyed after the time has elapsed. Please take note that the information disclosed in the focus group may not be confined to this group as there is the possibility that the other participants may disclose what is discussed here to other people outside this group. Additionally, I will be observing the interactions and taking notes as a participant observer. If you have any queries, my supervisors’ are: Distinguished Professor K.G. Tomaselli and Professor P. P. Frassinelli.49 January 2016 My name is ______and I am willing to participate in the research project conducted by ______. I am _____ years old. 1. I have read and understood the information given to me about this project. I have had opportunities to ask questions and have received all the information I need. 2. I understand that I will not receive anything for participating. 3. I also understand that I may withdraw at any time without any penalties. 4. I agree to be interviewed (please mark all applicable boxes)

49 Contact details were removed from the template for privacy reasons. 189

A In a group (I understand that confidentiality is more difficult to ensure in group interviews and am willing to participate regardless.) B Individually C For the interview to be recorded

I understand that I can ask for help if I feel any distress during my participation in the project. Signature Date

Appendix 4: Screenshot of the marketing material at the Fundudzi cultural camp.

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Appendix 5: Screenshot of the marketing material of the Baleni cultural camp.

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