A FULL THESIS IN FULFILMENT OF A DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY FACULTY OF HUMANITIES RHODES UNIVERSITY Borderline Hospitality Homestays as a commercial hospitality development project in Grahamstown East, Eastern Cape SUBMITTED BY VOLKHER HEINRICH CHRISTOPH VON LENGELING STUDENT No. 09v7657 December 2015 SUPERVISED BY PROFESSOR ROBIN PALMER ii Abstract This study started as an anthropological investigation of commercial hospitality from the point of view of the hands-on host. The chosen case study for this investigation was the Kwam eMakana Government Initiated Poverty Alleviation Project which offered homestays in the townships of Grahamstown East since 2004. Homestays are the most intimate form of commercial hospitality, one step removed from non-commercial or social hospitality. Even at the homestay level there is a conceptual conflict between poverty and (Westernized) commercial hospitality, however, Kwam homes are more middle class than poor. Later the investigation revealed the deeper-seated form of poverty of the Kwam participants being (almost) illiterate. Kwam was a development project like many others, in which huge amounts of money were spent in the name of the project but very little of the benefits reached the intended beneficiaries. Thus, as fieldwork ensued, the emphasis of research migrated from an empirical study of homestay hospitality, to actively assist with the struggle of the Kwam hostesses to maintain the project and gain autonomy for themselves. This study was from the outset reflexive, as the host’s point of view could technically only be presented by auto-ethnography. Then the investigation shifted to a form of engaged anthropology far exceeding advocacy as it is usually understood. The presentation of this can be called radical reflexivity, while it is simultaneously an ethnographical account in the sense of anthropology ‘at home’. It also implied, besides ethical concerns, revisiting literary sensibilities, such as the use of a third person narrative for the reflexive account. To conceptualize the development process of both Kwam and the research interventions Bourdieu’s ‘totality of capital’ (in which the strands of economic, symbolic, cultural and social capitals intertwine) proved most useful. By assessing the various capitals the development of the project and the power struggles central to it can be understood. This study confirms that long-term anthropological investigation is best suited to the study of iii development projects, if not necessary for real development to be effected. Reflexivity and ethnography are complementary methods to reveal truths which under certain research circumstances may have been very difficult or even impossible to research. iv Preface and acknowledgements Hospitality has fascinated me all my life and my involvement with commercial hospitality began when I was 16 years old and found a job as a waiter in a pizzeria. After school I worked my way through various positions in the hospitality industry in different locations in South Africa, while I studied Law and completed the LLB degree. Although I have been admitted as Advocate of the High Court of South Africa, I never practiced law as such and instead continued hosting commercially. In 2003 my partner Claudia and I settled on a small farm 20km east of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. As we had school-going children at the time we decided to come to Grahamstown because of the quality schools and Rhodes University. By then I had two decades of on-the-job experience in restaurants, hotels, guest houses and eventually my own hospitality businesses - my ‘profession’ could now be described as that of commercial host in the accommodation and food sector of the hospitality industry. So, when we moved to Bon Tempo (as we call our farm) we started building guest facilities such as a huge dining or functions hall, guest cottages and a central ablution block. Unlike elsewhere in South Africa where I had set up a hospitality business, our enterprise at Bon Tempo has yielded very slow returns. When an opportunity arose to try out what a business in the centre of Grahamstown itself would bring we operated a very successful restaurant there. Soon we moved to bigger premises which also allowed us to expand into the accommodation sector besides the restaurant. After two years of these operations a buyer made a suitable offer in 2008 and we returned full-time to Bon Tempo. At first we could draw on the client base we had built up during the two years in town but this dissipated as, besides Bon Tempo being a very different venue with a unique style, few people saw their way so far out of town for a restaurant and/or accommodation experience when places in town were perhaps more convenient. So business was back to slow again v with only occasional parties and functions, and only a handful of tourists and other travellers who came in times outside of the few peak seasons on the Grahamstown calendar. Grahamstown is the principal settlement of Makana Municipality, and was the second city of the old Cape Colony. A former garrison and centre for missionary as well as military and administrative activities, the city had a key role in the frontier wars of the 1800s. Since then it has become mainly an educational centre, which was what attracted us to the place. Although the borders of Makana more or less coincide with the regional tourist route dubbed ‘Frontier Country’, this municipal area is not a major tourist destination despite efforts to make it so; the only successful tourism sector is game farming within and beyond its boundaries. This failure is unfortunate especially because Grahamstown has no significant industrial development to otherwise employ people, who largely rely on the educational institutions for formal employment. Nevertheless, there is sufficient coming and going in the city itself to permit, formerly a number of hotels, but more recently a competitive B&B sector. With time on hands and driven by my interest in the hospitality phenomenon I embarked on an MA by thesis entitled “The Nexilitas Factor; Host-guest relationships in small owner- managed commercial accommodation facilities in contemporary South Africa” (Von Lengeling 2011). In this study I compared myself and my experiences as commercial host with other hands-on hosts in Grahamstown operating ‘neo-inns’ (B&Bs, guesthouses and the like) in a sector dominated by white middle-class owners. I found that a root motivation for hospitality, also present in commercial hospitality, is the reward of social bonding, even if it is only temporary. I had expanded on Derrida (2000; 2003) and Caputo’s (1997) interpretations of Derrida, concerning his expositions about ‘Abrahamesque hospitality’ (pure or true hospitality), the ‘master of the house’ (host autonomy), and the importance of the threshold (liminality); and I discovered various mechanisms hosts engage to maintain the seeming contradictions and paradoxes of the hospitality situation, especially when it is commercialized. I had drawn on Turner’s (1969) communitas concept (which is social bonding in liminal circumstances where the participants to it have been equalized; thus vi distinctions like material wealth or status have been temporarily suspended), to discover that at the bottom of the hospitality experience lies social bonding (or at least the potential for such bonding) of a different, more structured, kind; since there was no term capturing this I called it nexilitas (a derivative of the Latin word nexus). The major difference between nexilitas and communitas is that the latter pre-supposes an equalization of social relations (such as in the course of an initiation ritual or pilgrimage), whereas with nexilitas the hierarchy between host and guest in the liminal hospitality situation is maintained throughout. Although the host offers what might be taken for subordination to the guest via a warm welcome and an offering to meet all reasonable needs of the guest, it by no means implies that the host steps down from the autonomous position of master/mistress of the house. Hands-on hosts prefer to choose whom and when to host and use various mechanisms to control this. But once guests have been welcomed into the home hosts engage strategies to maintain at least a balanced encounter, yet the host also desires a pleasurable experience which, in turn, is bound up in guest satisfaction. Good examples of successful bonding occur in instances of host-guest commensality (sharing meals) or compotorality (sharing drinks) and with return guests. What all these findings point to is that even in commercial hospitality, non-commercial aspects of the interaction are very important, if not sometimes more important, than commercial considerations. The objective of that study was to contribute to the restoration of the position of the host in tourism studies in anthropology with special reference to small commercial enterprises catering to the particularities of the market in the Grahamstown area. I had noted that hospitality and the host had been neglected in the inter-disciplinary field of tourism studies and this neglect was probably due to the difficulty of the research task derived from the fact that the researcher is always in the guest role, particularly the anthropologist who resides with the people s/he studies over lengthy periods. Key to delivering on my objective to emphasize the role of the host was an innovative auto-anthropological approach in my essentially 'anthropology at home' research situation. vii Although my inquiry was restricted to the more established neo-inns, which were found in Grahamstown West (the formerly white area), I took note of the existence of a government- initiated poverty alleviation project in Grahamstown East (the area of former black townships) which aimed to encourage tourism while at the same time providing an opportunity for emerging black entrepreneurs to establish themselves in the hospitality sector by offering homestays (Von Lengeling 2011:26-7).