Accommodating Aspirations

Since South Africa's democratization in 1994, Cape Town has become an international tourism hotspot while its peripheral townships remain burdened by poverty and crime. Township tourism promises to bring tourists across the divide of racial segregation. Black South African women, insulted by notions of "slum tourism" and attuned to an economic opportunity, have created hospitality markets by turning their township homes into bed and breakfasts and guesthouses. In Postcolonial Placemaking, Annie Hikido illustrates how these entrepreneurial Black women stage the precarity and promise of Black place in the afterlife of apartheid. Some hostesses create an "authentic" African experience for white Western tourists. Others offer modern township luxury for Black South African guests. But in the shadows of these two sectors, hostesses accept "hourly clients," township locals who are willing to pay for private rooms to escape overcrowded conditions. Drawing from rich ethnographic fieldwork, Hikido reveals how Black women modulate their gendered service labor for different clientele and construct competing portrayals of Black townships and post-apartheid South Africa. Far from a definitive break with the past, their home-spun hospitality demonstrates how colonial hierarchies of race, gender, and class continue to shape everyday life in postcolonial nations and how we imagine their development.