First Stage of Our Research

Finally, I have the time to update this blog!

We arrived back in Haarlem around the 15th, and we've been busy with festival preparations, presentations, a photo exhibition, and other projects.

During our time in South Africa and Swaziland, we created three newsletters, and you'll see the first one below, as pictures. Click on the picture, and you'll see the larger view. Some of you may have received these newsletters already by email.

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So! After a 12-hour flight with a lay-over in Heathrow, we arrived in Johannesburg. Johannesburg is the most populous city in South Africa, with a population of 8 million people living in the Greater Jo-berg Area. We didn't have to change our clocks when we arrived, because although Jo-berg is a long flight from Amsterdam, we didn't cross any times zones since we flew almost straight South. Also, we learned upon arriving that in fact South Africa is moving into its winter season now, with colder temperatures and leaves falling from trees. The seasons there are reversed, just like in Australia.

During our first day in Johannesberg, we went to the Apartheids museum. To understand apartheid & it's effects, you have to look at the history of South Africa. It began when the Portuguese first came to the region is 1487, looking to expand the slave trade to the New World. The Dutch East India Trading company (the same as in the Pirates of the Caribbean) used South Africa as a strategic trading point for trade. Then the British entered the scene, bringing slaves from Malaysia and India. Lots of wars broke out between everybody, and in the end, the Dutch won. This is why Afrikaans is now largely spoken in South Africa, because it's a 15th century version of Dutch (but still classified today as a separate language). Anyway, there were lots of tension between the local people, even though it was quite multicultural. The Afrikaans government officially implemented apartheid in 1948, but segregation had been happening for a long time before then. Things came to a head when many black visionaries began speaking up, including Nelson Mandela, who later was sent to prison. On a side note, we saw his house in the township of Soweto.

So what does all this mean? When we were doing our research, we found that apartheid is still an issue for many people in South Africa today, since they lived through it themselves. Apartheid in South Africa officially stopped in 1994, so just 14 years ago. Racial tensions are there today, just under the surface of day-to-day life. We found this to be a big barrier in community-based tourism development. Some black, or mixed communities did not feel like they could make tourism partnerships (or any meaningful partnerships) with other, white communities. Apartheid had the effect of socially disempowering lots of black and colored people. It is not a problem that can be overcome quickly, but only with time. Again, we found this to be a considerable barrier for tourism development in the region.


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One interview I found really interesting was with an NGO called Fair Trade Tourism South Africa (FTTSA). We had a meeting with a director from the NGO while we were in Pretoria. This NGO is the first of its kind, in which it has taken the "Fair Trade" label, and applied it to the service industry in tourism. It has a certification program, in which tourism businesses can applied to be certified with FTTSA, if they prove that they do a list of 'best practices in tourism'. This includes things like: hiring local people, buying products through local channels, paying workers fair wages, having an anti-discrimination policy in place, providing resources for HIV/AIDS, etcetera. It's kind of like an ethical seal of approval, if a business is certified with FTTSA.

But why would a business want to become certified, other than to prove they are 'ethical'? Certification isn't free, after all. Businesses realize that there is a growing demand from tourists who are looking for ethical business practices. Consumers are becoming smart. Once they are certified, a business is featured on the FTTSA website, and in this way gains access to new markets. They are also able to network & partner with other businesses that are certified, and are given consultancy advice from FTTSA on how to succeed.

So far as they know, there is no other NGO like it. FTTSA wants to expand regionally within southern Africa, but does not yet have the capacity to consider expanding abroad.




On my next post, I'll talk about our experiences in Bulembu, Swaziland.