ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s, guided sightseeing tours of the former township of Katutura have been offered in Windhoek. City tourism in the Namibian capital thus became part of the trend towards tourist use of disadvantaged urban areas at a fairly early stage – a trend that had begun in neighbouring South Africa at the beginning of the same decade. Often referred to as “poverty tourism”, the phenomenon has not only caused quite some media attention since its emergence, but it has also increasingly developed into a field of scientific study in recent years. Both in the media and academia, the discussion on slumming in the Global South is mainly guided by ethical concerns. Moral scepticism focuses primarily on slum tourists’ motivations as well as on the form and content of depictions of urban poverty areas and their inhabitants in the context of the touristic staging. Given the dominance of this moralising paradigm, it seems appropriate to make the relationship between motivation, slum imaginations and slum representations the object of examination. This chapter determines the extent to which tourists’ expectations of a township are met within the communicative-performative setting of a guided tour and how pre-existing geographical imaginations are used, reproduced, modified and/or revised during the township tours. It is argued that township tourism should be understood less as poverty tourism and more as a form of cultural tourism that in particular uses post-colonial ideas of “real Africa” and “African culture”. So, does township tourism contribute to questioning and revising Eurocentric stereotypes that have existed for centuries? Does township tourism make a difference? The chapter is based on an empirical field study conducted in Windhoek.
