ABSTRACT
This chapter examines websites that invite tourists to stay overnight in South African townships. Township hospitality is driven by Black South African women who have turned their homes into tourist accommodations. As a sector of township tourism, their places promise an “everyday experience” that goes beyond bus and walking tours. Business is inhibited, however, by a global myth that frames Black urban neighbourhoods as dirty, dangerous, impoverished and hypermasculine. Marketing websites anticipate and recode the racial, classed and gendered meanings of Black townships. Through text and images, they create counter-myths that present women’s homes and communities as clean, safe, entrepreneurial and maternal. By focusing on the township hospitality market in South Africa, this chapter illuminates how New Urban Tourism in the Global South involves the strategic negotiation of neighbourhood representations and the possibility of doing so online for an international audience. It also cautions that counter-myths that advance New Urban Tourism might sustain rather than challenge structural inequalities.
