ABSTRACT
The author examines the performative nature of the South African township tour in the construction of a specific tourist mythology with regard to landscape, gender politics and racially defined social mobility in the so-called 'new' South Africa. In South Africa, townships were mandated by the 1923 Urban Areas Act, which controlled the presence of black South Africans in urban areas. In the presentation and performance of the township tour as staged for an external audience, women's health and safety are omitted from the narrative of township life in the new South Africa the success of that narrative depends on women's complicity with the agreed upon tourist text of upward mobility, progress and hope that is propagated in large part because of and by the township tourist industry itself. The author offers an ecofeminist reading of several counter-narratives that tacitly engage with ubuntu and challenge the township gaze.
