Making South Africa Safe: The Gendered Production of Black Place on the Global Stage

This article offers an intersectional analysis of how non-elites frame neighborhood as a synecdoche for nation through tourism. In Cape Town, South Africa, white Western tourists perceive the peripheral Black townships to be more dangerous than the city’s white center but also more representative of the country and thus worth visiting. Drawing from ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate how Black women who have established home-based township accommodations iron out the tension between tourists’ fear and desire. I employ Goffman’s theories of impression management to demonstrate how township hostesses make Black South African space fit for Western consumption through race, class, gender, and nation. On the frontstage, women assuage tourists’ inhibitions by acting as maternal African figures. On the backstage, they cover the risks borne of poverty as communal Black mothers. Their gendered production of Black place palliates post-apartheid problems and projects South Africa’s stability on the global stage, which invites further Western visitation and capital.