Cultural villages developed as outdoor museums where visitors could learn about other cultures and peoples with an environment designed to be both educational and entertaining. This type of learning experience dates to the late 1880s, when open-air museums featuring historical buildings began to be established in Sweden. While cultural institutions following this model remain popular today, problems arise when they engage in histories and stereotypes of cultures that are far more complex than what’s presented to visitors. In South Africa, cultural villages find themselves at the crossroads of a history shaped by colonialism and apartheid.
As South Africa opened up and reintroduced itself on the global stage after the apartheid government fell in 1994, cultural villages became an important aspect of the tourism sector. As South Africa sold itself as a “world in one country,” write historians Leslie Witz, Ciraj Rassool, and Gary Minkley, its cultural villages were “safe” spaces where tourists could experience a diverse “new world.” Thanks to these attractions, tourists could enter “rural villages” without having to travel too far from city centers and travel hubs.
In creating a coordinated environment for visitors, cultural villages use vernacular architecture to set the stage for workers who give tourists a “traditional” experience, often including dance performances, craft-making, and eating local or indigenous foods. For example, Lesedi Cultural Village, established in Gauteng, South Africa, in 1993, offers visitors accommodations and meals alongside educational entertainment that focuses on five cultural identities in South Africa: Basotho, Ndebele, Pedi, Xhosa, and Zulu. Upon arrival, visitors are greeted by the head of their homestead and brought to their traditional hut accommodations (with modern amenities). They’re also assigned a tribe representative to guide them through a variety of cultural experiences, including a village tour and a dance show, which were planned and controlled by the design of the cultural village.
Cultural villages became an integral part of developing both international and domestic tourism within South Africa. Yet, despite the seemingly good educational intentions behind them, the villages relied on views of the country’s Indigenous peoples that were defined during colonization by White settlers. Witz, Rassool, and Minkley analyze how South Africa’s past was repackaged to serve modern-day tourism. When discussing cultural villages, they write that
[e]ach village reproduces a specific ethnic stereotype that has its genealogy in colonial encounters, the creation of administrative tribal units, and displays in imperial exhibitions across Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This even ties back to the establishment of the first cultural village in South Africa in 1965, when the apartheid government was still in power.
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“The timing of the construction of the first cultural village in South Africa, by a subject whose race category was in the process expressing radical doubt about the humanity of the [I]ndigenous black subject, must thus be viewed with suspicion,” scholar Morgan Ndlovu explains. When the village was founded, it “could not then have been possible to deviate from the dominant discourse about what it means to be a black African, seen from the point of the coloniser.”
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Given the strict and inhumane racial categorizations implemented by South Africa’s apartheid government, the white ownership of this first cultural village that would have overseen Black labor, at a time when the power inequities were so large, ensured that there could be no fair or just employment arrangements. By the year 2000, Ndlovu writes, the majority of cultural villages in South Africa remained under white ownership, with “a total of 16 cultural villages…built by White entrepreneurs, whereas four were built by [I]ndigenous entrepreneurs between 1992 and 1999.”
As the passage of time has moved us into the twenty-first century, the problematic history and power dynamics of cultural villages are recognized more widely. Social media posts and blogs on tourism in South Africa are filled with suggestions for other cultural experiences that support local Indigenous communities. The central role cultural villages once had in the South African tourism and education sectors appears to be on the way out.
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