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Since South Africa's democratization in 1994, Cape Town has become an international tourism hotspot while its peripheral townships remain burdened by poverty and crime. Township tourism promises to bring tourists across the divide of racial segregation. Black South African women, insulted by notions of "slum tourism" and attuned to an economic opportunity, have created hospitality markets by turning their township homes into bed and breakfasts and guesthouses. In Postcolonial Placemaking, Annie Hikido illustrates how these entrepreneurial Black women stage the precarity and promise of Black place in the afterlife of apartheid. Some hostesses create an "authentic" African experience for white Western tourists. Others offer modern township luxury for Black South African guests. But in the shadows of these two sectors, hostesses accept "hourly clients," township locals who are willing to pay for private rooms to escape overcrowded conditions.
Drawing from rich ethnographic fieldwork, Hikido reveals how Black women modulate their gendered service labor for different clientele and construct competing portrayals of Black townships and post-apartheid South Africa. Far from a definitive break with the past, their home-spun hospitality demonstrates how colonial hierarchies of race, gender, and class continue to shape everyday life in postcolonial nations and how we imagine their development.
"In this skillfully designed and brilliantly executed ethnography Annie Hikido reveals both the achievements and limits of the placemaking practices of Black South African women entrepreneurs working at the crossroads of new neoliberal policies and the enduring legacies of apartheid. Hikido's vivid, engaging, and absorbing depictions of the inventive practices of women seeking to transform themselves and their society demonstrate how the burdens of economic survival and development today fall on the shoulders of those already disadvantaged by histories of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation."—George Lipsitz, author of Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads
"Set at the conjunction of coloniality and urban entrepreneurialism, Annie Hikido shows how a self-empowerment ethos mediates white supremacist legacies and state incapacity. Her careful ethnography centers the agency and dynamism of Cape Town's Black township hostesses to explore how they navigate the dueling considerations of reputation and earnings amid severe constraint. Postcolonial Placemaking powerfully reveals the schisms, ambitions, imaginaries, and failures of the 'post'-apartheid city."—Jordanna Matlon, author of A Man among Other Men