The face of tourism has undergone a makeover since the dawn of democracy some 30 years ago, but whether it is a big enough change remains to be seen.
Stepping off a monstrously sized and noisy aeroplane at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport, warm air blows into your face. Your eyes squint while trying to adjust to the blinding sunlight. There is an immediate atmosphere of hustle and bustle, and you can hear several different languages being spoken around you.
Touring the city, you make your first stop at the Johannesburg Zoo for a glimpse of the Big Five up close and personal. A stroll around the Botanical Gardens leaves you parched, so you find yourself on Vilakazi Street for some authentic South African food and beverages. Feeling adventurous, you abseil down the Soweto Towers and ride a bicycle through the Johannesburg central business district and its arty Maboneng Precinct.
The next day, you hike through the Melville Koppies, visit the Apartheid Museum, cheer on a rugby game at Emirates Airline Park (previously Ellis Park Stadium), and enter a time capsule by exploring Mandela’s House and Liliesleaf.
You have an early flight out tomorrow morning, but there is still so much left to uncover; so much more still to experience.
However, looking down at the skyscrapers from your tiny aeroplane window, you realise something: if you had visited Johannesburg 30 years ago, the city would still be bustling with tourism, but you would view all the attractions through the eyes of a fractured society.

Contextualising tourism: More than 30 years in the making
Tourism has existed for centuries, even if it constantly redefines itself. Tourism did not become a concept only when trains, boats, cars or aeroplanes were invented. People have been moving from one place to another for different reasons for as long as mankind has inhabited the Earth, which is one early definition of tourism.
Tourism is different from expeditionism in the sense that tourists follow set paths or visit already discovered areas. Tourism can thus be for business, sports, medical, leisure, cultural or religious purposes.
Geoffrey Wall and John Towner say the history of tourism encompasses three themes: tourism in the ancient and medieval worlds, the Grand Tour era of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the growth of spas and seaside resorts.
These themes have some factors in common, mainly that individuals who participated in these kinds of tourism were powerful and wealthy.
Until 1994, tourism in South Africa had these two commonalities as well. Only people of an upper-class, white status could indulge in movement from one place to another. Black individuals were issued with a dompas: an internal passport that restricted their movement on foot. Thus, they could not indulge in free travel around a city like Johannesburg, never mind for leisure to a seaside resort.
This is what led to the White Paper of 1996, which described “diversity [as] where the country’s tourism attraction lies” and stated that the end of apartheid “opened the country’s tourism potential to the rest of the world and, indeed, to the previously neglected groups in society”.
Yet, tourism only really redefined itself in later years. Black people were now granted human rights, but they could not exercise in these rights until they were given a platform to practise them.
Itumeleng Rabotapi, director of strategic management, monitoring and evaluation at the department of tourism, says: “The above advantages notwithstanding, South Africa has not been able to realise its full potential in tourism. As such, the contribution of tourism to employment, small business development, income and foreign-exchange earnings has been limited.”
The White Paper says: “Had its history been different, South Africa would probably have been one of the most-visited places in the world.”
Johannesburg is seen as a microcosm of South Africa in this report, which investigates whether touring the city has changed since democratisation or if it will take 30 more years to master.
State of tourism pre-1994
If you went back in time to revisit apartheid South Africa, you would find a vastly different City of Johannesburg than the one to which you are accustomed.
A tourist in South Africa was typically a white, wealthy, powerful individual or family. To take part in tourism activities pre-1994, academic IB Mkhize explains that a person needed to have disposable income, leisure time, means of transport, freedom of movement, access to facilities and destinations to visit. The apartheid regime deprived all South Africans, except white people, of these things.
Jane Skipsey, a former hotel general manager and guesthouse owner, says: “The hotel industry was very glamorous in the 1980s, with lots of glitz. The five-star Carlton Hotel [now closed] in downtown Johannesburg was buzzing with international guests.”


Academic Christian Rogerson says the crisis tourism experienced until 2010 has roots in the policies of apartheid. He places emphasis on the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and the declaration of a state of emergency in the 1980s, which led to South Africa being politically isolated from the rest of the world.
However, despite this, Skipsey says, “Business still had to be conducted and holidays were still taken. There were not that many prominent hotel groups at the time and Southern Sun dominated the market, with business and leisure hotels aplenty.”
Justyn Spinner, managing director of Hello Lifestyle Magazine (formerly Hello Joburg, Hello Cape Town, Hello Durban and Hello Pretoria), says that in the 1980s, when his father pioneered the company, “There were no reliable sources of lifestyle and entertainment content.”
This is what inspired Spinner senior to create a guidebook-style publication featuring lifestyle and attraction spots in Johannesburg. It was targeted at people who had the freedom of movement and choice to partake in leisure activities.
Christo Nicolopoulos, a restaurateur in Johannesburg, says that pre-1994, “The process of opening a restaurant was less bureaucratic.” Nicolopoulos opened many high-end restaurants and he was also involved in “black eating houses… and opened the first eating house with proper plates and knives and forks in Kempton Park”.
“Black eating houses”, or restaurants for black people, show the depth of apartheid segregation in the tourism sector. Black people were not granted access to mainstream tourism activities and were often left undignified and underprivileged in what they could pursue for leisure.
Although Johannesburg was a world-class city with beautiful hotels and restaurants that international businesspeople or tourists would travel to see, its status was maintained on the foundation of apartheid.
State of tourism post-1994
The numbers say South Africa’s tourism sector has been on the mend since 1994. With international sanctions lifted, and the eyes of the world on South Africa’s new democratic state, tourism experienced a boom.
The inception of South African Tourism also helped to rebrand the country and manage its reputation. The body was instituted with the hope of allowing historically disadvantaged South Africans to benefit from the sector.
Rogerson says, “Domestic rather than international tourism is the backbone of the South African tourism economy. While the major component is accounted for by white South Africans, steady growth is occurring in the black tourism sector.”
The tourism industry is more diverse now in terms of ownership and clientele. The introduction of small to medium-sized enterprises and the department of tourism’s enterprise development and transformation programme allowed locally made products and services to enter the tourism market.
One example is the Yeoville Dinner Club, pioneered by Sanza Sandile. For Sandile, who grew up in apartheid Soweto, this dinner club “has become a vision and a direction of [his] childhood dream”. After moving to Yeoville at the dawn of democracy, he wanted to redefine what was once called “a derogatory shebeen in [his] grandmother’s day”.
Sandile’s dinner club “is about celebrating this piece of history through food socials”. The dinner club has “enjoyed a whole mix of international guests and real local foodies from a slightly higher LSM [Living Standards Measure]”.
Locals often describe Yeoville – and Hillbrow – as the geographical centres of deterioration and crime. However, Sandile says his patrons view the now “accidental pan-African suburb” as “one of the most popular cultural and topical spaces in Johannesburg”.

Nicolopoulos says black economic empowerment policies created a group of black diners, colloquially known as “Black Diamonds”, who enjoy splurging on champagne and cognac on occasion.
A tourist of colour who often frequents the streets of Johannesburg is 21-year-old Uyanda Tyusha. After growing up in Johannesburg, Tyusha moved to Stellenbosch to finish his tertiary education.
He says: “Having previously lived in Johannesburg, I often travel back to visit friends and family… I mostly find myself going out for something to eat, either lunch or dinner… I also go to attend musical festivals or concerts… I am interested in.”
As a student on a tight budget, Tyusha dreams of “visiting the lesser-travelled areas in the country and discover[ing] more” in years to come.
Being a Born Free, Tyusha “can’t image having restrictions on the sort of travelling that [he] does”. He says if had been born during apartheid he “would most likely be restricted to movement within [or] between the townships”. There would be no chance of him visiting an establishment like the Yeoville Dinner Club.
At the National Job Summit in 1998, tourism was recognised as “the sector which had the greatest potential for reducing unemployment in the country”, Rogerson says. This potential was envisaged as manifesting through community-based initiatives and township, rural and cultural tourism.
Tourism in Johannesburg now has an economic, social, political, cultural and educational value. In 2024, the city has endless tourist attractions, most either born from apartheid, in remembrance of apartheid and the people who lived under it, or an attempt to advantage previously disadvantaged people.
Tourism as a a socioeconomic sector
According to the 1996 White Paper, South Africa relies on tourism to increase the rate of employment, promote equality in all aspects of society, and contribute to the overall gross domestic product (GDP) and investment in the country’s economy.
South African Tourism, the marketing arm of the department of tourism, says tourism promotes “the sustainable economic and social empowerment of all South Africans”. Tourism is a multi-sectoral industry, which means its growth allows multiple sectors to grow too and for more jobs to be created.
The White Paper found that tourism contributed 2% to the GDP in 1994, which increased to 4% in 1995. In 2024, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) says tourism contributes an estimated 8.8% to the GDP. In 30 years, tourism has more than doubled its contribution to the economy.
Spinner says “we should see the tourism industry as a major contributor to our GDP”, due to its diverse offerings and the welcoming culture of our country to international visitors.
There were an estimated 70,000 working in the sector in 1994 and 1.7 million in 2024. Globally, one in every nine jobs is in the tourism sector, which is about 10.7% of the global workforce.
Skipsey says there is still a massive educational divide that limits equality in the tourism sector’s workforce. The majority of management positions were previously held by white people and unskilled positions were given to people of colour.
“This started to change with employment equity, brought about by the new government post-1994,” Skipsey says. “There are still hurdles. Some black South Africans are assigned jobs for which they are not qualified and this can end up messy.”
Rogerson estimates that 50,000 international tourists visited South Africa in 1986. When 1994 rolled around, the White Paper estimates South Africa welcomed 4.48 million international tourists. Stats SA estimates this number to be 10.7 million in 2024.
Stats SA says tourism is set to grow 7.6% annually over the next decade. This is above the overall economic growth rate of 1.8%.
To residents of Johannesburg, this might come as a shock. The city is not seen as glamorous by its inhabitants, but rather as deteriorating by the second.
Restaurateur Nicolopoulos says, “our economic hub, Johannesburg, is avoided by tourists”, due to the “lack of law and order, corruption and high levels of crime”. The city has simply become “a transit port of entry for Cape Town and the Kruger National Park”.
Overall, the department of tourism’s Rabotapi says tourism is “well-positioned to link under-developed regions with the developed ones as it transcends spatial and geographic boundaries”.
Tourism has a unique ability to promote and maintain harmony on the premise of a shared love for one’s country.
A peek into the next 30 years
Although tourism is classed as a leading socioeconomic sector in today’s South Africa, it still has unlocked potential.
Rabotapi says: “Growth of tourism to and within South Africa requires the portfolio to provide an enabling environment.”
This includes improving tourism assets and infrastructure, ensuring tourism safety and access to basic services, and developing a culture of travel among South Africans so the sector is supported domestically.
Throughout South Africa’s 1.27 million square kilometres, Johannesburg’s province of Gauteng takes up a mere 18,000. Yet, it has made significant strides in transforming the tourism sector during the 30 years of democracy.
Touring the city was once a privilege; now, doing so is a reminder of what humanity went through to be alive today.
FEATURED IMAGE: Johannesburg is known for the spotting of Jacaranda trees all about its suburbs, and they have become a tourist attraction in Spring time. Photo: Victoria Hill
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