Apartheid Hotels: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Non-white’ Hotel in South Africa

Abstract

In tourism geographical scholarship there is a neglect of historical research. Against this backcloth, the chapter addresses the underdevelopment of research concerning tourism geographies of the past for South Africa. The research focus is the evolution of the ‘non-White’ hotel an institution which offered accommodation services to racial groups denied access to the country’s exclusive ‘White’ hotels. The emergence of the ‘non-White hotel’ is inseparable from national government’s application of apartheid racial legislation to the hotel sector and at a particular time of the growth of leisure and business mobilities among segments of the country’s Coloured, Indian and African communities. The normalisation of hotels in South Africa was a phased process beginning in 1971 with the establishment of the country’s multi-racial airport hotel as an experiment in racially mixed hotel space. It moved towards the stage of approving ‘international hotels’ before moving to the opening in 1986 of the formerly exclusive ‘White’ hotel spaces to all races. This event ultimately undermined the competitiveness and the raison d’ȇtre for racially exclusive ‘non-White’ hotels in apartheid South Africa.