The people of South African Tourism are busy busy busy, always promoting South Africa anywhere they can. Recently they were on the road attending Africa Showcase North America, an event produced and operated by On Show Solutions of Johannesburg. It was a two-week series of gatherings with activities in four cities crisscrossing the United States: Seattle, Denver, Fort Lauderdale and Boston.
The event was designed to provide a mix of networking opportunities, destination insights, and business interactions. Forty-four African travel suppliers were brought over and taken from city to city to meet with some 200 pre-qualified North American buyers.
Though South Africa was the lead destination, the networking event was not exclusively about South Africa. African suppliers hailed from more than 40 nations. It was Africa from A to Z, including Angola, Botswana, Congo, Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland), Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The series was engineered to put the African suppliers in touch with a highly qualified selection of buyers, including Africa specialists, high-performing agents, tour operators and consortiums. It was launched to take advantage of a recent surge of interest in Africa by American travelers.
South Africa’s vital tourism industry is now essentially recovered from the COVID lockdown period. Tourist arrivals from the US in August were back up to 93 percent of the numbers of August 2019, just before the world travel industry drove off a cliff. So that’s a milestone, and now North America has taken first place of all countries as a source for visitors to South Africa.
A Day in the Life
But this event is, in a sense, just another day for SAT. Since that event a week or two ago, SAT dashed down to participate in the ILGTA convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And now this morning as I write, the team is in Las Vegas at IMEX America. It goes on and on and never stops, and that’s good in my view, because ever since I personally discovered the richness and depth of South Africa, I’ve been promoting it to my American friends. I do this not just as a favor to South African Tourism, but as a favor to my American friends.
That’s because over time I have developed the conviction that South Africa is one of the best places in the world for Americans to travel to. Why I believe this is a long story. It takes a little familiarity with the history to appreciate what I am talking about. At a time when there is so much hatred, racism, division and violence in the world, when it often seems that civilization is devolving backwards towards barbarism, South Africa is today’s “shining light on a hill.” It presents us with a fresh vision of the values we in America used to hold dear. They are values that have been admired and emulated all over the world. But ironically it feels today as if America may be on the verge of abandoning them.
South Africa is now nearing the 30th anniversary of its founding as a democratic country, after it threw off the yoke of the apartheid state that ruled with an iron fist from 1948 until 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president in the first election in which all South Africans were able to vote. Mandela was able to unite all the bitterly divided factions of South Africa with his vision of a “Rainbow Nation,” which celebrated its great diversity and called for peace among the previously warring factions.
When Mandela was released from prison after 27 years as a political prisoner, no one could have been more entitled to feeling rage and a thirst for revenge. And a nation of native South Africans were ready to follow him. But instead of revenge, he chose peace and reconciliation. In his first speech in Cape Town after his release, he quoted something from his own speech at the Rivonia Trial way back in 1964, when he and others had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
“I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination,” he said. “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Mandela rescued the country from a bloody civil war with that speech, and that’s not just hyperbole. I met a tour operator in South Africa who told me that Mandela’s speech when he emerged from prison changed his own life and the course of South African history.
“When I was a young man,” he told me, “I was fiery and angry. I got involved in violence and got into some trouble. I was ready to go further down that path. But when Nelson Mandela came out of prison and made a speech, it changed me. And it changed many other people the same way. Mandela changed the course of history with one speech.”
The spirit of Nelson Mandela is alive in South Africa, and it’s great to experience it. When you travel to South Africa, and immerse yourself and learn about its dramatic history, it reminds you of those ideals that I still think really matter. And I believe that a majority of Americans, including the many immigrants who came to this country because of those ideals, really do love and cherish them.
When so many places are sliding backwards towards authoritarianism, which is, in plain terms just big-time gangsterism, South Africa is one country that is clearly moving in the other direction. It’s exhilarating to experience when traveling in South Africa. It’s the direction we used to call “upward” in the US. I hope we can restore the idea that moving toward more democratic values, peace, tolerance, solidarity and the celebration of diversity, is the “upward” that we seek.
Recent gruesome news events only accentuate my feelings about this. The events in Israel and Gaza are so upsetting that it’s hard to bear tuning into the news. And the events that have been going on in Ukraine for a year and a half now, actually since 2014 when Russia took over Crimea, are also terribly grim. In neither situation does there appear to be any hope for resolution in the foreseeable future. They seem locked into never-ending cycles of mutual destruction.
It’s high time and long past overdue for the human species to evolve beyond the stage at which bombing cities and killing civilians is considered a solution to anything. There’s no need to rehash the recent news events. They are only too well known. No need to go through all the examples of senseless hate, division and destruction in the world as we speak. Surely you get the point. With all the hate and division in the world, it’s really a huge sigh of relief to go to a place that was founded only 30 years ago on precisely the opposite tendency.
As with many other countries, the model for the South African constitution was America’s founding documents, and all springing from the fundamental principle at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
South Africa’s constitution is a modern interpretation of the principles of the American founding documents, with the benefit of a couple of hundred years of experience since those documents were written. The South African constitution is often called the most progressive in the world. The constitution’s bill of rights explicitly spells out a wide range of rights of every South African, and states them clearly so there can be no doubt: freedom of expression, of movement, of religion, freedom from forced labor, the right to education and healthcare, and much more. Places where these ideals reign seem ever more rare these days. But South Africa threw off the bonds of apartheid, an oppressive, racist regime, and that brings hope to all people in the world who would like to see racial hatred and oppression eliminated.
In Israel, as well as in Ukraine, it just seems to go back and forth, I kill, you kill, now I kill again. But South Africa proves that it’s possible to put an unsustainable cycle of violence behind and seek peace and reconciliation. That means more today than ever before. That’s why I support South Africa. I believe in their mission.
Travel evolves along with all the other events of the ongoing rush of history. COVID changed travel preferences and aspirations. Climate disaster has changed them, and these current wars and other geopolitical tensions are also changing them. Many of the changes in today’s world tend to make South Africa more attractive as a travel destination. This seems to be confirmed by the enthusiastic reception South African Tourism is getting as it takes its show on the road.
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.