The Southern African Pleasure Periphery, 1966–83

Abstract

Both Lesotho and Swaziland possess a well-developed rhetoric advocating disengagement from South Africa, exemplified most recently in their joint commitment to the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference. Nevertheless, both countries remain firmly fastened to their dominant neighbour and committed to development strategies which tend to perpetuate such ties. The implications of continued social and economic domination by South Africa have not been lost on analysts of these two small, nominally independent Southern African states.

Talking Race, Marketing Culture: The Racial Habitus In and Out of Apartheid

“…In 1972, the apartheid state passed legislation allowing South African leisure firms to build and operate casino resorts in the homelands. Managers in these firms were exclusively white, and their practices betrayed a habitus marked by the apartheid formation (Crush and Wellings 1983;Stern 1987). To the international community they sought to portray an image of racial harmony and integration.…”

Vanishing Peripheries: Does Tourism Consume Places?

“…An important pillar for making these impoverished entities more economically viable involved the establishment of large casinos in locations within nominally independent Bantustans accessible to large population centres in 'white' South Africa. Associated characteristics of this example therefore include a context of extreme and geopolitically formalized economic peripherality as well as extreme form of hedonic tourism (Crush and Wellings 1983). From the conventional pleasure periphery perspective, the consumption of Bantustan-based hedonic tourism served to reinforce Apartheid, reinforcing dependency on South African markets but conferring legitimacy on the Bantustans through the revenues provided by those markets.…”

The Movement to Decriminalize Sex Work in Gauteng Province, South Africa, 1994-2002

“…10 Morality in South Africa: History of the Immorality Act, Other Sexual Legislation, and Previous Efforts to Decriminalize or Legalize Sex Work In order to situate and better understand the emergence of the South African movement to decriminalize sex work and the subsequent decision by the ANC and the Constitutional Court not to repeal the Sexual Offences Act, it is first necessary to examine earlier approaches to sexuality and prostitution, including approaches under apartheid. As many South African historians and other scholars have noted, despite legislation that curtailed sexual relations, and in particular sexual relations between different races (e.g., Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act [1949] and subsequent changes to the Immorality Act/Sexual Offences Act), and despite die image that South Africa under apartheid projected to the world, attitudes toward sexuality under apartheid and earlier were not uniform (see Crush & Wellings 1983). Not only was the apartheid government contradictory in its approach to sexuality, but South Africa also has a long history of accommodating varied minority discourses on sexuality.…”

“…Furthermore, this position may well be a protest against the hypocrisy of the South African Nationalist government, which had criminalized interracial sex but simultaneously had supported the development of prostitution in the former homelands and neighboring states. Crush and Wellings (1983) describe the development of what was termed a "pleasure periphery" in neighboring states of South Africa (primarily Lesotho and Swaziland) and the then homelands (e.g., Bophuthatswana, Transkei, Ciskei) during the apartheid years. The existence of casinos and the lure of interracial sex ("sex across the color line," as it was called) in these areas, and the boom of tourism to these neighboring states and the homelands in the 1970s and 1980s, was never protested by the apartheid government, despite the fact that prostitution and interracial sex were illegal and highly prosecuted in South Africa.…”

“…The existence of casinos and the lure of interracial sex ("sex across the color line," as it was called) in these areas, and the boom of tourism to these neighboring states and the homelands in the 1970s and 1980s, was never protested by the apartheid government, despite the fact that prostitution and interracial sex were illegal and highly prosecuted in South Africa. Moreover, the marketing of these forbidden fruits in South Africa was not prohibited, and the advertisements were clear about what was being made available (Crush & Wellings 1983). Certainly the existence of a "pleasure periphery" during the apartheid years, and the contradictions and hypocrisy of a government that actively policed the sex industry in South Africa while encouraging it elsewhere, have fortified the convictions of many black South Africans that government-supported prostitution has no place in the new South Africa.…”