| Abstrakt: |
This article describes the relationship of the South African people and American tourists during the 1900s and the emergence of South Africa's tourism industry. The new Union of South African government did like Americans. From the beginning of the diamond and gold booms both American engineering expertise and American mining equipment had been part of the process. There also seemed to be a respect for Americans among the deeply suspicious, anti-imperialist Boers. America, it was remembered, has seized its independence from the British, and had adopted the republican form of government so revered by the Afrikaners. There seemed to be an affinity between the people of the Union and the United States just as South Africa was beginning a new era of autonomy and the United States was coming into its own as a world power. In 1910 when the Union of South Africa Act was passed, commercial tourism, an organized industry to attract and profit from great numbers of visitors, was still a phenomenon. Thomas Cook and Son in the mid-nineteenth century had initiated the modern tourist era. The availability of protected ports in South Africa provided the first key to developing a tourist industry. British steamship lines, anxious to increase business, had published since before the Boer war immigrant and tourist guides to South and Central Africa. Although the First World War put a crimp on the program of European tourists development, it expanded the commercial contacts between the Union and the United States. Tourism had to wait until the end of the war and then a new Africa was in the making. While independent African states would question and debate the desirability of western tourism and possible linkages to imperialism, the Union of South Africa would continue to seek tourists from the west. Tourism became big business. But the ground work for further developing the tourist industry in southern Africa had been set in the simpler times between the wars. |
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