BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa – An expensive South African resort has recently drawn international anger over its fake “Shanty Town” luxury accommodations. The Emoya Luxury Hotel and Spa, a five star resort on the western border of Bloemfontein, offers guests the opportunity to stay in tin corrugated “shacks” modeled on those characteristic of South Africa’s impoverished townships.
These “shacks” are colorful, intricately designed, and wholly unlike the real thing, featuring amenities like heated floors and Wi-Fi. The resort also features a communal long-drop toilet and a fire pit ringed with rubber tire chairs, apparently meant to add a feeling of authenticity to the experience. The whole thing costs about 82 dollars per night. For comparison, that is more than most South Africans make in an entire month, and a little less than half the average monthly salary.
The resort, which has offered its “Shanty Town” accommodations since 2010 (in time for South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup, of course) has come under new international scrutiny after Stephen Colbert featured it on his television show, calling it “poverty porn.” Colbert joked that those tired of simply glam camping (glamping) could now give glamour slumming, which he coined “glumming,” a try.
While slum tourism is certainly nothing new, the suggestion that this experience in any way relates to the lived realities of those who are actually impoverished makes this brand of it particularly offensive. As Sipho Hlongwane wrote in the Johannesburg Business Day, the resort shantytown reduces the pain of poverty “to an experience that you can dip in and out for more money than those poor shack dwellers have in a month.”
The features Emoya’s website boast further highlight the differences between “playing poor” and living it. Emoya assures that the town is “completely safe” and “child-friendly,” two luxuries not afforded to those living in South Africa’s townships, where violence is an everyday reality and crime rates are high. Infant mortality rates in the country are also high, and doubled between 1998 and 2011. Not exactly child-friendly conditions.
While the resort shantytown is listed as ideal for “team-building exercises and theme parties,” real shantytowns are overcrowded and plagued by poor sanitation, no place for celebrating. A quarter of South Africans do not have access to sufficient housing or electricity.
Then there is the problematic way Emoya’s resort ignores the bitter realities of racial inequalities that led to the creation of the townships under apartheid and continue to plague black South Africans today. Zachary Levenson of the popular blog “Africa Is A Country” notes how the resort contributes to “the naturalization of informal settlements as some sort of indigenous habit.”
“No one wants to live in a shack, not a single damn person. This is a housing type…that emerges from necessity,” Levenson writes, “not because this is how some select ethno-cultural group chooses to live.”
Emoya promises its guests “the experience of a lifetime,” but there are millions of South Africans living below the poverty line for whom much worse conditions are a lifetime experience. Wealth disparities in the country have actually increased since apartheid, and the problems with inequality and poverty are as real as ever. Check out the South-African based NGO The Black Slash, which works to combat conditions of deprivation and injustice, and donate today.
– Sarah Morrison
Sources: Emoya Hotel and Spa, International Business Times, Los Angeles Times, Sydney Morning Herald, The Telegraph
Photo: Africa is a Country