Performing the Primitive in the Postcolony: Nyoni’s Kraal in Cape Town

Abstract

The production of particular spaces for tourist consumption of the "exotic" other involves the performance of particular conceptualizations of people and places that recreates theatrical versions of the primitive. Through analysis of one such space-Nyoni's Kraal in Cape Town-we contend that both hosts and visitors are complicit in the construction of these spaces and imaginaries. To this end, practices of social and spatial policing as well as performativity and representations of cultural constructs of an "authentic Africa" are deployed in the projection of a specific form of constructed, "benign" multiculturalism. We contend that such practices reproduce a mythical idyll of Africa for consumption that recreates-rather than questions-colonial power structures, and therefore remain imbued with the inequitable and uncertain outcomes of modernity.Keywords Urban tourism . Primitivism . Exoticism . Multiculturalism . Postcolonialism . Cape Town Patrick Conner, in Exotic Worlds-European Fantasies, a review of a collective of museum exhibits that took place in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1988, correlates the European desire to re-investigate exotica to the then relatively new field of postcolonial criticism. Connor considers these exotica as representative objects about "exotic" spaces and people created by and for Europeans, and as emblematic Urban Forum (

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