IN line with a move towards greening businesses, a lot of tourism products in South Africa are focusing on ‘responsible tourism’ by paying attention to recycling, saving electricity and using local materials for building and local people for staff. Often they support local micro-businesses, like traditional dancers or vegetable growers.  It might be more trouble than dealing with a monolith, but fits in with the philosophy of ‘tourism doing good’.

Another area where a lot of lodges and hotels help out, is in the matter of adopting a local school.  Despite the fact that South Africa has one of the highest governmental budgets per capita for education in the world, there are still too many schools in desperate need of help.  Ghost Mountain Inn, at Mkhuze in Zululand on the N2 highway that links Mpumalanga and KwaZulu Natal, is one of these benefactors.  A family-run hotel, it is very much rooted in its community.  Employees of the hotel – culled from the local population – often work their way up into positions of influence, sometimes leaving to start their own businesses with the hotel as their main client.  The hotel makes a point of running tours that feature the unvarnished traditional rural experience.  One of the hotel’s beneficiaries is Mtwazi School.  It is a ‘Combined’ school, teaching children from pre-primary all the way to matric.  At first glance it is not exactly prepossessing:  there are no manicured lawns, reception offices, flowerbeds or sports fields.  Instead, there is a large expanse of bare ground and some neat and simple cider-block classrooms. I was shown around by the deputy headmistress, who was clearly proud of what the school had achieved.  The teachers’ salaries are paid by the Department of Education, but everything else has been supplied by local businesses.  Charity events are regularly organised to raise funds to buy books and desks, building materials are donated, children’s parents supply the building labour. There are no sporting facilities – yet.  There is no science lab or home economics room.  There is also no real staff-room for teachers and only a row of chemical toilets against one wall for 800 pupils.  But all of these are on the list for future projects. The hotel, along with other businesses, has introduced a feeding scheme for the smaller children and serves more than 300 meals a day from a shed stacked with huge cooking pots and gas burners.  It is possible that this is the only meal that many of these children get. Everything at the school is a combination of donations from business and farmers, sweat equity from students, their parents and teachers, and sterling dedication from staff.  There is no local accommodation for teachers and therefore several of them commute from Richards Bay – a distance of more than 100km – to school every day.  There is almost none of your standard school equipment, sports gear, or teachers’ comforts.  This really is schooling in the raw, and yet this school obtains an almost perfect pass rate every year. Parents from all over the area jostle to get their children into this school because of the high standards of education.  But the real anomaly is the fact that, apart from teachers’ salaries, this school receives no money from the government to repair broken windows, supply teaching equipment, maintain a vegetable garden or anything else. I commented on this.  “Why doesn’t the Department of Education supply funding for the school for books and maintenance?”  I asked.  The answer was a shake of the head.  But when I left I was shown a vast ugly building, just across the road from the school, in the typical government Rural Unsightly style of architecture, for Education Department staff.  It is rather ironic that government officials would spend millions of rands on luxurious offices for themselves while right across the road the very pupils that they are supposed to serve have to make do with the kindness of the local community. If it wasn’t for the tourism owners and tourists in rural areas in South Africa, many of these schools would have no buildings at all.  The Department of Education will always have their expensive offices, their air-conditioning and their shaded parking lots for their shiny new cars. Without the beneficence of tourism, the schoolchildren would have nothing. There are many tourism businesses in South Africa that sincerely help their surrounding communities when the government has failed to do its job.  This is the concept of responsible tourism at its finest.  Perhaps, when planning your next trip, look for lodges and hotels that genuinely take part in the well-being of their community (not just skin-deep ‘eco-tourism’ for the sole purpose of marketing).  Your tourism dollar will never ever be better spent.