The Horizon and Limits of the South African Leisure Industry

This paper focuses on an under-researched area of leisure in South Africa, to outline its parameters, uses, limitations and its stratifications. Leisure in South Africa has been historically been determined by race, class, gender, disability and geography. While there have been some changes in such categories over the past 30 years, the leisure industry remains within such parameters even while transgressing such boundaries.

While the leisure industry has shifted its parameters, it may be a market related reaction to draw in the new black middle and upper classes, and what remains to be done is for the notion of leisure to really penetrate the African townships in South Africa. There are various forms of leisure activities in South African townships, including soccer, emerging rugby among a host of sports codes. But these are sports related forms of leisure, rather than a wider definition that relates to a variety of forms (games, non-competitive sport, indigenous sport etc.).

This paper seeks to outline the variety of forms of leisure that South Africans engage in, how this sector continues to be stratified, and what the possibilities of change there are for a more diverse range to spread across the various historical categories described above. It also seeks to outline how various traditional forms of leisure are penetrated by capital, by stratifications, by an order of things and how such forms continue to create the conditions of a lack of access to all the variety of forms of leisure due to various socio-economic, econo-political and policy criteria that can be more innovative for a changed leisure sector. Notions of leisure are usually taken as epiphenomena, but they also have impacts, are linked to power and pleasure.