A wonderful thing, bureaucracy. It can deprive people of their livelihoods at the stroke of a pen.
That’s what it’s done to hundreds of Cape Town tour guides who completed a three-year national diploma in tourism management at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and have been working competently in the industry ever since, only to be informed by the Department of Tourism that their accreditation is now invalid.
Apparently they are no longer recognised as “legal guides”. They may not work unless they have a certificate from Cathsseta, which sounds like something you use for urine drainage but actually stands for Culture, Art, Tourism, Hospitality and Sport Education Training Authority.
What a lot of... not urine, the other substance!
Surely three years at a university should be sufficient to teach you how to show visitors the attractions of the Cape.
All you need do is swot up a bit of history, be knowledgeable about the exact state of the Robben Island ferry’s seaworthiness and when its next breakdown is likely, learn the difference between leucadendrons and leucospermums before taking your party to Kirstenbosch, stop them falling over the edge of Table Mountain, be able to expound on the relative after-tastes of Merlot and Pinotage, convince them that Cape Point is southern Africa’s most dramatic headland (even the Cape Agulhas two-ocean fanatics can’t argue with that), and Bob’s your uncle.
So long as they don’t think you’re referring to that Zimbabwean Bob.
Rather tell them you’ve met Nelson Mandela. That will impress them. They are not to know that nearly everybody in South Africa has met Madiba at some stage or other.
The diploma course graduates will be even better informed. But if they now try to impart their knowledge to paying guests, they are likely to be pounced on by the tourist police, or whoever enforces the tourism authority’s absurd edicts.
That wouldn’t have stopped me when, some 25 years ago, I proclaimed myself to be a “mountain walk guide”.
Having lost a parliamentary election as Prog candidate and been reduced to freelance work, I added that to the top of my letterhead, after “writer, editor and after-dinner speaker”, in the hope that I could also augment my income by taking visitors up the mountains I had been climbing as a man and a boy.
Alas, no one ever requested my mountaineering services.
Thank goodness my other abilities were more in demand, or my family would have starved.
I trust that my old friend Nachum Arnoni is not rendered penniless by the tourist licence fiasco. All Israeli tourists to the city know that in Nachum (who prefers to be known as Norman to his friends and whom my wife calls “Stormin’ Norman”) they have a tour guide who speaks fluent Hebrew. Which is not surprising because he was born and bred in Israel.
Another tour guide friend is Hugh Finn, who gained his accreditation after retiring as headmaster of St Joseph’s College. He reminded me that guides were also required to have a diploma in first-aid. I just wondered whether mental assessment fell within the ambit of first-aid, in which case all those guides put out of work might consider asking the tourism bureaucrats whether they wanted their heads read.
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