Razina Munshi

The quaint town of Matjiesfontein, fondly known as the Grand Duchess of the Karoo, is a good reminder that beauty is often found in unexpected places.

The life of the town began in 1884. At the time locals wove reeds from the Baviaans River into mats, hence the name of the place.

In recognition of its history, the entire village was restored in 1970 and declared a national monument. Its status has helped the Karoo village play host to a small but steady stream of visitors intrigued by its colonial past and Victorian architecture.

But in the rest of the Karoo, visitors have been limited to local desert enthusiasts. Dwindling tourism is a failing that local authorities have identified.

A new project aimed at boosting the region’s tourism will re-brand the Karoo in the run-up to the soccer World Cup. The region will be packaged as a desert destination for both local and foreign tourists, with a yet-to-be launched logo and “Karoo South Africa” as its slogan.

Spearheaded by the Karoo Development Foundation, with assistance from the University of the Free State (UFS), the project is intended to inject energy into the desert region’s economy.

Prof Doreen Atkinson, convener of the Arid Areas Research Programme at UFS and a trustee of the foundation, says few South Africans are aware of what the Karoo has to offer. They fly over it, or at best drive through it, but few stop to appreciate it.

“The emptiness of the desert is precisely its attraction,” says Atkinson, who wants the Karoo as well as the Kalahari and Namaqualand to become as recognisable as the Australian outback, the Sahara desert or the Grand Canyon.

The region’s sites, she says, can rival the world’s famous deserts. The Karoo offers game farms and reserves, conservation areas, unique fauna and flora, literary tourism, sites of Khoisan and Anglo-Boer War heritage, adventure tourism and extreme sports, unique crafts and even fossil tourism.

Branding specialist Roger Sinclair agrees the Karoo needs a strategy to attract tourists. The first step, he says, should be to create awareness of the brand. South Africans may know about the Karoo; international visitors don’t.

Once awareness has been created, “associations” made with the brand will make people want to visit it. In the case of the Karoo, this could mean building the profiles of popular towns or other attractions to create positive associations.

Towns like Matjiesfontein and Graaff Reinet, as well as themes like Anglo-Boer War history and adventure sport at the Gariep Dam are possible areas of focus.

The project will take re-branding even further. It has identified six highways, linking the 2010 host cities, that pass through the Karoo. Using brochures and marketing campaigns, it hopes to encourage soccer visitors who use these roads to travel to and from matches to stop over in the region.

The soccer World Cup may have provided the campaign with momentum, but its effects will extend much further. Atkinson and her team intend monitoring tourist inflows into Karoo towns before, during and after the World Cup to assess what effect the event and the re-branding exercise has had.

Local tourism has the potential to transform the economies of smaller Karoo towns victim to emigration, so the economic development departments at local and district municipalities are drawn into tourism development plans.

Atkinson adds that the strategy to develop towns includes drawing in local commercial and small-scale farmers, who, she says, could have a positive effect on the development of a town’s economy.

The Karoo cuts across four provinces, which is why it has not been marketed as a collective entity before, says Atkinson. The new project, which defines the region based on its ecology, will include provincial, district and municipal initiatives to draw tourists and ultimately create jobs and alleviate poverty.

Sinclair believes that Germans, who will come to the soccer with a sense of adventure, are the perfect target for desert tourism promotion.

Source: Financial Mail