Abstract

The study of flamboyant sartorial innovation by Durban’s Rickshaw pullers, since their introduction to the South African city in 1879, remains patchy. Scholarship has largely focussed on the rickshaw phenomenon as city transportation; the problematic treatment of the pullers; its general aesthetic; and its role as tourist Art. More recently it has been argued that this innovation was a process of self-identification or consequential of them becoming career men. However, the socio-political causality behind this innovation between 1879 and 1994, is largely unconsidered. This was a period in which the Durban Publicity Association (DPA) was charged with luring British tourists to its shores, so that the city could be considered as their potential immigration domicile. Drawing on tourist photographs and postcards, the article examines the socio-political factors fomenting this innovation. It probes into the pullers’ role as front-line instruments of a local colour tactic - an ethnic tourism approach. Drawing on theories, such as Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Urry’s Tourist Gaze it is illustrated that local colour led to an orchestrated process of transvaluation (from rickshaw self-identity to commodified spectacle), underpinned by a societal perspective of the pullers’ as the ‘Noble Savage’; and later, through a process of white self-actualisation as African identity.