Tourism in South Africa has enjoyed rapid growth since the end of Apartheid. The number of foreign visitors increased more than tenfold over a period of ten years, from 640,000 in 1994 to more than 6.5 million in 2003, and reaching 9.2 million in 2007. It is now the country's fastest growing industry and accounts for just over 7% of its GDP. With all eyes set on an expected influx of visitors for the World Cup in 2010, many South Africans were keen to tap their share of tourist revenue. It was projected that tourism would employ more than 1.2 million people, directly and indirectly by 2010.

Game parks and Cape Town remain the most spectacular attractions but numerous other initiatives are attempting to capture their corner of the ever-increasing tourist market. Business and conference tourism is seen as the money-spinner of the future, while ecological tourism – ranging from bird watching to snorkelling and hiking – is currently the fastest growing segment of the industry. Prominent among relatively new ventures in the tourism sector is community tourism, sometimes labelled ‘cultural tourism’ or ‘heritage tourism’, with its potential to involve not only tour operators but local residents as well.

Township tours and cultural villages have been designed to allow tourists a glimpse of modern and traditional lives of ordinary black South Africans. More than a thousand people visit Soweto every day to see the two-bedroom house in Orlando where Nelson and Winnie Mandela lived, and the Hector Pietersen Museum, which commemorates the 1976 Soweto Uprising.