Turning History Into Tourism : South Africans have been quick to commercialize the country's traumatic history of apartheid.(travel industry)(Illustration)(Statistical Data Included)

Renate Horst wanted to visit Africa, but she wasn't only interested in running around the bush looking for zebras and hippos. "I told my travel agent I didn't just want to be a tourist. I wanted to go where ordinary people don't get to go," says Horst, a resident of Munich. Today, this middle-aged hausfrau is getting her wish. As her car pulls into Cape Town's crime-plagued Langa township, guide Ntobeko Peni, 27, starts reciting a capsule history of the apartheid struggle, starting with bloody 1960 protests over the country's pass law for blacks. He takes his visitor by police stations where marchers rallied, through a squatter-camp beer hall, then finally pulls up to the street in Khayelitsha township where a mob stoned and stabbed to death American exchange student Amy Biehl in 1993. Four people served time in prison for the murder, the result of a fringe party's efforts to block scheduled elections by creating unrest; they were later granted amnesties. Peni adds nonchalantly: "One of them is now involved in tourism, and he is driving for you." Horst seems unfazed, and after the tour is complete declares: "That was a good thing."

A growing number of her fellow visitors to South Africa seem to agree. World outrage over apartheid sparked international sanctions that squeezed South Africa's economy until the system fell in 1994. But the memory of apartheid lives on--thanks in part to thriving tourism businesses. In the last year interest in attractions that highlight the nearly 50 years of segregation has been growing rapidly. Last week Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners languished for decades in jail, announced that 300,000 people visited its prison turned museum over the last 12 months, a record. Private tours of Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg, are booming. Four museums devoted to the apartheid era have opened in the last year, one adjacent to a casino. In Cape Town, Peni caught on to the possibilities while working as a business strategist for the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, having been publicly forgiven by the victim's parents. He led his first tour for the charity in June. "I saw an opportunity," he explains.

Although apartheid was unique to South Africa, the idea of teaching people a little history and making a buck off the lesson is not. "It's well known that tourists all over the world are more and more interested in culture," says Mohammed Valli Moosa, South Africa's minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism. "People don't just want to bask on the beach anymore--they want to see things they're not able to see anywhere else in the world." So his department promotes South Africa's multicultural, multireligious society, an ethnic stew in which there isn't a single majority language. And Moosa's department hasn't shied away from exploiting the country's segregationist history--or, as he prefers to describe it, "the heroic struggle against racism." A Johannesburg native, he admits to being surprised by the depth of cultural and historical interest in South Africa internationally. "I never would have thought in all my dreams that people would find this place so interesting," he said.

The biggest attraction among apartheid-related sites is undoubtedly the Robben Island Museum, a half-hour ferry ride from the Cape Town waterfront. A national monument since 1997, the museum logged its millionth visitor last December. Much of its appeal derives ...