The first thing Mama Dlamini does when you arrive at her house in Dube, Soweto, is hand you a plate. It is ten-thirty at night and you have just come from OR Tambo on a delayed flight, and the plate contains pap and a braai chop and a small pile of chakalaka that she has kept warm on the stove for the past two hours — not because she knew you would be late, but because in Mama Dlamini's house there is always something warm on the stove. Her meticulously maintained four-room house on Mokoena Street sleeps three guests at a time and is fully booked through June.
Soweto's homestay economy is small but growing fast. According to Johannesburg Tourism, the number of registered overnight accommodation providers within the township increased from eleven in 2021 to sixty-seven in 2025, with an estimated additional forty to sixty operating informally. The growth has been led not by outside investment but by a specific demographic: Soweto residents in their forties and fifties, often with a grown child who has emigrated or moved to a Joburg flat, who find themselves with a spare room and a story they want to tell. Andile Khumalo, who heads the Soweto Tourism Association, calls them "the second generation of township hosts."
The second house on my itinerary sits several rungs up the economic ladder. Lebo Mokoena's home in Diepkloof Extension is a four-bedroom house with a small pool and a wall covered in original works by Soweto painters. Mokoena, a former set designer for SABC, has decorated each guest room around a different era of township visual culture: one is Drum Magazine Fifties, another Protest Art Eighties. She charges R2,200 a night and turns away more bookings than she accepts.
We are not a museum. We are people who live here and choose to share it. The difference is important.
The success of these operations has attracted scrutiny from some quarters. A guest review published on a travel platform last December accused one Soweto host of "performing poverty for tourists" — a charge that prompted a heated response from the broader community of hosts. "We are not a museum," wrote Ntombi Vilakazi, a host from Pimville, in an open letter published in the Sunday Times. "We are people who live here and choose to share it. The difference is important." The debate mirrors arguments made in Cape Malay quarters and Durban informal settlements, wherever tourism and daily life have intersected without a buffer zone.
Johannesburg's township tourism industry has been trying to reinvent itself for over a decade, since the departure of the big tour-bus operators who once herded visitors between Mandela's house and the Hector Pieterson Memorial at a pace that precluded actual encounter. The homestay model represents a different theory of the visit: slower, less curated, dependent on the specific chemistry between host and guest. It is also, advocates argue, more economically direct — the money goes to the person who made the breakfast, not to a tour operator in Sandton. "When you stay with me, I keep everything," says Mama Dlamini. "That has never been true before."
My last night in Soweto is at Kgomotso Sithole's place in Meadowlands Zone 4, a compact and immaculately ordered house shared with her teenage daughter and an enormous friendly dog named Shaka. Sithole works nights as a nurse at Chris Hani Baragwanath and leaves a thermos of rooibos on the kitchen counter with a handwritten note. The note says: "Help yourself. Back by 7." In the morning she fries eggs and asks me where I am going next. When I tell her I am returning to Cape Town, she nods. "Come back in winter," she says. "Soweto is different in winter. Slower. Better."
