By Fred Katerere
In Japan they call them "yellow cabs" and in Jamaica they are called "milk bottles" - but in Cape Town they don't yet have a name because their trade is being plied under wraps.
Welcome to the world of female sex tourism, a lucrative industry in some of the world's top tourism destinations and apparently fast creeping into Cape Town which, according to recent figures from Cape Town Routes Unlimited, is attracting an estimated 2.8 million international and domestic tourists this summer.
If you look carefully you can see it happening on Long Street where female tourists are known to hang out with holiday "Rastas" in the bars, backpacker hostels and nightclubs. While there may be nothing wrong with tourists wanting to have a holiday fling and intimately experience the attractions of the "dark continent", investigations into this trade revealed enclaves in Green Point and Sea Point where pimps use the occasional unsuspecting jobseeker.
Godfrey, 30, lives in the city. He says he became a male prostitute after he was lured into the trade thinking he was getting a "casual job". He was picked up while waiting with other unemployed men beside the road, hoping for a casual job.
"I was waiting at the Point as usual with my friends when this guy came and he said he was looking for a "strong young man" to perform a sexual activity. No one believed him, but I volunteered out of sheer desperation."
Godfrey, who has picked up prostitutes himself, said he was driven into a townhouse complex where he realised he was going to see "the other side" of prostitution.
"I normally pick up prostitutes when I have some money but I have never entered into the trade on the other side where it is me who is expecting to be paid."
Godfrey said he was offered cocaine, alcohol, cigarettes and all types of beverages.
"I was asked to take a shower and then come out wearing just my underwear. I then realised that all the people who were inside were partially dressed and almost on every wall there was a television set showing pornographic videos."
He said he was shocked when he saw his client, a foreign woman. "I could not believe she would want sex with a down-and-out man like me."
He said the sex was "rigorous" and involved "performing acts that I never dreamt of performing on a woman". He was paid R400.
Godfrey's story was corroborated by Dumisani, who said he was also picked up by some men who took him to a house where he had sexual encounters with a woman for money.
The World Tourism Organisation (WTO), a specialised agency of the United Nations (UN), defines sex tourism as "trips organised from within the tourism sector, or from outside this sector but using its structures and networks, with the primary purpose of effecting a commercial sexual relationship by the tourist with residents at the destination".
The UN opposes sex tourism, citing health, social and cultural consequences for both the home countries and destination countries, especially in situations exploiting gender, age, and social and economic inequalities in sex tourism destinations.
According to the website www.sex-tourism.org, female sex tourism differs from male sex tourism in that women do not use bars, sex shows and formal tours to meet foreign men, but often work through an intermediary.
The site, which gives a detailed view of other forms of sex tourism, also provides answers to "frequently asked questions".
It states that female sex tourism began in Rome in the late 1840s, at the same time as feminism's first wave "which encouraged independence and travel". "There are 'de facto' tours, however, such as airplanes bound to Gambia in West Africa full of British and Scandinavian women seeking affairs with beach boys," says the website.
"Often such trips are referred to by women as 'romance tourism'. Women usually give clothes, meals, cash and gifts to their male prostitutes."
Some destinations have "going rates" for male companionship, ranging from $50 to $200, while in a few destinations men do not expect to be compensated.
Common female sex tourism destinations are the Caribbean, southern Europe, Gambia and Kenya. Lesser known destinations include Morocco, Fiji, Ecuador and Costa Rica.
The site notes: "Guys ready to offer such service (are) called kamakia in Greece (fishing harpoons), sharks in Costa Rica, rent-a-dreads and the foreign service in Caribbean, kuta cowboys or pemburu-bule in Bali (whitey hunters), Marlboro men in Jordan, bomsas or bumsters in Gambia and sanky-pankies in Dominican Republic."
In South Africa, the Sexual Offences Act makes it a crime to sell sex, solicit, keep a brothel and live off the earnings of prostitution.
Cheryllyn Dudley, MP for the African Christian Democratic Party and one of the country's foremost campaigners against the legalisation of prostitution, says she has not heard of any cases of men being paid for sex. "We haven't heard of that type of prostitution. If it exists in Cape Town it is well hidden," she said. - West Cape News.