COLUMN ONE : Township Tourists Flock to S. Africa : Foreign visitors are heading to Soweto and other places where the battle against apartheid was fought. A sense of history and curiosity fuel a growing business.

Not every foreign tourist who visits this sprawling slum of tin-roof shacks and dirt-floor shanties wears three strands of gleaming pearls, a huge diamond brooch and prim white gloves.

Nor are most guarded by riot police in tank-like armored vehicles, shotgun-toting sentinels in bulletproof vests and snarling German shepherds.

But the hourlong visit by Queen Elizabeth II to a British-backed handicrafts project at a community center Tuesday in one of South Africa’s most infamous black townships was typical in one key way.

Nearly a year after the collapse of apartheid, a flood of foreign visitors have not only discovered the country’s stunning scenery and the wonder of its new democracy. They are also flocking to the impoverished communities that suffered the worst bloodshed and deprivation in the long battle for liberation.

“Foreigners want to see where the struggle took place,” tour operator Paula Gumede said approvingly, watching the beaming British monarch--who visited six townships during a weeklong trip that ends today.

Indeed, the queen, who last visited this former British colony in 1947, was only the latest luminary to visit what has quickly become the world’s most politically correct destination.

The Rolling Stones came last month, following Sting and Whitney Houston. Pope John Paul II plans to tour in September. A dizzying whirl of state visits last year so swamped President Nelson Mandela that his office politely asked other world leaders to back off a bit so he could do some work.

With South Africa no longer an international pariah, tourism has become the fastest-growing segment of an economy striving to recover after the ravages of economic sanctions, capital flight and years of political upheaval and civil strife.

To be sure, most well-heeled foreigners still head to lovely Cape Town and the lush wine estates near the Cape of Good Hope, to the glitzy casinos and hotels of Sun City, and to the vast game parks and luxurious private reserves teeming with the Big Five: lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant and rhino.

But hundreds also go each week to the long-troubled townships outside Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Gumede has led an average of 15 overseas tourists a day into Khayelitsha and other battle-scarred shantytowns near Cape Town since starting One City Tours in October, 1993.

Her groups tour such sites as a school made from rusted shipping containers in the squatter camps of Crossroads, and a desperately overcrowded workers’ hostel on a muddy street in nearby Langa, where families pay $1 a week to share tiny, grimy rooms.

Visitors also see the weed-filled remains of District Six, a thriving urban community that was bulldozed in 1979 in the government’s brutal attempts to forcibly remove “black spots” from white areas.

Virtually all her customers are from the United States and Europe. Most black South Africans need no introduction to township life, of course, since they already live there. But only a handful of white South Africans have joined her trips.

“Mostly it’s fear. They are afraid of going to the townships,” Gumede said. There’s another reason as well.

“Local whites don’t want to hear these stories of forced removals,” she said. “They may have known it happened. But they don’t know the effects.”

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She paused, and then added: “And they didn’t do anything to stop it.”

Many foreigners come with another perspective.

“We did everything we could to bring down apartheid,” Dutch lawyer Hans Brandt said proudly after a recent three-hour $25 minibus tour of Soweto, the largest and best-known township. “That’s why I’m here.”

David Moshapalo hopes to cash in on such sentiments. He heads the South African Taverners’ Assn., which represents 15,000 licensed and unlicensed township bars called shebeens. The group wants to convert shebeens and shacks into “mattress-and-breakfasts,” where tourists can dine on fermented porridge and chicken feet.

Moshapalo’s goal is to portray townships in a positive light.

“When people think of the townships, they have a view that when you walk in, someone slits your throat immediately. That’s not true. We want to put those fears at rest.”

Rising crime is a concern nationwide. No tourists have been attacked in the townships in the last year. As in the United States, however, several have been mugged in the big cities. The five-star Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg even offers discreet armed escorts for guests eager to stroll outside.

But the danger has done little to dampen outside interest. International tourism boomed by 12% last year, as measured by airport arrivals, according to the South African Tourism Board. That compares to 3% growth worldwide, and barely 1.5% in the rest of Africa.

Even that growth rate is misleading. Tourists shied away from the rampant violence and instability that reigned in South Africa before last April’s elections. The floodgates only opened in the second half of 1994. By November, tourism was 50% higher than a year before.

The tourism board hopes for a further 20% jump in overseas visitors this year, to 800,000--including 90,000 from the United States. They should spend nearly $2 billion in much-needed foreign exchange. The highlight will be the monthlong Rugby World Cup tournament that starts in May. About 30,000 foreign fans are expected to attend.

In all, the tourism board reports $800 million in new infrastructure to serve the influx, including an aquarium in Cape Town, a convention center in Durban, an upgrade for Johannesburg’s aging airport and new fleets for rental car agencies.

Hotels and resorts already are overwhelmed. Hyatt International is racing to open a 248-room hotel by November in a Johannesburg suburb, the first hotel built by a major chain here in a quarter-century. A Hilton will be built in Durban.

Soweto’s only hotel, the 28-room Diepkloof Protea Hotel, also plans to expand. Abe Ntlatleng, general manager since it opened in October, 1993, said 16 French tourists are encamped there and more are coming.

“There’s a lot of interest now,” Ntlatleng explained. “People want to experience life in Soweto.”

As a result, the tourism board plans to portray Soweto--site of the historic 1976 uprising--as a destination, not an eyesore, in its new travel guide.

“Our recent history is of such interest internationally that we may as well use it to lure tourists,” said spokesman Martin van Niekerk.

Soweto’s 33 townships, from squalid squatter camps to the millionaires’ mansions in an area known as Beverly Hills, already draw up to 1,000 tourists a month, thanks to Jimmy Ntintili and his 7-year-old Face to Face Tours, the largest and oldest of township tour operators.

“I have an overflow now,” Ntintili said happily. His groups wander through a muddy squatter camp, browse in a crowded vegetable market, visit a home for the elderly and pose for photos outside the lavish walled compound of Winnie Mandela, the estranged wife of President Mandela.

Last month, one of Ntintili’s tourists was the first to alert the local media after watching heavily armed police swarm into Winnie Mandela’s house to search for evidence that she had taken bribes and kickbacks in exchange for arranging government contracts to build housing for the poor.

Winnie Mandela’s business interests include a recently announced “tourism verite” venture with film star Omar Sharif.

They said Road to Freedom Tours will visit prisons where anti-apartheid activists were tortured, sites of historic rallies and riots and President Mandela’s rural birthplace.

Perhaps the most unusual tourism project is in a Pretoria classroom. Over the last month, Eleanor du Toit has tried to teach the basics of tourism to 14 former warriors from a so-called Self-Defense Unit in Thokoza, one of the country’s bloodiest war zones before the election.

The basics are basic indeed for these would-be tour guides.

“They’d never been to a hotel before,” Du Toit said. “They had no idea what it looked like. So I took them. They couldn’t believe how the rich lived.”

Similarly, the group had never been to a sit-down restaurant, or seen a jet except those passing high overhead.

“They all thought a plane carried 20 or 30 people,” she added. “So I arranged to take them to the airport and walk on a 747. They were amazed.”

Unlike Soweto, Thokoza is still tense. To enter, visitors must pass two barbed-wire roadblocks, where armed police search cars for weapons. And graffiti still warns, “Welcome to Hell,” and “Do you want protection? Dial AK-47.”

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But deep in the dusty ghetto lies the “Thokoza Tourism Offices,” as a hand-lettered sign proclaims. Inside, the group has taped newspaper pictures to the dingy walls. Most capture the township in flames, but one shows the aspiring tour guides surrendering their AK-47 assault rifles at a peace ceremony last year.

Asked for a tour, former guerrilla leader Sputla Modise, 26, conferred with his colleagues.

“We will show you where our friends were killed,” he finally announced.

First stop was a former “no-go zone” outside the Mshayisafe Hostel, where rival Zulu fighters frequently fired on Modise’s band.

“This was the main battleground,” he said, nervously peering at the distant brick barracks.

Constable George Siphiwe Ndlovu approached. “It’s quiet now,” he warned, fingering his assault rifle. “But you can’t trust the quiet. Last week, we found three bodies here. They were stabbed.”

Other tour sites were similar. Outside the Buyafuthi Hostel, aspiring tour conductor Emmanuel Phungula led the way to the bullet-pocked house where he had worked as a sniper.

“This is where we would shoot them from,” he said. “And over at that house, that is where they killed my father.”

Such attractions may not lure everyone. And the gunmen-turned-guides have vague plans at best. Still, Modise’s boosterism would make a Chamber of Commerce proud. As twilight fell, he pointed to the police floodlights that tower over the townships instead of street lamps.

“Tell people that at night, it’s very bright,” he urged with a grin. “Just like New York.”