The aim of this paper is not to discourage visitors from coming to South Africa, but rather to place the potential threat of terrorism in context. Understandably, South Africa is not on the same level of alertness towards terrorism than countries in other parts of the world, but it is especially this level of comfort, or the common assessment that ‘it will never happen to us’, that contributes to South Africa’s vulnerability as a potential target. While crime and the threat of hooligans are more realistic, South Africa also needs to realise that in being part of the international community places the country in a different threat category than it is normally used to
