Considering tourism in Africa is a depressing enterprise. So systematically does the industry assume there to be a fundamental difference between African people and the non-African tourists who visit them, that the literature’s euphemistic terms “hosts” and “guests”—suggesting at least the potential for reciprocity—seem almost ludicrous when applied to an African setting. Even more than in other parts of the world, the tourism industry in Africa has been built on a potent blend of primitivizing exoticism and brute inequality, with foreign or white settler ownership of most tourism infrastructure a taken-for-granted structural feature of the tourism economy. Loincloth-clad “bushmen” and dancing “warriors” on display at lodges costing hundreds of dollars per night, purportedly wild spaces that have been purged of their human inhabitants to facilitate tourist enjoyment, beach resorts where one might feel free to sunbathe topless in the middle of a deeply conservative African community—these have been the industry’s stock in trade for decades.
Still, given the large and growing importance of tourism revenue to many African national economies, and given the undeniable impact of tourism on the innumerable African people who must accommodate to its gaze and adjust their lives to its priorities, there is clearly much more to be said about the subject than simply that it is often unsavory. As strikingly little has actually been written about Africa in the scholarly literature on tourism, which has tended instead to focus on Asia and Latin America, van Beek and Schmidt’s new collection of essays represents a very welcome contribution to the field. With a substantial introduction and fourteen Africa-focused essays, the book draws together and extends existing scholarship on the cultural dimensions of African tourism significantly.
The volume includes several essays that provide useful overviews of less well-known contemporary trends, including one on the African backpacker phenomenon, one on the rise of Atlantic diaspora “roots” tourism along the West African coast, one on the recent influx of paying volunteers, or “voluntourists,” in many African countries, and two that explore the cultural dynamics surrounding sex/romance tourism between white European women and African men. Other essays are case studies more squarely grounded in particular local contexts, as with one ethnographic analysis of the micropolitics associated with the decision to pursue tourism development in a cluster of Dogon villages, and another describing the implementation of a community tourism project in a San community in Namibia. Still others describe specific interesting and unexpected phenomena. One, for example, discusses the association among Tuareg between working as a tour guide and joining a regional rebel movement, the logistical skills and worldview needed for both pursuits overlapping considerably. Another uncovers the fact of regular wildlife exploitation by Maasai who, in the context of Kenya’s tourism-conservation complex, routinely proclaim themselves publicly as natural guardians of the game.
While the volume’s editorial touch is light, the essays cohere theoretically around a concept the editors refer to as the “tourist bubble,” a term they use to refer to the infrastructural and ideological frameworks that shape tourism encounters. Although all the authors acknowledge the powerful influence of stereotypes and mythologies about Africa in shaping tourist desires, they keep their analytic focus mainly on the infrastructural side of the bubble, emphasizing less how Africa is apprehended by tourists than how its presentation and sale to them shapes African lives in various ways.
Unsurprisingly, a recurrent theme of the volume is inequality: the profound social distance characterizing most African tourism encounters, and the ways in which the relative impermeability of tourist bubbles in Africa works to maintain this distance, protecting “guests” from meaningful, preconception-challenging interactions with their “hosts” and blinding them to the toll that their tourist activities often take. One particularly poignant chapter in this regard chronicles the eviction of black tenant farmers from white-owned farms being converted to private game ranches in KwaZulu-Natal. With the loss of state subsidies in the postapartheid era, landholders in the region are turning to tourism to keep their land profitable, converting complex agrarian landscapes into nouveau wildernesses for safari-goers, and in the process relegating their historic African laborer-clients to the sidelines as unskilled cultural attractions. The job-creating promise of tourism development is here analyzed with devastating effect as an example of “organized hypocrisy.”
The book is also full, though, of examples of African ingenuity and agency, as African people seek to harness the forces of tourism for their own purposes and benefit. Transactions between male “bumsters” in The Gambia and the female romance tourists who frequent them can hardly be said to be purely exploitative in any simplistic way, for example. Nor can the Ghanaians who decide to anoint Western visitors as “development chiefs,” staging elaborate installation rituals for foreigners in the hopes of binding them in enduring patronage relations, be described as passive victims of an exploitative tourism industry. In general, the picture that emerges in this rich volume is of Africans trying to maneuver as best they can in the face of an industry that is steadily reshaping their place within the world system.
