Decolonization, Development, and the Political Economy of Tourism

The Kenyan government’s prioritization of tourism took form during the early-independence years of the 1960s, when one of the central conflicts at the level of high politics was over how the state would define “development.” Though Jomo Kenyatta ran in radical circles during his years in London (“Jomo Kenyatta” 1930–40), by the time he took control of independent Kenya during the 1960s his vision for the future was far more conservative. Kenyatta, along with the conservative bloc in the Kenya Africa National Union (KANU), drew from global ideas about development and modernization, as well as an indigenous moral economy of honor won through individualized hard work, and through this they advocated for development through a liberalized capitalist economy.^{Footnote 11} However, radicals within KANU countered this conservative conflation of development with capitalism, arguing instead that Kenyan development should represent a more decisive break with the colonial past. According to this more radical line of thinking, development was defined as the leveling of society through the dismantling of the inequalities of colonialism represented by the social redistribution of wealth, the nationalization of key industries, and the free provision of social services such as medical care and education. Though KANU radicals garnered significant popular support, Kenyatta and other conservative officials systematically excluded them and their view of development from Kenya’s governing structures, both violently and bureaucratically, with assassinations, expulsion from the party, and finally with the political repression of the opposition party created by former KANU members (Ochieng’ 1995:83–109; Branch Reference Branch2011:35–65).^{Footnote 12} Daniel Branch concludes that, by as early as 1966, KANU’s “radical faction had been routed” (Branch Reference Branch2011:58). Consequently, in Kenya’s official post-colonial governmental policy, development and capitalism were interchangeable concepts.

Within this framework for development, tourism was a perfect fit. In 1965, KANU released a sessional paper in which it outlined the party’s view for the future of the Kenyan economy, “African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya.” Despite rhetorical reference to “socialism,” the document was fundamentally a plan to maintain Kenya’s relationship with the large economies of the Western capitalist world and to foster development through economic growth. During the mid-1960s, the Kenyan economy remained largely in the same structural location it had occupied during colonialism, producing agricultural goods for export, with its primary commodities being coffee, tea, sisal, and flowers. Within the overall economy, agriculture and related export areas accounted for over 40 percent of Kenya’s total gross domestic product (GDP), while manufacturing accounted for less than 10 percent (Republic of Kenya 1964). The drafters of the sessional paper identified the central obstacles to the goal of development through economic growth being a lack of foreign-exchange reserves and, critically, indigenous capital from which to enlarge and diversify industry and commerce. The solution, the authors contended, was to promote growth through foreign-direct investment in Kenya. In pursuing this plan, tourism, a potentially rich source of foreign exchange and capital, was central to their vision of Kenya’s economic future.^{Footnote 13}

Part of the attraction of tapping into Western tourism was that the tourist industry itself had been undergoing vast transformations during the mid-twentieth century. Elite leisure travel in Europe has an antique history, but mass tourism is a more recent phenomenon (Korte et al. Reference Korte, Harvie, Schneider and Berghoff2002; Zuelow Reference Zuelow2015). From small-scale, nineteenth-century antecedents, middle-class tourism grew rapidly beginning in the mid-twentieth century with increasing middle-income spending power in Western countries as well as declining prices for airline travel. As previously noted, tourism had already generated USD6.8 billion in 1960, but this only continued to grow, reaching USD97.6 billion by 1980 (Summary Reference Summary1983:1). With these increases in global tourism revenue, Kenyan officials saw a huge market with further potential for expansion that could serve as a source of foreign exchange, but, in order to maximize these possible revenues, a new infrastructure needed to be constructed. More specifically, Kenya needed to not only build roads and hotels and retrofit airports, but also to transform a colonial industry that had been aimed at global elites into one that could accommodate middle-class travelers, allowing Kenya to access the fastest growing consumer class in the world economy.^{Footnote 14}

To achieve these ends, the Kenyan government initiated a comprehensive plan to create a state-nurtured tourism industry. First, transportation issues had to be addressed. By the 1970s, Nairobi International Airport had been reconfigured to accommodate jumbo jets, and Mombasa’s airport was expanded to handle increased air traffic to the coast. Additionally, regulatory restrictions on charter flights, which overwhelmingly carried middle-income travelers, were loosened to allow these cheaper flights to land in Kenya. Finally, visa requirements were eased for tourists arriving from high-frequency countries so that once they landed they could easily leave the airport and head to their destinations. Once the tourists left the airport, they also needed an efficient road system for transportation between Nairobi and the game parks, and between Mombasa and beach hotels, and so road building projects were initiated to facilitate ground transport to established tourist sites and to the newly opening ones in northern and western Kenya. Parastatals also poured money into local hotel construction to increase accommodations for the anticipated influx of tourists, with particular emphasis on building mid-range hotels to support the middle-class tourism market. From 1966 to 1976, the number of hotel beds in Kenya increased from 2,131 to 6,584.^{Footnote 15}

Additionally, the government also set out to refashion the cultures of work and even daily life in Kenya to help promote tourism. Specifically, this meant the expansion and refining of sub-groups within the professional and working classes expressly trained for the tourism market. According to these plans, hotel staff members needed to understand and maintain the international standards of the industry and be conversant in not only English but also other European languages such as German, French, and Italian. Others in daily contact with tourists, such as safari drivers and guides, had to be equally conversant in foreign languages, in addition to having a broad knowledge of Kenyan history and anthropology, and an expertise on the country’s flora and fauna. More fundamentally, the entire population of Kenya needed to be inculcated to understand the importance of tourism so that they would treat tourists they encountered with “civility, respect and courtesy.” This would be accomplished by embedding studies of tourism into the school curriculum and with a national campaign designed at “educating the masses about tourism and the role of citizens in helping the advancement of this industry” (Development of Tourism 1969:19–21).

Evidence suggests (Makonnen et al. Reference Makonnen, Mutemi and Ogala1972) that the Kenyan government had trouble inculcating the entire industry and population into its new tourism ethos, but, in terms of broad economic indicators, the state accomplished many of its goals during the 1960s and 1970s.^{Footnote 16} From its beginning as a small colonial industry for the ultra-wealthy, tourism in post-colonial Kenya experienced a meteoric rise by tapping into the growing global mass tourism market. During the 1960s, the industry grew 20 percent per year. By 1967, more than one hundred thousand tourists traveled to Kenya each year, compared with 60,000 during the colonial period, and by 1969 the tourism industry earned GBP16.2 million, exceeding coffee, the top agricultural product. This growth continued, and by 1977 earnings had reached GBP41.4 million, with coffee and tourism vying year-to-year to be Kenya’s top economic sector.^{Footnote 17}

However, some caution is required when considering this “growth” within Kenya, which speaks to the inequities in the global economy. Since much of the expansion of Kenyan tourism came through cheap charter flights and package tours, this meant that, though numerically more tourists were coming to Kenya, package tours were able to leverage their high-volume businesses to command lower prices for accommodation and transportation. Consequently, this diminished Kenya’s return on its infrastructural investment in tourism accommodations, as the income generated per newly-created bed space was low. These package tours also exposed the Kenyan tourism industry to what development economists call “leakage,” the reality that large percentages of the revenue generated through tourism, especially in countries reliant on foreign-direct investment, are repatriated out of the host country.^{Footnote 18} As many of the arrangements were made through European and American travel agencies, a significant portion of tourism revenue, perhaps as much as 40 percent, remained back in the country of departure. Taken together, Isaac Sindiga (2000:143–44) argues that the Kenyan government was actually subsidizing an unprofitable tourism industry.

Despite these drawbacks, the Kenyan government’s conclusion was that it was dependent on tourism, and the industry’s success was now linked to the nation’s economic future. Rather than retreating from tourism, officials decided the best way to combat the low margins on the package tours was to try to increase the overall number of tourists coming to the country (Sindiga Reference Sindiga and Dieke2000:143–44). However, Kenya was only one of many possible destinations in the growing global tourism economy, and officials realized that they needed to communicate a curated image of “Kenya” abroad in order to attract travelers from those countries with the largest number of potential tourists. Seeking to increase their piece of the growing tourism economy, officials during the 1960s and 1970s created new governmental structures beyond the borders of Kenya to make this a reality.

The Creation of a Tourism-Marketing Infrastructure

To expand their share of the global market, tourism authorities saw the need to connect with Western consumers by vastly increasing the knowledge circulating about Kenyan tourism in Europe and North America. This entailed not only specifically highlighting tourist attractions in Kenya, such as safaris, beaches, and mountains, but also changing how people thought about “Kenya” more generally and its place in Africa and the modern world. However, before any of this was possible, they had to physically construct an infrastructure in the Global North through which they could access the social networks and communication systems necessary to promote Kenyan tourism in these parts of the world. By 1969, the Kenyan government had set up offices in London, New York, and Frankfurt and staffed them primarily with Kenyans whose job it was to market a notion of “Kenya” that officials hoped would create interest and, most importantly, bring more tourists to the newly-independent nation (Republic of Kenya 1971). At the close of the 1960s, these freshly-trained tourism officials were settling into their new foreign offices, and were beginning to map out potential markets and implement strategies to increase Kenya’s share of world tourism.

These new marketing centers faced a tourism economy that functioned through a distinct set of mechanisms, networks, and institutions that determined where and when people traveled and, in consequence, how tourism capital was distributed throughout the globe. More specifically, the highly-coveted package tours were sold to consumers through privately-owned travel agencies, which were the institutional funnel through which Western tourists found their way to destinations around the world. While travel agencies date back to Thomas Cooke’s tours during the nineteenth century, as a mass institution they are linked to the rise of airlines during the twentieth. Since airlines could not afford to have offices in every major city, they hired these agencies to be their representatives. As airlines and tourism grew together, travel agencies proliferated along with them, expanding their services to include packages with hotels and guides. On a day-to-day basis, these travel agencies were represented by travel agents, themselves members of a newly-emergent, middle-class profession of the twentieth century, who were powerful interlocutors between tourists seeking to travel and the airlines, hotels, and, indeed, countries who wanted their money. The opinions travel agents held about vacation destinations, and the consequent packages they suggested to their clients, were critical factors in the geographical distribution of global tourism spending (Feifer Reference Feifer1986:224–25).^{Footnote 19} Consequently, even as office furniture was being selected and additional staff being hired during the late 1960s, Kenyan tourism officials were already strategizing how best to infiltrate these professional networks.

However, initially, the Kenyan government’s financial commitment to its overseas tourism offices in New York, Frankfurt, and London that were responsible for forging these global linkages was limited, spending approximately GBP70,000 annually on all the offices combined. However, by 1970, as part of the program to increase tourist flows to make up for the lower revenue from package tours, the government had expanded its promotional budget and increased the number of overseas offices. In 1970–71, the budget for overseas promotion grew to GBP300,000 per annum, and new offices were opened in Los Angeles, Paris, Stockholm, and Switzerland (Republic of Kenya 1971, 1972). The overseas offices were responsible for the major cities in which they were located, but there were also mobile teams that traveled regionally to small towns and communities to promote Kenya, meeting especially with local travel agents among other people. The London office worked throughout Britain, Paris was responsible for all of Francophone Europe as well as Spain, Stockholm for Northern Europe, and Frankfurt for Central and Eastern Europe. In North America, the New York office covered the East Coast, Midwest, and the southern United States, as well as Eastern Canada, while the Los Angeles (LA) team did promotional work in the western U.S. and Canada.^{Footnote 20} In one letter sent back to Nairobi in 1976, the LA office reported that it would travel to “all major cities within the West Coast region” over the following four months (Letter from Maliti to the Permanent Secretary, February 6, 1976).

This mobility, though, was born of financial need. Due to budgetary constraints, Kenyan tourism officers decided that a mass advertising campaign in the Western media was not a feasible strategy. Instead, they would engage in a face-to-face, mobile marketing campaign moving from town to town, and region to region.^{Footnote 21} The centerpieces of these events were “Kenya Evenings.” The purpose of the Kenya Evening was to bring local travel agents to an informal party where the tourism officers would recreate “Kenya” through invoking the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of East Africa. They often showed documentaries with images of safaris at Maasai Mara and Tsavo East, beach hotels stretching up and down the Kenyan coast on the Indian Ocean, the snow-capped peak of Mt. Kenya, and downtown street scenes of Nairobi. There was almost always a cultural element at the events, which variously included dancers, drummers, musicians playing “Swahili pop music,” and wood carvers creating crafts for the guests (Report: August 1970). In addition to these visual and aural displays, the visiting travel agents were treated to Kenyan beer and cuisine, as well as to the country’s foodstuff exports, such as coffee, fruits, and nuts. In addition to these spectacles, the travel agents were also provided with ample brochures that they could read and share with their clients.^{Footnote 22} Writing in 1970, official P.M. Mullei observed that “it is with these evenings that you can make contacts with those that matter in this industry,” providing a cost-effective way to distribute knowledge about the Kenyan tourism industry in these Western markets (Letter from Mullei to Muiruri 1971).

Within Europe and North America, the other major venues for interpersonal promotion and networking were travel and trade conventions. Situated alongside other countries promoting their own tourism and trade, Kenya brought much of the same approach to these conventions as it did to their Kenya Evenings, drawing the interest of travel agents and other curious guests to their stands through a multi-sensory reproduction of a Kenya vacation. However, though participating in these exhibitions as an independent state, the production of culture in these spaces was not disassociated from the power structures of empire and decolonization, and this was nowhere more evident than during Kenya’s participation in the 1969 Royal Agricultural Show in Stoneleigh, England. At this exhibition, a conflict emerged between Kenyan tourism officials and the Agricultural Society of Kenya, with whom they were sharing a display, over how they would represent themselves. The agricultural society was an institution with roots in the colonial period, dominated then by white farmers, and its postcolonial composition had yet to experience much “Africanization” by 1969. The white Kenyans running the Kenya display in Britain, along with the agricultural show’s organizers, desired a minimalist aesthetic that would conform to their expectations of the British public’s desires. However, tourism officer Muriuki, along with his British colleague K. Meadows, a tourism advisor, wanted to dazzle the audience with spectacle and to mark distinctively the Kenyanness of their display.^{Footnote 23}

Following the exhibition, Muriuki, Meadows, and other tourism officials were concerned that the display had not sufficiently communicated the uniqueness of Kenya as a tourism destination nor explicitly explained that this was a Kenyan government stand, as opposed to one sponsored by the Kenyan Agricultural Society or other private interests. The tourism adviser Meadows felt that Kenya’s stand had lacked “authenticity,” and, in a comment seconded by Muriuki, observed that the British could use that same Kenya stand “for a British Government display at the Nairobi Show” (Meadows 1969; Muriuki 1969). Muriuki went on to express his frustration at how the British and white-settler aesthetic sense had taken precedence at the pavilion at the expense of Kenyan marketing goals, commenting that that it “was obvious that the stand was designed to be a mere beautiful pavilion without the necessary motive to sell Kenya to the British public.” They were able to display the large lion, some animal skins, and handbags, but were not allowed to adorn the site with the official tourism map, posters displaying safari, fishing and beach vacations, and animal-skin rugs. Exasperated that the display was not “African enough,” Muiruki asked the question, “What is wrong with displaying these posters?” They were “eye catching and an effective means of advertising which most countries in the world use to advertise themselves” (Muriuki 1969).

Most egregiously, the tourism marketers’ concept for the flag arrangement was rejected. Initially, they had wanted the five flags above the site to spell out Kenya, each flag having a letter: K-E-N-Y-A. However, the agricultural society insisted that two of its flags fly as well, and only through intense negotiations was it agreed to drop them one foot below the now remaining three Kenyan national flags. Questioning their commitment to the nationalist project, Muriuki wrote that the agricultural society “should have been satisfied with if not proud of the Kenyan National Flag being flown alone at the pavilion.” Suggesting he was not the only one who felt this way, he noted that several “Kenyan Nationals who visited the show made serious enquiries about the flags.” Pointing to the racialized power dynamics that led to the nature of the display, Muriuki observed that only three Africans were involved in the Kenya stand compared to the many Europeans whose voices had drowned theirs out (Muriuki 1969:1–3).

Less than ten years after independence, the limits and boundaries of nation, sovereignty, and decolonization were in evidence in the construction and performance of the Kenya display at the Royal Agricultural Show. For the Kenyan tourism contingent, their desire to unambiguously display Kenyan national sovereignty in that hall on British soil was articulated through their disappointment at how it was not totally clear that the stand was produced by the Kenyan government. The Kenyan delegation realized the symbolic significance of having the flags of the white-settler dominated agricultural society next to theirs, as well as the visual effect of minimalizing the Kenyanness of the displays. Muriuki concluded his reflections by asserting the need for Kenyan control over Kenyan events. For future conventions, he requested that actual government officials be sent rather than members of civil-society associations, and that “Kenya’s representative in country … be considered as head of the pavilion” (Muriuki 1969).^{Footnote 24} In other words, Kenyans committed to the nation-building project needed to be in control over how their image was being crafted and presented.

These exhibitions, along with the Kenya Evenings, were central pillars of the Kenyan government’s approach to marketing its tourism to the West. This mobile, less expensive marketing put government representatives in rooms with travel agents across Europe and North America, positioning Kenya to make the contacts necessary to expand its global presence as a tourism destination. However, at the same time that these tourism marketers were traveling from convention to convention, rented hall to rented hall, hundreds of European and North American journalists were also landing and being welcomed in Kenya throughout the 1970s on all-expenses paid tours of the country. Partnering with airlines, tour companies, and hotels, the government provided free “familiarization” tours to Western journalists in exchange for their writing travel articles for their newspapers or creating documentaries for television. Through the cost-sharing between industry and government, this was still a far cheaper option than direct advertising, and it provided the more “authentic” opinion of an “objective” journalist recommending a trip to Tsavo East to see the lions and elephants, or to Mombasa to stay in a beachside hotel.^{Footnote 25}

These familiarization tours added a crucial final piece to the expansive marketing infrastructure that the Kenyan state developed during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Europeans and North Americans imagining where they might spend their next holiday could open their daily newspaper and find a lively review of Kenyan tourism written by their own local travel writer. They would then be able to go off to a travel agency and book a trip with an agent who had recently attended a Kenya Evening or seen the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife’s latest stand at the local travel convention. Moreover, the creation of such governmental structures can be situated within the broader context of Kenya’s post-colonial political economy. In President Jomo Kenyatta’s dream for a new Kenya, government and capital were to work hand in hand, with the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife directing Western tourists and their money to Kenya, with mostly private businesses transporting, feeding, and accommodating them during their stay in the country. Through these mechanisms, an entangled global “idea of Kenya” was emerging and circulating around the world through the micro-level of daily interpersonal interactions between tourism marketers and travel agents, and through macro-structural, mass-media communications, as newspapers described Kenya, “safariland,” to their audiences.

Tourism Marketing and the “Idea of Kenya”

The political independence that came to African states during the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond in some ways created a radical set of global communicative conditions. With the colonial apparatus receding, Africans who took control of independent governments had the opportunity to craft their own narratives of nation, modernity, and tradition, free from the direct constrictions of colonial repression and control. In charge of their own states, African officials could put the energy of their governments behind rewriting the Eurocentric vision of the world that had so long dominated narratives produced by Europe about itself and its colonial societies. However, as much scholarship has aptly demonstrated the very real limits that global capitalism and the geo-politics of the Cold War placed on African autonomy and sovereignty, so too have the cultural projects of post-colonial African states been constrained by the economies and political arrangements that empire left behind. The discourses that constituted the marketing campaigns of the Kenyan Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife during the 1960s and 1970s allow us to see the new forms of African agency that emerged in the postcolonial world, while also bringing forward the entangled nature of the ideas produced in these endeavors (Cooper Reference Cooper2008).

The question of postcolonial African agency, authorship, and autonomy becomes immediately complicated when considering how tourism marketing’s “idea of Kenya” was actually produced. Perhaps the most prominent force behind the wider promotional strategy was Guyanan intellectual and Pan-Africanist Ras Makonnen. In a long and well-traveled life that included lengthy stays in Britain and Ghana, Makonnen was given refuge in Kenya by his old friend Jomo Kenyatta after Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah was ousted from power in a 1966 coup d’état (Makonnen Reference Makonnen and King1973). Upon arrival, Makonnen was quickly provided a job in the Ministry of Tourism and lived out his life in Kenya working as a tourism adviser until his death in 1983. Makonnen did not officially hold the top position in marketing, but in practice he exerted great influence over the ideas presented to the rest of the world, reading through, marking up, and approving the many texts that eventually became the basis of the larger promotional strategy.^{Footnote 26} Additionally, following the gradualist approach to Africanization put forward in the sessional paper of 1965, many Europeans were also hired to work on tourism promotion.^{Footnote 27} Therefore, while Kenyans constituted the majority of the staff at the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, both in Kenya and in the offices abroad, they held only partial authorship over the discourses they were spreading through their marketing efforts.

This can be seen in the Kenya: Agents’ Sales Manual, a 152-page presentation of Kenyan tourism. A promotional document, the manual was circulated to all the tourism offices both in Kenya and abroad, and was the basis for all the brochures and posters that were displayed and distributed at events (Kenya: Agents’ Sales Manual 1976).^{Footnote 28} Of the thirty-three credited authors of the manual, only two were African. However, the content for the volume was created in collaboration with the staff working in the many tourism-related government entities, which by this point were staffed mostly by Africans, so we can surmise that their conceptions of how to think about fishing, wildlife, transportation, and hotels were part of the production of the ideas for this document (Kenya: Agents’ Sales Manual 1976).^{Footnote 29} This manual, therefore, was multi-authored, with input from European and African writers, African officials who shared information about their areas of specialization, and finally the editing hand of Makonnen, a man of the African diaspora whose sensibility was shaped by his upbringing in Guyana, life in England and Ghana, and the international currents of African nationalism and Pan-Africanism (Makonnen Reference Makonnen and King1973). Tourism discourse about Kenya was globally constructed, yet through a specific assemblage of residual colonial structural inequalities that continued to open spaces for white voices to speak for Kenyans at the level of government. However, these marketing materials were also importantly shaped by the transformed position of Africans and the diasporan Makonnen in the state, who now had more formalized roles as writers, editors, and contributors to their global image.

Combining the sales manual with other remaining documents from the 1960s and 1970s, a series of tropes emerge that dominated the idea of Kenya that officials were selling to the Western world. Andrew Norton, in an analysis of safari brochures from the 1990s, has argued that tourism discourse constructs Kenya as an ahistorical space, inhabited by the “timeless” and “noble” Maasai, who wander through the primeval naturalism of the savannah, over which they and wild animals have sole dominion. He charges that this discourse ignores the long, cosmopolitan urban history of the coast, and focuses instead on a romantic pastoralism, thus minimalizing Kenya’s modernity. For American and European tourists reading these brochures, this romantic naturalism is contrasted with the destruction of nature in the West by industrialism and modernity (Norton Reference Norton1996). Norton does correctly observe the primeval theme that runs through some safari promotion during the 1990s. However, if we expand the scope a bit, we can actually see a much broader and more complex concept of “Kenya” that was being circulated.^{Footnote 30}

During the 1960s and 1970s, the larger marketing campaign sought to portray Kenya as a “land of contrasts.”^{Footnote 31} Rather than simply a space of primeval nature and ahistorical tradition, tourism marketing created an idea of Kenya as the center of African post-colonial modernity, while also a place where romantic naturalism could still be found. The foundation of this binary was the modern urbanity of Nairobi and the primeval naturalism of the game parks just a short drive away. In the sessional paper of 1969, officials were already observing that, in addition to their more conventional attractions, e.g., game reserves, Kenya was also home to Nairobi, an attraction in itself. Nairobi was presented as “a well-developed modern metropolis comparable to other big cities in the world” and as such this “modern and sophisticated” city’s “already important role … as host to international conferences and similar functions should be expanded.” Nairobi was, according to the promotional literature, an international capital on scale with any in the world, which was already attracting and should continue to bring in business, political, and associational conferences, all while being “situated right in the center of Kenya’s tourist attractions” (Sessional Paper No. 8 1969:7).^{Footnote 32}

The vision of a modern, international conference destination took on material form when the Kenyatta Conference Center opened in Nairobi’s town center in 1973. Located a short walk from city hall and parliament, the Kenyatta Conference Center was architectural nation-building par excellence, embodying the goals of development, as it was constructed specifically to attract international visitors and conferences along with their foreign exchange, as well as potential investment capital. A two-building complex, one structure was a 28-story, tall cylinder tower and the other a short, circular pavilion; together they symbolically proclaimed Nairobi and Kenya as an international hub. Articulating this sentiment, Kenyatta noted that the center displayed “something of Kenya’s beauty and her people working together for their continued development and welfare through the spirit of HARAMBEE” (Kenyatta Conference Center c. early 1970s). Mwai Kibaki, future president of Kenya but at that time minister of finance and economic planning, remarked that the center was “a landmark on the road to our future. A prosperous future” (Kenyatta Conference Center c. early 1970s). While this conference center was a symbol of Kenya’s modern internationalism, its promotional brochure circulated to travel agents and others around the globe also juxtaposed this modernity with the naturalism that was to be found just outside the city. On the front cover of the brochure, the most dominant image was a stalking lion, taking up nearly three quarters of the page, with a small graphic of the conference center below. Beneath the lion one reads the marketing pitch: “Unconventional conventions, just a lion’s roar from the wildest adventure left to man” (Kenyatta Conference Center c. early 1970s).

If we include other publications created and distributed through the Kenyan tourism marketing networks during the 1970s, not only does the modern/primeval binary continue as a consistent theme, but the constrictions global capitalism placed upon Kenyan discourses about tourism also become readily apparent. While African travelers, most of them traveling for business, purchased approximately 25 percent of the bed space in Kenyan hotels, tourism officials were not concerned with attracting them to the Kenyatta Conference Center or other destinations (Republic of Kenya 1974). It was European and North American visitors the government was seeking, and thus the images produced within the promotional materials worked to make Kenya a knowable and familiar space to Western audiences, corresponding to a particular gendered and racial order, and one not so distant from the colonial past (Nairobi Handbook c. early 1970s). Sketch drawings of large, modern meetings at the Kenyatta Conference Center, equipped with the latest technologies, displayed rooms full of white men engaged in discussions, with another image showing other white businessmen working in their office with a young, racially-ambiguous female secretary easing their administrative burdens. A white woman enters a different scene pages later, but only once the men have retired to the restaurant where an African waiter approaches with their meal as they enjoy their view of the city. Elsewhere in the brochure, women in gendered spaces become more prominent, and whiteness as a feature of Nairobi’s landscape becomes naturalized outside the conference center, as seen in photographs of leisure activities in which a young man and woman dine at an upscale restaurant, and another photo where a tuxedoed man, evoking a James Bond fantasy, is playing cards at a casino, accompanied by two women (Kenyatta Conference Center c. early 1970s).

While the actual composition of those who traveled inside Kenya was more diverse, the discourses that Kenya’s marketers produced were aimed specifically at a Western, and quite clearly white, demographic. Speaking to this audience, the overriding message from the collected tourism promotion of the 1960s and 1970s was that Kenya was a place in which these tourists could come and have all their expected comforts met, yet also see things inexorably foreign to their everyday experiences.^{Footnote 33} As Tourism Minister J.L.M. Shako (Reference Shako1971) put it, “you can step back into past traditions or into our modern towns and cities.” In the urbanism of Nairobi, tourists could “eat some of the best food in the world” prepared by “world-famous restaurateurs,” stay in sophisticated hotels, while using the amply available car services to move around. To allay any possible fears concerning public health and hygiene, potential visitors were assured that the city “enjoys a standard of health which compares most favorably with that of healthy cities in Europe or America,” with “entirely safe” water supplies and strictly monitored food-safety procedures.”^{Footnote 34} When visiting Nairobi, “In one direction the view is the prehistoric age of the mammals; in the other, a 20th century city of half a million inhabitants—and, for the moment, the two extremes are complementary and compatible” (Kenya: Agents’ Sales Manual 1976). These discourses were put into practice through the many documentaries, brochures, posters, and other media that were distributed throughout Western Europe and North America through the tourism infrastructure that the government had created. Kenyan tourism officers, well versed in these principles, shared them with the many travel agents and other visitors they encountered at their Kenya Evenings and exhibitions.

These promotional ideas about Kenya and its tourism also entered into global circuits of knowledge through the many journalists who visited Kenya during the 1960s and 1970s on familiarization tours. Many of these journalists who traveled to Kenya to write feature pieces for their newspapers arrived with ideas about Africa shaped by centuries of imperialism and Western literature. Kenya, one journalist explained to his readers, was composed of “tribes” with “the deepest, darkest hatreds that divide its black people,” while another travel writer explained that “outside cities the African is still the primitive, unlearned individual pursuing his tribal ways” (Dowdy 1972a; Meredith Reference Meredith1974a). Ancillary to these explicit racial stereotypes, a theme of adventure fantasy that was derived from nostalgia for a bygone colonial era also dominated these articles. Writers visiting Kenya drew on the tropes of the “white hunter” with his wife and “native” guide, dressed in colonial khakis and stalking animal prey in the savannah. This image was most notably produced by Ernest Hemingway in his writings on East Africa and permeated travel journalism during the 1970s (Hemingway Reference Hemingway1966, Reference Hemingway2003).

However, these articles, rather than simply being the product of a unidirectional othering process, were composed of entangled discourses. As these journalists were in Kenya at the invitation of the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, officials crucially shaped the image of their country that was rendered in these Western newspapers, as the tropes and phrases produced by tourism marketing made their way into the language and photographs of the articles. Earl Dowdy, the travel editor for the Detroit Free Press who went on a familiarization tour in 1972, wrote a three-part series for his newspaper, and the two photos for the first article evoked the dualism of Kenyan tourism that officials were working to promote. One photo was of a Turkana woman with large plate earrings meant to embody tradition next to an image of another Kenyan woman who was wearing a button-down shirt, jeans, and holding a purse, each of these fashion items clearly signifying her modernity. The caption below the image read: “Worlds apart.” Throughout the first article, Dowdy could not hide his obsession with Hemingway and the safari fantasy, but he realized, sitting in his “air-conditioned room at the intercontinental hotel,” that the only “danger” he faced was the traffic of taxi cabs outside. His dreams of primeval Africa had to wait until the second article, when he left the city (Dowdy 1972a, 1972b). Two years later, Jack Meredith, writing for the Canadian Windsor Times, observed that Nairobi indeed was, as the “hackneyed expression” had it, a “city of contrasts.” After this explicit invocation of the language of tourism marketing, he then went on to admit by the end of his second article that “Kenya is as the travel folders say, a land of contrasts” (Meredith Reference Meredith1974a, Reference Meredith1974b).

The discourses that Kenyan tourism marketing produced were not uniformly “African,” but neither were the ideas presented by these travel journalists wholly “Western.” The writers of the tourism promotional materials and the tourism officers who interacted with the journalists clearly planted concepts, phrases, and binaries into the minds of these journalists which then made it on to the printed page that readers in Detroit, Windsor, and elsewhere used to construct new, even if simplistic and unsatisfying, ways of thinking about Kenya and Africa.

Concluding Postscript

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Kenyan government, controlled by conservative officials committed to the premise of liberal modernization theory, chose a path towards development through the narrow options that the post-colonial world offered. Tourism was a rapidly growing source of global revenue, and officials in Kenya and many other decolonizing countries mobilized the resources of their newly-independent states to try to direct the flows of tourism capital towards their economies. Kenya has been among the most successful at this strategy in Africa (Fletcher & Morakabati Reference Fletcher and Morakabati2008). By the 1980s, tourism accounted for more than 12 percent of the country’s GDP, employed 140,000 people directly and another 350,000 indirectly, and earned on its own close to the combined incomes of coffee and tea, the country’s two primary exports (Akama Reference Akama2002:5). However, by the end of the twentieth century, the fragile linkage that tourism marketers had forged between themselves and Western tourists, the global pathway through which tourism capital came to Kenya, was slowly weakening.

This was partially due to increased competition from Southern and other East African countries that offered similar tourism experiences (Akama Reference Akama2002:7), but also because the Kenyan government began to lose control over the production of its global reputation that it had been crafting since independence. During the 1980s and 1990s, as many government-run programs were privatized across Africa, so too was tourism promotion, and by the end of the twentieth century “the marketing of Kenya’s tourism product in tourist-generating countries, particularly in Europe and North America, [was] under the control of overseas tour operators and travel agents” (Akama & Kieti 2007:744). Kenya’s loss of control over its global image, as well as the mounting saturation of the safari tourism industry in the region, was then paired with increasing Western media coverage during the 1990s and early 2000s of political violence and terrorist attacks in the country. This fostered the perception that Kenya was an “unstable” destination, and as a result tourism receipts, from their relative high point during the 1980s, began to slip (Akama Reference Akama2002; Fletcher & Morakabati Reference Fletcher and Morakabati2008). The effects of this changing perception were at first relatively small, but, more recently, the industry cratered when the extremist group al-Shabaab began to launch attacks on Kenya after the government invaded Somalia in 2011. Consequently, many Western states placed travel warnings on Kenya, after which the number of tourists from these countries, still Kenya’s primary market, dramatically declined. From 2011 to 2014, the number of holiday visitors from Europe, Canada, and the United States decreased by almost 28 percent. In 2011, Moi International Airport in Mombasa received forty chartered flights per week from Europe, but by July 2015 that number had dropped to three.^{Footnote 35} Many hotels across the country closed permanently, while others temporarily closed during the low season, and thousands of employees lost their jobs (Masese Reference Masese2014). Overall, tourism receipts dropped every year from 2011 to 2015, while employment in the sector contracted by nearly 25 percent.^{Footnote 36}

This recent economic crisis and the longer history of Kenyan tourism marketing demonstrate the global entanglement between discursive structures and the world economy. The global tourism system, dominated by the spending choices of tourists from North America and Europe, has created conditions in which many Kenyans, including thousands of low-income individuals, are directly dependent upon what Western consumers think of the abstract notion of “Kenya.” The crushing materiality of this discursive relationship could be seen daily on the Kenyan coast during the crisis, not only in the quiet halls and dining areas of semi-deserted hotels, but also in the experiences of struggling taxi drivers in front of these hotels, tour-guide operators without clients, and curio sellers along the beach, waiting for customers who never seemed to come.^{Footnote 37}

The response of the Kenyan government to this reality has been a familiar one. In September 2015, President Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo, hosted “Kenya Week” in Milan, Italy. Flanked by tourism officials and representatives of Kenya’s private industries, the president optimistically reflected afterwards that their “trip largely succeeded in correcting perception about Kenya, which has had negative reference before while we have some of the most attractive investment possibilities in the world.” Along with this “Kenya Week,” the government launched a new branding of the country, Make it Kenya (Okath 2015), and increased its funding to the ministry of tourism by over KSH5 billion. (nearly USD50 million) in order to, among other priorities, “market Kenya as a preferred tourist destination” and “to counter the negative publicity occasioned by restricted travel advisories in our key source markets [Western countries]” (Republic of Kenya 2016:221). Facing the precipitous decline of tourism receipts, the Kenyan government has tried to reassert its control over its global image, and to re-forge the country’s crumbling linkage with Western consumers.

While the 2015 “Kenya Week” hosted in Milan was reminiscent of the direct interpersonal strategies of the “Kenya Evenings” during the early post-colonial decades, government marketers have also adapted their approach to new communication technologies, producing a series of online promotional videos. In the digital campaign, Kenya as a “land of contrasts” remains the overarching theme and the intended audience is still white and Western, but some of the content of the message has changed. With an industry reeling from al-Shabaab attacks, the marketing pitch is no longer simply informing consumers about Nairobi’s urbanity and the natural wonders just beyond it. They are now also trying to assuage fear. The videos on the Make it Kenya website are specifically tailored to this political-psychological context. They feature a tourism expert and a travel writer, as well as a couple and a retiree visiting the country (all of them white, except for one African guide), and the message in the videos is quite clear: that of white bodies in the Kenyan landscape looking to assure other (white) Westerners that it is “safe” to come to Kenya.^{Footnote 38} To “modernity” and “primeval nature,” twenty-first century tourism marketing has now added “security.”

Overall, the place of tourism in Kenya’s economic future is at present ambiguous. In addition to the declines since the 1990s, the shift toward extractive oil industries in the north suggests that tourism might lose its place as one of the country’s top revenue earners. However, while extractives may in time produce more revenue, the oil industry seems unlikely to create as many jobs as tourism. Therefore, within the narrow possibilities that the global economy offers to Kenyans for ways to earn income, tourism will likely remain a primary option. Moreover, optimism about the industry is returning, as 2016 saw the first increase in tourism earnings since 2012, with a 17.8 percent improvement and more growth projected for 2017 (Republic of Kenya 2017:207; World Travel and Tourism Council 2017:4). One of the principle reasons for this change, according to a government report, was “aggressive marketing in the domestic and international markets” (Republic of Kenya 2017:207). For the foreseeable future, then, the livelihoods of many will continue to be tied to the entangled and contested idea of Kenya as it is revised, reproduced, and circulated throughout the world.