Introduction
In a recent programmatic article, Freya Higgins-Desbiolles calls attention to the ongoing “symbiosis between tourism and imperialism.” To address the ongoing injustices and dependencies tourism produces, she calls for a “critical historical grounding” of tourism and an “engagement with [its] wider structural contexts.”Footnote 1 This article contributes to this historicisation and contextualisation by focusing, in particular, on the transition from colonial to post-colonial tourism. I argue that analysing this period and its specific historical actors is crucial to understanding how the symbiosis between tourism and imperialism could outlast the colonial era and what room to manoeuvre this left the independent states in their tourism policies.
As Andreas Greiner and Mikko Toivanen point out their introduction to this special issue tourism was entangled with colonialism from the start. This also applies to tourism in Africa.Footnote 2 However, after the Second World War tourism became part of what Corey Ross calls the colonising powers’ “technocratic programme of developmental imperialism”Footnote 3 that was aimed at “modernising” the colonies through rapid economic growth. The primary goal of this program was not to improve Africans’ living standards but to further reconstruction in Europe and provide struggling imperial powers with additional foreign currency. While those powers strove to intensify their exploitation of Africa's natural resources, they also expanded their measures to conserve them.Footnote 4 Tourism – especially nature tourism – promised to resolve the contradiction between resource extraction and conservation by offering a way to consume nature with apparently little impact. Hence, it became an integral part of the post-war development agenda, albeit one that has received little scholarly attention so far.
When most African states gained independence during the 1960s, tourism presented them with a serious dilemma.Footnote 5 On the one hand, tourism promised to stimulate economic growth, provide much needed foreign currency, and create employment opportunities. The leisure industry's rapid proliferation in Europe, especially in Italy and Spain, had demonstrated the macro-economic significance of something so mundane as holidays. Accordingly, international organisations and economic experts offered further support for tourism development. On the other hand, international tourism had the potential to threaten the economic independence of post-colonial states and perpetuate colonial stereotypes, as well as international and local power imbalances and inequalities. The newly elected governments had to deal with this “colonial baggage.” As I will demonstrate in the case of East Africa, there was no simple solution.
East Africa is particularly suitable for examining the question of how tourism became a development strategy and what consequences this had for post-colonial states. The region looks back on over a century of shared tourism history, but Kenya and Tanzania, the two countries I focus on in this paper, approached tourism and its colonial legacies in diverging ways after independence. To trace their respective tourism histories, I draw on published reports and newspaper articles, historical research literature, in particular, from tourism scholars of various disciplines, as well as archival sources from the National Archives in London, the United Nations World Tourism Organization Archive in Madrid, the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi, the Historical Archive on Tourism in Berlin, and Deutsches Tagebucharchiv [German Diary Archive] in Emmendingen.
I will start by examining the establishment and work of the East African Tourist Travel Association, which was the first actor to pursue a distinct tourism strategy for the region as part of Britain's late colonial development strategies after the Second World War. In the second section I discuss why tourism under the auspices of the association was clearly a colonial endeavour, dominated by members of the settler society, who linked it to conservation concerns and practices and propagated notions of East Africa as an untouched wilderness. In the third section I explore the different tourism strategies Kenya and Tanzania pursued throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, in the concluding outlook, I address some of the general problems that tourism development, with its colonial baggage, poses for post-colonial states.
Boosting Travel to Save the Empire
During the first decades of the twentieth century, East Africa developed into a popular travel destination for affluent sports hunters from North America and Europe. They were catered to by a growing local tourism industry that involved a variety of actors, from local Africans who worked as caravan porters, camp staff, and skinners, to game wardens and the so-called professional hunters, who acted as tour guides. The hub of this tourism industry was the newly dedicated capital of Kenya, Nairobi, which had become the commercial and cultural centre for the growing number of European settlers and was easily accessible via the port of Mombasa and the Uganda Railway. From there, the tour companies set out on lengthy safaris into Kenya and its neighbouring colonies Tanganyika and Uganda.Footnote 6 Those luxurious “champagne safaris” did not yet attract a large audience, but they would shape ideas about luxury wildlife tourism and Eastern Africa for years to come.Footnote 7
Two technological and economic developments revolutionised tourism during those first decades. The first was the spread of automobiles, which simplified and individualised travel.Footnote 8 The second was the enhancement of photo and later also film cameras, which were greatly reduced in size and thus easier to transport. Cameras allowed for a new, resource-friendly form of “hunting” animals and helped to market tourism to East Africa in a new way. (Moving) images familiarised a broader audience with its unique natural attractions, appealed to more travellers, and generated support for the conservation of wildlife.Footnote 9 The concept of the photographic safari was more compatible with middle class sensibilities and leisure habits and thus drew new tourists to Eastern Africa after the Second World War.Footnote 10 As wildlife tourism changed from an elite pastime to a leisure activity that attracted broader audiences its economic prospects rose. This put tourism in East Africa on the political agenda.
Britain's economic crisis after the Second World War prompted a more systematic tourism policy for the region. In May 1948 a group of British colonial officials and representatives of some larger transportation, tourism, and oil corporations formed the East African Tourist Travel Association (EATTA). “It needs an organization for a publicity campaign, directed mainly in the present instance to hard currency countries in an endeavour to assist in the current economic crisis by encouraging the tourist from those areas to spend his money in East Africa,” explained Reginald Robins, one of the founding members. “Any step which can be taken now to ease the hard currency position should be introduced without delay […].”Footnote 11 Advancing tourism to save the British economy was by no means an isolated East African strategy. By the end of 1949 the Commonwealth Liaison Committee appointed a working group “to consider measures to encourage tourism in the Commonwealth with the primary object of increasing dollar earnings from this source.”Footnote 12 A few months later the British Travel Association published a brochure that advertised the United Kingdom alongside Jamaica and Barbados, Malta and Cyprus, Malaya, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and East Africa as “a variety of fascinating and delightful British territories [that] awaits your exploration”Footnote 13 So the development of tourism in East Africa was indeed part of a broader British development agenda.Footnote 14
Since EATTA outlasted the end of the colonial era in East Africa – albeit by only a few years – it is particularly suitable for examining the role tourism played in this late phase of colonialism. The few scholars who have explored the history of the association all agree on its importance for tourism in the region, even beyond independence, but they have largely ignored that it was an integral part of late colonial development policies.Footnote 15 It is important to acknowledge that fostering tourism in East Africa was part of a larger political agenda aimed at making African colonies more profitable and legitimising colonial rule in the new international language of development.Footnote 16
EATTA's stated goal was to “promote[,] foster and maintain tourist traffic” and “to encourage the improvement and development of travel and allied services […] in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar.”Footnote 17 Following this aim the association became a gathering point for local as well as international travel companies and led a quite successful publicity campaign for over fifteen years until its dissolution in 1965. It lobbied the colonial and later the independent governments in all matters concerning tourism policy, to relax customs and immigration restrictions, construct new roads and hotels, and to designate certain areas, in particular national parks, as tourism destinations. To publicise the region, it cooperated with local travel organisations, encouraged air and shipping lines to improve their services to the East African ports, distributed information to international tour operators and travel agencies and opened information centres in Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, and Mombasa, as well as abroad in London, New York, Durban, and Salisbury. EATTA also produced its own advertising material – travel brochures, maps and even films.Footnote 18
Similar to post-war tourism development efforts in Europe this campaign initially targeted primarily the US-American market in an effort to close the “dollar gap.”Footnote 19 To gain better access to this market EATTA joined the American Society of Travel Agents as an allied member in 1949.Footnote 20 But by the 1960s the economic situation in Europe had improved considerably, so upper- and middle-class Europeans became a target group as well. International arrivals rose from 27,290 in 1950 to 98,850 in 1965.Footnote 21 This was rather moderate compared to the Kenyan tourism boom in later years, but still considered a success at the time.Footnote 22
EATTA also represented East Africa on an international level. To develop the local tourism industry in accordance with international conventions it became a founding member of the International Union of National Tourist Organisations (IUOTO) and actively participated in its annual conferences as well as its Regional Commission for Africa.Footnote 23 In 1949 EATTA also hosted the Third International Congress of African Touring in Nairobi.Footnote 24
In many respects EATTA thus resembled other (mostly national) tourism boards that emerged around the world throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Tourism development gained widespread political, economic, and scholarly support during this time. It was an integral part of reconstruction in post-war Europe, favoured by many US policymakers over foreign aid to build up other export industries as it did not threaten their own national economy.Footnote 25 Advocates of tourism as a development strategy also somewhat naively assumed that tourism, unlike other industries, did not need many resources to develop and consumed hardly any.Footnote 26 Therefore it seemed well-suited to boost all kind of economies, be they market oriented or planned, domestic or colonial. The founders of EATTA shared this enthusiasm and hence differed little from other “travel boosters”Footnote 27 at the time. So, what was distinctly colonial about tourism development in East Africa?
Colonial Elites, Fortress Conservation, and the Myth of Wild Africa
Three things made early tourism development in East Africa a clearly colonial endeavour. First, the tourism industry was dominated by colonial elites. They used EATTA as a vehicle to navigate the transition from a colonial to a post-colonial economy, strengthening the links to international organisation and companies and safeguarding their own positions within the industry. Second, tourism policies were closely tied to colonial conservation strategies that often resulted in the eviction and disenfranchisement of people living in close proximity to national parks or conservation areas. Third, the conjunction of tourism and wildlife conservation meant that colonial motives and stereotypes remained central to the marketing of East Africa.
Tourism in East Africa remained a project of colonial elites under the auspices of EATTA. Most of the local companies who joined the association were owned and run by members of the settler community.Footnote 28 Established safari outfitters like Safariland and newcomers like Ker and Downey maintained strict racial hierarchies within their companies, employing Africans only in subservient positions as drivers, gun bearers, trackers, and staff for the safari camps. To them big game hunting was more than just a source of income. It was part of the extravagant lifestyle of the colonial elite and closely linked to the making of the white settler community in East Africa. It was not by accident that the professional hunters called themselves “white hunters” and largely kept to themselves in the East African Hunters Professional Association (EAPHA).Footnote 29 By organising luxury safaris for international guests and advertising East Africa as a sportsman's paradise they propagated their unique connection to the land and its wildlife, naturalised the racial hierarchy that structured colonial life, and bolstered their claims to minority rule.Footnote 30
However, within settler society tourism could provide chances for upward mobility. African Hunting Safaris, the third safari outfitter to join EATTA, was run by Ikram Hassan, who belonged to the Indian minority in Kenya. Professional hunter Brian Herne called him “one of a few men of brown complexion” to become “a full-fledged ‘white hunter’.” However, Hassan never joined EAPHA. Even though he was sought after by international clients he did not entrench on the other companies’ hunting grounds but specialised instead in elephant hunting rather close to the coast.Footnote 31 This suggests that a select few educated and wealthy men of colour could enter the tourism industry before independence, but only as long as they did not disrupt the status quo of settler society.
The Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant Abraham Block also managed to rise within settler society through his activities in the tourism sector. He had worked as a farmer, butcher, cattle transporter, land broker, furniture dealer and milk supplier, before acquiring the Norfolk Hotel in 1927. By the time Block joined EATTA he also owned the New Stanley. The two hotels were considered the best addresses in Nairobi and particularly popular with safari tourists. Over the following years Block Hotels would own and/or manage several hotels along the Kenyan coast as well as various game lodges in national parks.Footnote 32 Abraham's son, Jack Block, served as president of the East African Hotelkeeper Association and worked as chairman of Ker and Downey during the 1950s. He also became vice-president of EATTA at some point during the 1950s or early 1960s.Footnote 33 By this point the Block family had been well integrated into Kenya's upper class.
Despite their different backgrounds the professional hunters and hoteliers that joined EATTA belonged to a rather close-knit group of settlers. Some of them were established, others aspiring members of the colonial upper class, but they all had an interest in shaping the tourism industry in ways that would uphold their privileges in the future. While it was not yet clear at the end of the 1940s how soon the East African territories would achieve independence, the Colonial Office in London did envision a gradual transition to self-government. Scared by this prospect, settlers in Kenya and Tanzania exerted pressure on local governments to safeguard their political and economic dominance.Footnote 34 EATTA membership offered them a vehicle to navigate the transition from colonial to post-colonial economy, to strengthen or establish links with international companies and organisations and to safeguard their own positions within the industry.
Through EATTA, local tour operators and hoteliers were able to exert influence on the colonial administration, forge alliances with conservationists, establish contacts with major foreign travel companies, and represent their interests at the international level. A good example of those interconnections is Denis Owen Mathews, a former British government official who had moved to Kenya after the war. As EATTA's long-term general manager he signed responsible for much of EATTA's publicity campaign and represented the association at international meetings and conferences. His son, Terry, became a professional hunter, worked for Ker and Downey as well as EAPHA, and eventually opened his own safari business in 1967.Footnote 35 For settlers like the Mathews, tourism thus became a way to secure their future in East Africa beyond the end of British colonialism. Philipp Beverly, longtime chairman of EAPHA, noted in his memoir that after independence “[d]roves of young men – and some not so young” entered the safari industry “for the life and the money were both very good. Many of them were people whose farms had been acquired for African ownership and who turned to tourism, as an alternative to joining the throngs emigrating to other parts of the world.”Footnote 36
Another defining feature of tourism in East Africa during the late colonial era was its strong association with what Daniel Brockington has termed “fortress conservation.”Footnote 37 Responding to the pressure of local and international conservationist the British administration turned several wildlife reserves into national parks during the 1940s and 1950s. In doing so they placed the territories under the control of the state, exposed them to international scrutiny, and prohibited any economic use other than tourism.Footnote 38 With the establishment of national parks and other conservation areas local residents like the Somali inhabitants of Nairobi National Park or the Maasai pastoralists living on the Serengeti plain were often evicted and lost their access to lands that had been integral to their economic and cultural survival.Footnote 39 Once the areas had been turned into successful destinations for wildlife tourism it became exceedingly difficult to revise those injustices.
This rush of conservation occurred at a time when independence movements gathered power in East Africa and the end of European rule loomed on the horizon. After decades of framing Africans as the main threat to wildlife, conservationists and colonial officials now set about creating governance structures that would secure European influence over people and nature even after decolonisation.Footnote 40 Mervyn Cowie, a settler and already well-known conservationist at the time, was among the most ardent advocates of this process.Footnote 41 As the first director of the Royal National Parks of Kenya he became a founding member of EATTA and the one insisting that the big safari companies were invited to join. Later he acted as the association's vice-president for several years, closely entangling tourism development with conservation policy.Footnote 42
From the mid-1950s onwards Cowie and Mathews met for annual “games conferences” with representatives from EAPHA, the Game Departments of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, as well as the National Parks of Kenya and Tanganyika to discuss hunting quotas, measures against poaching, and quality control for safari guides.Footnote 43 When the conference members received an alarmist report about “Native Poaching” on the edge of the Serengeti National Park, it was Mathews who forwarded their resolution to the East African High Commission asserting that the quantity of poached animals in a single district of Tanganyika surpassed the tally of those shot by professional hunters and tourists across the entirety of East Africa and demanding further measures to “conserve the wild game which is our major tourist attraction.”Footnote 44 Roderick P. Neumann is therefore right when he argues that EATTA's appeals to the colonial administration effectively persuaded the authorities that the creation of national parks constituted “a pivotal economic development strategy.”Footnote 45
The influence of the safari industry also led to a continuous revival of the colonial “myth of wild Africa.”Footnote 46 EATTA advertised the region's wildlife areas as a pristine natural paradise, unspoilt by human interference, yet safe and picturesque. One of its earliest publications, a map of the region created by Mathews himself, depicts Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda as a unified “Land of Sunshine,” a colourful idyllic Eden full of lovingly drawn animals. Only a few humans populate the map; they seem to signify either ethnic groups or leisure activities like fishing and hunting. In contrast, the various means of transportation – trains, ships, cars and planes – are presented in great detail. The map emphasised that “wilderness,” in particular wildlife, was East Africa's main tourist attraction and that colonial modernisation had made this wilderness easily and safely accessible to the modern tourist.Footnote 47 Variations of this map, albeit less well drawn, were issued, and reproduced in travel and hotel brochures at least till 1965.Footnote 48 The short films that EATTA produced delivered a similar message.Footnote 49 They underscored the supposed success of the British colonialists in turning wildlife experiences into a product that could be readily consumed by tourists from the Global North.
More influential than any official tourism promotion, though, were wildlife documentaries and movies. Documentary makers, like Martin and Osa Johnson, Armand and Michaela Denis, or Bernhard and Michael Grzimek generated tremendous interest in East Africa.Footnote 50 In addition, Hollywood filmmakers discovered the region after the Second World War as the location for several successful romantic adventure films. These productions benefitted the tourism industry in two ways: On the one hand, they were a highly successful and, even better, free advertising campaign. 1960s travel brochures and guides referred to them regularlyFootnote 51 and a German travel journal from 1962 suggests that they played an important role in creating consumer expectations.Footnote 52 On the other hand, the filmmakers depended on the services of the local safari companies and paid them generously.Footnote 53
However, the advertisements, wildlife documentaries, and movies also perpetuated and spread stereotypes. Although oversimplified generalisations have long been prevalent in tourism marketing, the juxtaposition of supposed European modernity against African primitiveness was not only deeply racist but also a fundamental aspect of the colonial endeavour. On top of that, it obscured that tourism destinations like national parks were no “wilderness” but instead shaped by human agency and conflicts over land. For example, in his films “No Room for Wild Animals” (1956) and “Serengeti Shall Not Die” (1959) Bernhard Grzimek depicted the Serengeti plain as a last refuge of animals, that needed to be protected from human encroachment. In 1959 he even used his international influence to torpedo the establishment of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which was intended to provide space for both wildlife and local Maasai cattle ranchers.Footnote 54 However, what Grzimek presented to his captivated audience as a realm of pure nature, was in fact a cultural landscape, whose “typical” savannah environment had evolved from a long history of interaction between humans, flora, and fauna.Footnote 55 Tourism therefore contributed not only to the economic empowerment of colonial elites and to the disenfranchisement of East African societies living in or adjacent to conservation areas, but also to the ideological obfuscation of their respective environmental histories.Footnote 56
Divergent approaches to tourism and development
In the early 1960s the East African states gained independence from British colonial rule. In Tanganyika, the Tanzania African National Union (TANU) under Julius Nyerere managed to negotiate a peaceful transition from colonial to postcolonial governance in 1961. Uganda became a republic under one of the few multi-party governments in 1962, but soon faced internal conflicts that eventually led to dictatorship. With the Mau Mau War Kenya saw the most violent independence struggle of the region after which the Kenya African National Union (KANU) formed the first independent government in 1963. Zanzibar received independence at the same time as a constitutional monarchy. However, the sultan was overthrown only a few weeks later and the new People's Republic merged with Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania the following year.
The independent governments all faced the problem that their economies were mainly oriented toward the export of resources. In this situation, international experts suggested tourism as a promising strategy to diversify revenue streams and attract foreign exchange. Not surprisingly, strong impulses for the integration of tourism into postcolonial development schemes came from IUOTO,Footnote 57 international conservationists like the Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural ResourcesFootnote 58 and the World Bank. The latter based its recommendations on the analyses of expert commissions which visited the two countries in 1959 and 1961. They realised that the conditions for the development of a successful independent tourism industry were not the same in both countries. While the commission for Tanganyika admitted that tourism would most likely thrive only as long as the country continued its cooperation within the East African region,Footnote 59 the one for Kenya saw “considerable opportunities” for the expansion of tourism should the government make it a “high priority.”Footnote 60 Nevertheless both commissions urged the independent governments to invest in tourism infrastructure such as access roads and national parks, to allow foreign investments, and to expand package tourism. Thus, they followed the modernisation paradigm, that had already informed late colonial development policies, without addressing the question how to consolidate the development of international tourism with both countries’ aspirations for economic independence and self-sufficiency.
Tanganyika's and Kenya's independent governments both decided to follow the advice of international experts and organisations and integrate tourism into their development plans. However, they dealt with the colonial legacies of tourism in different ways. The Kenyan government opted for a liberal approach and opened the country for mass tourism as well as for private investors. This fit in with its overall capitalist policies after Kenyatta and his supporters had successfully silenced those voices within the Kenya African National Union who had called for a more radical restructuring of the economy after independence.Footnote 61 The Tanzanian government followed a different path, trying to consolidate tourism development with Nyerere's vision of African socialism. Linking socialist ideas with African communitarian traditions the primary goal of African Socialism was to overcome colonial dependencies and further the economic and political autonomy of the country in a world divided by East-West as well as North-South confrontations.Footnote 62 However, how this autonomy was to be achieved remained disputed and tourism was one of the fields in which this controversy was fought out.
The two neighboring countries differed most in how they addressed the question of ownership in the tourism industry. As outlined above, most safari companies and hotels were firmly in the hands of colonial elites at the time of independence. The Kenyan state tried to remedy this by founding a parastatal, the Kenya Tourist Development Corporation (KTDC), that cooperated with several development finance institutions to facilitated foreign direct investments into tourism projects. The German Development Corporation, for example, became involved in Kenya Safari Lodges and Hotels Ltd., a private company that was founded to build a beach hotel and two safari lodges in Tsavo National Park.Footnote 63
With vertical integration increasing in tourism from the 1970s onwards, private and corporate foreign capital came to dominate the Kenyan industry, in particular the high-end and mid-level accommodation sector as well as the big tour operators.Footnote 64 In 1972 the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife warned that non-citizens owned 95 of the 177 licenced tour operators in the country, ten of which controlled about seventy percent of the business. Of the 54 licenced tour guides almost half had Kenyan citizenship, but fifteen of them were white Kenyans. Minister Juxon Shako declared that the government would no longer licence tourism businesses unless 51 percent of the company's shares were owned by Kenyan citizens.Footnote 65 In response large companies contemplated bringing in Kenyan shareholders like the KTDC.Footnote 66 However, a comprehensive study on hotel ownership conducted by Rosemary B. Jommo in the 1980s demonstrates that African entrepreneurs still held only a marginal position as small- to mid-scale hotel owners or tour operators.Footnote 67 By this time the growing influence of international tour operators as well as airlines reduced Kenya's profits from tourism as a large percentage of them leaked out of the country.Footnote 68
In contrast, Tanzania focused on building a nationalised tourism industry which promised to minimise the influence of foreign investors and leave Tanzanians some say over how they marketed themselves abroad. In conflict with the objectives of African socialism, though, it had to rely heavily on external capital, expertise, and imports to do so. In the 1960s the state-owned National Development Corporation built a series of hotels and lodges in cooperation with foreign investors.Footnote 69 A few minor hotels were nationalised in 1968 after Nyerere's Arusha Declaration that marked the beginning of a more systematic socialisation campaign.Footnote 70 But private investments into the tourism sector remained permitted and did indeed expand during the following years.Footnote 71 At the same time the government formed the Tanzania Tourist Corporation (TTC), a parastatal like the KTDC, that eventually built and operated fifteen luxury hotels and lodges along the so-called “safari-circuit” in Northern Tanzania and in the South around Dar-es-Salaam. Foreign involvement in these hotels remained restricted to loans and management contracts, while the state held the equity capital.Footnote 72 The TTC also set up its own tour operator as well as travel agencies, advertising agents, and even a taxidermist.Footnote 73 Thus, the nationalisation of the tourism industry took mostly the form of new state investments, which were part of a broader expansion of the parastatal sector.Footnote 74
Overcoming the colonial myth of wild Africa proved difficult as well. As Devin Smart has pointed out, the Kenyan government launched an expensive marketing campaign during the 1960s and 1970s to sell the country as a tourist destination to a broader audience of middle-class travellers from Europe and North America. The campaign that was multi-authored, with input from European as well as African writers, portrayed Kenya as a “land of contrasts” between “primeval naturalism” and “postcolonial modernity.” Smart sees the inclusion of the latter as a partial break with colonial stereotypes.Footnote 75 However, a comparison with EATTA's marketing strategies above shows that the contrast between wilderness and modernity, albeit a decidedly colonial one, was already part of destination branding before independence. Furthermore, an analysis of (mostly) German-language travel brochures from various travel providers shows that they did not always portray post-colonial modernity in a positive way. Anticipating consumer expectations that equated East Africa – as it was still marketed – with wilderness, a newspaper campaign by the travel provider Touropa-Sharnow described Nairobi as a “Brasilia in Kenya […] absolutely not African, but unimaginatively modern.”Footnote 76
A 1972-3 survey of German tourists, found that they associated Kenya primarily with “interesting wildlife,” “safari,” and “unspoiled nature.” In addition, they valued the “good climate” and “beautiful beaches” while describing Kenyan culture as “completely foreign […] colorful and exotic.”Footnote 77 The respondents thus reflected predominantly the images of primeval nature that travel companies and filmmakers had disseminated since the 1950s. Regardless of whether they had already travelled to Kenya or not, their impressions and expectations remained shaped by colonial imagery. This seems to be at odds with Andrew Norton's assessment who argues that, while the tourist he interviewed in 1990s did associate East Africa primarily with a “primordial landscape,” they also registered material poverty, environmental problems and overtourism.Footnote 78 However, as Norton suggests, representations from news reports on poverty and internal conflict in other African countries influenced tourists’ perceptions of East Africa as well.Footnote 79 A survey of German tourists suggests that in the absence of a positive marketing campaign such as the Kenyan one general stereotypes about sub-Saharan Africa dominated tourists’ expectations. Most respondents were not even able to distinguish Tanzania from other African countries. Furthermore, they associated many negative attributes with the country, such as “racial problems,” “unrest,” “backwardness,” and “underdevelopment.”Footnote 80 Thus, while marketing with recourse to colonial stereotypes posed problems, abandoning such strategies did not necessarily lead to a more balanced view among (potential) visitors.
As far as numerical indicators go, both countries initially profited from the tourism boom of the 1960s and 1970s. In Kenya the number of international arrivals increased from 49,920 in 1962 to 428,400 in 1972. In the same period, revenues multiplied from 5.5 to 27.3 million pounds sterling. Only from 1973 onwards did the figures decline for a few years because of the oil crisis.Footnote 81 Tanzania saw a steep incline of international arrivals as well, albeit from a much lower point of departure of 5,119 in 1964 to 72,217 in 1970 and 235,000 in 1976.Footnote 82
While the rise in tourist numbers seemed to validate tourism as a postcolonial development strategy on a macroeconomic level, the inequalities and dependencies within and created by the tourism sector were a source of discontent in both countries. On the Kenyan coast, land prices exploded, which not only made it impossible for most African Kenyans to enter the hotel business, but also caused hardship for local farmers. In addition, environmental problems arose, such as periodic water shortages and pollution of beaches and coral reefs.Footnote 83 The situation was similar in conservation areas with heavy tourist traffic like Amboseli and Maasai Mara. Here, too, conflicts developed in the 1960s and 1970s over land rights, access to water sources, and the fair distribution of profits from tourism.Footnote 84 While a study conducted in the early 1980s suggested that many Kenyans along the coast did not object to tourism development in general, they were keenly aware of the fact that much of the profits went elsewhere.Footnote 85
In Tanzania an intense public debate unfolded in 1970 and 1971 over the compatibility of tourism, socialism, and economic independence in a postcolonial society. It was instigated by members of the TANU Youth League who openly attacked the government's course. They addressed the problem of vertical integration by pointing out that international airlines were already directly participating in building hotels and an international airport. Hence, they were convinced that “tourism directly and/or indirectly benefits mainly the ‘international bourgeoisie’.”Footnote 86 They also warned against the social and cultural impact of tourism that would help to “rebourgeoisify our own people and especially the local petty bourgeoisie” and proliferate “the ways and habits of a consumer ‘Coca-Cola’ society.”Footnote 87 Inspired by dependency theory and post-colonial critics like Frantz Fanon the students clearly rejected the western development paradigm that prioritised economic growth over independence and distributive justice. All in all, they concluded, tourism was not likely to advance self-sufficient economic development in Tanzania.Footnote 88
During the following months supporters argued that tourism was “not a new venue in socialist states,” since Russia and other socialist countries had “well developed tourist industries.”Footnote 89 And the Ministry of Information and Tourism insisted that it was not a matter of the incompatibility of tourism and socialism in general, but of shaping tourism according to socialist principles.Footnote 90 Most striking about the debate, however, was the precision with which individual participants identified the colonial legacy of tourism and the dangers it posed. The later diplomat and minister Augustine Mahiga called tourism “one of those appendage industries which give rise to a neocolonialist relationship and cause underdevelopment.” While Tanzania was trying “to break the neocolonialist links” it was “creating other links through the tourist industry!” He concluded: “We ought to rethink about tourism.”Footnote 91
As John Curry notes, the tourism debate came too late to “rethink about tourism” and stop the investments that had already been made. However, the obvious lack of public support certainly contributed to the cutbacks in this sector during the following years. From 1973 onwards the government no longer provided new funds for tourism projects. As the industry ceased to be a central part of Tanzania's development strategy, TTC continued to dominate the existing hotels and tour operators and left little room for new private enterprises.Footnote 92 Tourist numbers dropped drastically to 84,021 in 1980 and hotels and lodges as well as access roads fell into disrepair, due to severe shortages of foreign exchange.Footnote 93
Tourism scholars tend to explain this decline of the Tanzanian tourism industry as due to the economic failure of African Socialism.Footnote 94 Others emphasise that external factors such as the oil crisis and the war with Uganda led to the drastic decline in tourist numbers.Footnote 95 However, most of them agree, and I concur, that competition between Kenya and Tanzania played a crucial role. The colonial tourism industry's focus on Kenya gave the country not only an infrastructural edge, but also a marketing advantage, as tourists came to associate East Africa with Kenya and vice versa. Hence until the 1970s most travellers continued to enter the region, including Tanzania, through Kenya. In addition, beach tourism, which drew European middle-class travellers to Kenya, remained underdeveloped in Tanzania. The disintegration of the East African Community and the closure of the border in 1977 therefore hit the Tanzanian tourism industry particularly hard. Nevertheless, the comparison between the two countries shows that, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were different answers to the problematic entanglements of colonialism and tourism and different options to link tourism with questions of economic development, self-sufficiency and independence.
Conclusion: Rethinking Tourism
Compared to Europe, North America or Asia, the African continent's share of international tourism is still low.Footnote 96 Nonetheless, tourism has become an influential economic, political, and social factor for parts of North, South and East Africa during the second half of the 20th century. Tourism ranks among the top foreign exchange earners in many African countries, contributes around nine percent of the continent's gross domestic product, and provides around seven percent of all jobs.Footnote 97 This development cannot be explained solely by the allure of Africa's tourist attractions, nor can it be fully attributed to social and technical developments within the tourism generating countries, such as increases in wages and paid vacation or the commercial use of jet airplanes. Rather, as I have demonstrated, tourism to and in Africa was deliberately pushed and pursued as a development strategy from the late 1940s onwards, recommended by international organisations and experts, supported by politicians and interest groups, and welcomed by local as well as international businesses.
Yet, there were different avenues for dealing with the colonial legacy of tourism. And the comparison between Kenya and Tanzania reveals that the postcolonial governments did indeed follow them. While Kenya faced the international competition for travellers that turned parts of the country into tourist destinations and subjected them to the influence of international companies, Tanzania attempted to reconcile tourism with socialist notions of redistribution and self-reliance. However, under the severe economic crisis of the early 1980s the Tanzanian government was forced to abandon its socialist policies, adopt social adjustment programs, and privatise large parts of the economy, including the tourism sector. This seems to have increased the volume of visitors, though changing consumption patterns – from mass to “quality” tourism, in particular ecotourism – may have played a greater role than privatisation.Footnote 98 Today Tanzania's newfound popularity as an international tourist destination under capitalist conditions causes problems similar to those of Kenya, namely the influence of highly integrated multinational tour operators and hotel companies as well as the unequal distribution of profits and costs among the population.
The tourism industry – not just in East Africa – continues to benefit from what Denis Linehan, Ian D. Clark and Philip F. Xie call the “colonial roots of globalization.” Colonialism still shapes tourism infrastructures, destinations, and tourists’ expectations.Footnote 99 Three things that distinguish tourism from other export industries make confronting this colonial legacy extremely difficult. First, international tourism is a buyers’ market where the supply of products such as beach holidays or wildlife experiences generally exceeds demand. This puts destinations across the globe in harsh competition with each other. To succeed, postcolonial states need to successfully market and adapt their product to the tastes of consumers from the Global North whose expectations have been shaped by decades of colonialism.Footnote 100 On top of that, tourism often leaves them highly dependent on this volatile external demand. Second, tourism is an export good that is consumed on site. This leads to the creation of “tourist bubbles” within the independent states, social and physical spaces that cater predominantly to the needs and expectations of travellers from abroad.Footnote 101 Colonial injustices, such as the forced resettlement of people to establish nature reserves, were thus not only not revised, but deliberately continued. Third, because of the high level of competition in international tourism the industry tends towards vertical integration. Hence the involvement of multinational corporations in the tourism sector increased over the years. For postcolonial states this means, profits leak out of the country and foreign actors expand their political and economic Influence. This condition mirrors colonial economic structures and is therefore often perceived as neo-colonial.
Nevertheless, as Eric Zuelow stresses in his afterword to this special issue, it seems important to point out that the globalisation of tourism and the perpetuation of its colonial legacies was and is a process that involved actors and concrete decisions. For the history of tourism, this insight implies that we should pay more attention to local organisations like EATTA, as well as to international players such as IUOTO. For the future of tourism, it means that we can and should participate in its development. If there are chances to subject this influential economic sector to greater democratic control, we should use them and put the benefit of the people most affected by tourism at the centre of future policies. We ought to rethink about tourism!
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Mikko Toivanen and Andreas Greiner, and the two anonymous reviewers for their many insightful comments and suggestions on this article.
Funding information
Research for this article was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the project “The industry of the world's optimist”: Tourism as a development strategy in Eastern Africa (1950s-early 1990s) within Priority Programme 1859 – Experience & Expectation: Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour.
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