An engaging social history of foreign tourists’ dreams, the African tourism industry’s efforts to fulfill them, and how both sides affect each other. Since the nineteenth century, foreign tourists and resident tourism workers in Africa have mutually relied upon notions of exoticism, but from vastly different perspectives. Many of the countless tourists who have traveled to the African continent fail to acknowledge or even realize that skilled African artists in the tourist industry repeatedly manufacture “authentic” experiences in order to fulfill foreigners’ often delusional, or at least uninformed, expectations. These carefully nurtured and controlled performances typically reinforce tourists’ reductive impressions—formed over centuries—of the continent, its peoples, and even its wildlife. In turn, once back in their respective homelands, tourists’ accounts of their travels often substantiate, and thereby reinforce, prevailing stereotypes of “exotic” Africa. Meanwhile, Africans’ staged performances not only impact their own lives, primarily by generating remunerative opportunities, but also subject the continent’s residents to objectification, exoticization, and myriad forms of exploitation.

This book provides a comprehensive and readable overview of the critical debates and controversies around tourism in Africa, and the major factors that are affecting tourism development now and in the future. Drawing upon research emerging from collaborations between a growing number of African academics and practitioners based in the continent and in the African diaspora as well as international colleagues, the Handbook offers key critical insights into the issues, challenges and trends that Africa and African tourism is facing. Part I covers continent-wide issues such as climate change, ICT, heritage and development. The remaining parts are organised along geographic lines, with each chapter covering the development of tourism, current trends and discussion of critical issues such as community participation, gender, backpacking, urban tourism, wildlife tourism and conservation. Combining an overview of key theories, concepts, contemporary issues and debates, this book will be a valuable resource for students, academics and practitioners investigating the role of tourism in Africa.

Africa is a 'theme park' for Western tourists to experience untouched wilderness, untamed nature, and truly 'authentic' cultures, where the hosts, too, are part of a discourse about the 'other' and ourselves, about wildness, danger and roots. Tourism is important for Africa: international tourist arrivals to Africa continue to grow, income from tourism is crucial to national economies, and tourism investments are considered among the most profitable. This edited volumedeals with the interaction of local communities with tourists coming into their areas and villages. Based upon a common theoretical approach, fourteen cases of African tourism are discussed which involve direct contact between 'hosts' and 'guests'. The viewpoint throughout is from the side of the locals, establishing how the processes of interaction shape each small scale destination. Crucial in Africa is the fact that the large majority of tourism is game oriented and the interaction between locals and visitors is very much 'tainted' by this fact. Central is the notion of the tourist bubble - the infrastructure that is generated locally (and internationally) for hosting tourists, as it is this institutional interface that tends to impact on the local society and culture, not the tourists themselves directly. The examples come from all over Africa, from the Sahara to the Eastern Cape, and from Kenyato Ghana. All contributions are based upon original fieldwork. Walter van Beek is professor of anthropology at Tilburg University and Senior Researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden; Annette Schmidt is curatorof the African department at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, and is an archaeologist with a long experience in cultural management projects.

This book presents how tourism initiates economic development and how constraints to the growth of tourism in Sub-Saharan Africa can be addressed. With 24 case studies that illustrate tourism development, it reveals that despite destination challenges, the basic elements needed to initialize or intensify success are applicable across the region.

Alluring Opportunities examines the lives of African laborers in the tourism industry in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique and the social ascension that many of these workers achieved in spite of demanding conditions. From the origin of the colonial period until its end in 1975, the tourism industry developed on the backs of these laborers and ultimately became an important source of foreign exchange for Portugal. Todd Cleveland explores the daily experiences of local tourism workers in the genesis and expansion of this vital industry with an analytical utility that transcends Africa's borders by complicating the narrative established and reinforced by an expansive body of literature that stresses the exploitation of indigenous tourism workers. He argues that just as foreign tourists embraced the opportunity to travel to various locations in Mozambique, so too did many Indigenous laborers seize opportunities for employment in the tourism industry in an effort to realize social mobility via both the steady wages that they earned and their daily interactions with sojourning clientele. Alluring Opportunities reconstructs these workers' lives, highlighting their critical contributions to the local industry, while also prompting a reconsideration of Indigenous labor and social mobility in colonial Africa. As a result, Cleveland reveals new ways of thinking, more broadly, about the ways that tourism shapes processes of empire, interracial interactions, and power relations.

This dissertation examines the rise and development of the safari tourism industry in the British East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) between 1900 and 1939. It shows how the establishment of British rule and the introduction of modern transportation technology made East Africa accessible and gradually transformed the region into a tourist attraction of great economic value that would come to be managed by imperial powers, advertised in a globalized marketplace, and visited by tourists who desired to hunt, photograph, and observe East Africa’s abundant wildlife on an adventure known as the “safari.” It became a lucrative business. Numerous outfitters, safari and travel companies, guides, and other safari workers entered the business and helped to make the industry a model of its kind in Africa. As the safari trade expanded and animal populations came under pressure, however, this industry began to adopt new, eco-friendly forms of wildlife tourism that could preserve the main elements of the tourist safari while reducing its toll on wildlife populations, a shift exemplified by the introduction of motorized tours, photographic and filmmaking safaris, and the quest to establish national parks. The research presented in this study, drawn from archival collections across three continents, demonstrates that the four decades between 1900 and 1939 became a crucial phase in the development of safari tourism in Kenya. During this time, safari tourism became a leading sector of the regional economy and gave rise to a highly developed commercial and institutional infrastructure that laid the foundations of modern wildlife tourism in Kenya. At the same time, the safari industry became a product of the British Empire, shaped by the laws, institutions, and attitudes of colonial rule. While the introduction of British rule and the arrival of British colonists promoted tourist development, built roads and railways, ensured a degree of security demanded by travelers, and linked foreign tourists with Africa, it also relegated indigenous Africans to subordinate positions in the industry, and forcibly relocated African settlements to make way for parks and tourist spaces. This meant that the prerogatives of the tourism industry often clashed with indigenous ideas of land use and economic management, instead serving the interests of the British community in Kenya who owned and controlled the trade. Thus, the development of safari tourism under the aegis of the British colonial state aided the material development of the industry, but also created economic, social, and racial inequalities that remain evident to the present day.

Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa’s historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like “work,” “marriage,” and “land” take shape.