Benjamin Gardner - Selling the Serengeti: The Cultural Politics of Safari Tourism

Selling the Serengeti

GEOGRAPHIES OF JUSTICE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

Series editors

Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto

Nik Heynen, University of Georgia

Melissa W. Wright, Pennsylvania State University

Advisory board

Mathew Coleman, Ohio State University

Sapana Doshi, University of Arizona

Zeynep Gambetti, Boazii University

Geoff Mann, Simon Fraser University

James McCarthy, Clark University

Beverly Mullings, Queens University

Harvey Neo, National University of Singapore

Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia

Ananya Roy, University of California, Berkeley

Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, cuny Graduate Center

Jamie Winders, Syracuse University

Brenda S. A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore

Selling the Serengeti

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF

SAFARI TOURISM

BENJAMIN GARDNER

The University of Georgia Press

Athens & London

2016 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www .ugapress .org

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Names: Gardner, Ben (Benjamin Richard), author.

Title: Selling the Serengeti : the cultural politics of safari tourism /

Benjamin Gardner.

Other titles: Geographies of justice and social transformation ; 23.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2016. | Series: Geographies of justice and social transformation ; 23 | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: lccn 2015015512 | isbn 9780820345079 (hardcover : alk. paper) |

isbn 9780820345086 (paperback : alk. paper) | isbn 9780820348186 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Maasai (African people)TanzaniaEconomic conditions. |

Maasai (African people)TanzaniaSocial conditions. | Identity

politicsTanzania. | NeoliberalismSocial aspectsTanzania. | Land

useTanzaniaSerengeti Plain. | Land tenureTanzaniaSerengeti Plain.

| Culture and tourismTanzaniaSerengeti Plain. | SafarisSocial

aspectsTanzaniaSerengeti Plain. | EcotourismSocial

aspectsTanzaniaSerengeti Plain. | Community- based

conservationTanzaniaSerengeti Plain.

Classification: lcc dt443.3.m37 g37 2016 | ddc 305.896 / 5dc23 lc record available at http: // lccn.loc .gov / 2015015512

For Jennifer, Stella, and Maylie

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CONTENTS

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Is the Serengeti a place or an idea? The stakes of this seemingly simple question lie at the heart of this book, as I have tried to understand how safari tourism has changed the very meanings and geographies of places and people living in the greater Serengeti region of northern Tanzania. I now realize that I was initially drawn to the idea of the Serengeti when I first went to Tanzania in 1992 as an undergraduate anthropology student. As much as I wanted to see Serengeti National Park and its surrounding areas with my own eyes, I know that I wanted to experience what I had already determined to be one of the most important and valuable places in the world. I didnt question why I believed the Serengeti was so important and valuable a place. I just knew it was. I didnt see the historical and geographical discourses that shaped my understanding of this place from the position of a white male student from the United States or how it was that I might be involved in preserving or protecting a particular image or representation of this place. After years of living and working in Tanzania and then researching the political economy and cultural politics of tourism in the Serengeti region, I have come to understand how the production of the Serengeti as both a place and an idea influences current debates and practices concerning economic development, conservation, and tourism in Tanzania.

As geographer Doreen Massey explains, places are always constructed out of articulations of social relations (trading connections, the unequal links of colonialism, thoughts of home) which are not only internal to that locale but which link them to elsewhere. Their local uniqueness is always already a product of wider contacts; the local is always already a product in part of global

forces (1995, 183). This idea of places and their pasts enables us to see the Serengeti not simply as the crown jewel of national parks in Africa but also as a landscape that has been produced in the image of an idea of African nature and what it should be. all uses the metaphor of the West and the Rest to describe how understandings ix

x Preface

and beliefs about the history and meaning of a specific geography and the actual lived experience of a place like the Serengeti are inseparable. He shows that the idea of the West came into being through a biased system of representation during a period of European exploration, expansion, and conquest that not only described the West as a place but also provided a set of criteria to evaluate its relative value, which provided a new logic to explain difference. A discourse is a way of talking about or representing something. It produces knowledge that shapes perceptions and practices (Hall 1992, 317).

Tourism in the Serengeti is more than the enjoyment or appreciation of African nature. It is a critical site where cultural, political, and economic ideas and practices shape the activities and encounters among tourists, tour companies, state agencies, local communities, as well as the flora and fauna. It is a particular form of consumption in which the commodity is the landscape itself. The idea of the Serengeti is a powerful one. Geographer Rod Neumanns groundbreak-ing book, Imposing Wilderness, describes the production of the dominant idea of nature in Africa. Neumann starts by quoting a traveling companion: This is the way that Africa should look (1998, 1). He draws on archival sources, as well as interviews with residents, to show how the production of nature in Africa transformed the identities and rights of African subjects. His research is a significant intervention in how understandings of African parks were forged through historical struggles over who should have rights and access to African natural resources. Neumanns book is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between protected areas and livelihoods around the world.

The contributions of scholars like Hall, Massey, and Neumann go well beyond learning important histories. They enable us to recognize how contemporary understandings, ideas, and practices draw their authority and even their legitimacy from the very discourses that shape what people value in a place like the Serengeti. How discourse shapes landscape became an important lens as I researched and observed different forms of tourism in the Serengeti region.

Tourism is commonly framed as a way to add value to place, where visitors will pay simply to passively enjoy the environment. Such narratives pay scant attention to how that environment is framed and preserved or to how prioritizing a certain kind of experience actually shapes the landscape in question. In one of the examples I discuss in this book, a U.S.based tourism company purchased a former barley farm in the middle of three Maasai villages to establish a nature refuge and promote ecotourism. As I describe in detail, the company met considerable resistance from Maasai residents, who claimed that it had received the land illegally and the refuge would dispossess them of essential grazing land that they had used for well over a century. In a promotional video made by the company in 2012, the owners of Thomson Safaris describe their project to pro