The Nigeria-Biafra War: genocide and the politics of memory

Abstract

Volunteers pay organisations to mediate opportunities for them to help Africans and experience a foreign culture. The chapter nicely elaborates the paradox, that this help is different from what local people actually think would help them. Marijke Steegstra explores the awarding of honorary titles of development queens and chiefs to foreigners by Ghanaian local chiefs for their engagement in developing the area. The author argues that the foreigners enjoy the costly ceremony but often misunderstand its objectives and remain in the chief’s installation bubble, whereas the Ghanaian chiefs who are in control of the procedure aim at committing them to long-term friendship, hoping for more gifts and development. Wanjohi Kobicho studies romance tourism and the sex trade in Kenya. As the tourist industry is largely organised by foreign companies, young local women and men are only left with informal business and sex trade. Their activities produce diverging opinions between youth and their elders, and also between the local youth and the tourists who are “physically in the host culture but socially outside” (281). Lucy McCombes pushes these reflections still further when she analyses the Gambian love bubble. She contrasts prostitution with the romance and company that the youth offer to tourists, which is not only about sex and economic gain but more complex and open, as long-term relationships might also emerge. Finally, in her afterword, Annelou Ypeij compares the African tourism encounter and its consequences with that of the Inca Trail in Peru. This valuable book is written in an accessible style and provides exciting insights. It highlights the important role that imagination plays in the encounters and (mis) understandings of people from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. It clarifies that not only the West has its imaginings of Africa (untamed wilderness, dangerous animals, authentic inhabitants) but that local people equally have stereotypical ideas about the tourists and have a stake in the tourism industry. The concept of the bubble helps to explain why these mutual imaginings, both projected onto “the other”, remain so meaningful and long lasting. Most of the chapters provide an excellent analysis of the complexity of these encounters from multiple perspectives and refrain from simplifying dichotomies and moralising tones. The introduction could have gained from being a bit more focused and nuanced, but the further one reads, the more the arguments gain critical weight and detail the complexity of the entanglements between the different stakeholders in Africa’s tourism ventures.