SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 148

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SAFARI
Maybe it was those long afternoons spent at the zoo when my children, Lily and Lee, were
young. We lived within walking distance of Washington's National Zoo, where we became
friends of the baby giraffe, the elephant and the wildcats, but were always wary of the rep-
tiles. The pandas kept to themselves, so we didn't loiter outside their home. Instead, we me-
andered through the walkways of the zoo's private universe sheltered alongside Rock Creek
Park. It was so civilized we rarely got a whiff of the rank circus smell from large animal ex-
crement. Eventually those endless hours spent looking at animals in well-appointed enclos-
ures rearranged my images of wildlife. The raccoons and possums that prowled our back-
yard at night were wild. The animals in those cages were not.
That could be one reason why I never jumped at the suggestion of going on an African
safari. I'd read Isak Dinesen's autobiographical novel Out of Africa about her life in turn-
of-the-twentieth-century Kenya and saw the movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep and
Robert Redford. This was beautiful, romantic Africa seen through the eyes of privileged
Europeans who killed buffalo, lions and antelope, who eventually understood the harm be-
ing done and, too late, mended their ways. Public television specials on Africa showed the
opposite picture of wild Africa, with aerial footage of animals galloping across the savan-
nahs, unmolested by humans while they stalked and ate each other. I avoided the continent
until I began writing this topic and realized one of the pillars of the global tourism industry
is the African safari, with cameras or rifles, in search of those animals I saw in the zoo.
“Safari” is an Arabic word meaning “journey.” It found its way into the Swahili language
and was adopted by British colonialists to mean a specifically African journey or adventure.
Beneath the surface, the idea of a safari is loaded with the baggage of European coloniza-
tion begun in the late-nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa” that didn't fully end until
the 1960s and beyond. The Europeans conquered some 10 million square miles of territory,
tore apart traditional African nations and tribes, reassembling the land into thirty colonies
ruled by white foreigners: British, French, German, Belgium, Portuguese and Italian. They
extracted great wealth and treasure and subjugated the natives in a rivalry for empire.
The Europeans also treated the immense continent as their private hunting ground,
killing Africa's magnificent animals for trophies and sport at such a rate that some