SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 166

After the first day of panel discussions we gathered around the tree-shaded patio for
cocktails, tribal dances and gossip about tourism. Caristo Chitamfya, the media manager
for the Zambia Tourism Board, told me that fifteen years earlier he had quit his job in
broadcast journalism in order to produce weekly shows for Zambian television to tell his
countrymen and -women about their parks and animals.
“My goal was to show Zambians what is in their own backyards. So the people in the
north would know what was in the south and the south in the east,” he said. “We had to
change the perception of tourism as only for foreigners who are white. Yes, the parks were
originally only for colonial English. We were excluded but no longer.”
So he produced shows focusing on local tourism, showing Zambians which parks to vis-
it, prodding them to get out and “own” their parks. “When I began, people would call in
and ask, 'Is that in Zambia?' They thought it looked too wild to be Zambia,” said Chitam-
fya. “And, yes, we know it worked because more Zambians are going to their parks.”
Standing right beside him was Evelyn Mvula, a fifty-four-year-old Zambian native who
proved his point. She had been invited to the cocktail party with her friend Rhoda M.
Gander, also a Zambian native who has worked in tourism for thirty years.
Mvula said she saw her first lion in a French zoo in 2000 and didn't go to a wildlife
park in Zambia until she was thirty-three years old. “I only went because I was working
with some visitors from Johannesburg. When we got close to an elephant, I ran, I ran to
the car. The foreigners looked up and asked, 'Why are you running? The elephant won't
hurt you.' ”
Mvula giggled and told another embarrassing story. “When I was a child, I had a pen
pal in England and I would write and say an elephant was walking by my window—I lied.”
Gander had a different yet also typical history with parks and animals. She said she saw
her first wild lion when she was a child of seven visiting her grandfather, a tribal chief.
“We grew up with lion folk tales but not with many lions.” They were as effectively cut
off from their cultural heritage in Zambia's cities and farmlands as we Americans are from
the German forests and French castles that figure in our fairy tales. The big difference is
that their lions and zebras still inhabit their land as well as their imaginations, and the gov-
ernment wants them to replenish their ties with visits to the parks.
We were watching a dozen provincial dancers perform an abbreviated wedding dance
by the pool, their feet pounding out the rhythm with their ankle bracelets. “Look at the
dance—it is like the folk tales. It tells the story of our lives with the animals,” said Gander.
“There is no question in my mind that tourism has saved our wildlife. We need to save
more animals with stiffer penalties for poachers.”
Mvula shook her head and said it wasn't that simple. “There is a struggle for the land
between the animals and the people.”
That last warning was a subtheme of the rest of the conference whenever Zambians
held the stage. A majority of Zambians are rural and depend on subsistence agriculture.