SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 174

the islands to protect the land and wildlife and recover from the previous years' onslaught.
Beginning in 2012, only four cruise ships can land during any two-week period. Once on
the island, tourists are allowed to stay no more than four days and three nights. And they
will be spread out over more islands rather than congregated on three main islands.
The Galápagos restrictions were spurred, in part, by restrictions imposed further south
at Antarctica. An agreement reached by the nations with ties to Antarctica allows only 100
tourists on the shore at any time and completely prohibits all cruise ships with more than
500 passengers from entering Antarctica's waters. But Ecuador seems of two minds about
tourist restrictions. At the same time, the country is planning to build a new airport to wel-
come more visitors and boost the $500 million it earns annually from tourists.
• • •
Since the days of high-riding European colonials, tourism in Africa has been disparaged
as an industry that caters to white foreigners who look down on black Africans as “exotic”
natives at best. That cultural and racial chasm has been chronicled in numerous anthro-
pological studies. In his description of Maasai dancing staged for tourists in Kenya, the
scholar Edward M. Bruner captured this in a series of vignettes.
The Sundowner (Hotel) presents Maasai men dancing in the context of an “Out of
Africa” cocktail party near an upscale tented safari camp on the Mara reserve. The
Maasai performers mix with the tourists, who are served drinks and hors d'oeuvres
by uniformed waiters. Globalizing influences are apparent, as Hollywood pop cul-
ture images of Africa and blackness are enacted for these foreign tourists as they sip
champagne, alternately chatting among themselves and dancing with Maasai, all the
while on safari in the African bush.
Now that cliché is being overturned. African-Americans in search of their ancestry and
roots are becoming the sought-after tourists on the continent. In some respects this is part
of a larger trend. Cultural or heritage tours became big business around the globe in the
last twenty years, thanks to the Internet, which makes it possible to find ancestors and to
travel to countries that invite Americans to come and search for their families.
But most of the African-American tours are in a class by themselves, tied to the original
sin of slavery. They often have no documentation showing the nationality of their ancest-
ors or even their names. So their tours often begin in West Africa, where governments have
opened up the former European slave forts on the Atlantic Coast and created museums
and tours to educate the world about the centuries-long slave trade. In 2007 in celebra-
tion of its fiftieth year of independence, Ghana promoted itself as a must-see destination
for African-Americans, urging them to visit the slave-trade sites along its coast. St. George's