SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 175

Castle in Elmina is one of the most visited former slave forts, where tourists can see the
slave dungeons, the punishment cells and the auction room.
It's impossible to know how many of the nearly 50 million foreign visitors to Africa in
2011 were following a heritage tour. African nations are wooing them out of national pride
as well as financial gain. Tours originating in Senegal and Gambia promote themselves
as introducing visitors to the region where Alex Haley traced his family in the bestselling
Roots , a book that caused such a sensation in the United States, especially after it was
turned into a television mini-series that broadcast the full story of the African slave trade
into American homes. “Roots” is now shorthand for the heritage tours of African-Americ-
ans.
Paulla A. Ebron, a professor at Stanford University, studied the phenomenon by trav-
eling on a “Roots” tour sponsored by McDonald's, the fast-food giant. In her words, the
“McDonald's tour moved the tourists and refashioned them as pilgrims.”
There were ninety-six Americans on the tour; the majority of them African-American
women between the ages of thirty and forty-five. Most of them had won the trip in a contest
sponsored by McDonald's for African American History Month. William Haley, the son
of the author of Roots , traveled with the group. These tourists-turned-pilgrims were mo-
tivated in part, she wrote, because “African Americans are as deeply involved now in the
search for history and memory as they have been at any period in U.S. history. The stories
of collective trauma and of African cultural healing move people very deeply, even if they
take the form of advertising jingles.”
They followed the emotionally charged slavery route and talked about the irony that
this exceedingly personal trip was sponsored by the multinational corporation. They were
not on the champagne safari circuit. Instead, they were on a pilgrimage and the continent
they saw was “exactly what they already believed Africa to be: a poor, struggling, hot, spir-
itual, creative place, full of sound and color.”
They felt their homecoming, their pilgrimage, began when they toured the island of
Gorée. They were in awe, she wrote, at “the slave fort, the place where it all began.” Now
a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Gorée was one of the most infamous forts where slaves
were held and sold, then shipped off on the murderous “middle passage” voyage across the
Atlantic to be sold again in the new world.
This is not Africa as seen in tourism brochures, but it is part of an international trend
of mostly Americans traveling around the world to find their roots. Greece, Japan and Ch-
ina are three of the countries with special bureaus to help their overseas communities to
come “home.” These tourists spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to see where
grandmother or great-grandfather once lived. I traveled to Germany to see the northwest-
ern village of Lohne, where my family lived for hundreds of years. And on an August va-
cation Bill and I found out that my family's Irish branch came from Nenagh, County Tip-
perary, thanks to baptismal records there.