Experiencing nature: The reproduction of environmental discourse through safari tourism in East...

Geoforum, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 355-373, 1996 Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

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Experiencing Nature: The Reproduction of Environmental Discourse Through

Safari Tourism in East Africa

ANDREW NORTON,* Bristol, U.K.

Abstract: This paper develops a conceptualisation of safari tourism as an arena of nature negotiation. The circuit of culture model of cultural communication is modified for the institutional specificities of tourism and is used as a framework within which the encoding and decoding strategies respectively employed by tourism marketing texts and tourists are elaborated. From an analysis of tourist brochures, the tourism marketing of East African nature is described as utilising a primeval archetype, reproducing a romantic discourse which places the wild animals and primitive cultures in prehistory. From interviews of tourists in East Africa, the paper outlines how tourists develop their own experientially-based interpretations of East Africa, drawing on knowledges of other texts, personal experience and social dialogue, from the period of anticipation prior to the holiday, the safari experience itself and during subsequent reflection. These interpretations of East African society and nature are far more sophisticated than the idealisations reproduced in tourism marketing. However, the paper notes that tourists’ interpretations are partial accounts which are unable to draw on hidden discourses, including those which contradict the primeval nature archetype, such as the early history of civilisation in East Africa, as well as those which would expose historical and contemporary struggles to define and utilise the nature of East African national parks and game reserves. Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

Introduction

The ubiquitous reproduction of cultural and environmental discourse through tourism is an important feature of the contemporary age (Bramwell and

Rawding, 1996). As one of the largest industrial complexes and consumption markets in modern Western economies, tourism is an important component of mass consumer culture with tremendous discursive power. As with the modern culture of consumption generally, touristic consumption is “sign driven” (MacCannell, 1976). It is one of the most pronounced examples of a consumer product “anchored in a dynamic of sign/image construction/

*Department of Geography, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 lSS, U.K.

manipulation” (Watson and Kopachevsky, 1994, p.

645). As tourist places have become progressively

integrated into the “culture of consumption” (Feath-

erstone, 1991), cultural and environmental images

have been constructed and manipulated through

advertising, packaging and market positioning. So

successful has this dynamic been in popularising cultural and environmental meaning that the touristic code has become a “miracle of consensus which transcends national and international boundaries” (Britton, 1991, p. 463).

The discourses which are reproduced within and circulate through the tourism industry are not insub- stantial or transitory: the stuff of holiday memories or pub-quiz trivia. They inform us of our identities and sense of place (Squire, 1994b). Tourism is a uniquely

355

356 Andrew Norton

modern way of defining reality (Crick, 1989, p. 310), through which we view the world as a series of

touristic spectacles and each place in terms of its tourist iconography (Culler, 1981). Tourism is one of

the most important elements shaping popular con- sciousness of places, cultures and nature. As our senses are disempowered by a constant bombard- ment of images and information about different places by the media (Beck, 1992), tourism is “a means of providing “hands-on” geographic experiences that we would otherwise be only vicariously aware of” (Britton, 1991, p. 466). As Lowenthal (1961, p. 248) notes, “separate personal worlds of experience, learning and imagination necessarily underlie any universe of discourse.” Tourism provides an important opportunity for the individual to make sense of this universe.

However, academic writing on identity and place construction has been preoccupied with media forms

such as landscape painting, poetry, music and novels, and has been primarily concerned with the particular- ities of the parochial and national.’ In contrast, the role of international tourism has been neglected.2 Yet, Said (1995, p. 3) notes that, “the construction of identity involves establishing opposites and “others”.” The differences between places are central

to the fabrication of identity, which occurs through the “universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar place which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” ” (Said, 1979, p. 54). Study of tourism, as an arena for the discursive recreation of opposites and others, may reveal much about how we come to understand places, nature, ourselves and mundane social life (Urry, 1990, p. 3).

The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptualisation of tourism as a process of place construction and negotiation, which occurs through encoding and decoding practices employed respectively by tourism marketing managers and tourists, reproducing “racial-ethnic mythologies” (Rowe, 1993) and environmental mythologies (Urry, 1992). Following Squire (1993, 1994a,b,c), tourism is inserted into Johnson’s (1986) “circuit of culture” model of cultural reproduction, which provides a useful framework within which to investigate the roles of tourism marketing and the experiences of tourists in the development of popular understandings of nature and culture. The paper focuses on East Africa, a

place which has figured prominently in tourism dis-

course through the emergence of safari tourism (see

Figure 1). The paper investigates how East African nature and culture are represented through tourism marketing and are interpreted by tourists. In doing so, it interrogates Bruner’s (1991) account of the narrative structure of contemporary safari tourism:

The tourist is a member of a civilised world, even an elite member, with the resources, leisure time, and discriminating taste to travel to East Africa to see the remnants of a previous era, of a prehistoric world of wild animals and primitive man [sic], of the lions and the Masai, engaged in a struggle for survival that has been con- tinued since the dawn of time. (Bruner, 1991, p. 240).

According to Bruner (1991), tourism marketing represents East Africa as an archetypal ‘other’, a place which stands in stark contrast to the environmentally degraded nature and impoverished culture of the West. Bruner argues that contemporary tourism reproduces a view of East Africa as a place of primeval nature and primitive culture, making it narratively visible in pre-history though a romantic discourse which reveres ‘wild’ landscapes. Adams (1992) makes a similar observation:

We cling to our faith in Africa as a glorious Eden for wildlife. The sights and sounds we instinctively associate with wild Africa-lions, zebra, giraffe, rhinos, and espe- cially elephants-fit into the dream of a refuge from the technological age. We are unwilling to let that dream slip away the emotional need for wild places, for vast open spaces like the East African Serengeti Plain, per- sists. (Adams, 1992, p. 42).

In the next section, tourism is conceptualised as an arena for the reproduction of discourses of place, through linking ideas from media and cultural theory with the semiotic tradition within the tourism studies literature. The representational strategies of tourism marketing are then elaborated, from an analysis of a sample of tourist brochures, and the interpretations and experiences of tourists are described, from interviews performed in East Africa. Finally, the impli- cations of the empirical work are outlined through an analysis of the encoding and decoding strategies involved in tourism.

Nature, Landscape and Tourism: Conceptualis-

ing the Discursive Reproduction of Place

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition in radical scientific and social scientific circles and in the humanities of the contextualised, positional character of all forms of knowledge and experience.

Safari tourism in East Africa 3.57

Lake Turkana

Key to National Parks and Game Reserves

a - Serengeti N.P. b - Tarangire N.P. c - Tsavo N.P. d - Arusha N.P. c -Nairobi NJ! f- Selous G.R. g - Rungwa &

Ruaha Parks TANZANIA h - Mikumi N.P. i - Amboseli N.P. Dar es Salaa j - Uwanda G.R. k - Katavi N.P I - Mahala Mountains G.R. m - Ugalla River N.P. n - Moyowosi and Kigosi G.R. o - Ngorogoro Crater p - Aberderes q - Samburu, Shaba &

ombasa

Buffalo Springs Reserves r - South Turkana Reserve

Figure 1. East Africa: national parks and game reserves.

In geography, this recognition has been stimulated by an engagement with post-modernist and post- structuralist modes of thought and, in particular, their deployment within feminist and post-colonial studies literature. An extensive vocabulary of text, representation and discourse have been employed to point to the power relations which are implicit in claims to knowledge, highlighting its constructed and contested character (Barnes and Duncan, 1992). Two distinct areas of investigation may be identified within geography which offer useful insights on the reproduction of place meaning through tourism: work concerned with the social construction of ‘nature’, and textual approaches to landscape.

The former area of interest has investigated the different discourses through which social relations with nature are articulated (Fitzsimmons, 1989; Bur- gess, 1990; Wilson, 1992; Whatmore and Boucher, 1993; Anderson, 1995). This work has recognised that understandings and representations of nature are not inextricably chained to an absolute reality but are shifting, negotiated and partial. Representations of

nature, such as national parks (Katz and Kirby, 1991) and zoos (Anderson, 1995), are socially constructed and domesticated. Thus, nature is a cultural product

which is conceptually enclosed and fixed by particular discursive and non-discursive practices from particular constellations of power and ideology.

Textual approaches to landscape represent a distinct and separate tradition within geography to those approaches seeking to elucidate the socially and culturally constructed character of ‘nature’. Textual approaches to landscape examine their iconography and the texts which represent their nature and social relations in order to emphasise their culturally constituted and malleable character. Since landscapes are material constructions which are reflective of the basic organisation of society and economy, they may be ‘read’ rather like a text (Meinig, 1979), “to reveal the force of dominant ideas and prevailing practices” (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988, p. 1). The texts which represent landscapes, such as poems, travel writing and paintings, may also be scrutinised to uncover the meanings embedded in their iconography (Cosgrove

358 Andrew Norton

and Daniels, 1988; Daniels, 1993). Thus, landscapes are inter-textual sites which support unquestioned assumptions about the organisation of society through the naturalisation of particular readings from particular ideological positions.

The tourism industry is an important arena in which discourses concerning the landscapes, cultures and nature of tourist places are represented. The tourism industry reproduces discourses about places through the production of tourism marketing texts, through

the facilitation and management of staged cultural attractions and ‘natural’ spectacles, and through material intervention in the landscape. The production of marketing texts, such as tourist brochures, is perhaps the most obvious way that discourses about tourist places are represented. The apparently innocent representations contained in these marketing texts generate specific cultural meanings from particular ideological positions. As Uzzell (1984, p. 80) notes, the information about places, nature and culture “overlay the opaque messages on the pages of holiday brochures . . . [and] contribute to the creation

of a mythology.”

Unfortunately, studies of tourism as an arena for the reproduction of place meaning have tended to privi- lege the marketing texts which represent tourist

places and the position of the researcher to interpret them.3 There have been few empirical studies of tourists’ interpretations of places. Squire (1994b, p. 8) notes that beyond specially commissioned consul- tancy studies and market research, “little attention has been directed to visitors to explore their understandings of the social and cultural meanings of tourism and the tourist experience.” The lack of empirical research on how landscapes are interpreted in practice has meant that it is difficult to determine how ordinary people understand the symbolism of landscape in their everyday lives and whilst on vacation. Driver (1992, p. 35) acknowledges our relative ignor- ance about the processes by which ‘imaginative geographies’ are commercialised and popularised, noting that “there is much more to be said about the ways in which individuals remake the symbolic geographies they are sold.” Urry (1990, p. 111) states that we have “no sense of the complexity by which different visitors can gaze upon the same set of objects and read them in quite a different way.”

The dearth of empirical research within geography

which addresses tourists’ interpretations of marketing texts and tourist places reflects the inter- disciplinary seclusion of studies of tourism. As a relatively recent area of concern per se, research on tourism has been framed by the disciplinary perspec- tives of practitioners and has largely concentrated on narrow aspects of tourism, such as economic impacts, spatial movements, or psychological motivations

(Graburn and Jafari, 1991). According to Squire (1994b), under-developed dialogue between tourism researchers and social and cultural geographers has allowed spatial, economic and quantitative ap-

proaches to remain durable, accounting for what Hughes (1991) describes as the “pre-social state” of

geographical studies of tourism. The absence of cross-disciplinary dialogue has meant that geographical studies of tourism have not greatly engaged with semiotic approaches to tourism, which represent an important tradition within tourism studies owing to Dean MacCannell’s influential book The Tourist (1976) (although see Urry, 1990). Yet, there is scope to marry the insights from semiotic approaches within tourism studies with cultural geography’s concerns

with the representation and authorship of landscapes, nature and place meaning.

However, there has been a lack of empirical work on tourist’s interpretations of tourist places even in studies which have focused on the semiotic aspects of tourism. This is perhaps explained by methodological problems relating to the relative difficulty of access to tourists and the comparable ease for the researcher to analyse marketing texts and self reflect on the ‘tourist experience’. Where meanings in tourism are

addressed, approaches have been largely production- based, concentrating on the texts and iconography of tourism marketing, brochures, photographs and sou- venirs (for example, see Uzzell, 1984; Selwyn, 1989; Reimer, 1990; Goss, 1993; Mellinger, 1994). In com- parison, empirical research aiming to elucidate the interpretations and experiences of other tourists is difficult. In MacCannell’s The Tourist (1976), for example, data collection involved merely “follow- [ing] tourists, sometimes joining their groups, sometimes watching them from afar through writings by, for and about them” (MacCannell, 1976, p. 4). Sub- sequent work perpetuated an unsystematic, informal and methodologically individualist tradition which privileges the researcher’s interpretation of the text and images of marketing materials and fails to account for the polysemic and inter-textual decoding of tourist places (Cohen, 1988).

Safari tourism in East Africa 359

The lack of empirical work addressing tourists’ interpretations of texts and landscapes has fostered

contradictory conceptuahsations concerning the role of tourists in the reproduction of place meaning. In some accounts, tourists are regarded as passive, gullible sponges who readily absorb the intended readings of marketing texts. This conceptualisation reflects a tendency to regard tourists, as Culler notes, as “the lowest of the low. . . the least perceptive, the most gullible, and generally most amazingly foolish of human beings” (Culler, 1981, p. 128). Such a view of tourists can be traced to Boorstin (1964) who described tourists as passively and gullibly enjoying contrived attractions, or ‘pseudo events’. This view was reinforced by MacCannell’s (1976) account of the inauthenticity of tourist experiences. Yet, the image of the gullible tourist is awkwardly juxtaposed against the view of the tourist as a creative individual who uses the images found in tourism marketing much like an artist to construct her/his own understandings of the tourist destination. For example, Uzzell(l984, p. 79) argues that holiday makers are “active participants in the creation of ideology and myth” despite being “seduced” and “manipulated” by the adver- tisers of tourist destinations. According to Reimer (1990, p. 13), tour operators are “culture brokers who. , . create meaningful “dream vacations” ” yet provide “tools with which tourists may create their

own fantasies, images and selves” (Reimer, 1990, p. 503, emphasis added).

To provide a more nuanced account of the interpre- tative abilities of tourists and to redress the neglect of tourists’ interpretations of texts and places, I follow Moores’ (1990, p. 29) call to “consolidate our theor- etical and methodological advances by refusing to see texts, readers and contexts as separable elements by bringing together ethnographic and textual analyses.” Squire’s (1993; 1994a,b,c) insertion of tourism into Johnson’s (1986) model of cultural transformation provides a useful starting point for bringing these elements together. Developed by Johnson to summarise trends in cultural studies research, this model was subsequently used by Burgess (1990) with respect to the reproduction of environmental meanings in the mass media. Burgess described the model as “a circuit of cultural forms through which meanings are encoded by specialist groups of producers and decoded in many different ways by the groups who constitute the audiences for those products” (Bur- gess, 1990, p. 139-140). The model points to the ways that meanings are continually reproduced from pre-

existing discourses as media representations, made within the particular narrative conventions of the

media channel, and are interpreted by consumers. In decoding media texts and images, viewers utilise already-constituted, cultural knowledges and compe- tencies, “the repertoire of discourses at the disposal of different audiences” (Brunsden and Morley, 1978, p. 171). Thus, media texts are actively decoded from a position of inter-textuality. These interpretations are then incorporated into the consumers’ daily lives and reproduced in social dialogue, thereby providing

material for new media reproductions.

However, the experiential character of tourism means that the reproduction of tourism discourse differs markedly from the vicarious circumstances of the reception of televisual sounds and images or printed media, which involve instantaneous decoding in a single “moment of interpretation” (Brunsden and Morley, 1978, p. 171). In order to account for the experiential component of tourism, the circuit of culture model can be modified through the inte- gration of insights from semiotic approaches to tourism, allowing a link to be made between the reproduction of discourse through the texts of tourism marketing and the experientially-based reproduction of discourse through the interpretations of tourists. The following phases of discourse reproduction can then be identified within the circuit: anticipation; the holiday experience; and reflection (see Figure 2).

Firstly, there is a period of anticipation before the holiday is booked, during which the holidaymaker decides what type of holiday to organise. Fournier and Guiry (1993, p. 352) describe this planning process as “planful/anticipatory dreaming”, which they distinguish from “pure daydreaming”. While the lat- ter involves the entertainment of highly improbable events or fanciful wishes, planful fantasies involve the anticipation of probable future actions. Pre- consumption dreaming is encouraged by marketing institutions (Leiss and Jhally, 1986), particularly by tour operators using a range of media channels. Package tour operators play a ‘creative’ role in the definition and marketing of vacation dreams (Reimer, 1990, p. 501) since the texts of tourist brochures are decoded in the process of making the choice of which holiday to book, in the process of making consumption dreams possible (Colton, 1987). This decoding could be described as the initial reading, analogous to the immediate interpretation of

360

PUBLIC

Andrew Norton

Tourist brochures MEDIATED

PRI

UZSENTATIONS

‘ATE LIVES EXPERIEi

Figure 2. Tourism and the circuit of culture framework (modified from Johnson, 1986).

JTIAL

televisual images. Following the holiday booking,

there is a further period of anticipation, or anticipa-

tory dreaming. Then, the experience of the holiday

itself will allow a process of experiential re-

interpretation, which involves the tourist in a search

for cultural and environmental signs with which to

validate and authenticate contact with the tourist

destination. Places are understood as signifying cul-

tural and environmental meaning since, as Percy

(1975, p. 47) notes, “the term of the sightseers satis-

faction is not the sovereign discovery of the thing

before him [sic]; it is rather the measuring up of the

thing to, the criterion of the preformed symbolic

complex.” Culler (1981, pp. 140-141) describes tour-

ists as “armies of semiotics”, fanning out in search of

cultural and environmental signs:

A Frenchman [sic] is an example of a Frenchman, a restaurant on the Left Bank is an example of a Left-Bank-Restaurant: it signifies ‘Left-Bank- Restaurantness’. All over the world the unsung armies of semiotics, the tourists, are fanning out in search of the signs of Frenchness, typical Italian behaviour, exempl- ary Oriental scenes, typical American thruways, traditional English pubs.

So, tourism marketing managers reproduce dis-

courses about places through the representations of

tourism marketing to identify inventories of cultural

signs, or ‘markers’ to use MacCannell’s (1976) term,

with which the tourist may assess the authenticity of

the sight and validate the meaning of the sight within

the discourse. The tourist attempts to authenticate

and validate tourism marketing discourse, drawing

on other knowledge, and in doing so rewrites it

through re-interpretation. Thus, tourist brochures

are “contemporary myths” and the tourist is “one

who chases myths” (Selwyn, 1989). On return home

and with reference to the accumulated memories,

momentos and holiday snaps, there is a period of

reflection on the holiday experiences as well as “post-

acquisition fantasies” sparked by them (Rook, 1985).

This reflection will modify the understandings of the

holiday experience which then become discursively

circulated back into the lived culture of the home

society, transmitted within “textual communities”

(Stock, 1986).

Bringing Together Ethnographic and Textual

Analyses: A Research Methodology

The key discourses reproduced through the package

tourism industry in East Africa were elucidated

through a research strategy which involved both tex-

tual and ethnographic analyses. This strategy allowed

an investigation of how the marketing represen-

tations of East Africa relate to the interpretations


produced by tourists as they experience the land-

scapes, nature and culture. First, an analysis was performed of the texts and images of six tourist

brochures, selected to include a cross-section of the package holiday market: three tour operators offering combined beach and safari holidays to East Africa, as well as other types of holiday and destination; two operators specialising in safari-only holidays to various parts of Africa; and, one operator offering overland expeditions through Africa.4 Although such a sample size is small, this does not seriously limit the potential for the elucidation of the common representational strategies used in tourism marketing, since the repetitive use of imagery and text in tourist brochures is striking (Uzzell, 1984). Analysis focused on text, images-which included photographs, maps and drawings-and their presen- tation. With respect to the analysis of photographic images, both content and semiotic analysis were performed: the contents of the photographs were broken down into picture elements and composition, and each picture was treated as a semiotic totality, con- necting with other pictures and relating to written narratives (Ablers and James, 1988).

The next stage of the research involved in-depth interviewing of eight British package holidaymakers (see Table 1) .5 A qualitative interview approach was selected since it offers the opportunity of developing a more detailed understanding of tourists’ experiences and their interpretations than do quantitative approaches. The questions were designed to elucidate the key narratives that the tourists were developing through their holiday experiences. A semi-

structured, open-ended interview strategy was

selected in preference to a questionnaire-based approach as these are unable to reveal the full complexity of tourists’ experiences. Indeed, Hartmann

(1988, pp. 89-90) notes that “questionnaires often leave a wide gap between the verbal expression and the leisure lived or travel experienced.”

Diani beach, six miles south of Mombasa, was chosen

as the location from which package tourists were selected (see Figure 1). The relatively high hotel density along Diani beach offered easy access to tourists. which more easily facilitated the selection procedure. Indeed, the hotels which line the Diani beach are notorious as the entrepot for large numbers of package holiday makers (Crowther and Finlay, 1994, p. 175). In contrast, the safari lodges located in and around the national parks are more difficult to

access owing to their dispersed and isolated locations. Package holidays are organised so that the beach-

oriented part of the holiday is after the safari, allowing the selection of tourists with only one or two days of their holiday remaining and with more fully formed impressions. The interviews, which each lasted about an hour, were performed at the hotels, either in the bar areas, by the swimming pool or in the landscaped

gardens. These locations were found to be most

conducive for relaxed, informal and unhurried inter-

views. Thus, the interviewing strategy paid respect to

Squire’s (1994b, p. 11) observation that:

Tourism is so value laden that greater engagement with visitors in settings where there is potential for open- ended dialogue is essential, if links between tourism, culture and society are to be more fully understood.

Table 1. Interviewee profiles

Name

‘Margaret’

‘Bob’

‘Fiona’

‘Cathy’

‘Susan’

Sex

Female

Male

Female

Female

Female

Age

60s

40s

40s

40s

SOS

Occupation

Retired

Manager of engineering firm

Professor

Teacher

Nurse

First time in East Africa

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Other faraway places visited

Singapore, N. America, Hong Kong, Bali, Mexico, Seychelles

Jamaica, Australia. India

Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, India

N. America

Tunisia, Maldives, Sri Lanka

Operator

Kuoni

Kuoni

Kuoni

Tradewind

Thompson

‘Diane’

‘Steve’

Female

Male

40s

30s

Teacher

Truck driver

Yes

Yes

None

Tunisia, N. America

Thompson

Thompson

Source: Author.

362 Andrew Norton

The Nature of Africa in Contemporary Tourism Promotion: Reading the Tourist Brochures

Before embarking on a discussion of the images which are implicated in contemporary tourism discourse, it is important to note one important image of Africa which has circulated outside this institutional

arena-the image of Africa associated with famine and war. As Watts (1989, p. 1) notes, “in popular representation of contemporary Africa the most com- pelling image, indeed the leitmotif for the entire continent, is of crisis and decay.” Recent media attention to the continent with respect to famine, food-aid and the internal conflicts, particularly in the Horn of Africa, has meant that, as Hill (1986, p. xiii) notes, Africa has become a “doom-laden word”.

Such representations, which were perhaps most

widely circulating during the mid-1980s represent Africa as a dry place where fragile environments are degraded into dusty and infertile ones incapable of supporting their populations. Owing to intertextua- lity, such images of Africa cannot be disconnected from the representations of Africa promoted through tourism.

However, Adams (1992, p. xiii) believes that if you: “Ask someone to paint a picture of Africa today and it would resemble . . . the Serengeti . . . thousands of wildebeest marching nose to tail in a line a mile long, while several well-fed lions laze under a flat-topped

acacia tree nearby.”

Such animal-based descriptions of East Africa are common in television documentaries, wildlife maga- zines, travel writing, Disney productions, advertising and, in particular, tourism marketing. Indeed, the most notable feature of the marketing of East Africa is the emphasis on animals in both text and photographs. Tourist brochures mix a range of species in small captions between the text. These show groups of animals set in their habitats. Shots of young animals are used frequently-particularly lion cubs, baby giraffe and elephant. Through the focus on the large game animals, a particular subset of wildlife is emphasized as signifying the whole of this diverse continent. Two of the brochures selected, which are entitled ‘Africa’, use images of wildlife on their front covers (see Figure 3).6 In another, the section on Africa is preceded by a full page photograph of two lion cubs and the title ‘Africa’.7 The texts of the tourist brochures point out that it is the wildlife that “sets Africa firmly apart from virtually all other long

haul destinations”; the vast game parks of Kenya and Tanzania are “renowned for their wildlife and mag- nificent scenery which remain unsurpassed throughout the world.“’

Despite the diversity of landscapes in East Africa, there is a remarkable consistency in the photographic images used to represent them-dry and dusty ter- rain, with yellow grasses and thorny scrub.’ These landscape photographs represent East Africa through the symbolism of the Savannah in the dry season, a symbolism which accords well with the image of Africa as an infertile and drought prone land associated with famine (Watts, 1989).

The figure of the African as a noble savage comp- lements the imaginary East African landscape promoted in tourism marketing (see Figure 4). Rather, than a dynamic region experiencing rapid changes in the ways of life of its peoples, including immense

changes for nomadic groups, East Africa is represented as a place where the remnants of a bygone era remain inchoate. East Africa is the “Hearth of Mankind [sic]” where “archaeological digs have uncovered proof of our evolution dating back mil- lions of years.“” Whilst no connections are made

explicit between the Masai and the early hunting communities or the coincidental location of extra- ordinary wildlife in this area, the implication is that this is a place where the timeless rhythms of prehistory continue in the present. East Africa is a place where the “ferocious”, “proud”, Masai inhabit a world which “moves to a different beat; a world where tribal Africa is a day-to-day reality”. l1 Photo- graphs of Masai men and women are slotted along- side those of wildlife, presenting them as just another attraction to be gazed upon, not dissimilar from the wildlife itself (see Figure 5).12 The need to protect, value and understand the (pastoralist) culture and society is framed in much the same way as the need to preserve and understand the endangered flora.r3

Aspects of East African society and nature which do not fit with images of primeval nature are absent from tourism discourse. Whilst pastoralist, nomadic ethnic groups, such as the Masai, are displayed for tourists, evidence of a long time literate, Muslim coastal culture is absent. In Kenya, according to Eastman:

The romance of the safari pairs the ‘Big Five’ (lion, giraffe, elephant, rhino and hippo) with nomadic peoples such as the Masai and Samburu all roaming


Figure 3. Wildlife used to symbolise ‘Africa’.14 Source: Kumuka Expeditions (1996) “Africa”. p. 1.

364 Andrew Norton

Figure 4. ‘The noble savage’. Source: British Airways Holidays (1995) “Worldwide” p. 117.


Figure 5. ‘The noble savage’, not dissimilar from the wildlife. Source: Guerba (1995) “Africa in Close Up: Safaris and Expeditions. 1995-96” p. 10.

366 Andrew Norton

together in Masai Mara.. . Swahili-speaking people and their cultural practices are left almost completely out of the tourist picture... As far as tourists are concerned, coastal Swahili language and culture is mostly unknown, while Masai herding practices, dances, songs, and so forth are widely displayed--on view with the animals. (Eastman, 1995, pp. 179-182).

Brochures promote a ‘colonial form’ of Swahili language (Eastman, 1995, p. 179) as a symbol of adventure and fun in Africa, representing East Africa as a united linguistic and cultural reality and obscuring the economic and political differences between ethnic groups. There is hardly any mention of East African history, architecture or culture outside that of the pastoral, nomadic tribes. Readers could be excused for assuming that all East Africans are Masai or some other such tribal group with a nomadic, pastoral lifestyle. They could also be forgiven for thinking that there is no early history of civilisation or slavery in East Africa or any recent history of colonialism and modernisation.i5 The implication is that East Africa is empty of civilisation, history and modernisation, occupied only by wildlife and nomadic groups pursu- ing traditional lifestyles, existing much as it has done since prehistory and since its colonial discovery. This neglect is perhaps illustrated most dramatically by one operator offering holidays which are split between time spent in Egypt and East Africa: “This tour offers you the chance to see two very different aspects of Africa: the powerful civilisation that was Ancient Egypt; and the incomparable wildlife parks of East Africa.“16 The implication is that Africa south of the Sahara has no history of civilisation but instead is a land of spectacular natural beauty occupied only by wild animals and savages. It collapses two diverse regions into crude caricatures, based respectively on Pharonic monuments and the wildlife of the Seren- geti.

This landscape iconography signifies much more than a particular configuration of climate, flora, fauna and culture: tourism promotion represents East Africa through the trope of primeval nature and primitive culture, nature and culture which stand in stark and ironic contrast to the underlying social and environmental realities. Primordial flora and fauna are matched with primitive cultures which are “part of the landscape, not so unlike the wildebeest and zebra” (Adams, 1992, p. 23). However, these landscapes are profoundly cultural in the sense that they are the ecology produced by pastoralist and tourism/ park management practices. The Masai migrated into

the Masai Mara three hundred years ago (Briggs, 1993), although these lands have been used by pastoral groups for a much longer period. The national parks were only established after the pastoral groups using them were expelled during colonialism.” As Neumann (1995, p. 150) notes “The idea of a nature as a pristine, empty African wilderness was largely

mythical and could only become reality by relocating thousands of Africans whose agency had in fact shaped the landscape for millennia.”

Interpreting East African Nature: Popular Rep-

resentations of the Safari Experience

Before proceeding with an elaboration of the key representations of East Africa made by tourists interviewed, it is worth considering an account of safari in the Moremi Wildlife Reserve in Botswana conducted by Almagor (1985). In this study, Almagor describes

the form of contact which tourists seek through safari. Following Turner (1973)) he uses a religious analogy to describe tourists’ desire for a “first-hand communion with nature” as a “vision quest”, one *which allows a communion with “the beyond”. Theirs is “an elusive goal, which they themselves would find hard to define-an encounter with nature” (Almagor, 1985, p. 43). In Almagors’ case study, this “encounter with nature” took the form of an intense, direct, spontaneous confrontation, manifested by “the buffalo encounter”. This encounter involved a confrontation with a buffalo which occurred when the tourists ventured on foot such that they were in direct, physi- cal danger. From Almagor’s account, the animal was of symbolic importance to the tourists, embodying something untouched and beyond humanity, a deep and forceful symbol of the wild ‘other’. However, this experience was not simply an exercise in seeing: nature was neither a place of recreation nor a ‘land- mark’ that must be seen and requiring the services of an interpreter (MacCannell, 1976, p. 80). Rather, it was a search for an elusive, romantic ‘communion’ involving a “direct, spontaneous and first-hand encounter with untamed nature” (Almagor, 1985, p. 33).

From the interviews undertaken for this study, Alma- gor’s account of the motivations of tourists on safari was partly confirmed: the prime motivation for com- ing to East Africa was to experience untamed nature. However, the experience sought was essentially a visual one, simply seeing the animals in their ‘natural’


landscapes. It was the sight of a particular nature

which was attractive to the tourists interviewed: a wild, primordial nature, “the kind of Africa that

existed before man [sic] tamed it” (Almagor, 1985, p. 35). Wilson (1992) describes this image as a ‘Walt Disney’ view of nature, the image of landscapes, nature and cultures which are essentially unchanged since prehistory. Significantly, this caricatured image of East Africa as a primordial mise en scene was experienced on safari. ‘Margaret’, one of the interviewees, described the Masai Mara as follows:

Its vast, just like the world’s erupted, with cones of volcanic ash, nothing at ail except scrubby little bushes and things.. . You felt very much as though you were at the beginning of the world. Well, I did anyway. There is a film called “Fantasia” and this artist has drawn the beginning of the world to appropriate music and it is exactly as this artist has imagined it. And now I’ve seen it, for real.

Such impressions were broadly in accordance with prior expectations. Indeed, ‘Cathy’ expressed the feeling that not only did African nature live up to her expectations but it exceeded them by being ‘more

like’ them:

You know what you expect the Serengeti to look like because you’ve seen it on TV and you’ve read a certain amount about it. And it is like that and its more like that than you expected it to be somehow.

However, the interpretations of East African nature which were developed by the tourists interviewed involved a modification of their expectations. The experience of East African nature departed in a number of significant ways from the tourists’ prior

expectations. For example, the overall greenness and lushness of the vegetation came as a surprise for some. Rather than being dry and dusty, East Africa was found to be greener and lusher than expected. ‘Cathy’ found the landscapes ‘a bit greener’ than she thought they would be.‘Diane’ was also surprised and compared the landscapes with Scotland. For ‘Cathy’, ‘Diane’ and ‘Steve’, their expectations of East Afri- can landscapes and flora were broadly in accordance with images promoted in the tourist brochures, which had represented them through a Savannah archetype-depicted in the photographs in the dry season, sparsely vegetated with yellow grasses. How- ever, ‘Cathy’, ‘Diane’ and ‘Steve’ had arrived in East Africa in the high season, immediately after the rainy season. As a result, the vegetation was green when they had arrived. Another notable difference which

had been noted by the tourists interviewed was the

elusiveness of certain animals, notably rhino and leopard. East African fauna had been depicted in the

tourist brochures and were generally expected to be much more abundant and accessible to viewing. Sev- eral of the interviewees expressed disappointment at not having seen the ‘big five’ and registered concern for animal conservation. Such experiences reflect a tension between the image of East Africa as primordial nature, where animals roam in abundance and are unaffected by the exploitative capabilities of civilisation, with the animal population realities of East

African game reserves.

Another point of departure between expectations and experiences was the numbers of tourist vehicles lining the congested park roads. ‘Steve’ noted that “once you’ve found something another five buses come up behind you and have a look.” One park was so congested that it was criticised by ‘Susan’ for being “like a zoo.” In addition, the confinement of tourists in safari vehicles restricted the possibilities for the semi-spiritual contact with nature described by Alma- gor (1985). ‘Fiona’ complained of being “carted around”, “you couldn’t say “there’s a nice bird, let’s have a look at it” or “lets get out and admire the trees here”.”

The experience of East African society was found to contradict the images of primordial nature which were expected and desired. Although aware of the existence of a sedentary and urban society, the interviewees had performed a feat of mental gymnastics which placed this society geographically and culturally separate from the parts of East African nature which they sought. The non-pastoral society was effectively an “exotic backdrop” to Kenya’s coastal beaches (Eastman, 1995, p. 179), culturally distinct and spatially separate from the interior landscapes of the safari. The tourists interviewed were interested in a safari landscape removed from this hybrid, Wester-

nised society and nature: an ecology which integrates primitive peoples and primordial nature in a harmo- nious relation. However, the social and economic realities of the Serengeti and Masai Mara are rather different from this idealisation. Although geographically and culturally marginal, these places are not divorced from a spatial division of labour which locks them into processes of cultural and economic change. Furthermore, the standard of living and quality of infrastructure of the non-pastoral society, both in urban areas such as Mombasa and in the sprawling

368 Andrew Norton

roadside villages, was generally expected to be much more in accordance with Western standards-“more modern” as ‘Diane’ put it. ‘Margaret’ noted that “poverty is everywhere” whilst ‘Steve’ observed that “they ain’t got nothing.. . most of them, they haven’t got nothing at all, except the shoes they’ve got on their feet.” Contact with the non-pastoral society brought the interviewees strong impressions such that the image of the African as the noble savage was supplanted by a stronger impression of the material poverty and poor quality of infrastructure of the broader society-an image which offers a radically different impression of East Africa than that of primeval nature. As ‘Diane’ remarked, “there’s such a contrast between those who have [the tourists] and those who haven’t. I think that’s the biggest impression 1’11 take home with me.”

Encoding and Decoding Strategies and the Cir-

cuit of Culture

The empirical work reported above highlights a number of discrepancies between the representations of East Africa made through tourism marketing and those articulated by tourists. These discrepancies suggest that the circuit of culture is not simply a model of discourse transfer from producer to consumer: contra Boorstin (1967) tourists are not gullible. In- stead, the circuit of culture should be conceptualised as a rather complex model of discourse negotiation (Squire, 1994b), within which both tourism mar- keters and tourists are “active participants in the creation of ideology and myth” (Uzzell, 1984, p. 79). Since both marketing managers and tourists are active, the distinction between the productive and consumptive aspects of cultural communication noted by Johnson (1986) breaks down. In this section, the encoding and decoding strategies employed respectively by tourism marketing and by tourists are elaborated in order to explain the roles of tourism marketing and tourists in the negotiation of place meaning.

With respect to product marketing, it should be noted that the requirements of product differentiation necessitate the development of crude caricatures and simple symbolic complexes. The globalisation of tourism and the increasing propensity for long dis- tance travel within a wider choice of destinations has resulted in increasing pressure for places to be com- petitive (Urry, 1990; Britton, 1991; Bramwell and

Rawding, 1996). Furthermore, holiday resorts are so similar that an image has to be attached to them in order to distinguish and differentiate them for particular market segments and from everyday experience (Uzzell, 1984; Goodall, 1990; Shaw and Williams, 1994). Tourism promoters do this by building on the unique benefits of places and by feeding upon and representing discourses from other genres and forms of communication to represent cultures and environments through archetypes (Urbain, 1989). Although these archetypes may appear natural and innocent, the touristic marketing message, like any other, is full of implicit references (Urbain, 1989). The apparently innocent representations found in tourist brochures generate and transmit specific cultural meanings under layers of ideological sediment (Barthes, 1973). Archetypes compartmen- talise cultures and environments, collapsing difference into caricatures. As Rowe (1993, p. 261) argues from an analysis of the tourism promotion of Austra-

lia, “metaphysical mythologies are constructed and selectively mobilised in the act of consumer per- suasion.” Ablers and James (1988, p. 136) note that “Homogenisation, decontextualisation and mystifi- cation are processes that are widely used in representing and communicating ethnicity [and nature] in the context of tourism.”

The marketing of East Africa is no exception. The tourist brochures analysed were found to have drawn heavily on a romantic discourse inherited from col-

onial contact with Africa, representing East African nature as primordial and its culture as primitive, characterised by the noble savage. Together, these narrative descriptions of nature and culture accord well, offering a lucrative marketing mix which offers access to the “remnants of a bygone era” (Bruner, 1991, p. 240), a land which is “on hold, frozen in time for tourists to see” (Eastman, 1995, p. 182). This strategy represents East Africa as spiritually and environmentally richer than the West. As one brochure put it, East Africa is “ideal for escaping the pressures of the modern world and treating yourself to a relaxing lifestyle where peace and tranquillity are the key notes.” This location is a “paradise for esca- pists”. ” In the process, as Adams (1992) notes, tourism marketing collapses a fantastically diverse continent onto the head of a pin. A number of presentational devices were used to perform this “feat of mental gymnastics” (Adams, 1992, p. xiii): explicit, rhetorical claims to mimesis, authenticity and access to the archetype presented; matter-of-fact


description; implication; the identification and itiner-

isation of specific places as noteworthy; the selection of particular photographic images and textual descriptions; and, the omission of aspects which did not accord with the archetypes represented, such as modernisation, non-pastoral groups and visitor numbers to the parks, as well as historical and contempor-

ary struggles against the expropriation of park land.

However, the tourists interviewed were able to criti- cally decode the texts of tourist brochures and compared the tourist sights with the anticipated experience, or what Percy (1975, p. 47) describes as

the “preformed symbolic complex”, through drawing on knowledges of other texts, social dialogue and personal experience. By comparing the representations in the tourist brochures with their already- constituted, cultural knowledges, the tourists were able to re-interpret the texts of tourist promotion and tourist sights. Their “discriminating abilities” (Teu- bal et al., 1991) allowed rhetoric to be distinguished, omitted information to be inserted, and caricatured archetypes to be modified or supplanted with altogether new interpretations. Thus, several of the interviewees were able to re-interpret the animal numbers, the congested nature of the parks and the quality of infrastructure and material poverty. These re-interpretations were developed over the extensive period of time between their anticipation of their safari and their reflection on their experiences. Dur- ing this period, there was great scope for observation, social dialogue, consultation with different texts, and critical reflection.

Although the interviewees were able to fill in some of the missing detail, with respect to the material poverty of East Africa for example, there was little opportunity for them to develop an appreciation of historical and contemporary resistance and struggles, such as against the expropriation of park land. The negotiated positions which were developed “ac- knowledged the legitimacy of the hegemonic defi- nitions.. . while at a more restricted, situational level... operated with exceptions to the rule” (Hall, 1980, pp. 136-138). The Serengeti, for example, was ‘more like’ what ‘Cathy’ had expected it to be; for ‘Margaret’ it was a primordial landscape which made her feel as though she was at the beginning of the world. Although the safari experience prompted the development of ‘exceptions’ to the primordial archetype, such as visitor numbers to the parks, animal numbers and the existence of material poverty, the

park land-scape was not described as the product of human agency or as a historical conflict over access to land, stemming from the colonial expropriation of the

traditional lands of the Masai. So, although some aspects of East African landscapes were re- interpreted, certain interpretations remained unavailable for consideration. In short, safari tourism hid as much as it revealed, despite its inter-textual

and experiential character.

Conclusion

Anderson (1995, p. 291) describes the zoo as a dom-

esticated social product, “a space where nature is abstracted from its contexts and shaped into an image and experience by, and for, humans”. There are clear parallels between zoos and African safaris: the nature on display is implicated in a hidden nexus of capital and power relations, including colonialism and capi- talism; habitats and species populations are managed and animals become domesticated, through exposure to tourists rather than caging; and the experience is a constructed one which offers access to a ‘wild’, primeval nature and attempts to hide its material and symbolic construction. This paper has focused on the representational and experiential aspects of safari tourism, to investigate how safari tourism constructs East African nature. The paper has traced the reproduction of discourse through the circuit of culture, from the symbolism and text promoted by tourist brochures to the interpretations made by tourists following their safari experience. To conclude, safari tourism constructs East African nature through a process of nature negotiation between texts, tourists and places. Tourists negotiate their understandings of East African nature as the commercialised and managed character of the parks, the visitor numbers and the scarcity of certain animals inhibits access to an encounter with the kind of nature promoted in tourism marketing. In addition, they attempt to account for the perceived cultural and economic realities which enter the landscape. This process of negotiation distorts the simplistic idealisations of tourism marketing which spatially separate primitive and developed culture, primordial and managed nature. However, leisure space is not a tab&a rasa on which the tourist can build any imaginative geography since only certain interpretations are available within the circuit of culture. Although the accounts of East Africa developed by tourists are rich in aesthetic detail compared with the archetypes promoted in

Andrew Norton

tourism marketing, they are partial accounts which are unable to draw on discourses which are hidden from them, such as the history of civilisation and slavery in East Africa, economic and political differences between ethnic groups, and historical and con-

temporary struggles against the expropriation of park land.

From the empirical material elaborated, it should be noted that the circuit of culture is more complex in practice than the model might imply. The study of

tourism demonstrates that the circuit of culture does not involve a simple transfer of a discourse from a

‘producer’ to a ‘consumer’. Indeed, the conceptual distinction between production and consumption is deconstructed through the consideration of tourism as an arena for discourse construction and manipulation. Furthermore, if other forms of tourism are considered, rather than just package tourism, the flow of discourse through the circuit may be seen as much less cyclical than the model suggests. Instead, the role of social dialogue between tourists is much more important. Nevertheless, the circuit of culture model still provides a useful framework for the consideration of tourism as an arena for the reproduction of discourse if attention is paid to the unique periods of anticipation, experience and reflection which distinguish tourism from other forms of cultural communication. Clearly, there is still much to be learned about the experiential interpretation of nature: how discourse from different texts and social interaction is used to translate the experiences of tourism into meaningful narratives. Haraway (1991) notes that

‘experience’ and ‘nature’ are the two most ambiguous words in the English language. She argues that “Just as nature is one of culture’s most startling and non- innocent products, so is experience one of the least innocent, least self-evident aspects of historical, embodied movement” (Haraway, 1991, p. 109).

In order to further investigate tourism as an arena for discourse negotiation, popular and elitist readings of landscape representations from multiple media forms could be integrated with popular understandings of place. With respect to East Africa, for example, it would be interesting to develop an understanding of how representations from Out of Africa, the Lion King and news reports of famine and internal conflict relate to tourists’ (as well as locals’) understandings. There are also unanswered questions concerning how different textual readings are constructed, between tourists of different gender (Squire, 1994~) and ethni-

city, and between tourists and ‘locals’. In particular, Neumann’s (1995) assertion that the establishment of national parks in East Africa has imposed Western ways of reading East African landscapes needs empirical testing: how do interpretations of East African nature and culture differ between international and domestic tourists?’ Such an investigation would lead inevitably towards addressing the possibilities for different textual readings, ones which would illumi- nate important but presently hidden dimensions of East African history and geography.

Acknowledgements-I would like to thank Martin Boddy for his advice and help with the research which forms the basis of this paper, and Sarah Whatmore, two anonymous reviewers and Andrew Leyshon for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Finally, I would like to thank Ray Kirk for his help with the overseas field work.

Notes

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

See, for example, Barrel1 (1980), Lowenthal (1991), Clifford and King (1993), Daniels (1993), Bunce (1994), Cooper (1994), Crow (1994), Cosgrove et al. (1994), Hooson (1994), Matless (1994; 1995), Rose (1994), Taylor (1994), Willems-Braun (1994) and Kins- man (1995). Tourism is notable for its absence in a review of recent work on landscape by Duncan (1995) and in a review of work in cultural geography by Matless (1995). For example, see Buck (1977), Britton (1979), Uzzell (1984), Dilley ( 1986)) Ablers and James (1988)) Cohen (1988; 1989; 1993; 1995), Selwyn (1989), Reimer (1990), Bruner (1991), Hughes (1992), Goss (1993), March (1994)) Mellinger (1994). It should be noted that the selection was targeted at the pre-booked package market, rather than the back- packing market, which involves marketing and booking of safaris in East Africa. The brochures selected were: British Airways Holidays ‘Worldwide’ January- December 1995, 2nd Edition; Cosmos ‘Distant Dreams: Worldwide Holidays’ January-November 1995,2nd Edition; Dragoman ‘Passport to Adventure Overland Expeditions’ 1994-95; Guerba ‘Africa in Close Up: Safaris and Expeditions’ 1995-96; Kumuka ‘Expeditions Africa’ 1995196; Kuoni ‘Worldwide A to Z of Longhaul Travel’ 15 December 1994-14 December 1995. Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper. Guerba uses a photograph of two rhino on a grassy plain; Kumaka uses a silhouetted elephant with a setting sun. For copyright reasons, the cover of Kumaka’s 1996-1997 brochure has been reproduced in Figure 3. This cover utilises similar animal symbolism to the 1995-1996 brochure, representing ‘Africa’ using the imagery of one of the ‘big five’ game animals. Kuoni (1995). British Airways Worldwide Holidays (1995, p. 125); Cosmos (1995, p. 79). This was found in 25 out of 31 photographs of East African landscapes in the brochures examined.

Safari tourism

10. Cosmos (1995, p. 79). 11. Dragoman (1995, p. 15); Cosmos (1995, p. 80); Guerba

(1995, p. 2). 12. For example, the Dragoman brochure (1995, p. 15)

shows a photograph of two Masai women with babies adjacent to and slightly smaller than a picture of a gorilla; in the Kumaka brochure (1995, p. 28), a photograph of a Masai woman is slotted between photographs of rhino, giraffe and flamingo; and, in the Cosmos brochure (1995, p. 82) a Masai woman is slotted in between photographs of a giraffe, a lion and a group of hippos. Figure 5, the title page for the ‘East Africa’ section of the Guerba brochure, shows an elephant on a grassy plain with Mount Kilimanjaro in the background. Inset into this picture is a photo of three people in traditional clothes and carrying spears. This page combines the themes of primitive culture and primeval nature to represent East Africa. The text reads “East Africa is famous for its outstanding wildlife and beautiful scenery; the Serengeti; wildebeest mi- grations; Masai Mara; Kilimanjaro; silverback gorillas; and the Kenyan coast to name but a few” (Guerba, 1995, p. 10). Figure 4 is taken from the first page of the section on East Africa in the British Airways brochure (p. 119).

13. Kuoni (1995, p. 11) believes that “tourism should work positively towards protecting the natural beauty, culture, wildlife of the destinations we visit.” Guerba pledges to donate an unspecified amount to “charities concerned with helping the wildlife and peoples of less developed countries.” British Airways Holidays and Kuoni pledge to contribute to charities concerned with nature conservation, pledging f2 per person travelling to Friends of Conservation. Dragoman donates f2 per booking to Survival International, “a world-wide movement to support tribal peoples. It stands for their right to decide their own future and helps them to protect their lands, environment and way of life” (Dra- goman, 1995, p. 5). It is not mentioned that such an objective stands in direct conflict with wildlife tourism in East Africa-the National Parks of the Serengeti and Masai Mara are the traditional lands of the Masai, from which they were expelled in order to establish the parks (see Neumann (1995) for an account of the material and symbolic appropriation of East African landscapes) .

14. Photo by Lyall Elwin. 15. East Africa is richly endowed with culture and history.

The ancient Egyptians believed their ancestors came from a southerly land called Punt with which they traded from 2500 BC, the Phoenicians traded with a town on the Tanzanian coast called Rhapta from 600 BC, with which the Romans traded from the 4th Century AD. Early Islamic buildings on Manda Island, off the coast of Kenya, have been dated to the 9th century AD. Coastal trade flourished at this time with ivory, ebony, spices, Oriental and Arabic goods traded with gold from the Zambesi Valley. Zanzibar was a centre of flourishing trade with ships from Persia, Arabia and India from this time. More than 30 Swahili city states operated in the Shirazi Era, between the 13th and 15th centuries, during which sultans from Persia ruled. The most notable city state was located at Kilwa (Tanzania). This wasdescribed by the medieval travel- ler Ibn Battuta, who visited in 1331, to be “among the finest and most substantially built [city] in the world.” The Portuguese controlled some of the coastline from

in East Africa 371

the 16th Century. For further information, see Briggs (1993).

16. Guerba (1995, p. 10). 17. See Neumann (1995) for an account of the material and

symbolic appropriation of national parks through Bri- tish colonialism in East Africa. Neumann argues that not only were these spaces seized physically from the ethnic groups occupying them, but particular ways of seeing the landscape were imposed.

18. Cosmos (1995, p. 89). 19. Singida (1996) notes that Kenyans are beginning to

take part in domestic tourism through participation in promotional incentives sponsored by the Kenyan Gov- ernment, which may further the imposition of Western ways of seeing East African landscapes.

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