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4.4 Conclusion
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services in the various cultural tourism projects are women, only 25% of the revenues go directly to women. Furthermore, the empowerment of women and gender parity should be based not only on the amount of revenue that goes to a particular group, but also on overall participation in the decision-making processes. Although both in the Kenyan and Tanzanian projects women play an important role in the delivery of various services, few women serve as brokers and few women are actually involved in the decision-making processes.
Fourth, in terms of political empowerment, the cultural manyattas and the cultural tourism projects have introduced new political structures both within and between the communities. As stated, in most of the cultural manyattas, a management committee was established to manage the projects. Before starting a cultural manyatta, local project initiators have to consult with the leaders of group ranches and also with the local chief. However, the management committees are usually registered separately from existing group ranch committees. As a consequence, this form of arrangement usually introduces a new level of governance in the local community. In addition, the recent establishment (jointly by the African Wildlife Society, the Kenyan Wildlife Society and the Ministry of Culture and Social Services) of the Association for Cultural Centres in Amboseli Ecosystem (ACCA) has a new political implication that will affect local governance.
Apart from involvement in marketing and revenue distribution, ACCA also aims at relocating the cultural manyattas that are situated in critical wildlife corridors and dispersal areas. In other words, through ACCA the government and other interest groups are trying to control and reduce the haphazard development of cultural manyattas in areas adjacent to Amboseli National Park.
Similarly, the recent establishment of the Tanzania Cultural Tourism Organization (TACTO) to coordinator the activities of the CTP also has political implications. The main aim of TACTO is to coordinate the various initiatives subsequent to the withdrawal of SNV. However, TACTO has been a source of conflict among the various community projects ever since its establishment.
Although personal and financial disputes were the immediate sources of conflict, in essence the main cause of conflict centres on the issue of ownership of the CTP. In this regard, most of the local people in the various villages do not see TACTO as their organization. A lack of trust and cooperation among stakeholders remains. Successful projects within the CTP do not feel responsible for the less successful ones, and the variety of organizational forms within the 18 projects also impedes cooperative action. As one of the stakeholders observed: ‘TACTO is like a house hit by a storm. And sometimes it is easier to build a new one instead of rebuilding it’ (in:
Verburg, 2004). As the SNV has pulled out and the Tanzanian Tourism Board feels responsible only for the marketing of the projects, the CTP is about to fall apart in various projects; some are very successful, while others are almost out of business.
Chapter 4 Cultural tourism in African communities
community fractions) interact both within and between multiple interlocked scales. In unravelling this complexity, the following issues prevail.
It is particularly important for studies on community-based tourism to move away from the static concepts of tourism that reduce complexity to a binary situation of either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (and
‘modern’ or ‘primitive’, ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’, ‘global’ or ‘local’). We need to be prepared to undertake the laborious work of unscrambling the complicated interconnections of the local and the global, as well as the ways in which communities are fractured along lines of modernity and tradition, ethnicity or gender.
Hence, neither tourism nor communities should be dealt with as homogenous entities:
they are complex, open, fluid and heterogeneous, and the relation between them is even more intricate. Therefore, studies on community-based tourism should commence with a critical investigation of the diversity of people and things that are, at least temporarily, indicative of a particular community and of tourism. In doing so, it is also important to consider the processes by which these elements are simultaneously constituting, translating and at times shaping or challenging each other. Communities and tourism are constantly built as actors sustain or reshape notions and practices of ‘community’ and ‘tourism’. And these notions and practices mutually legitimate, circulate, embody, materialize and shape each other.
The interaction between tourism and communities evokes relations of power. Power should be dealt with as omnipresent, relational and at least potentially productive. Although subsequent relations of power may not be to everyone’s liking, they are genuine and need to be acknowledged when studying tourism. The understanding of power underlies the rethinking of community-based tourism, as ‘power in tourism can be negotiated, even mediated, but it cannot be denied’
(Cheong and Millar, 2000).
Finally, the interweaving of a large number of organizations (governmental, business, non-governmental, community based) in the CTP and their particular ways of seeing and doing2 progressed by trial and error and went through various stages of success and failure. At times the cooperation of many in the CTP converged, then faded away again and had to be repaired.
It illustrates that tourism results from recursive processes and that a lot of effort is needed to understand how it is that tourism gets performed and performs itself into relations that are relatively stable.
This is exactly the task I have set myself for Part II of this book, namely to establish how tourism is performed, stays in place and then transforms. In the following two chapters, I shall introduce actor-network theory and the concepts of tourismscapes and modes of ordering, in order to develop a new outlook on the study of tourism, one that enables a better understanding of the processes found and addressed in the previous case studies.
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Notes
1 This Chapter is based on a literature review, field visits to some manyattas and villages participating in the CTP, and discussions with Nanda Ritsma, Marcel Leyzer and Vedasto Izoba. I should like to acknowledge the contributions of Karin Peters, John Akama, Stephen Wearing and Daniel Verburg. Parts of this chapter have previously been published in Duim et al. (2005a. and b.)
2 In Chapter 6, I will discuss these particular ways of seeing and doing in terms of ‘modes of ordering’.
