Modes of ordering tourismscapes
6 Modes of ordering tourismscapes
6.1 The Cultural Tourism Programme
How did the Tanzanian Maasai communities get locked into tourismscapes? First, as outlined earlier, tourismscapes are performed through networked connections between people and organizations. The development of modules of the Cultural Tourism Programme (CTP) is largely in the hands of local villagers acting as coordinators, guides, cooks and dancers. However, in the Amboseli region in Kenya, members of the cultural manyattas also interlink with members of other Maasai villages and group ranches, various departments of ministries and the Kenyan Wildlife Service, numerous NGOs (e.g. the African Wildlife Foundation) and predominantly foreign-owned tour operators (Berger, 1996; Buysrogge, 2001). Linkages with the latter are predominantly established by drivers-cum-guides. They have great leeway in selecting which cultural manyatta should be visited. They act as the brokers between the manyattas and the tourists, providing a linkage to the outside world. In some cases, drivers share their powerful position with leaders of the cultural manyattas. These leaders form a cartel with drivers in which they make deals on benefit sharing (Ongaro and Ritsma, 2002: 133).
The CTP in Tanzania also consists of people working in the 18 modules as well as organizations (Tanzanian Tourism Board, TACTO, SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, foreign tour operators, etc.) and around 120 tour operators (around 40% of which include in their itinerary villages participating in the CTP) based in Arusha or beyond, and financing organizations like
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Oxfam Netherlands (NOVIB), the Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation (ICCO), the humanistic development organization HIVOS, Balance, Instituto Oikos, European Union and the Region of Lombardia. All these organizations had to be involved to make the CTP a feasible project.
Communities also link up with the outside tourist world through an array of networked machines and technologies that extend the manyattas in time-space. In the 1960s the utilization of jet planes to get to Nairobi or Arusha and of Volkswagen minibuses to tour around Amboseli or Arusha were decisive for the development of tourism in these regions. Obviously, those villages in the CTP that have easy access to Arusha or to the main roads connecting Arusha with nearby tourism attractions (e.g. Ilkidinga, Longido and Mto wa Mbu) are highly successful, whereas others lag behind. Furthermore, in the case of the CTP, mobile phones have recently enabled some villages and communities to link up with tour operators and tourists in Arusha, and this has made the CTP flourish2. For example, some coordinators of the modules use a mobile phone to communicate with potential customers. The technology becomes a tool of empowerment allowing the community to establish direct communication with the source of tourists and to negotiate an outcome.
Tourismscapes also encompass hybrid environments; complexes shaped by natural and cultural objects, human relics such as hotels, restaurant and entertainment facilities that match up with the tourist gaze (Urry, 2002; Ashworth and Dietvorst, 1995). The tourism space of the CTP is a typical combination of specific natural environments (Amboseli, Serengeti, Ngorogoro Crater, Kilimanyaro and Mount Meru frequented by the ‘big five’ operators), tourism facilities (lodges, campsites) and ‘Maasai’ villages. Without this specific environment there would be no tourism at all, as is the case in most other parts of Kenya and Tanzania.
All these actors in tourismscapes define one another in the intermediaries they put into circulation. As we have seen, intermediaries are the ‘language’ of the network. They connect actors into a network and define the network itself. Generally speaking, in the CTP the intermediaries are services (guidance, dances, food, souvenirs) and, in return, money. However, information and images are also important. In the case of Kenya, the Maasai and the Kilimanyaro are icons for tourists ‘looking for exoticism and adventure in the African wilderness’ (Akama, 2002: 43). Lastly, objects move across tourismscapes as well. Clothes (T-shirts and shukas) food and drinks, postcards and photographs, handicrafts and souvenirs are mobile as well (see Urry, 2000: 64-65).
Clearly, the CTP has been a remarkably successful project. It catalysed the creation of a new product demanded by the private sector, developed mechanisms for income generation and development projects in poor communities, and evoked valuable cultural exchanges between tourists and rural communities (see Kobb and Olomi, 2001). However, this success was a result not only of the particular way in which the SNV Netherlands Development Organisation and the Tanzanian Tourism Board orchestrated the CTP. The success stemmed from a particular interaction between various modes of ordering, which at least for a particular period of time converged. As Ploeg (2003: 28) asserts:
Chapter 6 Modes of ordering tourismscapes
What occurs as practice, as ‘state of affairs’, as material effect, at moment T and in place P will never be the unilinear effects of one mode of ordering, of one strategy, but rather the encounter, the interaction, the mutual influencing, conditioning, and often mutual transformation of several modes of ordering – i.e. several strategies – of several interlocking projects. (ibid.: 47).
For example, there are the concerns of tour operators and travel agencies looking for new products and experiences, which however draw heavily ‘on a romantic discourse inherited from colonial contact with Africa, representing East African nature as primordial and its culture as primitive’
(Norton, 1996: 368; see also Akama, 2002; Wels, 2002). There are the ‘dreams’ articulated by tourists, partly differing from those articulated through tourism marketing, which suggest that the circuit of culture is not simply a model of transfer of images and knowledge from producer to consumer (Duim et al., 2005b; see also Meethan, 2001). Moreover, the desired experiences differ greatly per type of tourist (Elands and Lengkeek, 2002).
There are ‘definitions of the situation’ and subsequent practices of nature conservationists and scientists from the developed world who suspected that pastoralism was responsible for environmental degradation and the decrease in wildlife numbers. These ‘definitions’ led to the displacement of the Maasai from natural areas, which are now frequented and ‘possessed’
by tourists (Mowforth and Munt, 2003: 237-240). Subsequently, new approaches to nature conservation and community participation were being explored, utilizing tourism as an instrument, with the aim of remedying some of the events of the past (see e.g. Knegt, 1998;
Rutten, 2002).
Agencies such as the SNV usually order their work in terms of such criteria as poverty alleviation, gender equity or empowerment. In the case of Tanzania, the SNV and local actors jointly designed eight criteria for developing the CTP (SNV, 1999), to the extent that Tanzanian external evaluators in 1998 commented: ‘SNV should not spend endless hours defining its purpose and thinking about terms. There is nothing worse than a large group of people financed through taxpayers’ money debating the meaning of “development” or “peasant agriculture”’
(Kob and Mmari, 1998: 4).
And last but not least there are the ‘modes of ordering’ of the Maasai and other ethnic groups that are either sharing or challenging values and meanings, based on a range of processes that connect or divide people by means of key activities, such as tourism. The CTP, for example, touched upon some ‘real cultural reasons of gender imbalances’, which however differed between various groups and modules (see e.g. Kob and Mmari, 1998; Cammen, 1997). But also other aspects of tradition – respect for elders, the recognition of lifelong leadership, and age group solidarity (Berger, 1996: 192) – are now facing other modes of ordering.
All these and other ‘worlds’ interlocked and, especially in the late 1990s, gained momentum. The interaction at that point generated a precarious pool of order and a project that was considered worldwide as being very successful. However, the institutionalizing of the CTP, which was necessitated by the foreseen withdrawal of the SNV, unfortunately revealed ‘deep divides within the project’ (Kob and Olomi 2001: 1). As the external evaluators concluded, after a successful period the ‘situation we entered was characterized by mistrust and stagnation’, which related to personal conflicts as well as to ‘incorrect policy decisions, invalid assumptions and improper institutional arrangements’ (ibid.: 2;) to the extent that ‘the process of institutionalizing the CTP
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has led to misunderstanding, mistrust, suspicions and divisions between TACTO and CTP as well as among the two institutions’ (ibid.: 19; see also Verburg, 2004).
The main issues at stake were the extent to which the CTP should be commercialized and operated like a business, the ownership of the tourism programme within and between communities, the utilization of village development fees, donor-dependency, the lack of skills and of experience of the persons involved, and fears for politicization of the programme (see Kob and Olomi, 2001; Verburg 2004). As a consequence of this discord, neither TACTO nor a proposed company to take over the marketing and booking of the CTP ever materialized, which all in all endangers the sustainability of the CTP.
