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Faces of Africa: come see the lionman… er, lions and men

Posted on January 18th, 2012

Sometimes I have to do a bit of thinking to decide on a topic for this blog. And then there are times like last Thursday.

I had stopped at the McGill campus Travel Cuts to see about a package deal on train tickets. (Ironically, I was on the way back to my office after teaching a seminar on popular images of Africa in the West.) As the woman behind the counter tried to find information about the promotion, I scanned a rack of travel guides.

I found a section of brochures devoted to Africa. The covers of the first two depicted typical scenes of Western tourism in Africa—a young girl in “traditional”, “tribal” dress (it is impossible, without previous local knowledge, to tell which community she belongs to as the picture is uncaptioned) looking off into the distance; a white man holding an expensive camera peering out at the savannah from an SUV. These images are problematic enough, but it was the third brochure on the rack that really caught my attention.

The cover of this brochure, produced by Acacia Adventure Holidays (and shown in the image above), features the face of a lion and the face of an anonymous African man merging into one another. Half lion, half human. The title below the picture reads, “FACES OF AFRICA: Strong & Proud.”

It should (hopefully) be apparent that this image is incredibly problematic. The image recalls one of the most offensive tropes of colonial- and pre-colonial-era representations of non-Europeans: The Other as a beast or animal. The fact that this African man is implicitly equated with a “strong, proud” animal such as the lion (and not, say, with a monkey) does not mitigate the fact that this purported equivalency is profoundly dehumanizing.

Unfortunately, this brochure is only an extreme example of a prevalent tendency in Western promotions of tourism to Africa: Africans—specifically rural, “traditional” Africans (urban, “modern” Africans are almost never depicted in such writing)—are just another aspect of Africa to be “seen.” Get in your SUV, drive to the watering hole, see some elephants, drive to a village, see some Africans, drive through the savannah, see some baobab trees.

It is unfortunate that such images of Africans are still being used in 2012. (Indeed, when I first picked up the brochure, I triple checked the date. I was sure that it must be a dusty relic from some previous, less political aware decade.) It is all the more unfortunate that there are, presumably, people out there who find this kind of thing intriguing, rather than horrifying; otherwise why would Acacia use it in their promotional materials?

I’m not against tourism to Africa. Indeed, I believe that meeting people from different places and cultures is one of the key ways to break down stereotypes and misunderstandings. (Furthermore, revenue from tourism is incredibly important to many African economies.) But this can only occur if travel is undertaken with an open mind and a spirit of generosity. When Africans become just another thing to check off your list of photographs, along with the “Big 5” safari animals and the Nelson Mandela museum, tourism become destructive; it builds walls rather than creating connections.

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