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'Connections and transformations in Africa' : |  |
| A workshop at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, Tuesday 21 November, 2006 |
return to: Index page 'Connections and transformations in Africa'
Among the many connections of
African societies with the rest of the world and with each other,
tourism takes a special place. In African tourism it is the
African locality which is connected from the outside, more than
the other way around. The mobility of one half of the tourist
equation determines the impact on the other, local half. Tourism
is a peculiar and paradoxical connection between people anyway,
but African tourism has some specific features which colour the
way tourism links Africans with the outer world. First, the
wealth imbalance between ‘host’ and ‘guest’
is severe, and both roles are not reversible, while also any real
reciprocity in the tourist exchange is problematic. Second,
This project researches the various
modalities of tourist-host interactions, with the concept of the
‘tourist bubble’ as one main approach. The way this
interface between the visiting and the visited is being
constructed at various tourist destinations, is crucial for the
connections that the local actors accrue through the presence of
tourists. How do, for instance, the types of destinations co-vary
with different connections of African actors with the ‘North’
and among themselves? What are the economic and political
dynamics of tourism in each of these situations? In what measure
do the tourist dynamics reproduce neo-colonial dependencies and
do they situate the African actors in the globalising world of
international travel?
return to: Index page 'Connections and transformations in Africa'
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