The sweet and sour of touring Africa
ReStory narrator: James Blignaut
Africa.
The mere sound of the name is enough to send shivers down one’s spine. Africa is known as the wild and wonderful continent with so many charms and unsurpassed beauty. The privilege and sensation of enjoying the elephants of the Chobe, the lions of the Kalahari, the hippos, crocodiles and bird life of the Okavango cannot be expressed in words. These are surrounded by mile upon mile of bushveld and savannah. Enjoying all these is to witness art in motion.
But Africa is not for “sissies”, it’s a tough continent and one should not obliterate reality through a silk screen of romanticism. The people of the land experience an increasing battle for survival. Africa’s natural beauty is swamped by the consequences of poverty and changes in the economic structure. During many travels to African states over the last ten years, I observed that a large number of people were forced to change from their traditional subsistence rural agricultural livelihoods to work as peasants for large-scale commercial, mainly cattle, farmers. Farmland that used to be collectively owned by a large number of community people is now in the hands of a selected few. These farmers rarely reside on the ranches themselves, though they have their roots there. This has obvious impacts on the general level of income (or the lack thereof rather) and causes poverty for the people residing on the land themselves. These peasants receive very little more than the right to remain on the land. The cattle are not theirs any longer, they are only the keepers of another’s capital.
The short-term drive for mass production and high turnover, one could also call it greed, has resultantly lead to the overgrazing of many fields. It is unfortunately very common to find large pierces of land with no groundcover at all.
The people, on the other hand, had to turn to alternative forms of income generation. Consequently, they migrated towards the main roads or arteries. Evidence of this migration is very vivid as one travels north, west and east from our country’s borders. On all the main arteries there are an increasing number of small villages, all fighting their own fight for economic survival. The people are displaced and impoverished – aliens in their own land – a land that does not supply dinner any longer.
Poverty and land degradation also go hand in hand. The poorer people become, the more they become dependant on natural resources. The more the natural resource base is harvested (or mined), the less resources are available and the more the natural carrying capacity is jeopardised, the more impoverished people become. It is these social, economic and ecological cycles that have devastating and long-term implications on welfare. Ways to alleviate immediate poverty include begging (the inevitable cries for sweets from children and money from adults), crime and prostitution.
Not only do these factors have a huge socio-economic impact on the local people and on the conscience of the tourist, but they also have a severe impact on the tourism industry itself. No longer is it possible to enjoy the unspoilt beauty of Africa without being acutely aware of the surrounding poverty. This makes bush camping very difficult if not impossible in some cases. To bush camp one needs to be in the bush, alone, just you, nature and those you love, and be able to drink in the tranquillity of the moment. One would not like to be on one’s guard and/or defence the whole time. The alternative to bush camping is to go to commercial tourism camp sites. This is also not without its problems. Other tourists (even camp site congestion!), lights and the sound of generators now form part of camping in Africa. Furthermore, it is becoming a very expensive alternative indeed. One good result, however, is the employment that tourism operators do create.
So, is the true African wilderness disappearing? To a large extent, yes. The majority of wilderness areas are now commercial enclaves and the playground for the rich with limited benefits flowing to the local communities. An ever-increasing sea of poverty and land degradation surrounds these enclaves. This requires an integrated and sustainable rural development and conservation strategy (and the implementation thereof) for southern Africa. If the governments and all other concerned parties of the southern African countries are not going to act fast, poverty will destroy arguably the sub-continent’s most valuable and precious export commodity – its land.
