Beyond safaris: Why it’s time for tourism to end the Disneyfication of Africa

I’m on my knees, hunched over a wooden barrel filled with ripened green bananas and topped with strands of spear grass, known as inshinge. Two Rwandan women are on either side of me. Together, dressed in Rwandan fabric, we begin squashing the banana-grass mixture with our bare hands. Steps behind us, a choir of women chants and beat the drums as our bodies rock back and forth, our hands working the mixture inside the barrel—same direction, same energy. A yellow liquid starts to emerge: It will eventually become banana beer, a traditional Rwandan drink.

“Banana beer brings people together,” says Emma, a volunteer at Red Rocks Rwanda Intercultural Exchange Center. A center in the northern, hilly town of Musanze where I’m experiencing a banana beer-making class.

Musanze is the gateway to Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. Every year, tens of thousands of international tourists pass through here to hike the protected park’s muddy forests and spot Rwanda’s prized mountain gorillas. At a cost of USD$1,500 per trekking permit per foreign visitor, the activity is Rwandan tourism’s crown jewel. Some visitors even trek twice in a single trip to view different primate families. Yet few of them sign up for authentic cultural experiences during their stay—even though they exist right here in Musanze. 

“Banana beer-making is an activity that joins neighbors, friends and extended families,” Emma explains. “It’s symbolic because it takes a lot of time and energy to make and it requires people’s hearts to come together.”

I already feel a bond forming with the vivacious women of all ages who welcome me, despite showing up later than anticipated. They’ve dressed me up in a black-and-white print umushanana, a long skirt with a one-shoulder drape that royals once wore, I’m told.

The joyous, communal nature of banana beer-making fills me with joy and I’m quickly reminded of the importance of seeing African destinations beyond their Disney-fied portrayal in Western media, and past trope-ish tourism marketing campaigns that depict the African continent as primarily a place of wild animals in vast open landscapes—while its people lie in the periphery.

I recall, too, the questions from my UK boarding school teenage classmates: Did my family live in the biggest tree in Côte d’Ivoire? Did we share a forest with the animals?

As tourism to the continent grows, there’s an urgent need to emphasize people-to-people experiences that support entrepreneurs and benefit communities in and outside tourist areas. Locally owned social enterprises such as Red Rocks Rwanda serve as powerful tools for economic growth, in addition to helping preserve traditions.

Spending a mere additional USD$25 per person for a banana beer-making class run by a group of independent women—many of whom were widowed after the 1994 Rwanda genocide—can help shift the scales of inequity in tourism, while supporting entrepreneurial dreams and learning about Rwanda’s heritage.

Of course, the deep-pocketed Western visitor would have to first reckon with the fact that there’s more to Africa than its wildlife. They’d have to perceive the continent just as they do, say, Europe, Asia or the Americas: A region made up of numerous countries with big outdoors and wildlife, but also diverse cuisines, modern cities, vibrant art scenes, hillside villages where traditions continue, and talented creative entrepreneurs offering unique experiences. The tourism industry in safari destinations would have to showcase that too. 

A lifetime of Africa tropes

As the product of two modern East and West African cities—Addis Ababa and Abidjan—I became aware at an early age of the Global North’s tendency to homogenize my birth continent as a single destination, reducing it to a vast savannah inhabited by animals.

My earliest memories point me to my father’s National Geographic magazine subscriptions wherein lions and cheetahs were the highlight when it came to Africa. Or I’d see tribal faces dominate the magazine’s covers—people that even we, as urbanite Africans, rarely saw on a day-to-day basis.

I recall, too, the questions from my UK boarding school teenage classmates: Did my family live in the biggest tree in Côte d’Ivoire? Did we share a forest with the animals? (Yes, of course we did, I’d quip). Did we have buildings in Africa? That’s when I wasn’t on the receiving end of “skinny Ethiopian” jokes… Even now, the dominating perception of Ethiopia as “the land of famine” has persisted despite its historical, cultural and outdoor riches.

When I became a US travel journalist, the stereotypes of my continent on social media and in travel articles grew difficult to ignore. Year after year, I watched media colleagues produce features of luxurious stays at foreign corporation-owned safari lodges where sundowners were embraced as normal, despite taking place in an ultra-low-income community. Authentic cultural experiences with everyday residents that I knew to be accessible elsewhere in the destination were often omitted. At times you’d even wonder while reading: Were there people at all in that country, other than the lodge staff and the people working at the lodge’s non-profit community projects?

Year after year, I struggled to reconcile the portrayal of African destinations outside of Africa with my lived experience in Côte d’Ivoire and Ethiopia, which was centered around people and traditions. I understood animals to be a part of the African ecosystem and part of our way of life on the continent, but it wasn’t a ‘them versus us’ scenario. We coexisted and animals were for subsistence, not recreation. I learned that from my father, who grew up in a rural family from the Gurage ethnic group in southern Ethiopia.

Granted, there’s no denying that spotting one of Africa’s Big Five in the wild is a breathtaking experience. Days prior to meeting the women of Red Rocks, my own first game drive had taken place in Rwanda’s scenic Akagera National Park. I’ll never forget the joy of seeing a male elephant graciously swaying towards our jeep under a golden light, or spotting my first giraffes, lions, zebras, and buffalos.

But as a journalist focused on sustainable tourism for over a decade, I know the social component of sustainability must go hand-in-hand with the environmental one. And as an African who grew up witnessing the Western stereotypes imposed on my native continent, I have learned to discern and push back on the single tourism narrative about a place. This dominant story is often one that was conceived by a small group of privileged outsiders—and it continues to drive inequality for locals, whose struggles for economic equity are overshadowed by reports of growing tourist arrival numbers.

The African safari is a great example of that—an activity born out of wealthy white men such as Theodore Roosevelt (who is described as a “naturalist,” not a poacher), going on big game hunting holidays on the continent. The term Big Five was actually coined by white ‘hunters’ in colonial times chasing after the lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros and buffalo, and determining these animals as the most dangerous to encounter on foot.

“The need to remove the artistic ‘Lion King’ impression of Africa—or of other destinations suffering a similar fate—is an imperative.”

- Mordecai Ogada, conservationist

Foreign conservationists followed, self-proclaimed or otherwise, and worked to separate the animals from African communities. They ‘saved’ the animals while marginalizing the people. The modern wealthy Western tourist continued that legacy of prioritizing animal sightings, eager to make those Lion King dreams come true while luxury lodges proliferated to cater to this lucrative market.

In Rwanda, tourism was born in the 19th century as European explorers and environmentalists sought to study one of only three countries in the world home to mountain gorillas. “In the 1960s through 1980s, hence before the civil war and genocide, the tourist product was built on (Diane Fossey’s) ‘gorillas in the mist,’” this recent scholarly article further confirms.

Decades later, travelers from the Global North, American celebrities included, remain enthralled at the thought of finding themselves in vast protected landscapes with silverbacks. Beyond the porters and gorilla trekking guides essential to checking off wildlife bucket lists, genuinely interacting with African people in culture-rich cities or towns—outside of charity projects—doesn’t seem to hold the same fascination.

Beyond the Big Five

There’s a reason wildlife tourism remains a priority for African safari destinations’ governments. Consider this: In 2022, gorilla trekking generated USD$113 million out of a total $445 million in tourism revenue for Rwanda. That’s a record 6 percent increase in gorilla tourism revenue compared to 2019, according to the 2022 annual report from the Rwanda Development Board, the country’s tourism board.

Rwanda is ahead of other African destinations in that it has an established Tourism Revenue Sharing program since 2005 which allocates 10 percent of the tourism revenue from national parks to communities living around protected areas. The aim is to ensure residents have a stake in protecting nature and receive benefits from tourism in their backyard, so to speak.

“It doesn’t come in direct income,” explains Greg Bakunzi, founder of Red Rocks Rwanda. The 10 percent allocation goes toward infrastructure projects in communities, from roads and water to schools, he adds, but not as direct cash for families. “Most of them want to see something direct,” he says, referencing the residents of Musanze who live primarily from farming and raising animals.

A former gorilla trekking guide-turned-entrepreneur and community tourism pioneer, Bakunzi created Red Rocks Rwanda to fill the income gap for communities in the Volcanoes National Park area. He used his own savings to buy the land that the cultural center occupies and to create the social enterprise. He did so after realizing visitors who flocked to Musanze to go gorilla trekking were looking for additional activities.

“I thought, this is where the communities that reside behind the protected areas can benefit from this,” he says. “If we are able to set up (cultural) centers like this, this could be another asset where people could be coming in and spread money directly to the local communities.”

Today, a total of 57 women—split into three cooperatives—who live in and around Musanze take turns offering experiences to tourists at Red Rocks’ cultural center. Banana beer-making is just one of several; other activities include live painting, basket-weaving, pottery, drumming, and dancing—none of which exceed $35 per person. All the fees the women receive from experiences they deliver go directly into their pockets, Bakunzi confirms. He only gets funds when tourists purchase drinks or food at the on-site restaurant, for instance, or when they book camping accommodations through his social enterprise.

Consider this: In 2022, approximately 2,000 visitors signed up for a cultural experience at Red Rocks Rwanda. That’s fewer than 10 percent of the 34,486 tourists, residents included, who visited Volcanoes National Park that year. A woman at Red Rocks earns approximately $1,200 a year from selling tours. “It may sound like very little money, but it’s a lot when it happens in a village because they keep on investing it,” says Bakunzi.

But what if 25 percent of tourists who visit Volcanoes National Park signed up for a $25 banana beer-making class nearby, for example? A ‘back of the envelope’ calculation suggests $215,000 of tourism revenue—for a single experience that’s just as unique and memorable as gorilla trekking.

Bakunzi believes mindsets have changed since the pandemic. “I can see that a big number of the tourists nowadays don’t only want to go to the national parks, but they also want to see something that can get them together with the community,” he says.

Rwandans who live near national parks or in tourism gateway towns such as Musanze shouldn’t receive mere crumbs while we enjoy their big outdoors for ourselves, the same natural spaces that they are kept from accessing freely unless they are park employees.

Yet a 2022 Annual African Safari Report from travel company Go2Africa reveals that more than 25 percent of travelers still choose seeing the “Big Five” in the wild as their number one activity of choice when visiting the African continent. Just 10 percent of respondents selected “meeting locals” as a priority on their African safari vacation.

“The need to remove the artistic Lion King impression of Africa—or of other destinations suffering a similar fate—is an imperative,” said Mordecai Ogada, a Kenyan conservation, ecologist and co-author of The Big Conservation Lie.

Ogada, whom I interviewed last year, is known for pushing back on the narrative of an Africa that is only about wildlife tourism. “What we are selling is sort of Tarzan,” he told me, adding, “We must put people at the center of the product—that is something that needs to be done by tourism agents and the countries themselves.”

Bakunzi says it’s the responsibility of travel journalists to show a diverse African continent beyond the animals. “Whenever you put up an article and you begin with community experiences in Rwanda, beyond the gorillas, of course people are going to say, ‘Oh, I was going to go to see the gorillas, but I saw that there’s something which is also more attractive next to the Volcanoes National Park, which I might go and see.’”

Journalists would have to dig deeper than the itinerary that the tourism board invites them to experience. Travelers must also be reminded of a vital truth: Tourism is an engine for economic growth—not just for governments but for communities and for African entrepreneurs. It is also a vital tool for culture and nature preservation. Africa is no different in that respect than any other part of the world, North America included.

Rwandans who live near national parks or in tourism gateway towns such as Musanze shouldn’t receive mere crumbs while we enjoy their big outdoors for ourselves, the same natural spaces that they are kept from accessing freely unless they are park employees.

“I think it’s a matter of showing (tourists),” says Bakunzi. “If people are coming for trekking, we need to come up with a very reasonable way of integrating community and wildlife.”

A continent rich in humanity

Beyond the promise of economic growth for Rwandans, social enterprises bring a host of benefits to their members. “In Rwanda, this kind of community-based tourism—not the one from national parks—has been a tool for peace,” says Bakunzi. He cites a new fireside storytelling and dinner experience at his cultural center.

“When they sit together around a campfire, they start interacting and exchanging ideas, history,” says Bakunzi. “It develops a dialogue between the foreign visitors and the local communities and creates understanding and long-term friendships.”

There’s more to the Red Rocks cultural center than catering to tourists though. The women use the outdoor oven for their bakery business, and they make banana wine to supply markets. An on-site arts and crafts gallery trains adults and youth to grow into creative entrepreneurs, with painting, sewing, and other workshops. Their colorful handmade creations are also on sale at the shop. It’s a thriving business.

As the banana beer-making class ends, I sip on the traditional beverage and learn to say cheers in Kinyarwanda—kubuzima bwacu!  “Now that we have our banana beer, the ladies are inviting us to a dance,” says Emma. I join a circle with the women who now feel like my sisters: Florentine, Maria, Colette, Gertrude and her daughters Delphine and Marceline. 

The cool evening air fills once more with their intoxicating rhythms and chants. As we clap, laugh and sway our hips from side to side, I relive the essence of the Africa I grew up in—one that centers people-to-people interactions. I think of the tens of thousands of tourists who miss out on this magical, soul-enriching experience, despite coming so close on the way to spot animals. They don’t realize that our African brothers and sisters have always been an inextricable component of the environment and the wildlife, even if depicted otherwise.

Like the women of Red Rocks Rwanda, Africans in tourism are more than charity participants or staff servicing wealthy foreigners at luxury lodges. They are diverse, talented entrepreneurs who are worthy of receiving a larger share of tourism’s tangible economic benefits.

That’s what drives me to continue to push back on the Disney-esque narrative of ‘Africa’ as a homogenous destination, rich in wildlife but devoid of humanity. Indeed, our landscapes and biodiversity are unparalleled, whether you go to Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire or Rwanda. But tourism equity on the African continent can only be deemed to exist and grow equitably when the travel industry and travelers drop the tropes and prioritize Africa’s people and heritage as much as they exalt its natural riches.

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