adminStephen Mpofu Perspective
The United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) general assembly came to the Victoria Falls, saw, learnt, was celebrated and may have opened floodgates for foreign tourists to inundate Zimbabwe, Zambia and the rest of Southern Africa. But tourists spend their hard-earned cash flying from distant countries in the West, the East and the South to, say, Zimbabwe among other African states not to gaze on the blacks, or black hobos they encounter in their own native countries.
No, they visit here to see natives in their culture and in that way broaden their knowledge of Africa’s diverse culture and civilisation as a portrayal in post modernity.
The UNWTO general assembly left an indelible impression on the minds of the ordinary Zimbabweans and, no doubt, of other ordinary men and women in the street about what these people also stand to harvest from a boom in tourism.
Eminent speakers spoke of tourism as “a tool” for “broad-based,” “inclusive economic development.”
What one immediately concludes from this is that ordinary Zimbabweans and others like them elsewhere have a Martin Luther King Jr. dream for tourism to open doors for them to a brave new economic future in their periphery and away from the centre or urban set-up which has enjoyed and continues to enjoy a lion’s share of windfall from tourism.
In Zimbabwe, plans are afoot to build this country’s own Disneyland, a tourism haven at the town of Victoria Falls, in anticipation of reaping handsome monetary dividends from the project which will certainly attract foreign visitors in their droves, like the Niagara Falls between the United States and Canada.
Already as the seventh wonder of the world, the Victoria Falls stands as a premier tourist spot in Zimbabwe.
But even when garlanded as probably the top tourist spot in Africa after the addition of Disneyland, the Victoria Fall city will not be another country in Zimbabwe, which suggests that for tourism to truly provide a base for inclusive, broad-based economic development the rest of the country should benefit from tourism as an economic development tool.
To date many tourist sites with a potential for drawing foreign visitors to various parts of the country remain huddling in the shadow of the Victoria Falls and, to a lesser extent, of the Great Zimbabwe, the Matopos and Khami Ruins. Yet many of these small tourist sites could also become magnets drawing foreign visitors in large numbers were they to be developed to provide portraitures of Zimbabwe’s ancient cultures, civilisations through material forms of culture such as handicrafts and tools rural communities used, say, in both the early and late Stone Age periods.
For instance, apart from cave paintings, very little, if any is known as the tools, utensils and clothing by the San who originally occupied this country before the advent of blacks who literally have progressively shoved the indigenous Zimbabweans in the shade.
In this pen’s humble opinion, a museum depicting the original way of life of the “Bushmen” as the San are pejoratively known to many is needed.
Such a museum, situated where the San now live, rehabilitated, not somewhere in an urban centre might draw foreign visitors and their money to such a showcase, helping socially and economically to develop those people who have been forced by “civilisation” to abandon their hunting and gathering forms of livelihood.
Once the much-fancied Disneyland comes to life, it could bring windfalls to nearby Binga as foreign visitors might wish to visit the Tongas in that district and learn more about the pristine culture of a people which has, unlike cultures of other ethnic groupings in the country, resisted any super imposition by decadent Western culture.
Is there not much prudence in promoting these community cultural villages through publicity to attract foreign tourists there with economic and social development an end result?
Upbeat about the prospects of economic and social development that tourism could have for Zimbabweans, Mr Voti Thebe, regional director of the National Art Gallery in Bulawayo, said a government ministry should be given seed money and be tasked to start community-based projects on creating an arts industry with money earned being ploughed back into the community as what happens with Campfire.
If defunct women’s clubs were resuscitated and funded to produce crafts for sale at the much-vaunted Disneyland this could make tourism a tool for developing the women in question in their communities, according to Mr Thebe.
Of course the right things to be produced for the right clients will necessarily have to be carried out in much the same way as archaeologists might wish to carry out excavation to discover the ways of life for the people who inhabited those areas before “those without knees” came to Zimbabwe bringing along swanky clothing and modernist tools and other forms of technology.
Such archaeological digs could unearth a wealth of knowledge about Zimbabweans and other Africans elsewhere that remains buried deep in the earth as though our people have no shining, proud history of their own albeit termed “primitive” by primitive-minded modernists.
Tourism being a growth industry and God willing, this country and indeed the entire Sadc region might never be the same again after the world tourism assembly last month. But as it is said “charity begins at home” and this also implies that home holiday-making should get the promotion that it truly deserves for Zimbabweans to learn more about their native country and become effective ambassadors themselves for the country when visiting abroad.
Trips organised jointly by tourist organisations and bus companies to ferry workers and others for weekend visits to tourist spots will refresh tired minds while also helping to promote their tourist attractions to foreigners through whatever publicity such weekend holiday joys people derive from the projects.
In a sense, cultural tourism provides the scope of broad-based, inclusive development and Zimbabweans should be raring to turn the whole country into a tourism showpiece.
Online Reporter