Africa: Bad Market for Tourism
There are fewer than 25,000 lions left in Africa’s wild, against 1.4 billion Black Africans. Yet more Europeans, North Americans, Eurasians, and East Asians visiting Africa come for the lions, rather than the people. No one is excited about going on holiday to Africa. But why? Why don’t people go on holiday to the various African countries? Why are there no tourists flocking to Nigeria, Uganda, Chad, or Somalia? Do they not like us because we are Black? Really? Barbados, Bermuda, and the Bahamas are Black. Why do they attract tourists from around the globe, but African countries don’t?
If lions, elephants, cheetahs, and the Maasai people became extinct tomorrow, half of white and East Asian visitors to Africa would stop visiting. I know many people are wondering why he included the Maasai alongside the wildlife. Well, more people outside Africa know about the Maasai than the names of many African countries, or even Kenya itself. Jokes apart! Why are whites, East Asians, South Asians, and Southeast Asians not going on holiday to Black Africa? Simple! Our countries are too ugly, dirty, unattractive, and unsafe. We have not built anything that they’d like to see, and they may not make it back alive.
Around 74 million people visit Africa each year. However, Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia make up 44 million of the 74 million. South Africa takes 10 million; that leaves 20 million. Seychelles and Mauritius take home about 3 million, while we keep 17 million. Dubai, as a city, receives more visitors and tourists than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa. Thailand receives more tourists and visitors than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. It is certainly not a Black thing this time but a Black African thing, because the Bahamas receives 11 million tourists and visitors each year, and the Bahamas is Black. Africa has rainforests like Brazil’s, yet more people visit Brazil and its rainforests than they do Africa’s. Why?
The Black African has not sold himself to the world at all. Nobody knows anything about the cuisine of Chad, the Central African Republic, Burundi, Togo, or Mali. Nevertheless, we all know Korean food. If you go to Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, or Korea, as soon as you land, you know you are in those countries from the airport. The signboards, cuisine, and overall setup represent the people. But when you land in Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, or Côte d’Ivoire, the people act and sound more like fake Europeans than people from their actual country or culture. Imagine a descendant of slaves from Brazil, Colombia, or the US state of Mississippi who has made it their dream to visit their motherland, Africa. They land in Nigeria and are greeted by a person who looks like him but is called ‘Goodluck Jonathan’, speaks funny African-accented English with grammar all over the place as their first language, and knows more about America and Europe than they do about Africa. Imagine the disappointment on the face of the Black descendant of slaves. He’d say, “I expected to see Dikembe Mutombo, but instead I saw people eagerly choosing slavery in Europe and America.”
What I’m trying to say is this: Africa has no authenticity. It has not managed to create a distinct identity, develop it, and build its various nations around it. It has no decent infrastructure, is wiping out its wildlife, cutting down trees that are hundreds of years old, if not thousands, and wreaking havoc on its environment, littering and defecating all over the place. Why would anyone want to go there on holiday? Kenya and Tanzania are the two Black countries with the highest number of tourists and visitors, bringing home about 5 million together. About half of that 5 million are there for the animals, not the people. From the Senegambia coastline stretching all the way to the Ilha de Luanda, a 4,200-kilometre coastline passes through Guinea, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, and Angola. None of it is developed for tourism. The Gambia attracts about 200,000 visitors per year, but that’s what Jamaica brings in in two weeks.
If you are European, North American, East Asian, or from any other region outside Africa, be honest with me: have you ever considered taking a holiday to the Congo, Cameroon, Chad, or the Central African Republic? That’s if you’ve ever even heard of them. How about Spain, Thailand, the Dominican Republic, or Sri Lanka? Let us know in the comments section. The UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar host over 35 million tourists and visitors each year, more than the whole of Black Africa, even though they are desert countries and are just about the size of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. I know size doesn’t matter, but the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain were deserts and dirt-poor in the 1970s, while the various African countries had trains, motorways, and functioning economies in the 1960s.
Why would an American, Canadian, British, an EU citizen, Australian, Japanese, or South Korean want to go on holiday to Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, or Congo, where grown-ups urinate and litter in public? You know, these guys actually have a culture of maintenance, prevention, precaution and a futuristic foresight incorporated into their worldview. So, before they decide on where to go on holiday, they do make enquiries like the healthcare (non-existent), safety (non-existent), emergency services (non-existent), decent hotels (non-existent), rule of law (non-existent), police service (absolutely corrupt), and driving style (similar to lions in the wild); why would they want to come to such a place?
Would you like to know the irony? Even Black Africans themselves would rather not visit other Black African countries. Their target number one is the USA, number two is the UK, and number three is Canada, before the other Western European countries and Australia. More Nigerians have visited the UK, Europe, or the USA than Kenya, Gabon, Congo, or Angola, and vice versa. Africa is a continent where everyone wants to leave. Actually, let’s correct that. Southern and Eastern Africans don’t leave the continent like Central and West Africans do. The Black African immigrants you see flooding Europe and North America are mainly West and Central Africans.
Watch the video version on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/UEpCPm7ZABE
By Ikechukwu ORJI
