Tourism for pan-Africanism

Worshipers set out on pilgrimage from Senegal or Guinea or Ghana or Oshogbo and Maiduguri to trek foot and donkey to fight geography till they reached Mecca for fulfil a sanctioned holy pilgrimage. Many married and settled in Sudan or Ethiopia and enjoyed earned spiritual peace in new homes instead of returning home. A historian […]

Worshipers set out on pilgrimage from Senegal or Guinea or Ghana or Oshogbo and Maiduguri to trek foot and donkey to fight geography till they reached Mecca for fulfil a sanctioned holy pilgrimage. Many married and settled in Sudan or Ethiopia and enjoyed earned spiritual peace in new homes instead of returning home. A historian reports of Hausa traders who, in the 1920s and 1930s, trekked annually from Congo Braz-zaville and Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo) to Mecca while oiling their trade in art works gathered along the way with sharing with French, British, Belgian and American diplomats in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and Brazzaville, intelligence about events in lands they had travelled through. They were also heroic barefoot tourists across Africa.
There are now new winged tourists.  ZENITH Bank has signboards at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. As I rushed about to conduct interviews in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, out popped signboards of UNITED BANK FOR AFRICA (UBA) and OCEANIC Bank. They looked serenely safe; while a permanent sentinel outside the window of my hotel room was explained to me as precaution against sporadic gun attacks by opposition groups across the border in eastern Congo. On Kenya’s television screens in Nairobi an advertisement of GLO and Nollyhood drama charge out at viewers. Absent were sights of groups of school children from Nigeria or Mali or Liberia sponsored by these signboard and television advert tourists to build the pan-Africanism they are travelling across.
Professor Alfred Opubor, of charmed memory, got West Africa magazine to publish a tourist report of my visit to a market in Kaolack in Senegal. The brutal nudity in aspects of the report infuriated the country’s ambassador in London. He accused me of writing as if I was not a fellow African. A Yoruba wit has it that a wound attracts the company of flies. In November 2012 as we visited Goree Island off Dakar, a Tanzanian journalist working for an America public broadcasting television agency interviewed me after planting me at the gate of the final exit of those cursed to enter ships that would carry them across the Atlantic towards the Caribbean island, Brazil and other South American destinations and the United States of America. The pain-soaked site is relieved by displays of beautiful works of art, textiles, jewellery and voices that see through your pockets.  Missing was photographs or drawing of lives of slaves on plantations in Martinique, French Guyana, Surinam, Louisiana and other destinations. Also absent were pictures of opulent lives of French and other European aristocracies whose wealth was bled out by slaves deported from Goree for over three hundred years were also absent. Senegal’s tourism was running on barefoot historical memory.
Another perplexing exclusion was that heroic revolution by African peoples in Haiti which humiliated, with a crushing defeat, a French armada under Napoleon.  That defeat saved the independence of the new group of colonies in North America who had thrashed the British army and navy. Napoleon had drawn up a plan to recapture them for France.  Despite its being flaunted as a historic destination for tourists – including heads of state and European monarchs- Goree remains intellectually malnourished. Moreover, the artists and traders deserve high funding support, intervention by imaginative architects, and infrastructure. Poor packaging and looks of its marketers discouraged us from fraternising a baobab beverage.
Like Goree, the customers at Coral Beach Hotel in Dar es Salaam, former capital of Tanzania, were predominantly of European ancestry. The hotel’s architectural merits were exquisite, while its location hugged the shores of the Indian Ocean.  The silence t wore shut out the din of traffic in commercial Dar es Salaam. What were missing were voices of tourists from Mozambique banging against those of Senegal, Angola, and Namibians and Cameroonians and Togolese and Eritreans or Abakaliki or Kontagora or Malumfashi. Africa was not enjoying the beauty of Africa. There were no school children on excursions offered as a corporate social responsibility by the major oil exploiters of oil in Nigeria, Gabon, Angola, Cameroun or Canadian, American and British haulers of diamonds from Central African Republic and Darfur and Botswana and Democratic Republic of Congo. Pan-Africanism is not fighting to feed Africa’s beauty and resources to the imagination of her children.
Once upon ‘’the urgent now’’, we travelled by bus from Abuja to Shagamu in Ogun State. Out of a group of twenty, Engineer Obi and I were a brave and positively oppressed minority of two males. The group of women were veterans of cross-Nigerian travel to attend weddings, vital birthday celebrations and burial ceremonies that involve members of their Anglican Cathedral’s congregation in Gwarinpa District. This group- tourism- on- wheels is most probably not visible to the Ministry of Tourism and the Federal Bureau of Statistics. This was evident from desperate needs for decent toilet facilities. Petrol stations for refuelling shone to attract and serve motor vehicles, but offered pitiful and severely limited toilet facilities for passengers. None served coffee, tea, palm-wine or zobo or snacks. In one of them in the Okene 11 area, women ran out of urinal alleys severely distressed and spitting out in disgust.
As we neared the Osun State border, the bus stopped for sewage to be posted on grasses. A passenger with an agitated bowel charged into the bush. A voice recalled oral historians reporting cases of pythons hugging persons at such moments of indulgence. There was no health clinic all along that trans-state road.  These are not seductive conditions for tourism by Nigerians touring Nigeria; let alone ECOWAS and trans-African tourists.