Victoria Falls is probably the first heavily touristy niche Ive been to in Africa. It is probably the first such place Ive been to since Siem Reap almost 18 months ago.
The entry into the park containing the waterfall is $30, which, considering it costs only $20 for a day pass to Angkor and you can walk around for hours, seems a bit steep. Touts follow you around and harass you to no end about buying their carvings, going on the their rafting trips, bungee jumping, etc. But the main difference between Victoria Falls and Siem Reap is that Cambodia probably gets a huge portion of its income from tourism: go anywhere, and there are plenty of tourists. On the other hand, Im not sure Ive seen a single tourist in Zimbabwe (including Harare, Rushinga, Bulawayo, and Bindura) since I arrived two and a half weeks ago (outside of Victoria Falls, of course, which is swimming in them... no pun intended). Maybe one or two, but I wouldn't swear to it.
So I asked a number of people how they came to be there. It seems many are on tour buses from Johannesburg, some fly straight into Livingstone (internal flights are pretty ridiculous outside of South Africa), others come via Zambia. But what worries me most is the perception that the hordes of tourists may get of Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular. Victoria Falls isn't Africa at all, and you really learn nothing about Africa by coming here. If you only came to Victoria Falls, there is nothing to say that you're in Africa other than that the local touts are black. For example, an individual I met said that some people he knew 'didn't like Zimbabwe at all', and I can see why if they only visited Victoria Falls. But we aren't in Zimbabwe. We are in a tourist bubble.
Like China, Zimbabwe is probably, on the whole, safer than North America. Consider the fact that in Canada you have to practically get cavity searches before you get on buses, and even a small pair of cuticle scissors will often have to be put with your stored luggage. On the other hand, at Mbare bus station when I was sitting on my bus waiting to go to Rushinga, there were touts outside the bus selling plenty of bizarre things, including 12-inch long kitchen knives and 15-inch sickles (which Li Weiguang could have used to behead an individual in one swipe...), their points capped with a small piece of cardboard or the top of a Coca-Cola bottle. Then on the bus as we were traveling through Harare, there were a few touts who stayed on the bus to do their selling. Standing in the middle of the bus aisle, he pulled out a chopping board and some cabbage to demonstrate the manner in which his 5-in-1 knife could shred cabbage. He then brought out some green onion and made short work of those. After this demonstration, the asking price was a dollar each and he distributed them like candy around the bus to anyone who put up their hand.
I can't explain this phenomenon completely, but my guess would be that there are at least two major contributors (aside from the completely random, absurdly gruesome, and probably unrepeatable Li Weiguang incident, which actually started the checks on buses in the first place). The first lies with the traditionally communal and often pacifist nature of Africans. Many are farmers (especially those going to remote villages like Rushinga) and survival is by no means a given (see the previous post), so violence is basically unheard of in many parts (putting aside violence between tribal factions, that is). In North America, the ultra-competitive and high intensity nature of society seems to lead people to adopt much more aggressive and dog-eat-dog demeanors. I have seen a few fights arise in bars in Africa now and again, but there is always a certain level of pride and humility involved on both sides. It isn't what sometimes feels like Hollywood nature of a lot of the bars in Canada with guys in muscle shirts calling each other out and heckling each other because they are so incredibly bored and need to somehow validate the inflated and often farcical notions of 'respect' and 'street sense' that they take from sitting in front of gangster and/or ghetto survival movies.
The other reason is likely the manner in which 'lawsuit society' has crept into Western society. Bus companies probably care much more about not being sued or getting bad publicity over some incident than the actual safety of their customers. When it is possible to sue the Winnebago company and win (and this may be an urban myth, I haven't corroborated that such an absurd incident actually happened) because it crashes because you put yours on cruise control to go into the back and make a sandwich, and 'it wasn't in the owner's manual that I couldn't do that', then companies this side really need to cover their asses.
But it brings me to a notion of freedom: in Africa there is much more freedom because of the organic nature of society, whereas in North America, everything is much more scrutinized and much more controlled. We may think we have more freedom because of the constant banding around of political buzzwords like 'freedom' and 'democracy', but in the end society ends up controlling itself through (amongst other things, see for example, Adam Curtis' series The Trap and/or Ray Bradbury's short story The Pedestrian), a combination of vanity and lack of confidence in one's ability to think for oneself. Acceptability and unacceptability to often come down to popularity amongst the general population: people think it absurd that I could study mathematics and philosophy with no eye to a possible career.
Education as an end in itself? You actually what to learn about the world for it's own sake? You want to satisfy your own curiosities about the underlying secrets of human nature? Have you seen a psychiatrist lately?
No comments:
Post a Comment