The Phenomenology of Tourism

[This is a slightly amended version of a speech I made at the Safari Park Hotel, Nairobi, in the evening of June 30, 2005, during a well-attended launch of the Kenya Xplored Handbook]

Introduction:
Tourists are people who are away from home – that is, from their usual places of residence – visiting other places. Their absence from home is short-term. The main purposes of their travel are leisure or one form or another of business or occupation or pursuit.

Tourism is driven by that occasional but deep urge in all of us to be somewhere else; somewhere other than where we routinely find ourselves, and routinely are; somewhere else that adds, or promises to add, value to our lives. It has been that way since time immemorial. This is what is oftentimes called the culture of travel, which is underpinned in perhaps all of us by a deeper force, a deeper predisposition – the frontier ethic. Africa was history’s first site of tourism. It is very easy to arrive at that momentous conclusion. It was humankind’s first home, and stayed that way for thousands of years, so archaeological and DNA evidence tell us. It was the primeval frontier ethic of Africa’s children, resident in these eastern parts of the continent, that spread not only tourism but humankind itself around the world. A monument to that fact is sorely needed. If time allows, I will return to this point in a moment.

Many of Africa’s children went, but never came back. But some did. From my readings I remember Cheng Ho, who was here on the eastern coast before Vasco Da Gama. I remember the brave seafarers who left far Asia to settle in Madagascar. Sometimes they came back in the wombs of their future mothers – and were born and died here. So it was with Mr. Griffin. But we have never truly built a monument to that first world family on whose shoulders, in whose loins, the future of the entire human race rested – Adam and Eve.

If Africa was tourism’s first origin and destination, the continent is not nowadays a tourism leader in terms of volume. It has been like that for perhaps a millennium or two. Western societies, for example, have gone much farther ahead. They acquired “a new sense of geographical and social mobility” – and “the new aesthetic which arose in response” – starting in the middle of the 19th century. The culture of travel, Bell notes, was sparked off by the coming of the railroad and “the excitement of speed” that it unleashed. The aesthetic of the village landscape gave way to an aesthetic of the wider world -- anchored, as it were, on "memories of people and things seen along the way", on the built structures and spaces of the city and the accompanying lifestyles, and on their rendition by impressionist and post-impressionist painters: Renoir, Manet, Seurat, Degas, Monet, Signac, Pissaro and others (Bell, 1976: 107, 48; also see Courthion, 1977). Later, of course, the excitement of speed and what Bell calls “a syncretism of experience” were to be pushed to their limits by the arrival of the automobile and the aeroplane.

The value addition which I mentioned earlier takes various forms, though the picture that tends to dominate our minds, when we do think about it, is that it is propelled by the search for places and moments of leisure – and even pleasure. Some do travel in search of pleasure, but others travel for other reasons. That is why there are as many, sometimes overlapping, forms of tourism as there are: sports tourism, business/professional/trade tourism, conference or convention tourism (this is why we built KICC, though it was widely criticized as a “white elephant”), religious tourism (or pilgrimage), health tourism, eco-tourism, urban tourism (even slum tourism), educational/research/study tourism, marine tourism, nature tourism, white-watering, big game tourism, ethnic tourism, cultural tourism, exhibitions and fairs tourism, trauma tourism. adventure tourism (mountaineering, kayaking, white-watering, hang-gliding, bungee jumping, ballooning), trade, wars – to mention only these.

To what extent is this variety in tourism captured in the priorities of our tourism sector here in Kenya? I think to a very little extent? If that is so, how do we expect the sector to acquire new potential, and to grow beyond today’s obvious straight-jacket – beyond today’s illusion of doing wonderfully with the same faded kiondo of offerings?


Domestic Versus International Tourism:
A domestic tourist can be seen as “any person visiting a region or area of his/her own country, other than that in which he has his usual place of residence, for any reason other than following an occupation remunerated from within the region or area of the country visited.” An international tourist is any such person visiting another country.

It has been observed that “for most developed nations by far the greatest amount of tourism is generated by people traveling within their own country...[D]omestic travel – although it is more difficult to quantify than is international tourism, because there are no national borders to be crossed at which tourists can be counted – is estimated to be 75 to 80 percent of all tourist activity.” Much of it is in the form of VFR.


Some of the issues to consider as we seek to increase the volume of tourism in Kenya:

Number of Visitors: Research findings suggest that the number of visitors to a particular destination depends both on their desire to travel and certain competitive factors that tend to reduce that inclination. The motivation to visit a given destination depends in part on one’s socioeconomic profile, and in part on psychology. The competitive factors that affect the wish to to travel include the time and cost it takes to get there, as well as cultural differences and the degree to which the destination depends on the seasons for its attractions. Reduced travel time and cost tends to increase the demand, sometimes very significantly.

Length of Stay (or Length of Visit to a Country): It has been found by tourism researchers that the longer the length of stay, the greater the demand for hotels, restaurants, shops, and attractions. So, the challenge is how to make the stay longer. This may require that we think seriously beyond “sand and bush”

Per-Capita Spending: It has been found that some 25% of all tourist spending goes to hotel accommodation. And the amount of money spent by tourists staying in hotels is about 80% of the total tourist earnings at the destination. The other 20% is accounted for by VFR arrivals.

Type of Accommodation required: Many stakeholders in Kenya’s tourism sector are either in the accommodation sector, or the transportation sector geared largely to delivering tourists to those accommodations, or to the game parks. This is perhaps fine as far as our focus is on international tourism. But, as one observer has noted, “There is a...relationship between the type of traveler and the kind of accommodation required.” I don’t think that hotel accommodation is the preferred form of accommodation for the domestic traveller in Kenya. Coltman notes, moreover, that “Generally, the type of tourist is also closely correlated with his or her average daily per-capita spending...”

Socioeconomic Profiles: Proper advertising and budgeting of tourism marketing (including advertising) requires that we have a continually growing data-bank of reliable information about the socioeconomic profiles of potential and actual tourists. To be included here are: age, marital status, family size, occupation, and income levels.

The Role of Universities in Tourism Development
This part of the narrative must begin with the acknowledgment of the fact that before the University of Nairobi launched its B.A. tourism programme in 2001, Kenya Utalii College had for several decades been the premier institution for tourism training. It has produced many graduates in the hospitality sector for the country and the region at large. However, much as it has tried to launch a degree programme, and the courses it has offered so far are pre-university.

The universities can play a crucial role in producing highly educated cadre for the tourism industry, but they have been late entrants into tourism training. Two major programmes are now offered at the University of Nairobi: one in the Faculty of Arts and another in the Faculty of Agriculture (more specifically in the Department of Range Management). Moi University also has a tourism programme.

At the UoN’s Faculty of Arts, the B.A. Tourism programme was designed to build up graduate-level HR capacity different from and beyond what Utalii College was good at. We wanted to produce graduates well-grounded in skills beyond those of the chef, the waiter, the receptionist and room-service staff. That is, tourism graduates conversant with one or more of the following: the evolution of tourism (domestic and international) around the world, Kenya’s history and the arts, the socio-cultural and economic dimensions of tourism, natural and cultural resource management, back-office operations, tourism marketing, and foreign languages.

At the Faculty of Agriculture (in conjunction with Kenya Wildlife Service), the programme specializes in wildlife management. At least that was the intent the last time I checked. It has thus found for itself a specialist niche which is quite remarkable – representing something of a paradigm shift in university learning.

The UoN programmes have been in existence for some five years now, but they continue to suffer from lack of official recognition in government policy and planning documents. The Strategy Paper of 2003, for example, made no mention of them at all. Other stakeholders in the tourism sector do not seem to be aware that the programmes exist at all.

The students are yet to be involved in any meaningful way in attachment programmes, or in marketing and related activities organized within the industry. The programmes are yet to gain access to the Training Levy Fund or the Tourism Development Fund. Blame must be shared by the University (which does next to nothing to advertise the programmes), government and other players. Indeed, all field trips so far made by the students have been funded by the students themselves.

The Adam and Eve Monument
There is a sense in which monuments catalyze tourism. These may be monuments of nature, and monuments emanating from the human spirit and highlighting human achievement. Sometimes, of course, what monuments we have are monuments to human folly and greed and mean-spiritedness. We here in Kenya are essentially a nation without monuments – of the human spirit. Yet every nation must have them. The French have the Eiffel Tower. The Americans have the Statue or Liberty, among many others. The Egyptians have the pyramids and the Sphinx.

I propose that we work toward:
1. The Adam and Eve Monument, which will be for all ages and on the same grand scale as the Sphinx – symbol of the family. Where else but in Africa should this monument, the first true wonder of the new millennium, be?
2. A Humankind Museum (HuMu): This would also underscore the centrality of Kenya, and Eastern Africa in general, to humankind’s journey across the planet – and over time.

Conclusion:
Allow me to conclude with a reading of one of my poetic pieces – a canto.

Canto XXV

Strange-bearded sailors from the east
Who came ashore at Calicut, armed,
Who cast anchor in the Arabian Sea,
And at Malin,
The power and glory of their giant armada all about.
And in the eleventh century,
Swahili envoys from distant Zanj –
Land of the rhino horn, of ivory, and of ambergris –
Walked the streets of Nanjing, sans Sheng,
Graced the Sung Emperor's domain in Beijing,
With tales and costumes of the farthest west.
Whose heart lies buried in Bajun Islands?
Whose memories on porcelain coast?


[NOTE: Since this paper was first read, at least two other Kenyan universities have launched, or are about to launch, degree-level tourism programmes. These are Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, and Strathmore University. The latter seems, at least for now, intent on duplicating at University level the core content of the Utalii College programme – focusing broadly, as it does, on “catering” skills.]