Pornography or prostitution?

It is a combination of cultural pornography and touristic prostitution that further entrenches ideas of being the lesser ‘other’ that is required to afford the perceived superior and foreign other to enter into spaces as if visitors in a zoo where entire countries and histories are on display to be gawked at or prodded and poked.

Throughout Africa, tourism is a big money-spinner and every incident whether the recent mainstream coverage of the outbreak of Ebola or news of yet another Boko Haram attack, has major impacts on an industry that for the main part generates huge profits for private businesses as opposed to what trickles into national coffers through visa fees. And yet tourism is touted as the lifeblood of many impoverished areas where lodge owners engage with surrounding communities through necessity rather than any noble altruistic inclinations. Often these relationships are anything but successful as rows of craft and curio stalls try to attract a tiny trickle of visitors who venture beyond the security gates and then only to have to haggle with well-healed tourists over the value of the trinket. These same tourists think nothing of spending six dollars for a cold beer at the bar and never walk out of a supermarket without whatever it is they wanted, but come to crafters and they get some imperialist joy out of bargaining and trying to impose a price that is based on an underestimated value of what it takes to produce whatever it is they want to fit into their hand luggage for so-and-so a friend or for the corner of the mantle that is standing bare.

Then there are the village tours and township tours where they want to point their cameras at the faces of poverty and desperation that have been coerced into allowing such an invasion through a lack of viable alternatives. The proud people of Africa reduced once again to nothing more than a curiosity. And not everyone, but those who have been sold and have bought the mistruth that there is a living to be made from such behaviour. Despite my reservations though, I have seen the levels of poverty and understand the willingness to be made a subject of scrutiny for a fee, but what I cannot fathom is the type of human being that would get some kind of kick out of visiting the zoo. What kind of latent voyeuristic tendencies must be lurking behind the social veneer of propriety that is more than often presented as the image of western culture and civilization? How easily that façade is cracked when given the opportunity to photograph the naked breasts of an African mother or child?

So whether it is a matter of cultural pornography or touristic prostitution is quite irrelevant! What it is, is fucking wacked!