Making Spaces through Infrastructure by Marian Burchardt Dirk van Laak

Author:Marian Burchardt, Dirk van Laak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2023-05-24T11:53:38.660000+00:00

7

Roads for Whom? Tourism and Infrastructure in Post-colonial East Africa

Mathias Hack

1

Introduction

The relationship between infrastructure and nature tourism presents a paradox. On the one hand, airports, bridges, and roads as well as a steady supply of electricity and water are needed to bring tourists to their holiday destinations as well as to run hotels, lodges, and restaurants in remote areas. On the other hand, too much infrastructure collides with what is being provided to tourists: a paradise of pristine nature, free-roaming wildlife, and intact ecosystems. This is especially true for conservation areas like national parks. They can be considered as spaces that are marked by an absence of major infrastructure systems, sometimes a simple dirt road network is all there is. This absence or limitation of infrastructure supports an idea on which wildlife tourism is built: untouched and unspoiled natural arenas, which have not (yet) been reached or are being protected by what can be called civilization, technology, or modernity – represented not just, but often, through infrastructure.1

This paradox both enlarges and calls into question our understanding of infrastructure as a key aspect of modernity.2 Often associated with a steady rise in the number of kilometres of paved roads or faster internet connections, modernity through infrastructure is understood as something growing in size, penetrating and entangling space(s). But as an escape from modernity, the return to a presumably simpler form of life has been part of the many discourses on modernity for a long time, and the relationship between infrastructure and modernity could also mean less infrastructure or none at all.3 This temporary escape from one’s everyday life and from the “constraints” of the modern world is one of the key features of tourism. Tourism is able to sell this desired experience especially in the form of nature, ecological, or wildlife tourism.4 The various forms of safari tourism in East Africa are among the many examples of this business model in the Global South.5 Infrastructure is a vital part of this experience and serves as a guarantee of modernity and acknowledges the lack of it. Both aspects are essential to shape and create touristic spaces.

In this chapter, I will look at how infrastructure produced these kinds of spaces in East Africa between the late 1950s and 1990. I am especially keen to examine how tourists, locals, and other users of infrastructure created and constructed spaces through and along roads in national parks. After briefly elaborating the entangled history of infrastructure and tourism in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial East Africa, I will argue, first, that roads were used to aid conservation efforts and to facilitate visits by Western tourists. This prioritization of infrastructure towards tourists meant exclusions and sometimes expulsions for local Africans. But as roads and gates brought new constraints and closed some spaces, I will argue, second, that they also brought new possibilities for local Africans. Some started working in game departments or as safari driver-guides; others used the key infrastructure nodes to offer goods, souvenirs, or entertainment for tourists.

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