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" 'Touristifying Kenya' explores the essential role tourism played in Kenya’s postcolonial history. Already a famed travel destination in the colonial era, tourist arrivals increased after Kenyan independence in 1963 due to government-sponsored development projects, promotional campaigns and investment from international corporations. Kenya became the tourist destination in Sub-Saharan Africa in ther 1970s offering a beach and safari product. With various development programmes and a determined yet moderate Africanisation policy, the emerging political and economic elite in Kenya made tourism a prominent part of negotiating power in Kenya. The economic importance of tourism allowed, as the project will show, to suppress several discourses over Kenya's colonial past, Western conceptualisations of wildlife conservation and the challenges of mass tourism. The project aims to make Kenya an African case study of global tourism development in the second half of the 20th century." |
