Branding Africa; Thank you CNN, but…
They are coming. Ministers of Tourism, Professors of Tourism across the globe; diplomats, technocrats in ministries, departments and agencies; from the Director General of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and the UNWTO Regional Programme Director for Africa, officers and staff of the Madrid-based UN agency, they are coming — from East, West, Central and Southern Africa, the United States, India, Nepal, Spain and the UK. Their Destination — Accra.
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From August 17 through 19, everybody who matters in tourism in the world will be locked in deliberations on a subject which is simultaneously a source of embarrassment, often even annoyance, yet very dear to the hearts of African policy makers.
This is the UNWTO Regional Conference to be held on the theme, “Enhancing Brand Africa, Fostering Tourism Development.”
It is the first of its kind and Ghana’s Tourism Minister, Mrs Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare, is expected to state her gratitude to the UN body for the choice of Ghana as the country through whose image the world will see Africa.
Knowing her, she will not miss the opportunity to invite her colleagues and other delegates to sample the best of Ghana’s world-renowned hospitality, its culture, warmth and much more.
Branding experts are expected to present papers that will seek to convince everybody why Africa needs to be branded like Omo or mobile phone; in short, how branding influences tourism competitiveness.
Some African leaders, including Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, need no tuition or extra classes on the subject.
For him, and for many others, the conference is the one big opportunity they have been waiting for all these years to get a few issues regarding Africa’s image off their chest.
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Even the most radical of Africanists concede that Africa does, indeed, need to rebrand.
At this conference, however, they will seek an answer to the most important question of all: Na Who Cause Am? In other words, who, really, is to blame for Africa’s terrible image in the eyes of the world today?
Radical, often angry, Africans who know the genesis of the image problem cannot wait to ask CNN, for instance, why at peak time when 90 per cent of its viewers were glued to their sets for news about President Obama’s visit to Kenya, the global news organisation chose to describe this East African tourism icon as a “hotbed of terror.”
For Africans, this was “the most unkindest cut,” seeing as Kenya survives, almost entirely, on tourism.
The irony is that the CNN news organisation is a major part of this rebranding Africa forum as one of the sponsors.
During the conference, it will host a cocktail party for delegates as well as make presentations on how Africa can rebrand itself.
But Africans will argue that if the continent is unable to take advantage of the capacity of the tourism sector to contribute to socio-economic development, it is because it is often hindered by negative perception, such as using crises situations in specific countries and generalising them to the whole of a country or the region.
A case in point is Ebola. Who takes the blame for making the whole world believe that the pandemic was killing everybody who came to West Africa?
Talk of terrorist attacks in Kenya and Nigeria. Are such acts of terror peculiar to Africa? Statements such as the one by CNN are why Africans have been fighting stereotypes all our lives.
The case will also be made that there are numerous positive stories of Africa that do not manage to reach a global audience and impact on the perception of the region.
It may sound like conspiracy theory, but there are African historians who assert that this whole ‘wahala’ about the “African-image problem” has been part of a century-old agenda by the West to under-develop Africa.
They cite Hollywood’s subtle efforts, through the cinema, in which Africans were portrayed as savages and cannibals led by Tarzan swinging from tree to tree in a dark continent where lions, cheetahs and snakes roamed.
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What the American and other western cinema audiences were not told was that the animals used in those films were flown from New York zoos to the Hollywood studios.
They were also not told that even the “Africans” in those films, such as ‘King Solomon’s Mines,’ were actually white actors who had painted their skin black.
They followed it up with books such as ‘Robinson Crusoe’ in which Man Friday, a terrified African male, was running for his life because it was his turn to be killed, boiled (or roasted) and eaten by his clansmen! Meanwhile, the author of that book had never set foot in Africa!
So it is true that Africa does have a problem with image.
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The greed of African politicians, technocrats and private contractors has contributed so much to impoverishing state coffers that we have become a continent of beggars.
It is the cause of the poverty that will justify CNN and Aljazeera filming scenes from Africa where the people drink water from the same source as cattle!
we ourselves must do something about this image.