9 Cruising round the Choco and Kuna To visit the Choco tribe in the Darién jungle, we stepped off the ship into cayucos

Box 8.9 Cruising round the Choco and Kuna To visit the Choco tribe in the Darién jungle, we stepped off the ship into cayucos

at 4 am and made the first two hours of our journey in these dug-out canoes in total darkness. We were amazed to see at first light the intricate palisades of mangrove on either side . . .

We powered upriver for another two hours in a convoy of eight vessels to . . . their little riparian village, about 40 houses on stilts built along a broad avenue that features centrally a basketball pitch . . . Beyond are some clearings of light culti-

13111 vation, but mainly they are hunters of meat, though their small stocky build suggests that over the centuries protein has been hard to come by.

They were waiting for us all along their riverside avenue, behind platforms and logs spread with the goods they had fashioned for sale, and were being continually reinforced by others who’d been alerted by messages in Coca-Cola bottles dropped from a plane by a dynamic American Mr. Fixit who has lived in Panamá for

40 years. The men make music; the women sell. They are the advance guard of a ‘nation’ of about 6,000 people. They carve beautifully in rosewood, imaginative little orna- ments and earrings from ivory nut. The women make the dyes and the baskets. They used to make them large, but they’ve learned that tourists can only handle small ones. Their goods sold on merit too – ‘Who would imagine that I’d get up at 3 am to do my Christmas shopping in the jungle?’ said my schoolteacher friend – and I estimate that we spent $5,000. Our cruise director takes along a float of $3,000 to bankroll those who run out.

We left more like $10,000 with the Kuna on Acuatupu in the San Blas Islands. The Kuna is a larger nation, about 50,000, with a much greater exposure to tourists. They are not as good-looking as the Chocos, their features are sharper, but they’re more together commercially. . . . for the past 25 years they’ve had the rights and control for domestic purposes of the archipelago.

means specifically their appliqué designs on squares which people have been known

They don’t carve, but they make brilliant ‘molas’ (a word for clothes that now

to buy for $10 and sell for $60 at Nieman Marcus) . . . The garment of one was overprinted, ‘500 años de resistencia indígena.’

And they make a dead set at the photographers, offering not only their own images but carefully contrived little tableaux. For instance, a little girl with an umbrella sitting on a bench, smoking a pipe and affecting to launder a brightly coloured shirt . . .

As the Kuna see the trade flagging, they rapidly pack up and jump into dug-outs, pulling plastic covers over themselves and their goods for the choppy journey . . . to a secondary outlet, the large cruise ship Radisson Diamond. I remarked to our ship’s official photographer that we’d just been looking at what the anthropologists call ‘staged authenticity’. He was shocked by this comment, and replied that that was surely an oxymoron. ‘That’s what they like about it’, I said.

Source: Hamilton (1995)

236 • ‘Hosts’ and destinations

Figure 8.3 The Hotel San Blas, Panama Source: Martin Mowforth

this has occurred in the past, but it is to the credit of the structure and operation of the TEA system of tourist allocation that the problem has thus far always been detected and corrected, in one case with the suspension of one family’s involvement in the scheme. In the case of the TEA, though, the competing scheme promoted by USAID and BEST is likely to create divisions within the village which could lead to the formation of a local elite, especially as this competing scheme has access to far more funding oppor- tunities than does the TEA.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that elitism may not relate solely to the financial aspect of tourism. Local district councils may develop an elitism of influence and deci- sion-making without necessarily benefiting financially from it. In such cases a social distance and a communication gap may develop between the decision-makers and those they represent. Some district councils in the frequently acclaimed CAMPFIRE scheme in Zimbabwe during the 1980s (see Box 8.8), for example, have been described by McIvor as ‘almost as remote as the central government in the minds of the people’ (1994: 33). In such circumstances, representatives of local communities may take deci- sions on behalf of interests other than those of the people they represent. This is alluded to by O’Riordan, who states that ‘participation on a mass scale is an idealistic dream. In a representative democracy, it is impractical and unnecessary; in a political culture with a tradition of elitism, it is out of the question’ (1978: 153). In the prevailing economic and political system, arguably, nothing else should be expected.

Displacement and resettlement

Of all the problems experienced by local communities facing tourism development schemes, the most harrowing involve accounts of people being displaced. Such events

‘Hosts’ and destinations • 237

normally reflect the distribution of power around the activity of tourism and highlight the powerlessness of many local communities. And it seems to be rare that displace- ment and subsequent resettlement of displaced people result in a more even and equal development.

In the literature most case studies of displacement and resettlement illustrate a dete- riorating situation for those displaced. This has been especially well documented in cases where the development promotes mass forms of tourism, as in Guatemala, where three hundred campesino families were evicted in June 1996 from land they claimed belonged to the state – police burned down their homes and arrested several of them – to make way for a Spanish businessman’s plans to build a tourist complex (Flynn, 1996: 4). But the UK Tourism Concern’s In Focus magazine (2002b) makes clear that displacement, often by violently enforced eviction, is also a feature of a surprising number of eco-

13111 tourism projects in many parts of the world. The example of the forced relocation of the Padaung communities in Burma for the development of tourist complexes and the creation of tourist attractions – a kind of mass eco-tourism or eco-voyeurism – is given in Chapter 9; and details of the displacement of groups in eastern Africa are documented in this section.

Around Third World countries, the list of such stories is endless and is charted regu- larly in the newsletters and publications of tourism campaigning groups, such as Tourism Concern, and human rights groups. One would assume, however, that the supposed ethical base of new forms of tourism would avoid such pitfalls. Unfortunately, much evidence appears to contradict this assumption, and displacement and resettlement have become frequent outcomes of policies aimed at conservation and protection. Two exam- ples are cited here, both from Africa, together with others elsewhere in the book, in order to illustrate the ways in which the goals of tourist money, conservation and ‘sustainable’ development policies may be linked together in the dispossession of local communities and indigenous groups from their land. Neither example here, however, is entirely pessimistic and both include an element or two of a positive nature for local communities.

The Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania

Box 8.10 introduces the first case study of displacement, the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania. It makes clear that the displacement was not a single move, a one-off event; rather, it has been a prolonged and systematic persecution of the Maasai by the Tanzanian and Kenyan authorities, although it should be stressed that these authorities were guided in their actions by First World conservationists and operated not only in their own interests but also in those of developers in the tourism industry.

It is clear from Box 8.10 that after the Second World War, all the policies of exclu- sion and resettlement in this case have been pursued in the name of conservation, espe- cially the conservation of wildlife. The mechanism for doing this has been the creation of national parks and wildlife reserves, and the impetus for creating them came largely from First World conservationists and scientists who suspected that pastoralism was responsible for environmental degradation and decreases in wildlife numbers. George Monbiot accuses some scientists of having ‘maintained that local people have always been a threat to wildlife: that they hunt the game with destructive methods and over- graze the land. These arguments have been well-rehearsed among conservationists, and are known to many of the tourists visiting Kenya’ (1995: 11). Monbiot argues that the Maasai’s activities did not threaten the wildlife and that the work of earlier scientists was clouded by ‘colonial disdain’ and ‘genuine misunderstandings about savannah

11111 biology’. He summarises:

238 • ‘Hosts’ and destinations

What is incontestable is that a fantastic abundance of wild game continued to exist alongside the herds of the Maasai and other nomads up to and beyond the arrival of the British in East Africa. It was indeed because the Maasai had not destroyed the populations of game that the Europeans wanted to conserve their lands.

(1995: 11) Today, it is difficult to escape the realisation that wildlife and the pastoral activities of

the Maasai have managed to co-exist in the region for many centuries, and that the land- scape (at least until recently) was the product of their grazing and burning practices. To Deihl, it seems ‘ironic . . . that one of the first steps in establishing a national park is to rid the region of its original caretakers’ (1985: 37).

As the Maasai have been excluded, so the tourists have been allowed access. Despite the exclusion of the Maasai from the crater areas within the Ngorongoro Conservation