In Search of Authenticity

How possible is it to experience an authentic holiday in a different culture?

Do we ever find the ‘real local culture’ on holiday?

During our school holidays spent on the white sands at the coast of Kenya, as a child I didn’t immediately question the number of Maasai men on the beach selling beaded jewellery, boat tours and other holiday spoils to the gathered overseas tourists.

That is until one morning, on a beach walk, my dad greeted a man cloaked in red with the most basic Maa greeting, “sova”, and got a response in Kiswahi l i, the nat ional language and dominant lingua franca of the coastal reg ion. Dad tried again to no avail and turned to me with a smirk saying, “See? They’re not even really Maasai.” Come to think of it he didn’t have the stretched earlobes that many adult Maasai men do. And, although they’re semi-nomadic people, generally those who choose to live a more traditional pastoralist life will be found moving between the central highlands down into Northern Tanzania. This far East, not so much.

The iconic existence of these tall, dark, lean people, who have so well preserved their traditional dress and way of life is by now synonymous with “that rich, exotic culture to immerse yourself in on a visit to Kenya and Tanzania” along with your wildlife safari. With tourists happy to pay for native-looking crafts, a dance or jumping show and even a photograph, why wouldn’t one try their hand at playing a part in this economy?

Years later, working at the front desk of a South African hostel, two peppy German backpackers approached to ask where in Cape Town they could try some African food. Dissatisfied with my recommendations of

shisa nyama [South African barbecue] and Cape Malay [an ethnic group in South Africa] cuisine, they specified that they wanted to try “buffalo meat and crazy stuff like that”. A concept restaurant along these lines has existed since the 1980s in my hometown, Nairobi, where patrons could – up until it was banned in 2004 – try meats from the various animals they may have just spotted on a game drive: ostrich, crocodile, impala, giraffe, the works. You’d be hard pressed to find any Kenyan of the last five or six generations (if ever) to have served any of that, even as a joke, in their home. Who decided game meat was what ‘African food’ consisted of? The short answer is European

“WHERE THERE’S A SELLER, THERE’S A WILLING AND OFTEN INSATIABLE MARKET OF TRAVELLERS”