Why school tourism in Zim should not be encouraged
ALARGE air-conditioned bus draws up outside a school. Tourists, most from Europe and the US, disembark, cameras at the ready. Some have brought gifts: packages of pens and pencils. They distribute these to the children, who spontaneously begin singing and dancing. This scene and others like it play out in schools around the world. It is called school tourism. It is similar to orphanage tourism and so-called “slum” tourism, in which tourists visit orphanages or “slums” in poor countries to witness poverty and suffering. These sorts of tourism come with several ethical problems: photography of unconsenting children and adults, intrusions on people’s private lives, daily interruptions to children’s routines and issues of child protection.
Tourists visit a school for between two and three hours. They usually enter classrooms, photograph children and sometimes watch cultural displays like singing and dancing. These tours are generally part of an arrangement with a tourism company but exist in a multitude of forms globally. As an example, a school tour often sits within the itinerary of a tour of southern Africa or alongside wildlife tourism ventures.
In Zimbabwe, schools have arrangements with tourism companies that enable funding for infrastructure and sponsorship of children. In Matabeleland North, close to Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls) and Hwange National Park, for example, 19 out of 20 companies interviewed by researchers in 2012 provided some sort of support, sponsorship or infrastructure to schools in nearby areas.
These partnerships are often in conjunction with an exchange of philanthropic funding for access to their school. This phenomenon has also been reported in Fiji, Zambia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Mozambique.
Zimbabwe’s economic troubles, including severe hyper-inflation, are well documented. Schools are poorly resourced and, in government schools, teachers are often unpaid or earn below the poverty line.
I am a Zimbabwean-born Australian woman and a trained secondary school teacher. In 2015, I was working with a school in Zimbabwe as part of my university degree fulfilments and witnessed this tourism myself. In 2019, as part of my doctoral research, I spent one term at a school in Matabeleland North. It received 129 visits from tourist groups that year alone.
During my time there I talked with teachers, tourism workers and NGO staff. I also asked students to draw pictures of their experiences of tourism.
In a recently published article I contributed to the growing field of research about how schools funded by tourism operated, I offered a critique of how an image of “Africa” is reproduced for the tourist gaze and the fact that images shared by tourists after their visits further inculcate damaging tropes of the African continent as a place only of extreme poverty and neediness. Schools funded by tourism become a mirror of the tourism industry.
The study
My research identified the sorts of images involved in marketing of tourism that portray a static and cliched image of “Africa”. This includes landscapes filled with animals, extreme poverty, white women and men dressed for safari and images of Maasai men herding cattle. Smiling and happy children are another part of the image.
The tourism workers I interviewed tried to prevent the continuation of these images by presenting counter-narratives of how Zimbabweans live. But they were not always successful. This is partly due to the structured nature of mass tourism initiatives: Tourists are sold an itinerary and this must be followed. Since the school tours are part of broader tours of southern Africa, the school and tourism workers felt a need to conform to a particular image — and this involved interactions