A large, air-conditioned bus pulls up outside a school. Tourists, mostly from Europe and the US, disembark and cameras are ready. Some have brought gifts: packs of pens and pencils. They hand them out to the children, who spontaneously start singing and dancing.
This scene and others like it are played out in schools around the world. It’s called school tourism. It is similar to orphanage tourism and so-called “slum” tourism, in which tourists visit orphanages or “shacks” in poor countries to witness the poverty and misery. This type of tourism comes with many ethical problems: photographing children and non-consenting adults, invasions of people’s privacy, daily disruptions to children’s routines, and child protection issues.
Tourists visit a school for two to three hours. They usually enter classrooms, photograph children and sometimes attend cultural events such as singing and dancing. These tours are generally part of an agreement with a tour company, but they exist in many forms worldwide. For example, a school tour is often on the itinerary of a tour in southern Africa or alongside wildlife tourism businesses.
In Zimbabwe, schools have agreements with tourism companies that allow funding for infrastructure and child sponsorship. In Matabeleland North, near Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls) and Hwange National Park, for example, 19 out of 20 companies interviewed by researchers in 2012 provided some kind of support, sponsorship or infrastructure to schools in nearby areas.
These partnerships are often coupled with an exchange of philanthropic funding to access their school. This phenomenon has also been reported in Fiji, Zambia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Mozambique.
Zimbabwe’s economic problems, including severe hyperinflation, are well documented. Schools are under-resourced and, in government schools, teachers are often unpaid or they earn below the poverty line.
I am an Australian born in Zimbabwe and a trained secondary school teacher. In 2015, I was working with a school in Zimbabwe as part of my university degree and witnessed this tourism myself. In 2019, as part of my PhD research, I spent a term in a school in Matabeleland North. That year alone it received 129 visits from tourist groups.
During my stay there I spoke with teachers, tourism workers and NGO staff. I also asked the students to draw photos of their tourism experiences.
In a recently published article I contribute to the growing field of research on how tourism-funded schools work. I offer a critique of how an image of ‘Africa’ is reproduced for the tourist gaze and the fact that the images shared by tourists after their visits further infuse destructive tropes of the African continent as a place of extreme poverty and need. Schools funded by tourism become a mirror of the tourism industry.
The study
My research found the kinds of images involved in tourism marketing that portray a static and clichΓ©d image of ‘Africa’. This includes landscapes full of animals, extreme poverty, white women and men dressed for safari and images of Maasai men cattle grazing. Smiling, happy children are another part of the picture.
The tourism workers I interviewed sought to prevent the perpetuation 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 must follow it. Since school trips are part of wider tours in southern Africa, school and tourism workers felt the need to conform to a certain image β and this included interactions with happy children. When teachers and schools feel the need to conform to a certain image, their actions and choices are limited.
Read more: Changing the African narrative through social media platforms
The school I worked with had different arrangements with three tour companies. One donated US$200 in cash at each visit. Another had promised to build a classroom block. The third company effectively founded the school, providing teachers’ salaries and significant infrastructure development. Some tourists had also donated larger pieces of infrastructure, such as materials for a borehole and electrical connections to the main grid.
the findings
School tours are disruptive to students and staff. They are a deviation from the normal habits of the school. A teacher said:
Sometimes you may be called, maybe you didn’t know that visitors are coming and they just want to come at that particular time… Then you are banned from the class and the time is not waiting for you. It goes and this topic is discontinued. Then you will no longer be able to proceed to the next topic now. Since you had already entered the previous lesson, you will not leave it in the air, you must complete it, so the next topic is now disturbed.
Read more: A close look at what happens when tourists and Maasai communities meet
The school in my study struggled to balance the perceived needs of tourists and the needs of the institution. As one of the school principals said:
We have to look at it in the sense that, yes, it takes time: we’re probably asking kids to do something they wouldn’t normally do when meeting someone. But you have to look at the side of things and also think, these are the people who are helping us. Potential helpers, some already helping, what are they (tourists) taking away?
The children were they know very well the need to please tourists, which they saw as fulfilling a specific need. Tawanda, aged 10, said:
I would prefer to come to the school that has visitors because they will help us. When there are no books, they will pay, give us some money and we will buy some books.
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Teachers worried that some groups would donate less if they couldn’t interact with the kids.
What should be done
Ideally, school trips should not take place at all. However, due to Zimbabwe’s economic instability, schools are becoming increasingly resourceful in finding ways to obtain additional funding. While not a perfect solution, philanthropic partnerships must exist.
My research does not suggest that people should avoid visiting Zimbabwe as a whole, and I do not mean to suggest that philanthropic funding of schools is necessarily bad. Instead, it is important to look for tourism experiences that do not homogenize culture and cultural experiences. Tourists should also check the itinerary of any tours they book and avoid companies that offer school tours.