LUANDA, ANGOLA — Three years after the end of its civil war, Angola is trying to lure foreign tourists to this nation where decades of fierce fighting littered the countryside with land mines, left much of it in ruins and depleted the exotic wildlife once abundant in lush national parks.Angolan officials are encouraged by the success of other African destinations and undeterred by enormous problems left behind by war and a failed courtship with Marxism.
At least six new four- and five-star hotels are planned on land confiscated by the government and nestled between the Mediterranean-style colonnades, arches and faded pastels of its old colonial architecture and the miles of squalid slums that stretch to the horizon in this seaside capital.
Tourism is the world’s largest industry and every year it pumps billions of dollars into some of the poorest countries in the world. It creates jobs, reduces poverty and builds roads, airports, hotels and hospitals.
Last year Kenya, with one of Africa’s most-developed tourism industries, hosted about 600,000 tourists and pocketed $577 million, or about 12% of its gross domestic product. In 2006, Kenya expects to attract 1 million to 1.6 million tourists, tourism ministry official Rebecca Nabutola said.
Some critics charge that in the rush to collect tourist dollars, indigenous cultures are changed forever or forced to move away from ancestral lands to make way for new hotels, roads or airports.
Akaki Ayumu Jovino, Uganda’s minister of tourism and antiquities, deflects the criticisms with a soft laugh and a smile. Tourism, he said, means jobs, poverty reduction and a better life for all the citizens.
Last year, Uganda hosted 512,000 tourists, he said, up from almost none in the 1970s and early ’80s when the brutal rule of dictator Idi Amin Dada frightened away all but the hardiest.
“Our studies also show that one tourist means eight jobs, not just in the tourism industry but also in agriculture and all the support businesses,” he said.
Africa is the world’s poorest continent and, despite billions of dollars in aid, falls farther behind the rest of the world every year.
It is no wonder that Angola, like so many other developing countries, sees labor-intensive tourism as a relatively quick fix to many of its problems. Angola ranks 160 out of 177 countries on the UN Human Development Index, which measures poverty and quality of life.
More than 5 million of Angola’s 13 million people live in Luanda, a city that was designed and has services for about 250,000. Most are unemployed and live without sanitation, running water or electricity in dusty, treeless, fetid slums of shabby unpainted shacks.
The International Council of Tourism Partners has launched a Mission Africa initiative to triple tourism income on the continent by 2015. ICTP President Geoffrey Lipman concedes, however, that the initiative will be a success only if it reduces poverty.
But he added that “there is no better potential of an export service that all the African countries can produce than tourism; it’s the one commodity they all have, and in some ways the lack of development to date means that it’s a relatively unspoiled product, of the type that thoughtful travelers are seeking.”
Angola, for example, has an undeveloped Atlantic coastline, lush tropical forests, starkly beautiful mountains, dramatic waterfalls and exotic birds and other wildlife, even if the numbers were depleted by war.
Source: Terry Leonard, Associated Press