AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	1. Tourism in Africa
Paper ID	558
Author(s)	Swan, Eileadh Catriona
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	This paper seeks to question the traditional separation of tourism and development as modes of travel through a discussion of emergent forms of international volunteering in Ghana. The Volta Region of Ghana is not typically known as one of Africa’s touristic treasures but some of its towns and villages have in recent years become host to a growing number of mainly white European and American volunteers who pay thousands of dollars to American organisers for the chance to ‘help’ Africans and be ‘immersed’ into a different culture. These volunteers assert their own identity in direct opposition to that of the tourist, and their time abroad as more meaningful and less damaging. However, this paper argues that while international volunteerism is able to move beyond some of the spatial and temporal confines of traditional tourism, it continues to rely on the provision of highly organised and structured encounters of ‘sanitised’ cultural difference, encounters which shall be discussed in contrast to the more problematic and complex everyday encounters of political and economic difference that young Ghanaians' demands for American visas and money often revealed. Indeed, it was often after these fraught moments that volunteers requested refunds from the organisation, claiming that they had come to ‘help’ but did not want to be treated like ‘walking wallets’. Examples such as these show volunteers rejection of some of the more challenging aspects of Ghanaian culture and ‘difference’ and certainly force us to question the claimed difference between international volunteerism and traditional tourism. More importantly though, they highlight the need for studies of tourism to acknowledge the political economy of expectation and desire as one of the effects of globalisation in Africa, an economy through which white volunteers become important commodities and are often viewed as the link between a seemingly futile African reality and the realisation of a successful and ‘easy’ life in the West. Unlike the image of ‘traditional’ Ghanaians painted by the volunteering organisation, young Ghanaians are very much aware of the Western world with its freedoms and global flows of images and commodities have become important resources for the imagination of a better life there. Moreover, it is ‘whiteness’ that figures centrally in these imaginings and so this paper shall first consider the different ways in which whiteness is imagined by young Ghanaians before going on to discuss the impact of their actual meeting and interaction with white volunteers. In considering the effects of international volunteering as a form of tourism it is important to consider how young Africans experience their position in a globalised but ever more restricted world and the ways in which this position is often articulated through the imagination of and encounters with the white Other.

The White Volunteer: Globalisation, Ghanaian Youth and the Meaning of 'Whiteness'.