Leaving The Eiffel Tower Behind For Soweto And The Slums Of Lagos - Meaningful Tourism For The Socially Aware

Bob and Edie Parsons had taken a foreign trip every year.  They were not getting any younger, the children had long since left the nest, and the world was their oyster.  Vienna, Prague, Budapest and of course the magnificent cities of Western Europe were their destinations. They had marveled at the Grand Palais, spent hours in the Louvre, sailed ceremoniously down the Seine, and wondered at the precision and tonsured beauty of the Luxembourg Gardens.

They visited Italy of course and Greece.  How could one not visit the birthplace of Western civilization?  The impressiveness of the Parthenon alone was worth the trip for all it inspired.  It was more than just a landmark, a place to visit.  It had meaning.  It embodied Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. 

That was what made the Greece trip so memorable - it meant something - and while of course they were duly impressed with Versailles, the Hall of Mirrors, and the Colosseum, it was the Parthenon which remained fresh in their memory.

Meaning...absent from most tourism and its endless rounds of ten minute stops in front of a Venetian palace or walled medieval city, statues of Trajan and Augustus, the Appian Way, and the Reichstag. No, the Parsons wanted more out of foreign lands, something that resonated and made a difference to their lives. 

'Soweto', said Edie earnestly. 'We must go to Soweto'. 

Soweto of course is the most famous of the Johannesburg black townships, the seat of insurrection and revolution, the birthplace of a free, black South Africa  Also a blighted slum which decades of black rule have done nothing to improve.  It is as bad as any American inner city, crime-ridden, anti-social, and rat-infested. 

A bit of backstory.  Both Parsons were inveterate social justice advocates with long service to the black man and his plight. Over the years there was nothing they wouldn't do for him, and in so doing chose to overlook the persistent irresponsibility of the ghetto, the patronizing entitlements of the white wealthy, and the succession of corrupt municipal governments which prospered from the poor.

In short they were idealistically myopic in their fight to place the black man on the pedestal where he so richly belonged. 

So, for liberals like the Parsons Africa was even more important than it was for African Americans.  Liberals saw it as the birthplace of humanity and the legacy of the sentient forest dweller, in tune with the environment, aware of the mystical forces of nature, robbed of all this endowment by slavery. 

 

There are of course so-called 'slum tours' available with any of the major international tour companies, so it was not difficult to locate one. The Knossos Tour promised an inside look not only into Soweto but the inner cities of Lagos and Kinshasa, two of the more impressive black ghettos of the continent.  Of course 'ghetto' and 'inner city' didn't quite capture the nature of these places, for most of Lagos itself was a pestilential slum encircled by a few skyscrapers to give legitimacy and a certain modern poignancy to the scene. 

The Parsons left their Washington suburban home with four other couples of the same vintage and background, progressives like themselves who had spent decades at the barricades of civil rights and justice, older retired citizens, but who had lost none of the fire in the belly for the black man. 

The Knossos Tour turned out to be a low-end money-maker which spent little on lodging and food.  The organizers knew that this class of tourist wanted to suffer, at least a little bit in solidarity with the poor, so the St. Regis Arms Hotel in downtown Johannesburg was a one star hotel which maintained even this bottom ranking thanks only to a little on the side.  It was a dump, an airless, horrible place worse than any half-way house in Detroit, the meals were greasy and inedible, and the security lax.

The bus that took them to Soweto was an old American school bus that had been gifted to the republic as a gesture of good will by the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Memphis and still had initials carved into the seat backs.  The windows wouldn't open, the brakes were indifferent, and the whole carriage rattled and shook. 

'Imagine', Edie said to her husband. 'This is how these poor black people must travel every day.  How awful'.  She took his hand and smiled at him.  They would have something to bring back home. 

The tour company knew that their charges did not want to see order and civility - they were here to see misery and the horrible plight of the black man, so the bus went down the most rutted, trash-strewn, stinking streets of the township.  Angry men raised their fists at the bus as it passed.  Young boys threw rocks. 

'Just a little commotion, Ladies and Gentlemen.  Nothing to be concerned about', but the passengers went ominously quiet.  This is not what they expected. African poverty was supposed to be more dire, more defeated, more abysmal than the American violent type, so this was a rude awakening.  Poverty is as poverty does, I guess, said  passenger who piped up from the back of the bus. 

The driver started yelling out the window as rocks began to crack the windshield.  He gunned the motor, the engine gave a great bellow of blue-black exhaust, and the bus banged and whacked its way out of the worst of the trouble. 

'Weren't we supposed to stop and have lunch with the locals?', one passenger asked the guide who looked incredulously at her.  'Are you kidding, Madam?', he said and helped the driver navigate to safety. 

'Lagos will be better, dear', Bob said to Edie. 'Just you wait and see.'

What the Parsons didn't know was that any sane international consultant had a No Nigeria clause written into his contract, for most travelers in the know understood that to spend even one night there was tantamount to willingly submit to armed robbery, rape, assault, and financial shakedown.  The only reason that Knossos tours had even ventured there was because of lucrative drug trading arrangement in which the tour company would provide a conduit for drugs in exchange for fair treatment in-country.  

 

So, thanks to this arrangement, the worst that could have happened did not happen, but for the tourists the experience was one from hell.  Soweto was a children's playground by comparison.  Lagos was a frightening city, loud, aggressive, nasty, and intimidating.  The hotel was atop an open sewer, there was only old hospital gauze stretched over the windows, mosquitoes were everywhere, the halls were noisy, there were comings and goings of addicts, whores, and dogs night and day. 

'Welcome to Lagos', said the hotel manager who showed them to their rooms. To a man, the tourists - and every foreigner who had ever set foot in the city before them - wondered if they would ever get out of Lagos, out of Nigeria, and back home. 

The tour was abbreviated - public markets, beads and cheap jewelry, flies, heat, crowds, touts, and beggars - but it was enough.  The tourists had got what they came for. 

'Wow' said Edie to her husband as they finally settled in to their United flight back home. 'Now, that was something.'

True to form, the Parsons did not lose a beat.  Their commitment to the black man if anything was renewed and reinvigorated.  'We did the right thing' Bob said reclining in his Economy Plus seat, a bit of luxury he felt they deserved.