The Great Divide

One of the perks of working in the field of international development is the opportunity, every once in a while, to find a little slice of personal paradise. Being stationed in or regularly travelling to remote locations allows for the exploration of places untapped by the developed world. At times, either at work or play, you can reasonably fool yourself into thinking that no one else has experienced what you are doing. For a brief moment, you imagine there is something unique and groundbreaking to your time and place, and that your presence there is special. It is to be the first to climb a cliff face, or to stumble on a secluded cataract in a forgotten ravine. You blend an element of fantasy into the surrounding reality, and find a momentary escape coupled with adrenaline, endorphins, or simple relaxation.

Conveniently forgotten are certain facts: that you are the first to ascend the cliff face not because it is an impossible climb, nor because none have been there before you. You are the first because no one within a hundred kilometers ever had a climbing rope, and no one saw the need to climb that cliff when there is a perfectly easy path up the back slope. Similarly, every local knows the waterfall that you have found and thinks it nothing more special than a somewhat inconvenient place to wash their clothes. In the moment, though, you aid yourself with a small willful loss of perspective, and the results are either a sense of accomplishment, slightly misguided self-importance, or just a good story. There is a small divide between reality and your experience of it, and none are left the worse for it.

Enter tourism. No longer is your cliff face untouched, and you find your waterfall on a postcard. Gone is the isolation of the moment; gone is your minor fantasy. But tourism brings its benefits. It boosts the economy, taking in wealth from other places and distributing it here and there, almost haphazardly, but distributing it nonetheless. The surplus of available labor recedes slightly, and new opportunities arise. The loss of your sense of importance is a small price to pay, and the little divide between your fantasy and reality is washed away.

Were your artificially inflated moments of greatness the only sacrifice for increased economic wellbeing, all would be fine, but this is the developing world. In the developing world the power of wealth is exponentially greater than in a world where the rule of law protects all people equally. In the developing world the lines between help and hindrance, the legal and the lawless, a poor girl and a prostitute, are all blurred. Within the developing world there is the great divide.

The great divide sits between the traveler or expatriate, the outsider, and the country around them. The great divide is between the deep history of people and land and the superficial observations of the itinerant visitor. The great divide lies between the expectations of the observer and the forces driving the objects in view. Any outsider looking for the divide to be bridged from the other side will be disappointed.

In a dance club outside of Mombasa, the western world has plunked itself down with an unconvincing thud, and the beacons of a globalized society gyrate and shout in time with a thumping background noise. The expatriates and visitors who want to find some semblance of what they left behind are met with a quizzical hybrid of the familiar and the strange. Some immerse themselves in the familiar, using the same ignorance, willful or lazy, that allows the person at the waterfall to imagine that they are the first to discover it. Now instead of overlooking the laundry spread on a nearby rock, they overlook the disparities of wealth and power in the room. They overlook the rail-thin girls’ obedience to the middle-aged businessmen and concentrate on finding a good margarita. They leave the club much as they would leave any bar back home, only with a vague sense that not everything was as it seemed. Other visitors indulge in the strange, taking advantage of the position that they find themselves in, giving commands and debauching themselves until they catch their plane back to their normal place on the totem pole. Finally, some of the outsiders stay, making a life, for better or worse, from a de facto position of economic power, but often without making headway into the social strata around them. These expatriates are still tourists. They are tourists because they do not understand anything beyond the great divide that separates them from the vast majority of the people who cannot enter the club. They may stay for ten or twenty years, or for the rest of their lives, but until they make the effort to cross the divide, they will always be tourists.

Some travelers say that they do not want to simply be a tourist. Perhaps they want a better story to go home with, or to get pictures that no one else has. Perhaps they feel an ethical imperative to be more than another economic blip that drips dollars, euros or pounds along their way. Perhaps they cannot ignore the moral infractions and disparities in power that are illuminated, but at times supported, by tourism. Perhaps they are idealists.

To be more than simply a tourist takes effort. To break that mold demands more than visiting out of the way locations where other travelers do not go. In Kenya, the people of tribes, classes and political parties know hundreds of years of history. Like anyone’s history, theirs is not a perfect knowledge of past facts, but a perspective provided to each individual from a lifetime of input. It is a history of conflicts, successes and failures, and peoples living and moving across the land. To be more than a tourist here requires attempts to understand that perspective, and to see past the surface. That is what it is to try to bridge the great divide. It may take years, and it may seem impossible, but there is just as much need to bridge the divide as there is need for the material advantages of development. The first step on the bridge is to realize that you arrive a tourist, knowing nothing, but open to learning. To keep an open mind takes serious effort, but no one said this would be easy. If a vacation is what you're looking for, there are plenty of tourist destinations out there.