Western hysteria over killing of Cecil the lion! Othering from the Zimbabwean gaze

Abstract

The Western media exploded in August 2015 because of a lion killed in Africa. Politicians, conservationists, civil society, musicians, sports stars, talk show hosts and ordinary people were outraged by the killing of a lion called Cecil in Zimbabwe. Interestingly there was not much focus on the reaction of Zimbabweans who were most injured by Cecil’s death. If anything, Zimbabweans were surprised by the blanket coverage of Cecil. In this essay, Zimbabweans’ reaction to the Western media coverage was analysed within the broader context of Edward Said’s concept of ‘Othering’. Viewing the concept of Othering through the Zimbabwean lenses deepened and widened the traditional definition of Othering to include self-Othering and what I termed reverse-Othering. The Zimbabwean gaze must be understood and contextualised. Without this understanding, the ultimate outrage over Cecil, which is about sustainable wildlife management, might not be won for local people must be partners in the sustainability endeavour.

Keywords

netnography Othering reverse-Othering self-Othering sustainability

Introduction

In 2015, the Western world woke up to blanket coverage of a lion called Cecil which had been killed by an American hunter in Zimbabwe. The media coverage in both print and electronic, including social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, was intense and unrelenting for over a month. In this social media era, Zimbabweans also responded to this coverage in various ways. The differences in the Western and Zimbabwean media coverage of the killing of this lion can be analysed from a number of viewpoints, however, in this article, the conceptual framework of analysis is the theory of ‘Othering’ in tourism.

The Western media’s saturated coverage of Cecil provides an interesting lens to view tourism and in particular the hunting industry which is dominated by rich predominantly White Western tourists visiting wildlife-rich but poor developing countries. While various groups from conservationists, hunters, travel industry, politicians and governments in the West gave their views and even protested about the killing of Cecil, the Zimbabwean voice was largely missing from mainstream international Western media. Most commentary about Cecil was focused on and motivated by issues like sustainable wildlife management, hunting and ethics, eco-tourism and anti-poaching, among others. However, a few of the commentators also tried to include more than the predominantly Western media coverage and reached out to Zimbabweans to find out if the same issues were significant to them. Zimbabweans are important stakeholders and their views on this need to be acknowledged for future wildlife management programmes. Conservation and sustainable wildlife management programmes, especially those formulated in the West, often fail in developing countries because they are devised without finding out about the needs and challenges from the perspective of the locals. In most cases, this means locals do not feel that they have any interest and, therefore, ownership of these programmes.

The article starts with an introduction to Cecil as presented in the media. This is followed by a discussion of the concept of Othering, which forms the theoretical basis of analysis of this article. Unlike most tourism studies which use the concept of Othering from a one-dimensional perspective of rich Westerners and thus ‘Othering’ poor locals in developing countries like Zimbabwe, this article broadens the definition of Othering to also discuss the concept of self-Othering (Bunten, 2008). While scholars like Bunten posit that Othering is multi-dimensional, they do not go far enough in analysing the Othering processes in the African context, and the importance of understanding not only how the West views Africa but also how Africa ‘others’ Westerners. In this article, this process will be called reverse-Othering for clarity. Following this is a brief discussion of the structure of the hunting industry in Zimbabwe, a structure common to that of other African and developing countries, which provides the context for this study. A discussion of the methodology is then presented, which sets out the approaches and analysis used in netnography and ethnography to provide an analysis of the Zimbabwean gaze in the Cecil drama.

Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the findings and how these broaden our understanding of the concept of Othering. The analysis of this gaze is important if there are to be solutions to the tragic mass killing of wildlife in Africa’s developing countries. The hope is that these insights can inform a new critical post-colonial discourse in the sustainability of wildlife, because without acknowledging and understanding the Zimbabwean gaze, many unsung Cecils (lions, elephants, rhinoceroses, leopards, giraffes and others) will face the same fate.

Cecil the lion

A search for Cecil the Lion on the Internet during the period 10 to 15 December 2018 yielded on average 18,800,000 results (Google.com, 2018). This suggests that in death Cecil, a lion hardly known in Zimbabwe, touched the lives of millions and in so doing put Zimbabwe under the global media spotlight (Mawere, 2015). Cecil was a major tourist attraction in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe’s largest game reserve. The 13-year-old animal was renowned for being friendly towards visitors and easily recognisable because of his large size and distinctive Black mane (Sevenzo, 2015). He led two prides containing six lionesses and twelve cubs along with another lion, Jericho. He was part of an Oxford University monitoring programme studying lion conservation (Sevenzo, 2015).

More than 850,000 signatures were gathered in the campaign after Cecil was killed to send the hunter, Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer, to Zimbabwe. Given that any petition to the White House that attracts over 100,000 names within 30 days requires an official response (Vaughan, 2015), US officials launched an investigation into the killing with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) saying it was ‘deeply concerned’ about the ‘tragic’ death of Cecil the lion. Director Dan Ashe said they will ‘go where facts lead’ (Baheux, 2015). Part of this response included Senator Bob Menendez introducing legislation, the Conserving Ecosystems by Ceasing the Importation of Large Animal Trophies (CECIL) Act, to curb trophy hunting of endangered and threatened species. The CECIL Act would extend restrictions on the import and export of animals considered for inclusion under the Endangered Species Act. Currently, the restrictions apply only to animals already on the list (Lerner, 2015).

A range of other responses included the mysterious ‘Tips for Jesus’ campaign, which suggested people leave a tip dedicated to Cecil at the Irma Hotel located just outside Yellowstone National Park, a home for many wild animals and built by Buffalo Bill in 1902 (Carothers, 2015). The big three US airlines banned the shipment of hunting trophies. Delta Airlines was the first to announce the change saying that it would no longer accept lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros and buffalo trophies. American Airlines and United Airlines soon followed suit (Mayerowitz, 2015). Wildlife researchers from Oxford University who were monitoring Cecil the Lion’s pride received more than US$780,000 in donations (Loveridge, 2015). Zimbabwe wildlife conservation group’s chairman Johnny Rodrigues suggested that Cecil’s head be mounted in a glass case or be commemorated by a bronze statue at the entrance to the park where he lived (Leithead, 2015).

What is Othering?

Said (1979) in his seminal work, Orientalism, coined the term Othering. He defined Othering as the process of creating and maintaining a dichotomy between oneself as marked by a particular (Western) identity and the Other(s) (Bresner, 2010). As Bresner explains, Said argued that orientalism is ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’). Orientals lived in their world; ‘we’ lived in ours with the vision and material reality propping each Other up and keeping each Other going (Bresner, 2010). Thus, orientalism creates a dichotomy or binary between the East and the West. While initially constructed in terms of East and West, the term orientalism offers an important way to understand how developing nations are also constructed through a Western lens.

Said’s approach is particularly relevant to understanding Western views of Africa because of the history of colonialism on this continent, where the Western colonisers viewed the colonised Black Africans as the Other (Mkono, 2013). Hence, Bresner argued that colonialism, ethnography and tourism occur at different historical periods but arise from the same social formation. At the heart of all the three in practice and in theory are power relations between usually a Westerner and a native. They are bound up in an institutionalised web of power relationships and, therefore, inherently political (Bresner, 2010). This has resulted in some scholars arguing that tourism is in reality another form of colonisation (Bender, 2001).

Hence an analysis of tourism cannot be divorced from the historical socio-political and economic milieu that has defined the colonial relationship between the colonised, the coloniser and the coloniser’s gatekeepers (kith and kin) in the colonised lands. Tourism research has, therefore, raised awareness of post-colonial issues. Post-colonial theory refers to a modern or post-modern discourse which consists of reactions to and analysis of the political, cultural, social and economic legacy of the colonial project (Aitchison, 2001). However, tourism research has often neglected meaningfully involving the Other – what Spivak (1988) has termed as ‘epistemic violence’. More recently tourism research has incorporated a critical reflexivity so producing a series of critical ‘dialogues, conversations and entanglements into the nature of power, discourses and representations in tourism’ (Ateljevic et al., 2005: 1–2). Nonetheless, scholars have argued that Africa continues to be a victim of the endless process of Othering (Hitchcott, 2009: 158). Even as tourism studies adopt critical approaches such as post-colonial tourism theory, the tendency remains to interpellate the non-Western cultures it seeks to foreground into a eurocentric frame of thinking (Osagie and Buzinde, 2011). Musila (2008) emphasises this by noting that tourism research has retained the tendency to construct the Other as a negation of its normativity. This means the tendency to view the Other from the point of view of not conforming to how things should or ought to be according to dominant discourses or power structures.

Osagie and Buzinde (2011), as quoted in Mkono (2013), argue that

[i]ndeed tourism scholarship has been pertinent, relevant, necessary and sympathetic to the oppressed. It has nonetheless been framed from the perspective of the often removed Western researcher and thus does not take into account the local issues as articulated, lived and dealt with by the locals. (p. 16)

Mkono (2013) further argues that this is because in most tourism theories, Othering included, the African or traditional Other voice is at worst missing and at best underrepresented because very little space has been apportioned to tourism research that includes the African voice.

While Urry (2002) provided an important concept in tourism, that of the tourist gaze, scholars like Musila (2008) have noted that it is the European tourist gaze that is assumed to have the ability to know the Other, and that inherent in this assumption is that the Other cannot return this gaze. Hitchcott (2009) put it beautifully:

In the classic African travel narrative, the ‘natives’ do not speak but are rather represented by the lone white male adventurer as the silent savage Other. If African voices are ever heard, they are ‘ventriloquised’ by white authors. (p. 158)

The West has read ‘native cosmologies predominantly through Eurocentric lenses’ which mostly dismissed African people as inferior and irrational beings without understanding the ‘logics underpinning their world views’ (Musila, 2008: 117). Hence Mkono (2013), re-asks the question posed by Spivak in the African context: ‘Will the subaltern be allowed to speak?’ She goes on to note that the African remains in a muted, subaltern or marginal position within the hegemony of the Western gaze (p. 4). Osagie and Buzinde (2011) offer an answer by arguing that there is a need for future (current) scholarship in tourism to engage with the perspectives of (formerly) colonised Others.

Given this complex background, Bunten (2008) has sought to redefine the concept of Othering. For example, Bunten (2008) has defined Othering as a multi-directional phenomenon, although his focus remained on the relationship between Western to native Othering. However, Bunten has expanded the definition to include self-Othering. This is important because, as Mkono (2013) explains, self-Othering is related to such concepts as self-exoticisation, self-commodification and the commodified persona – all of which have significant impacts on the process of Othering. Scholars like Mkono (2013) have filled this gap in tourism studies by focusing on the perspectives of Africans as tourists. However, this remains somewhat limited because tourismscapes are defined in terms of what she terms ‘eatertainment’ (Mkono, 2013) and did not encompass how locals Othered Westerners in general.

This article returns to the original definition of Othering propounded by Said as well as incorporating what Bunten and Mkono call self-Othering. Finally, the concept of Othering will be used to examine how Zimbabwean natives return the tourist gaze and how these perspectives can inform tourism studies. For the avoidance of confusion given that the traditional definition of Othering is based on the Western to native gaze, this approach will be termed reverse-Othering. This will enable an analysis that is based on a three-dimensional gaze which can broaden and deepen our understanding of the traditional concept of Othering.

The findings reported here interrogate the concepts of Othering (traditional), self-Othering and reverse-Othering. It is only when one looks at all the three dimensions that a broader picture about Othering emerges. There is no better lens than the killing of Cecil to unravel these concepts.

The structure of the hunting industry in Zimbabwe

The hunting industry is made up of buyers and sellers. In most cases, the sellers operate safari businesses and sell animals, and the buyers are the customers who purchase the animals of that industry. Wildlife researcher Paradza (2015) described in brief the operation of the Zimbabwean hunting industry:

The sellers in most cases are governments through National Parks or rich individuals or companies that own private game conservancies. Each year the Department of Parks and Wildlife representing the Zimbabwe government allocates hunting quotas to safari operators registered as such to conduct hunting operations.

He explains further that the buyers purchase hunting packages at international conventions or expos mostly in Europe and America and get their thrills from hunting and collecting trophies of different animals hunted all over the world. In Cecil’s case, Palmer was a customer who purchased a hunt and paid for it probably at an international convention or expo in Reno or Las Vegas. The buyers would then require the services of professional hunters. Professional hunters are the experts who work with operators to ensure that a hunt is conducted for their customer professionally.

According to Sevenzo (2015), in Southern Africa in particular, these hunters fly in on chartered flights from South Africa, live in lodges far from the locals, kill wild game and head back to their Western capitals to await the delivery of the animals’ severed heads. Hunting and, to a large extent, conservation remain a ‘White man’s game’ throughout Southern Africa (Sevenzo, 2015). The professional hunters are often White Zimbabweans, White South Africans or White Zambians who in turn are visited by other White folk with huge disposable incomes, like cricketer Glen McGrath, the former Spanish King Juan Carlos or the American dentist from Minnesota who paid US$50,000 to kill Cecil (Sevenzo, 2015).

Big game hunting is big business, although current Zimbabwean figures are difficult to get. In South Africa, the industry is worth more than US$500 million (£320 million, €450 million) per year with more than 9000 foreign hunters visiting the country in 2012 (Crowcroft, 2015). Across the industry the hunters are almost entirely foreigners from the United States and Europe with between 46 and 62 percent of lion trophies being imported into the United States, according to a 2013 report which also claimed that agents, hunting operators known as ‘outfitters’ and professional hunters were also almost entirely White and Western (Crowcroft, 2015).

The huge uproar generated by the shooting of Cecil the lion provides a fascinating lens into Zimbabwe’s new elite land politics and the relationship between humans and ‘wild’ nature. The country’s extensive game ranches and conservancies were mostly subject to land reform in the early 2000s. Many of the former owners (who were mostly White farmers) were evicted along with their safari operations. But this land, unlike most of the agricultural areas elsewhere in the country, was not handed over to land hungry peasants or unemployed urbanites but to elites (Scoones, 2015). These new Black elites had no connection to international buyers so they entered into elite pacts with former White farmers to continue this valuable hunting business. The new landowners in search of income from their land have teamed up with White safari operators some of whom formerly operated in the same areas (Scoones, 2015). Although there is a sprinkling of the new Black farmers, the institutional and structural configuration of the industry remains as intact as it was before independence and the controversial land reform programme of the early 2000s. That is why even the professional hunters are still predominantly White. This reality gives an interesting context for critiquing the concept of Othering.

The major players in the Cecil saga represent this new reality. We have Palmer the buyer, a wealthy dentist from the United States, the professional hunter, Theo Bronkhorst, a White Zimbabwean and finally the Black ‘new’ farmer on whose land Cecil was shot, Honest Trymore Ndlovu, representing the new Black elite.

Method

In today’s social media age, the Internet is becoming an important (virtual) field work site (Williams, 2007). Literature on the use of the Internet as a primary research tool has grown and continues to grow exponentially (James, 2006). Netnography is a combination of various methods and techniques that can include content analysis, historical analysis, semiotics, hermeneutics, narrative analysis and thematic analysis among others (O’Reilly et al., 2007). It provides a mechanism for accessing and interpreting computer mediated textual discourse between anonymous or pseudonymous participants on a public forum (Kozinets, 1997). It was originally developed for online marketing research by Robert Kozinets in the 1990s (Kozinets, 2006).

The massive growth of mobile technology in Zimbabwe has necessitated the use of this method. With a mobile penetration of over 108 and 50 percent Internet penetration (Zim-Statistics, 2015) and a Diaspora population estimated at about 3 million (Mugwagwa, 2014), many Zimbabweans are using social media like Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook and other comment-enabling websites. This facilitated the viral nature of the Cecil story, which also trended on Zimbabwean sites. For this study, it is easier, faster and cheaper to get real time information about a viral phenomenon like Cecil since it was trending on almost all the online Zimbabwean and global channels. The added bonus was that one can easily get views from a broad spectrum of Zimbabweans, and indeed the world, while it was potentially more difficult to access the views of communities living in these tourist areas.

For the present study, the comments section of the following sites were accessed and analysed: Zimbabwean Twitter group @263, the WhatsApp group Zimboz, Facebook group, Zimdotcoms, newzimbabwe.com blog, alexmagaisa.com blog, herald.co.zw, newsday.co.zw, news24.com and TripAdvisor. These sites are those most popularly used by Zimbabweans. On Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter, some handles revealed the location of the commentators so these could be categorised into Zimbabwe- or Diaspora-based responses. About 400 Diaspora as well as 100 Zimbabwean-based handles across the social media networks were catalogued. One important difference is that the Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp groups provide an identity or name while the blogs and newspaper groups are usually anonymous.

These social media handles were then categorised into major themes of which three main themes were identified. The identification of these themes was based on social media posts that have received the highest number of responses. This included both replies and ‘likes’. The categorization was easy to accomplish because an analysis of literature (mainstream print and electronic media like newspapers) showed that social media discussions were largely in response to issues raised by the mainstream media. For example, in response to banner headlines in newspapers like the New York Times that had described Cecil as Zimbabwe’s most beloved lion, handles on social media would start with Zimbabweans asking if anyone knew of Cecil before this media moment. In that case, a theme of knowledge of Cecil by Zimbabweans would be identified.

The responses to this question about knowledge of Cecil were then examined according to Zimbabwe- and Diaspora-based responses so that any salient similarities or differences would be noted in the findings. Not all responses were relevant to the initial post as other respondents would move on to another topic, so only relevant responses were selected until the pre-planned number for both Diaspora- and Zimbabwe-based respondents was reached. Given the huge number of responses that reached over a 1000 on the most topical issues like knowledge of Cecil, the total number of responses per theme was divided by 10 and then rounded to the nearest 10 for a manageable number to enable ease of analysis.

Using this approach, the two themes identified in addition to the one already outlined above are the symbolism of the name ‘Cecil’ and cost of the Zimbabwean tourist products. A range of other sub-themes emerged in analysis of the comments – such as Zimbabwean knowledge of tourist attractions, involvement of local institutions in tourism, the political economy of the tourism industry post-2000s land reform programme as well as the general symbolism of the tourism industry – and these were refined. The results of the analysis are provided in Schedule A at the end of this article. One important thing to note in the analysis of these posts is that while in a police state like Zimbabwe people might not be free to express their true sentiments, the Cecil story was viewed in humorous ways so that even people on social network groups felt they could express their unvarnished opinions.

In addition to netnography, traditional ethnographic methods were used, including a review of newspaper reports since Cecil became a media phenomenon. Focus group discussions and face-to-face interviews with 20 Zimbabweans living in the Netherlands (where the author lives) were also conducted. This was important for triangulation and also to sharpen the discussion to specific issues since on the online media humour was the dominant focus. The challenge with this was separating serious from light-hearted comments for analysis. Therefore, while the 20 Zimbabweans in the Netherlands are not a representative sample, they contributed another dimension to the analysis, and assisted with interpreting any issues that were not clear from netnography and desktop research. The 20 Zimbabweans interviewed participated in a social get-together which occurred when the Cecil story was trending in print, electronic and social media. Thus this was not a set of formal interviews but instead a discussion of the issue of Cecil that was already dominating the conversation, with the author would join a group of five participants, for example, who were preparing the barbeque and already discussing the Cecil story and then join the discussion like any other co-participant. The author then drove the discussion in a particular way based on a checklist of questions he had drafted (refer to Schedule B at the end of this article). This approach was carried out with a group of five women preparing food in the kitchen as well as a group of four individuals when driving together to the local supermarket to replenish supplies. The author then carried out six face-to-face informal interviews comprising three men and three women. This was intended to address any potential gender-specific issues.

The Zimbabweans interviewed in the Netherlands are all highly skilled immigrants who hold post-graduate degrees (master’s and PhD) and are all over 30 years old. They grew up in Zimbabwe and were educated in Zimbabwe up to bachelor degree level. Most worked briefly in Zimbabwe and could be described as having been part of the salaried professionals that formed the middle class. All of them left Zimbabwe to come to work in the Netherlands between the 2000 and 2005 when the Zimbabwean economy started to collapse after the Mugabe regime started grabbing commercial farms from White farmers without compensation, which triggered a political and economic crisis. The interviewees are a part of the exodus of 3 million professionals as outlined earlier who left Zimbabwe because of this crisis. Not many settled in the Netherlands because of the language barrier so that is why there is a small Zimbabwean Diaspora community in the Netherlands.

Findings

Zimbabwean knowledge of Cecil

All 20 Netherlands-based Zimbabweans interviewed did not know Cecil or the name of any other lion in Zimbabwean National Parks before the killing of Cecil. On social media an overwhelming majority of both Diaspora- and Zimbabwean-based respondents did not know Cecil before his killing. For Zimbabwean-based respondents analysed from the catalogued social media handles, 100 percent did not know Cecil whereas only 10 percent of the Diaspora-based respondents said they knew Cecil and had seen him on a visit to Hwange National Park.

A South African newspaper, news24.com aptly captured this in a teasing headline: ‘ “What lion?” Zimbabweans ask amid Cecil global outrage!’

The most famous lion for native Zimbabweans I interviewed in the Netherlands and from examining social media is called Maswerasei, not Cecil. All Zimbabweans I interviewed in the Netherlands knew Maswerasei. Maswerasei enjoyed wide coverage in the Zimbabwean media in the 1980s because he was causing terror, attacking people and livestock in the rural area of Hurungwe. Myths were built around Maswerasei, whose name owes its origin in the story that he only appeared towards sunset, the time when people traditionally ask Maswerasei? (How are you?) (Magaisa, 2015). In contrast, Cecil brought US$10 million in tourism revenue in his life because he was popular with international tourists. Leading Western media like the New York Times called him Zimbabwe’s ‘most beloved lion’ (Rodgers, 2015), yet native Zimbabweans both inside and outside the country had not known of this lion (Zano, 2015).

For local people and the local media, lions are only in the news when they escape from national parks or private conservancies and cause terror to people. Therefore, the relationship between wildlife and local people is based on conflict, and so locals do not care much about the killing of wild animals. This was captured in the following media interview with two Zimbabweans on news24.com, a South African daily newspaper. Tryphina Kaseke, a used-clothes hawker on the streets of Harare said, ‘Are you saying that all this noise is about a dead lion? Lions are killed all the time in this country. What is so special about this one?’ Joseph Mabuwa, a 33-year-old father of two cleaning his car in the centre of the capital added, ‘Why are the Americans more concerned than us? We never hear them speak out when villagers are killed by lions and elephants in Hwange’ (News24.com, 2015).

One might expect rich Zimbabweans with the money to visit resorts would have heard of Cecil. Yet Trevor Ncube, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Alpha Media Group, the largest independent media group in Zimbabwe, retorted when asked by the CNN via Twitter, as quoted by Pante (2015),

I do not share your priorities and I am afraid I won’t be able to help. I have nothing to say about Cecil the Lion. Lots to say about Zimbabwe’s economic situation. #SomeoneTellCNN we will not package our lives to please their audience #AfricanNarrative.

One might then ask which Zimbabweans considered Cecil the most beloved lion? Is there another Zimbabwe to whom Cecil was known and beloved? Does this Zimbabwe include the native Black Zimbabweans who had no knowledge of Cecil before he was killed and were even intrigued by the Western media coverage?

The 10 percent of the catalogued responses from social media handles that expressed knowledge of Cecil before his death had mostly ‘European’ names and based in the Diaspora. They are most likely White Zimbabweans or Western tourists who had visited Zimbabwe before. The following quote a handle called Paula Frech, who uploaded an image of Cecil in November 2013, 2 years before he was killed, is representative of such comments:

We were lucky enough to see an ‘old’ friend! We saw this lion last year in his prime with cubs – he was pushed out by another male and has now teamed up with another Lion named Jericho! So sad to hear that this beautiful Lion has been killed by trophy hunters – RIP Cecil! (Magaisa, 2015)

A similar comment was posted by P Robinson, who uploaded a photo of Cecil taken in September 2014, a year before the killing of Cecil:

For the hunters who feel killing ‘older’ lions is acceptable, this ‘old guy’ reconquered his territory by teaming up with another ‘older’ male. Cecil and Jericho are two mature males who are rocking Somalisa private concession in Hwange, Zimbabwe. (Magaisa, 2015)

These views of Cecil were corroborated by desktop research where even non-Zimbabwean Westerners showed deep knowledge of Cecil and other lions in Hwange National Park. For example, Brent Stapelkamp, a field researcher with Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) said of Cecil,

Cecil was the ultimate lion. He was everything that a lion represents to us as humans. He was large, powerful, but regal at the same time. He was receiving a lot of attention from both his females and his cubs. (Stapelkamp, 2015)

One can interpret this as an interesting case of Othering by Westerners. The Conservation Taskforce that broke the news of Cecil’s death is an organisation created and staffed by White Zimbabweans. That the story was not broken to the local Zimbabwean media but to the Western media can also be understood as a case of Othering of the local media by the White Zimbabweans that work for this taskforce. This Othering process is also embedded in the ways in which Western journalists accessed information about Cecil exclusively from researchers from Oxford University conducting a study of Cecil rather than from the Zimbabwean natives and even institutions like the National Parks that are in charge of the Hwange National Park where Cecil lived.

Hitchcott (2009) argued that in the classic African travel narrative, the ‘natives’ do not speak but are rather represented by the lone White male adventurer (in Cecil’s case White conservationists) as the silent savage Other. If African voices are ever heard, they are ‘ventriloquised’ by White authors (in this case, Western journalists, conservationists and Oxford University).

The local tourism sellers and middlemen like tour operators and safari companies do not market to the local Zimbabweans but to international and, usually, Western markets, although increasingly of late the rapidly growing Chinese market as well. These Westerners then visit these tourist areas. The local tour guides, consciously or subconsciously borrowing from the concept of self-Othering, inform Western tourists that Cecil is Zimbabwe’s most beloved lion. The Western tourists, who include travel journalists, believe the story and then present it as such in the Western media in the wake of Cecil’s death.

This is what Bunten (2008) calls self-commodification meaning self-Othering for business gain, something that is quite common in the tourism industry in African and other developing countries. This might explain why, following Cecil’s death, there were demonstrations and petitions drawing millions in countries like the United States, yet Zimbabweans, who presumably were the most dismayed by the killing of Cecil, were treating the huge media coverage with humour, surprise and laughter (except for officials who had to give comments to the Western media).

For the Zimbabweans interviewed the major question was why it was only Westerners who knew about the lion before it was killed when local native Zimbabweans did not. In reverse-Othering they viewed tourism in general as an elitist and White man’s activity. For native Zimbabweans there were worthy causes that deserved the kind of coverage that Cecil received, especially the disappearance of human rights activist Itai Dzamara. A leading newspaper in Zimbabwe led with the headline, ‘Cecil’s death eclipses Dzamara!’ (Matenga, 2015). Many Zimbabweans fear that he was murdered by the then Mugabe regime.¹ This was important and topical news in Zimbabwe at that time, thus in reverse-Othering of the West, native Zimbabweans viewed the Western value system as colonialist where concern for animals was seen as more important than concern for people.

The symbolism of the name Cecil

The other major area of concern was the symbolism of the name Cecil both in focus group discussions, face-to-face interviews carried out in the Netherlands and also online, where 100 percent of Zimbabwe-based handles viewed the name as a celebration of former Zimbabwean coloniser, Cecil John Rhodes. About 80 percent of the Diasporic community agreed with this perception of linking the name to Cecil John Rhodes, with the remaining 20 percent feeling that it was just a name. While Zimbabweans also do use English names because, as a former British colony, English is the widely used official language, the name Cecil has historical significance not lost to Zimbabweans. Many Zimbabweans found the name of the lion to be offensive. As Magaisa (2015) commented on a popular Zimbabwean blog,

You realize something is wrong somewhere when the most famous lion in the country is known as ‘Cecil’ sounds like a glorification of the fallen colonialist. I wonder why the domestication of names did not extend to this significant sector of the country’s heritage.

Another prominent Zimbabwean blogger, Sevenzo (2015) also added on the same subject:

The lion’s death has not registered much with the locals and for most Zimbabweans the name is more associated with the British imperialist diamond digger Cecil John Rhodes serving as a reminder that the country once bore the name Rhodesia. Indeed, for the Zimbabwean press this explains the saturation coverage on the demise of his namesake.

However, it is important to note that this lion was not in a private conservancy, but a National Park run and owned by the government. The management and workers of the Zimbabwe National Parks are predominantly Black locals, yet it was they and not the Western tourists or media, who gave such an iconic lion the name Cecil. I suggest that this was a conscious or subconscious act of self-Othering informed by what the local officials thought appeals to the Western tourists who visit the National Park. This is done for self-commodifisation showing that in tourism, sellers of tourism products in Zimbabwe and, indeed, Africa are not ashamed to do anything for profit. Even a White British researcher, Scoones (2015) of the University of Sussex, in a blog about Cecil aptly captured the same sentiment:

Conservation and hunting have been long associated with white privilege and colonial expansion and a European construction of landscape as wilderness. Cecil (and the name same as Cecil Rhodes becomes more appropriate with this lens) is also about issues of race, colonialism and the control over land.

While the lion was not named ‘Cecil John Rhodes’ but only Cecil, the fact that it was being mourned by Westerners conjures images of the British coloniser Cecil John Rhodes. Cecil John Rhodes (July 1853–26 March 1902) was a British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa. An ardent believer in British colonialism, Rhodes was the founder of the Southern African territory of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) which was named after him in 1895. South Africa’s Rhodes University is also named after him, and he set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship which is funded by his estate (Maylan, 2005).

Cecil John Rhodes is buried at Matopos National Park in Zimbabwe (Colvin, 1992). His grave is a major tourist attraction for visitors from the West in general and from Great Britain and South Africa in particular. The Matopos National Park boasts of various types of game including the ‘Big Five’ (elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo and rhino) but even on TripAdvisor (2010) the highest ranked attraction is Rhodes’s grave. Of all the 48 reviews on TripAdvisor, only 3 are from Zimbabweans and the rest are from Westerners, especially the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. While I could not get the breakdown of current statistics from Hwange National Park with authorities referring me to the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority which was also uncooperative, this sample in itself is instructive.

Some of the comments from UK tourist Sean K headlined ‘A Big Part Of Southern African History’ goes that

Cecil John Rhodes has left a very important legacy in Southern Africa and much of Zimbabwe’s development can be attributed to him. He had great foresight and vision. The views from his burial site are magnificent and the colors of the rocks change at different times of the day and through the seasons.

Grace580 from New Zealand in comments headlined, ‘Privileged experience’ wrote,

To stand on the rocks that Rhodes loved to go and see his final resting place struck me with awe. The history of this place along with the shrew² to be seen and view beyond at sunset was inspiring.

Almost all the comments by Western visitors posit Cecil John Rhodes as a hero, but that view is not shared by Black Zimbabweans and even Black South Africans as shown by the pressure from some Zimbabweans for the exhumation of Cecil John Rhodes (Laing, 2012) and the removal of Rhodes’s statue from the University of Cape Town (Grootes, 2015).

In the interviews I conducted in the Netherlands, when subjects were asked if they had a chance to visit Matopos National Park what would be the Number 1 attraction they want to see, all answered that they wanted to see the ‘Big Five’ and no one said the grave of Cecil John Rhodes. Even when the author later explained to them that the grave was in Matopos National Park, the Number 1 attraction in Matopos National Park remained the big five. About 40 percent of the interviewees expressed no interest in viewing the grave although the remaining 60 percent said they would visit it after viewing the ‘Big Five’.

The guides at the Cecil John Rhodes’s grave in Matopos National Park are local Zimbabweans. They are the ones who guide and explain the history of the place and Rhodes to Western tourists. While they do not own the narrative they perform for tourists, which is likely decided by the White business interests in Matopos, and this is another form of self-Othering. Bunten (2008) calls it self-exoticisation which he defined as, ‘when the native presents “a simplified version of the self” that conforms to Western concepts of the Other popularized in the mass media’ (p. 386).

Tourism in this case is an act of performance by the guides who tell the story of Cecil John Rhodes from the perspective of their Western guests most of whom view Cecil John Rhodes as a hero. To the broader native Zimbabwean population outside the National Parks and tourism industry, Cecil John Rhodes is no hero as was shown by both interviews outlined above and online commentary by Zimbabweans. Yet, this is not the experience of tourists, including non-British Westerners, who might not be aware of Cecil John Rhodes, leaving them with a wrong perception of the real feeling Zimbabweans have about Cecil John Rhodes.

Native Zimbabweans, through a process of reverse-Othering, interpreted the mourning over Cecil as mourning for the coloniser, Cecil John Rhodes. To native Zimbabweans, Westerners and Whites view the tourism space which they dominate with nostalgic remembrance of their hero Cecil John Rhodes and colonial domination. Therefore, giving the name ‘Cecil’ to the king of the jungle, the lion, is a way of affirming that Whites are still in charge of the tourism space in Zimbabwe. Unbeknown to many native Zimbabweans is the fact that the Western outcry was from people who in most cases do not even know the history of Zimbabwe or Cecil John Rhodes but who were concerned about wildlife conservation and against trophy hunting and were using Cecil as a symbol for that war.

The Zimbabwean political terrain has been contested for the past 15 years, especially with the then-President Robert Mugabe’s anti-White, anti-British and anti-West rhetoric. However, even before the 2000 political crisis when Mugabe had a cosy relationship with the West, White tourists flocked to Matopos National Park to pay homage to Cecil John Rhodes who is a man of historical significance. However, to locals, this was reverse-Othered and interpreted as elevation of Cecil John Rhodes to hero status by the Western tourists who visit the grave in huge numbers. Black Zimbabweans mainly visit the National Heroes Acre (Lonely-Planet, 2015) in Harare where heroes of the war of liberation are interred. Yet a search of Harare on TripAdvisor (2015a) (for landmarks of historical importance to visit) did not include the National Heroes Acre; what is included are only colonial time structures like the Anglican and Catholic Cathedral.

Hence, the tourism sellers in Zimbabwe view tourism as an industry for Westerners and not ordinary native Zimbabweans. The sellers Other the Westerners and in their view judge what they believe might interest them and thus exclude landmarks and attractions they feel might not be of interest to Westerners. The Zimbabwean sellers’ lens is still mired in the colonial disposition of tourism, which is based on the perception that Westerners are more inclined to like Rhodes’s grave than the graves of heroes of the war against colonialism. This was reinforced in the interviews carried out in the Netherlands. On being asked which landmark of historical significance they would recommend tourists to visit in Zimbabwe, 100 percent of the respondents said the Great Zimbabwe. None ever said Cecil John Rhodes’s grave in Matopos National Park.

Furthermore, the Cecil issue happened at a time when there was debate about colonial statues, starting in South Africa where Cecil John Rhodes’s statue at the Cape Town University was brought down by predominantly Black students (Grootes, 2015). The debate was also strong in Zimbabwe with some Zimbabweans calling for the exhumation of Cecil John Rhodes from Matopos National Park (Laing, 2012). The Zimbabwean government rejected the calls for Cecil John Rhodes’s exhumation on the basis that the grave is important for tourism. This justification was reverse-Othered by locals since it reinforces the fact that tourism is for Westerners who have interest not in the native Zimbabwean heroes but their colonial heroes despite the fact that these might be viewed as villains by native Zimbabweans.

Very few native Zimbabweans visit tourism attractions

In the interviews carried out in the Netherlands it was found that before moving to the Netherlands between 2000 and 2005, only 25 percent of the subjects had visited Zimbabwe’s premier tourist attraction Victoria Falls. Of that 25 percent, 60 percent had visited the Victoria Falls for work-related activities (meetings and conferences) and the remaining 40 percent on school trips. However, after moving to the Netherlands, all the subjects visited Victoria Falls when they returned to Zimbabwe on holiday. They stated that it was not only a question of money which made the difference but a culture shift adopted from the hectic life in Europe that meant that leisure is now valued more by Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora.

I could not access current visitor statistics for Hwange National Park where Cecil was domiciled from the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority, although this is the government agency with statutory responsibility to collect such statistics. I was informed that they do not have the statistics and the Hwange National Park referred me back to the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority when contacted for the same. This shows difficulties that foreign-based researchers face in accessing official figures.

Therefore visitors to Hwange National Park who rated the Park in 2015 on TripAdvisor (2015b) were analysed. The analysis was limited to 2015 because this is the same time that the killing of Cecil occurred as already mentioned and was a global media event. The total number was 93. Of those who identified their country of origin, only 10 are from Zimbabwe, 21 from the United States, 20 from the United Kingdom, 12 from South Africa, 7 from Australia, 2 from Canada and 1 each for Belgium, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Kenya. Hence Western tourists were better positioned to have seen Cecil than local Zimbabweans.

This reflects a lot about the state of Zimbabwe and indeed most African tourism in post-colonial Africa. There are spaces and places in independent Africa that the local population still view as foreign, although these places are located in their own countries, and these places are particularly associated with tourism. The attitude of local Zimbabweans shows that tourism is viewed as Western, and predominantly White spaces for leisure and pleasure. It also speaks to the ownership structure of the tourism sector, in particular the hunting industry, which is generally made up of White Westerners as the buyers, White-owned safari companies and predominantly White professional hunters. Hence the description of tourism as colonialism in reverse-Othering makes sense. During colonialism, local natives were not allowed anywhere near National Parks by law but in post-colonial Zimbabwe and indeed post-colonial Africa, money has become the currency of exclusion of the majority of natives.

Zimbabwe is one of the most expensive tourism destinations

In the catalogued online discussions on social media as explained above, there is an interesting difference triggered by the Cecil debate between Diaspora-based and local Zimbabweans. Over 80 percent of Diaspora-based Zimbabweans included comments venting their fury at the cost of holidays in tourist resort areas like Victoria Falls and Hwange National Park among other attractions. Diaspora-based Zimbabweans complained bitterly about the unaffordability of holidays since the country adopted the US dollar as its official currency in 2010 following the demise of local currency due to hyperinflation. Many Diaspora-based social media handles complained that they no longer visit Zimbabwean tourist facilities but instead travel to other destinations in Southern Africa, like South Africa and Namibia among others when on holiday.

These comments posted by Zimbabwe-based social media handles were strikingly different to that of local Zimbabweans who were not discussing the cost of holidays in Zimbabwe, suggesting that Diaspora-based Zimbabweans have developed new tastes that include leisure and tourism. The highest trending online refrain from Zimbabwe-based social media handles was to mock the Diaspora-based handles, often questioning why they ‘waste’ money on holidays yet in many cases they create GoFundMe pages upon the death of Zimbabweans in the Diaspora seeking financial assistance to transport remains to Zimbabwe for burial. Thus, the Zimbabwe-based locals were also Othering the Diaspora-based Zimbabweans on the basis of their new tastes. This suggests that for Zimbabwe-based locals, tourism and leisure remain low in priority thus reinforcing that tourism and wild animals like Cecil are viewed in this country as an indulgence for rich foreigners.

Tourism not only excludes local people but even local institutions

Cecil was studied by Oxford University researchers (Perring, 2015), and this is also significant to this discussion. Despite the economic crisis after 2000, Zimbabwe boasts great universities, and has the highest literacy rate in Africa. However, Oxford University is Cecil John Rhodes’s former alma mater where he bequeathed the highly prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. The research on Cecil was funded by the Panthera and the Dallas Safari Club, organisations that support trophy hunting. These same organisations bore the brunt of people’s anger in the protests about the killing of Cecil. Yet, these organisations raised over half a million pounds for Oxford research, and, as the Daily Express in Britain put it, the revelation was embarrassing (Perring, 2015).

The involvement of Oxford ahead of local institutions of higher learning was interpreted in reverse-Othering by native Zimbabweans as the usual first-world bias of lacking faith in local institutions. The funders were perceived as not trusting local institutions with money. Furthermore, native Zimbabweans viewed this as further evidence that Cecil the lion was viewed in the West in relation to Cecil John Rhodes. Moreover, the involvement of the hallowed Oxford University reinforced the view that tourism in Zimbabwe is part of a lucrative and still colonialist relationship with elites.

When asked their views of the institutional capacity of Zimbabwean research universities, like University of Zimbabwe, to carry out internationally acclaimed research on Cecil the lion, 80 percent of Netherlands-based participants stated that the capacity was there, although 20% felt that while the human capacity was present in Zimbabwean universities, they doubted if the funding was available for the research. They further questioned if research on a single lion, as they put it, was good stewardship of limited research funds given more deserving research issues like the relationship between local people and animals.

Elite cohesion trumps ideology

Zimbabweans wondered how the famously anti-Western and anti-White then-President Mugabe would respond to Cecil. People expected that he was going to use the Cecil issues as a godsend opportunity to launch his usual tirade against the Whites and colonialists. Commenting after about 2 weeks, Mugabe surprised many native Zimbabweans by mourning his government’s failure to protect Cecil (Feeny, 2015). Mugabe did not care about wildlife. Under his leadership, a chaotic land reform programme affected wildlife in some areas before he moved to stop the destruction he caused on farmland to conservancies for the price of elite incorporation as partners with some Whites (Ndebele, 2015). His government has been exporting elephants and other game to China from the same Hwange National Park where Cecil lived regardless of the outcry from many Zimbabweans (Russo, 2015). Syndicates suspected to be run by his top lieutenants are widely believed to be behind poaching in National Parks for the Far East market that at one time included using cyanide to kill 300 elephants (Thornycroft and Laing, 2013). His wife evicted villagers from a farm where she established a game reserve for a tourism venture despite a court order stopping the action and a massive outcry by Zimbabweans (Mushava, 2015).

Therefore, native Zimbabweans saw the rare convergence of Mugabe and the West as based on symbiotic monetary interests from tourism. British researcher Scoones (2015) who has written extensively about land reform in Zimbabwe also noted some important similar sentiments which rhyme with the expressions of native Zimbabweans outlined above. He explains that in Zimbabwe’s controversial land reform programme of the early 2000s, there was for a time an argument that conservation areas were not to be part of the land reform and that a separate wildlife-based land reform would be instituted. This was to be under the control of the Ministry of Environment and not the Ministry of Lands and so would guarantee the sanctity of the wildlife estate as a good source of revenue, which included hunting but more especially tourism.

Furthermore, Scoones (2015) outlines that this approach was soon over-ridden by politics and many of the conservancy lands and some game farms were allocated as part of A2 (medium- to large-scale) land reform. And as with a lot of A2 allocations and particularly in the conservancies that many assumed to be very lucrative businesses, allocations were made to well-connected elites. Thus, this resulted in some form of elitist incorporation between the former White commercial (wildlife conservancy owners in this context) and the political elites who had the power and muscle to grab (often violently and at gun point) the wildlife conservancies. Moreover, Scoones (2015) noted that the list of beneficiaries of some of these areas reads like a list of, ‘Who is who?’ of the ZANU-PF³ political-military elites. He notes that Honest Trymore Ndlovu, the owner of the land where Cecil was shot, was one such beneficiary and commented that

The new land owners in search of income from their land have hooked up with white safari operators some of whom formerly operated in the same areas. Wildlife is once again perpetuating a new elite land politics, excluding wider populations from the benefits. This time it’s with new (black) faces. But many of the same unsavory connections of the past remain, with links between politicians, poachers and hunting business entrepreneurs never far from the surface.

Conclusion

A lot of literature in tourism research on the subject of Othering has focused on the narrow definition of Othering from the Western to native perspective. This article has broadened the concept of Othering and given a voice to that of traditionally Othered Africans. The findings have shown that the traditional Otherer and Otheree see the same issues from different prisms. It is thus important that future tourism studies on Othering be multi-dimensional so that all the salient underlying nuances are scrutinised in research. This is particularly important in areas like sustainable tourism and wildlife management where assumptions have been made by institutions in the West in particular that more often than not results in the sustainability goals set not being met.

If we are to save wildlife, which is increasingly under threat especially given the significantly increased demand by the emerging Chinese market, corruption in most African governments and increasingly daring poaching syndicate the local population must be involved and feel part of the process. Another important area of research linked to this article would include measures that can be adopted to promote domestic tourism and broader inclusion of local people in tourism and wildlife sustainability endeavours; lessons learnt from this study on Othering can be invaluable. Knowing the views of the locals will help to design programmes that address those perceptions. I will conclude by reflecting on the observations of British researcher Ian Scoones.

First, Scoones (2015) argued that rhetorical posturing about the extradition of the American dentist to Zimbabwe was not helpful in addressing the real issues that Zimbabwe and other wildlife-rich developing countries must deal with. He argued that it was important for Zimbabweans to look harder at who really benefits from the wildlife resource endowment and the dividends thereof. He suggests that the bigger debate Zimbabweans must engage in is how the revenues generated from hunting quotas must be distributed. He argues that these revenues must not be a preserve of the narrow elite represented by the new pact between White hunters and their safari companies and the new politically connected Black elite. Furthermore, he posited that conservancies and game ranches must be opened up for wider use to generate broader benefit for all people. He puts it,

Only then will the wildlife assets of the nation be properly shared and the habitats preserved for Cecil and his relatives. Perhaps the outcry over Cecil can result in a proper wildlife based land reform, so that such wildlife can benefit everyone, not just elites – black or white. (Scoones, 2015)

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

ORCID iD

Garikai Chimuka

Author biography

Garikai Chimuka is a former MSc student at Wageningen University. He is a Zimbabwean with research interests in sustainable development issues in the Global South.

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