The Nervous Gaze - Imaginative Pleasure Seeking in Africa

I am current reading McCannell (The Tourist) and Urry (The Tourist Gaze) so they’re influencing my opinion in an unfinished way…
The Dark Continent
Africa, home of the mighty lion and all the other amazing animals of the safari parks and jungles, wild and exotic Africa…but there is another, more wild, more unpredictable and more fearsome creature lurking in the shadows, waiting for his moment to pounce…the black African!
The Western mediascapes that portray Africa as the exotic and dangerous continent reinforce the 1st Worlds structural racial bias (racism) towards the 3rd World.
A continent full of black Africans, all looking the same – where a poor tourist is unable to tell the good from the bad by looking them in the eye!
All we ever (want to) hear are the stories of civil wars, famine, AIDS - and very attractively, of animals to gaze upon, to consume, like valuable pieces of art, their value heightened by threats of extinction…
Africa, where the tourists’ imaginative pleasure seeking, the anticipatory dream of exotic adventures, comes crashing to the ground, and the terrified tourist finds themselves holed up, gazing nervously out of the (secured) windows at the real Africa that surrounds them.
Into liminal places of safety they are herded by their tourist guides, trapped by their own fears, and by the fearful/thrilling anecdotes of the revolving participants who reinforce and perpetuate the Africa myth.
Where if they escape, it is via the safety of the Safari tour, the next imaginative pleasure, the one that will surely meet all of its promises, the one that will make up for the failings of the last…
Escape on a bus where notions of self superiority and privilege reign. A bus where the tourist gaze drifts vacantly, through hang-over and boredom, out of the windows, where the plains of the Serengeti become merely transition points as they move from one campfire sing-along to the next.
A bus that when it does stop, disgorges scantily clad young things, who race around the village snapping photos of everything they deem necessary, and buying coca cola and cigarettes, and reinforcing notions of servitude, and exposing ethnically reconstructed villagers to the vagaries of western capitalism.
Tourists, who when they (finally) do get home and are re-established in the mundainity of their lives, entertain their families with their tales of their adventures in Africa, of their encounters with the dark and fearful continent, adventures recalled and reconstructed to ensure that their authenticity is beyond doubt, and to prove just how intrepid they really are.