Let Uganda embrace 'Dark tourism' to attract more visitors

By Francis Nono

Uganda is a beautiful country that is "gifted by nature", and these natural attractions on their own are bringing in about 1.32 million tourists annually.

I have been thinking: ‘what if Uganda diversified its tourism attractions from just the wild games in the game parks, birds watching, mountain climbing, etc., and embraced other more salient but increasingly popular forms of tourists' attractions like "dark tourism"? how many more tourists, both local and foreign, would we be able to attract to Uganda, not to mention the benefits that comes with it?'.

Dark tourism is a concept common mostly in Europe and America but is a new development here in Africa. Dark tourism is simply the act of traveling to places historically associated with death and tragedy, e.g. massacre sites, monuments, etc.

Foreign tourists, especially, are increasingly getting attracted to "dark tourism sites" all over the world, and Uganda with its turbulent past - some of which have already been popularized through movies or documentaries such as "The Last King of Scotland", "Kony 2012" and the recent "27 Guns"; can become a favorite destination for this new form of tourism.

Such dark tourism offers a more complex and personal stories of those affected. And these exposures could act as deterrents to Ugandans and visitors alike, that such sad events never reoccur anywhere in future ever again.

But more could be done to market Uganda's tourism sector if we diversified our strategies to woo visitors, as suggested by many others. I was inspired by an article by Nicholas Sengoba, titled: "Kanye West should not stop at animals, rivers and the rolex", which appeared in a local daily last week. 

He opined, rightly so, that Ugandan tourism is not just about the beauty "gifted by nature", but that we also have many other narratives which we should equally tap into to market our tourism sector.

The promotion of dark tourism or the idea of ‘Memory and Memorialization' is one such narrative which, I want to believe, Sengoba had in his mind. His arguments ignited my imaginations and thoughts about urgency with which we should integrate these ‘new' concepts into promoting tourism in Uganda. 

Uganda's turbulent past, gives us a unique character that many people - both citizens and foreign visitors - would want to learn from, especially the outstanding resilience those affected by the past woes have exhibited.

Uganda also has very rich oral history, and coupled with its turbulent past, it offers a rich dish of conflict narrative - which to some extent little documentation has been done about.

Both the ‘positive' and negative history about Uganda, in my honest opinion, can be carefully packaged and sold together to tourists, in a bid to diversify touristic attractions in our Iand. It is therefore quite unfortunate that most Ugandans think for us to promote tourism, one must only talk about the positives.

I have disagreed with a couple of friends on this issue. I feel every country has its negative past and how its people have transformed that ugly past to positive, is what really matters at the end of the day. Lest we forget, both the negatives and positives must be documented for people to learn about a country or people, however sad.

Countries like Rwanda is not even halfway as gifted by nature as Uganda is, but everyone who has been to Rwanda has learnt about the conflict history of Rwanda. It is not that Rwandans are proud about its genocide past, but they are rather proud of how they were able to recover, reconcile and stand together again as a one nation after the genocide.

It could be safely argued that such stories around the resilience of the Rwandan people after the genocide packaged alongside the rare Mountain Gorilla, is what has contributed to that country becoming one of the best tourism destinations in the region.

Back to our Uganda, having consistently worked in northern region for the last 14 years in areas of peace building, Memory and Memorialization, transitional justice, etc., I can safely say northern Uganda has received many visitors - both local and foreign nationals - who are interested to learn about the conflict history of the region. These particular group of curious visitors has been more in numbers than tourists who come majorly for vacationing in Uganda for example in Kidepo National park. This alone should give an indication on the role of memory and memorialization of a country.

Every part of this country has suffered conflict or has had some little share of conflict narrative, which to some extent is documented or has never been documented. Yet all these can be transformed in to memorial sites with consistent narrative. 

While visiting memorial sites in Luwero district recently, one thing that caught my attention was the lack of care and attention given to these sites. The places looked desolate. I am sure not very many Ugandans are aware of these sites with very rich history, yet its importance is not being shared to the younger generation to learn from the history in order to avoid recurrence of such dark history

At one of such sites in Luwero, we had to give two days for the community to look for someone to give us a narrative about the place since most people who were apparently more knowledgeable about the place were not around.

On the need for the memory and memorialization of a community or country as a whole being intertwined with other tourism attractions, the Refugee Law Project (RLP) of the Makerere Law School together with Kitgum District, have put in place a memory and memorialization museum on war in Uganda.

The National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre which opened its doors to the public in 2011, is home to not just cultural artifacts but also rich with tools, stories and various data about conflicts events in Uganda.

The Centre, currently managed by Refugee Law Project, has attracted scholars, students, visitors - both locally and internationally to come and learn especially about the northern Uganda conflicts.

Two weeks ago, Uganda hosted a high profile tourist in the country which caused lots of excitement not just within the tourism industry, but the whole country as well.

As a music fan and an ardent twitter follower of Kanye West (Ye, as he is currently called), I too was excited to see him visit our country. However, his visit was restricted to the more traditional tourism attraction; the wildlife at Murchison Games park. I wished his visit had also included one of the many dark tourisms sites in Uganda so he could learn something about our past as well.

Way Forward

It's therefore my appeal and wish to the various line ministries as well as the entire tourism fraternity to integrate issues of Memory and Memorialization of past events in promotion of tourism in Uganda.

The writer is a Transitional Justice Practitioner/Community Outreach- Officer