tourists as pilgrims: commercial fashioning of
transatlantic politics
PAULLA A. EBRON—Stanford University
In the opening chapter of The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy notes the centrality of the
journey in the formation of African diasporic identity and cultural history. The dispersal of
Africans taken from the continent to the New World has left its mark on the very tropes of
heritage and identity. Gilroy's idea offers a point of departure for my discussion of the ties
contemporary African Americans forge with Africa as they remap the exit routes from Africa
centuries ago. I describe and analyze a corporate-sponsored African American homeland tour
to explore both the context and the specificity of contemporary transatlantic imaginings in
African American cultural politics. In particular, I argue for the critical importance of an analysis
of the relationship between identity formation, global politics, and the culture of capitalism.
Through an explication of the tour, I illustrate the processes through which culture becomes a
commodified object. I explore how commercial campaigns can provide deeply felt subjective
identities. At the same time, I ask about the relationship among multinational capital, local
marketing schemes, and African American participation in contemporary global marketing
visions.
At the heart of the debate among contemporary cultural analysts are concerns about analytic
approaches for the study of local and global processes (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Keith 1997;
Tsing 1993, n.d.). To study social phenomena as simultaneously local and global is not simply
to place old things under new glass, with "local" objects merely positioned in "global"
discussions; rather, methodological tools must reveal the global histories and socioeconomic
processes at the very heart of local cultural commitments. They must also assay the particularities
and local positionings of the most global claims (Castells 1997). Appadurai (1990:2%)
suggests a model of multiple scapes—ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes,
and finanscapes—that put into play simultaneous processes crucial to the constitution of global
phenomena. His model offers a beginning for an analysis of local global processes; still, it is
necessary to pull these—and other—imaginative fields of global articulation into closer ethnographic
range. How are particular scapes composed in a given plan? Rather than decide this
question in advance, as if the five scapes were universally applicable, I will examine how African
American transatlantic imaginaries create history and memory scapes. These underline Appadurai's
point about the transnational importance of the imagination at the same time as they
In this article, I ask how a site of history gets made into a successful tourist
destination of a remembered past. I focus on a U.S. corporate-sponsored homeland
tour to Senegal and the Gambia (the region ofRootsj aimed toward commemorating
sites especially momentous for African American tourists. Through the lens of
global "scapes," I analyze the multiple aspects necessary to create and sustain this
place of meaning. Of interest are the ways in which culture can be produced as a
commodified object and, in the process, made available for ritual framing and
reappropriation. [commodity culture, tourism, pilgrimage, identity formation ritual]
American Ethnologist 26(4):910-932. Copyright © 2000, American Anthropological Association.
910 american ethnologist
crosscut and confound the scapes he distinguishes. To localize global imaginings requires
attention to the agents and distinctive legacies that forge their distinctive differences. Sometimes
such attention yields evidence of unexpected identifications and oppositions.
In this article, I follow a McDonald's advertising campaign that rather successfully swept a
group of African Americans into reformulated diasporic identities. These identities emphasized
the collective removal from Africa centuries ago during slavery and nurtured the contemporary
return of a homeland tour. I argue that the McDonald's African American homeland tour I
analyze here was successful in producing deep feelings and a sense of transformed identity
because it mobilized familiar images, symbols, narratives, and artifacts to stage events that could
function as a transformative personal experience.1
The commercial campaign began this
process by bringing together the group and formulating their common project. But this was not
enough. The tour itself appeared as carefully crafted as a Turnerian "ritual process" in which
stages of separation, liminality, and reintegration produced social transformation (Turner 1969).
In the case of this tour, participants were pressed to rearticulate their identities within particular
narratives of family and homeland—narratives that allowed the participants to reaffirm their
sense of being successful American consumers, but with a culturally privileged difference.2
Furthermore, the wealth of familiar and powerful public imagery concerning slavery as well as
African culture employed during the tour came together with the materiality of the tourist visit
to produce a sense of personal involvement. The tourist as pilgrim, produced as a frame of
experience, in turn enabled the trope of collective memory—the central trope of African
American identity discourse—as both oppositional creed and American affirmation (Fabre and
O'Meally 1994; Roach 1996).
In many places around the world, McDonald's has become a symbol of U.S. imperialist
commercial domination; yet in tours such as the one I describe here, McDonald's has become
an enabler of minority cultural identities. This contradiction pushed me to consider how
sponsored culturalisms enter corporate strategies of global expansion. In various ways, communities
based on identity are implicated in the complicated and contradictory practices of
multinational corporations (Frank and Weiland 1997).3
In what forms do minority cultural
identities thrive under corporate sponsorship? This question can be addressed through a close
examination of a specific instance—in this case, of how the McDonald's tour moved the tourists
and refashioned them as pilgrims.
At the center of cultural politics lies a question of power. Self-consciously alternative identities
perhaps challenge but may also reinforce dominance; both invigorate discussions of the new
antagonisms that are breaking the hyphen between nation and state (Anderson 1983; Appadurai
1996), the dilemmas of identity politics of all kinds (Bhabha 1996; Hall 1996), and the passion
and terror of the global spread of "long-distance nationalisms" (Anderson 1992, 1994; Clifford
1997; Lavie and Swedenburg 1996 ).4
There is no simple formula that clearly delineates the
power dynamics of cultural identities. For African Americans, the question of the politics of
identity is fraught, under constant negotiation and continual reframing, not only within contests
over citizenship and rights within the United States but also within a diasporic imagination.
Key to the problem of this article is the ironic fact that the very success of certain culturally
oppositional formulations of African American identity has become the basis fora consumerism
tied to commercial (rather than political) critique and commentary. African American appeals
to traumatic collective memory and to sustaining ties to African culture originated in the context
of opposition to U.S. national narratives of belonging and tended to be understood as a
subversive formulation of identity. Today, however, those appeals are most obviously seen in
mainstream television and in magazine advertising.
What is the political status, then, of such appeals? It would be a mistake simply to dismiss
them as superficial marketing tools. An explanation of the current state of affairs necessarily
begins with the question of why the association of commodity and identity seems so awkward,
tourists as pilgrims 911
even troubling. African Americans are as deeply involved now in the search for history and
memory as they have been at any period in U.S. history. Stories of collective trauma and of
African cultural healing move people very deeply, even if they take the form of advertising
jingles. Deep subjective experience and commercial marketing campaigns are not necessarily
mutually exclusive from this perspective.
One answer to the question of how commodities and identities are joined lies within notions
of identity formulation itself. African American cultural nationalists have long maintained that
African Americans must return to African spiritual identities in order to escape the grip of
Western materiality and commercial greed. The search for African roots, in the formulation of
many of its most famous advocates, is the dichotomous opposite of consumerism (Asante 1987;
Karenga 1982).5
Furthermore, this dichotomy comes to life as more than a mere opposition of
equivalent forces. The search for a self that is deeper than materialism is embedded in many
mainstream American formulations of religious piety, community distinctiveness, and personal
identity. Such quests are inherently critical of materialism, in their common assumption that
identity is something that precedes the market, not something sold. It follows that commodified
identities are somehow less authentic than one's real self. Identity and by extension one's
membership in a community must be gained through one's own careful, private, and self-searching
endeavors. We often look in different directions to think about deeply felt personal identities,
on the one hand, and commercial campaigns, on the other. We may not see them as
dichotomous, but rarely have we searched for their mutual constitution.6
The heritage tour brought 96 U.S. citizens, 89 of whom were African Americans, to Senegal
and the Gambia in the summer of 1994. Participants ranged in age from nine to early nineties,
but most were between the ages of 30 and 45. The overwhelming majority were women. Visits
to a 15th-century slave fort, contemporary markets, an orphanage, and villages all framed the
experience, inducing for many an emotionally charged experience of reflection and immersion.
Travel routes in such contemporary "return" journeys to the continent are maps of collective
memory; to participants the visit becomes a "revisit," tending to the trauma of capture—the
capture of Africans taken to the New World as slaves. Yet it was difficult for participants to forget
the sponsorship of the giant hamburger chain, McDonald's, which played the role of financial
backer and cultural broker. The most intimate memories of reunion with the place many African
Americans imagine as "Mother Africa" were moments anticipated by clever marketing strategies—moments
that helped create what McDonald's has called in another context
"McMemories, TM." In the context of the tour, transnational trends and ideas about culture and
identity converged with the strategies of multinational capitalists, the dreams of diasporic
communities, and the income-generating plans of African national governments to produce
Africa as a commodified cultural object of global significance. In this process, Africa became
sacred and commercial, authentic and spectacular.
Heritage tours like the one I describe here merge familiar stories of slave journeys with the
contemporary physicality of Africa, thus creating a subjective sense of remembrance. At the
same time, the tours provoke varied and complicated responses among participants; the
experience can prompt cultural crises and contradictions even as it carries the participants
through the rites of passage that allow them to experience Africa as home. In the liminal space
created by this particular tour, notions of self and community were called into question and, at
least momentarily, sedimented ideas about Africa's meaning. As these emerged, Africa became
a site for critical engagement and reassessment of the participants' divergent histories.
Personal transformations must be seen within a broader context in which a variety of
influences help to shape one's notion of self. My discussion helps illuminate, in particular, the
relationship between commercialism and subjective experience. The tour I describe below
represents, perhaps, an ironic twist in which past and present converge, and culture and
economy merge neatly. While 17th-century merchant capitalist interests brought Africans to
912 american ethnologist
the New World, here at the end of the 20th century their journey back is again sponsored by
capitalist interests—this time by a multinational corporation seeking to reunite African American
tourists with their homeland. This tour illustrates one kind of complex interaction between
culture and economy: culture made into commodity for transnational consumption.
advertising and the aesthetics of identity
In global terms, U.S. commercial culture has set global trends for advertising since World
War II (Frank 1997; Nava et. al. 1997). The impact of the social movements of the 1960s helped
African Americans challenge and resist their exclusion from the repertoire of positive images in
corporate advertising. A glance at television commercials and ads in African American
magazines today indicates that in the 1990s, by contrast, companies have identified the lucrative
potential of African Americans as consumers and promoters of commercial products. Susan
Willis (1994) points to the pervasiveness of African Americans in American popular culture—in
television sitcoms and advertising more generally. African American sports figures and rap stars
offer a striking contrast to the relative absence of positive images of African Americans 30 years
ago. Now African American images, especially of men, have become an international symbol
of style—icons of cool, bad, and of oppositional, youth-oriented culture. Another trend,
particularly evident among advertisers in African American magazines, has been the evocation
of African American discourses of cultural identification with Africa.
The discursive placement of Africa within narratives of home and family is especially
prevalent in the advertisements circulated during the annual African American History Month
(February). One McDonald's commercial depicts animated African sculptures dancing around
a room decorated with a melange of cross-continent textiles, including Malian bark cloth and
Ghanaian kente cloth. Another advertisement features Hannibal the general in a Budweiser
beer promotion designed to celebrate great moments in African American history. More
recently, in 1998, Heineken (the beer producers) promoted a trip to Ghana during African
American History Month. Each of these efforts capitalized on the possibility of selling identity
and community along with company products. Through the representation of family and
community, these ads exploited the perceived connection between Africa and the United States
from the perspective of African Americans. (African American advertising agencies have played
an important part in this effort.) Manufacturers of products as diverse as automobiles, cosmetics,
food, and film frequently pull a piece of an imagined and aestheticized Africa into their
marketing schemes in an effort to captivate African American consumers.7
As a particularly concrete example, consider an advertisement by Polaroid (Figure 1). Against
an antique map of Africa is tacked a photo of two African American children dressed in
Africanized clothing and standing in a room perhaps meant to be a museum of African art. The
caption begins: "Go back in history for an instant. Black History Month is a perfect time to
explore the rich heritage of ancient Africa. Discover the legacy of its timeless culture." In this
nexus of global commercialism and identity-making projects, Africa is framed as a site of
meaning for Polaroid's rapid recovery of history through the production of a commercialist
subjectivity. It is outside of time, in a frame marked by culture. This is a place that can be
accessed through the click of a camera shutter.8
In a similar effort to attract African American consumers, in 1994 McDonald's provided the
financial backing for a "homeland" tour for African Americans to travel to Africa in search of
their roots. The tour was inspired by Alex Haley, author of Roofs (1976). Initially a book and
soon after a television docudrama series, this story helped create a narrative of kinship ties
between African Americans and Africa that seemed more tangible than the fragments of memory
pieced together in many ordinary family histories. Haley's encounter with West African griots
(performers renowned for their role as oral historians) resulted in a genealogical narrative that
tourists as pilgrims 913
Go back
in history
for an instant.
Black d >. i Month a a perfect to
i. h htntatfe i if ancient Africa
Discovei the ! . lets culture.
k };j~i-jn hn an instant, and make
t last with ... P»*«.l^»»—..^J
Instant Photography HOfSPOIQ
CELEBRATING B L A C K
1 Atlvortising "the rich heritage of ant ifiit Atric.i
not only ( aptivated the attention ot Aincan Americans but also garnered (onsidcrable international
attention. Roots remains one ot the most widely circ ulating accounts ot Atncan American
history. David Wolper, executive producer ot the television version, suggests that Koof.s had
two elements that broadened its appeal to mainstream U.S audiences: first, it was the story of
,i powertul underdog overt ommg enormous odds to sue ceed, and, second, it showed the power
ot family (interview in R ggs 1l
J(
)l). Roots was an immigration story, a Horatio Alger story, and
an assimilation narrative I homes that appealed to many Americans bet ause ot their own family
914 american ethnologist
histories. Indeed, the tropes used by Haley were central in constructing an American identity
at the same time that they helped build an African American identity. For McDonald's to base
a tour on Roots was not just an incidental choice; it was a reaffirmation of the American identity
of African Americans even as it brought them to Africa.
McDonald's represents a common hybrid in today's multinational culture. Its corporate
strategies promote universalist Fordist production standards and work culture at the same time
as its marketing strategies appeal to distinctive cultural communities (Watson 1997).9
If
globalization is the corporate search for universal markets, with its necessary dream of a united
globe, its best tool is still the marketing campaign that appeals to particularistic cultural
identities. Many scholars have observed this tie between corporate dreams of globality and their
uses of localism (e.g., Wilson and Dissanayake 1996), but few have followed the effects of
particular campaigns into the identity politics of consumers. Attention to the localizing practices
of a multinational corporation contributes to an analysis of the ethnographic life of capitalism
at the same time as it illuminates aspects of specific group formations.
traveling dreams come to life
Most of the travelers on the tour were winners of a contest sponsored by McDonald's during
African American History Month. Radio campaigns had been launched in selected cities, and
varied strategies were used to gather contest winners. Some contestants were required to answer
questions about African American historical figures, while others were asked to explain why
they wanted to go to Africa. Still others were randomly chosen as part of a phone queue.
Forty-one winners, each of whom could bring a guest, were eventually selected. The winners
came from Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere; notably, all of the white participants,
of which there were seven, came from small towns in Mississippi, North Carolina, and
Oregon. The selection process provided a cross section of age, class, and racial-group
distinctions among the participants.
Not all of the travelers were winners of the contest. Also along on the tour were members of
Alex Haley's family, a member of the original Roots cast, and a biographer of Alex Haley who
was making the trip to meet informants connected to his Roots research. In addition, the group
included members of the major Chicago-based African American advertising agency that had
helped to arrange the contest (they came along to facilitate the logistical aspects of the tour),
and an editor from a popular African American women's monthly journal. A colleague and
I—both of us having previously conducted research in the Gambia—traveled along with the
tour but without the sponsorship of McDonald's. I joined the tour almost accidentally. In the
course of inquiring about a magazine advertisement for a trip to the Gambia, I was informed
by the travel agency of the McDonald's tour. The agent asked if I was one of the winners of the
contest. I had no idea what she meant. She explained the details and suggested that this was
the trip I should take. Once I understood the possibility, there was little question that the tour
might provide an important contribution to my longer study of Gambian history, performance,
commercialism, and the international circulation of Gambian culture.10
The ten-day trip was facilitated by Alex Haley's son William Haley, who undertook the project
as an entrepreneurial venture. When I inquired how McDonald's had become involved in this
particular trip, Mr. Haley explained that, in response to a discussion at a McDonald's executive
board meeting, a proposal was drafted and accepted calling for the corporation to sponsor a
contest during African American History Month with the prize of a trip to West Africa. Haley
added that McDonald's had agreed to an initial commitment of sponsorship for three years and
that the details were to be handled by a prominent Chicago-based African American advertising
agency.
tourists as pilgrims 915
From the perspective of the majority of the tourists, the most striking aspect of the tour was
the immediacy of Africa; the tour allowed travelers to experience Africa, in all its sensual texture,
with awe and wonderment. From my perspective as a long-term researcher of African culture,
the most striking aspect of the tour was the way it enabled travelers to see exactly what they
already believed Africa to be: a poor, struggling, hot, spiritual, creative place, full of sound and
color. The Africa that travelers experienced was an Africa of news reports, tour brochures,
television, films, coffee-table books, and African American magazines. The tour created photo
opportunities into which travelers could insert themselves, thus reproducing familiar images to
enhance the personal intensity of experience. For most of the travelers, this was their first actual
experience with Africa, but this Africa had already been scripted by media-generated images
and stories. Furthermore, the tour itself played an important role in structuring the perspectives
of the travelers by shuttling them with care and efficiency from one impressive and vaguely
familiar site to another. In the following pages, I recapitulate the stops along the tour to illustrate
how they helped to shape the subjectivities of the travelers, including myself. My aim here is
to convey this encounter with Africa within a "structure of feeling" (Williams 1966:48) that
produced a longing for place and identity. In the concluding section, I consider how the tour
was designed to produce a distinctively American longing for place and identity even as it staged
encounters in the realm of African culture.
To my eyes as an anthropologist, the tour itinerary described below seems strikingly parallel
to the classic rites of passage as described by Van Gennep (1960(1909]) and interpreted in
several works by Victor Turner (1969). This structure was deliberately designed by the
organizers. As I recount aspects of the tour in an effort to suggest the multilayered dimensions
of the "return" journey, as in a Tumerian ritual process, I also analyze the ways temporal and
spatial disjunctures experienced by participants (including myself) throughout the journey were
resolved at the end of the trip to create a sense of transformation and reintegration—again
anticipated by Van Gennep and Turner.11
As Rosaldo argues in the course of his critical rethinking of the concept of culture, rituals form
"crossroads," "busy intersections" of multiple perspectives (1989:20). The Turnerian structure
of ritual as well as commercialism help establish the course for a discussion of diasporic dreams
and desires. Still, the tour as ritual would have been less satisfying had it not brought together
a rich and sometimes contradictory set of images, exceptions, aspirations, and self-making
projects that went beyond commerce. The travel encounters could not be contained by the
plans of the tour guides. No interpretation would be satisfying that did not take into consideration
some of the conflicting aspects of the participants' experience. By including particular participants'
activities in my description of the tour, I show how the tour worked—both in and beyond
the intentions of its planners.
a pilgrimage, not a safari
"You are on a pilgrimage, not a safari." These were the welcoming words of our tour guides
upon our arrival in Senegal. The guides, from Heritage Tours, were well accustomed to traveling
with tourists from the United States and Europe as well as from other countries within Africa.
The phrase "pilgrimage, not a safari" carved a distinctive regional niche in the more common
representation of travel to Africa, which often takes the form, in imagination and practice, of a
safari venture.12
But this opening greeting would come to assume a deeper significance.
Repeated almost like a chant over the ten-day period, it prompted us to be mindful of the
perspective proper to this tour—as well as the difference between this trip and other journeys.
The phrase also seemed to embody the exasperated sentiments of our tour guides when they
had reached their limits with the group's behavior.
916 american ethnologist
This tour was marked by moments when many of us revealed ourselves to be capable of
becoming stereotypical "American tourists." Many of the travelers experienced an overwhelming
sense of consumer dissatisfaction when things did not go as expected; in addition to
providing a constant undercurrent of tension, this had the remarkable effect of causing the tour
officials to offer meals not part of the package as gifts to appease disgruntled customers. The
tour guides quickly grew agitated by the rumblings of what appeared to them to be a group of
privileged Americans.
The first task of the tour organizers—which began before we left the United States—was to
offer us a sense of common purpose: the recovery of our sense of our historical ties to Africa.
Participants needed the proper orientation toward Africa. This was not the imagined place of
wild jungles; rather, it was the site of a great civilization. As students of African heritage, we
needed to be respectful of this legacy and of the great kingdoms (as well as what some have
called "queendoms") that framed this vision. There was no better place to convince participants
of this splendid heritage than the Schomberg Cultural Center in Harlem, New York, the site of
one of the major archives of African American culture and history. It is a place where culture,
at least to some, can be considered in a context of high reverence—a fitting place for the trip's
beginning.
The evening before our scheduled departure to Dakar, a reception was held for the travelers
at the Schomberg. This send-off reception was the first meeting of the tourists and provided a
chance for the group—with their diverse individual experiences—to receive an initial tutoring
session to create a shared meaning of Africa. The reception was an elaborate affair, with musical
performances and speeches dedicated to wishing us a safe journey. The guests were carefully
dressed; the mood was festive, yet subdued. This event set the tone for the journey; Africa in
this imagined space was a place to be revered. The African culture and homeland we were
about to discover should be approached with mature humility and respect. To chronicle their
impressions and personal experiences of "home," winners were presented with imitation
kente-cloth covered travel journals.
Most of the travelers I spoke to were indeed impressed by this elaborate send-off party; some
were made uncomfortable by it. Although it provided an initial cohort-forming moment, many
of the participants with whom I spoke said they left the opening ceremony with mixed feelings
about what was expected of them. Some of the people I spoke to afterward felt intimidated and
even alienated, comparing the event to a gallery opening for an exclusive art show. One of the
contest winners expressed her sense of discomfort and wondered why she had been asked to
attend: "It seemed like just another high art event at an exclusive club that I wasn't a member
of." The reception was an effort to make a unifying event. Yet, cultural capital, exposed through
class and regional differences, was highlighted; these and other differences would surface
repeatedly for members throughout the trip, despite the organizers' best intentions to create a
unified community. At this early point, indeed, much deeper displacements were required
before the group could begin to feel unity in the pilgrimage.
The following morning we boarded an Air Afrique plane in New York. We arrived at joof
International Airport, in Dakar, Senegal, in the afternoon. When we disembarked in Senegal,
most of the tourists stood at a distance from each other. For many, this was a first trip to Africa,
and few of those who had traveled to Africa previously had visited Senegal. Indeed, comments
such as "I've been to Africa" often lacked national specificity and the distinction of place. The
range of particular travel sites—including Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and Egypt—melded into
a single representative site: Africa. The very process of being a tourist was also a new experience
for many. It drew us together, although at times in bizarre and ironic ways.
We skimmed through immigration with the privilege of an organized tour group from a
powerful country. Then, however, we found ourselves stranded together, waiting for our luggage
in the dim light of the airport lobby. Pensively, some of us wondered what would happen next.
tourists as pilgrims 917
Figure 2. Welcome to Africa.
Soon an enormous mass of suitcases began to arrive. Suitcase after suitcase, forming a daunting
pile to our travel hosts, the sight certainly implied a stay much longer than ten days. The bags
later seemed like magic trunks, revealing an amazing collection of objects: wide-brimmed straw
hats; clothes for every occasion, however casual or formal; full-size irons, accouterments and
accessories to dress up ordinary wear; presents to exchange and supplies to give; and much
more—even food prepared by one of the travelers just in case the meals did not measure up to
her accustomed standards. This could only seem like heavy freight to the baggage handlers, yet
the comforts of home were not to be left behind. The weight and contents of the luggage would
later become a source of laughter as we were struck by the convergence of packing styles that
had led to this oversized heap. Obviously, no one wanted to be underprepared. Someone
quipped, "Is this our African heritage?"
Two Senegalese guides from a tour company were at the airport to greet us. Video-cameramen
paced around, eagerly stalking the McDonald's winners to record their first impressions of what
it felt like to be "home." One person seemed especially unprepared for these questions, and
perhaps understandably, since for most people an airport waiting area is hardly the place to
conjure up images of home. Soon the guides offered their official welcome: 'You are on a
pilgrimage, not a safari." The reminder was first a subtle suggestion; as it was repeated
throughout the course of the trip, it became like an advertising jingle, a collective prayer, as
well as our hosts' desperate plea that we remember the distinction between this tour and an
ordinary tourist jaunt—a reference to self-privilege and culturally insensitive behavior. Even in
the moment of becoming tourists with our bodies and baggage, we were called upon to be more
than tourists; we were to be pilgrims.
After the welcoming speech offered by the guides, we were taken by bus to the hotel. As the
tour bus approached the hotel entrance, a glance at the building again reminded us of our
sponsor. One large banner overhead read: "Welcome. The Haley family adventure to the
homeland" (Figure 2). Another proclaimed: "McDonald's and Novotel welcome the Alex Haley
family." This was not the only reminder of the commercialization of homecoming. As we exited
the bus, we could scarcely pass the door without meeting other greeters. "Hello, my brother,
my sister, welcome home,' the vendors said, showing us full displays of trinkets and souvenirs.
918 arnerican ethnologist
These "instant kin" evidently saw little difference between expressions of kinship and offering
good deals. At this first welcome, we did not know how to receive either kinship or good deals;
most of the travelers were uninterested in such deals after the long journey from New York.
Within a few days, however, many had learned to bargain more fully.
Once we were registered in the Novotel, the hotel representatives offered a small reception
of welcome. Much of this moment of hospitality is familiar and standard fare for tourists who
arrive as part of a group; yet the constant references to home and family reinscribed the
importance of this tour as a special kind of journey. Later in the day, gazing out the hotel window
high above the streets of Dakar, a few of us noticed the island of Goree—known to some of us
because of its significance in slave-trading history. At a distance, its appearance through the
mist conjured the eerie first soundings of what we later came to experience as collective
"memory."
crossed expectations in the contests over home
Our tour of Senegal began the next day with an early visit to the U.S. embassy. To the people
on the tour with whom I had by now made a brief acquaintance, this embassy visit appeared
curious: what reason would we have to visit the U.S. embassy? There was, after all, "so much
of Africa to see!" One traveler wondered aloud, "Why would we waste our time visiting
Americans?" This visit, however, helped illuminate some of the cross-purposes and assumptions
intimately wrapped up with the tour. Our tour guides thought it fitting that we be introduced to
representatives from the United States; they brought us to greet our countrymen as any proper
host might do. In contrast, for many of the pilgrims, this journey represented an opportunity to
distance themselves from the United States, to find a more significant home.
The cultural misunderstanding that plagued the framing of this event only deepened as the
visit unfolded. Our African tour guides assumed that the American hosts would—of
course—provide some refreshments for their compatriots. Yet the U.S. Foreign Service staff did
not provide what the tour guides saw as a proper welcome. "Not even drinks," one of the guides
commented, marveling at the poor hospitality. Was this an intentional affront? From the
perspective of many of the tourists, however, this was the least significant issue raised by the
visit.
Many of the American guests, troubled by having to visit a U.S. office while in Africa,
wondered aloud what American officials could possibly contribute to an understanding of
African heritage. We were ushered into a small and soon overly crowded room and asked to
listen to another welcoming speech. This speech, however, did not emphasize the uniqueness
of the tour group and the meaning of the "homecoming"; instead, the American hosts explained
the conventions of proper behavior in Senegal. The expressions on the faces of the tourists in
no way showed enthusiasm for this lecture. Many sat with a bored gaze, looking as if they were
listening to a junior high school teacher explaining the basic rules to follow on the class trip.
The age and race of the hosts did not go unnoticed. Many of the tourists later said they found
it disconcerting to have to listen to two young white men introduce Africa to a primarily African
American audience. In the context of race relations in the United States, it was not an easy leap
to accept the embassy representatives' introduction to local conventions in West Africa as a
helpful gesture. The collision of these emotional worlds provided a fertile example of the
tensions that are created when imaginary social worlds collide with present moments. The group
grew restless with a sense of exasperation at the self-presentation of the white men as authorities
on Africa, and that exasperation peaked as one of them began to explain the current political
situation on the streets of Dakar: "Today, around noon, there is going to be a political rally, and
there will be soldiers around the streets. If you see a crowd, just go in the opposite direction."
At this point, one elderly man rose from his seat and assertively asked, with indignation in his
tourists as pilgrims 919
voice and yet with what I heard as well-practiced restraint, "Why do we care about this? We
are here on a homeland tour. We are not here to listen to you tell us about political problems.
What has this got to do with a homeland tour!" Some of the tourists seemed embarrassed by
the directness of the confrontation, but for many others, he had verbalized the cause of their
restlessness during the entire presentation. To them, the details of contemporary Senegalese
politics seemed irrelevant, even antithetical, to a voyage of self-discovery and nurturance. The
speaker's response was nervously to explain his reasoning for providing the information and to
conclude shortly thereafter.
This encounter suggested that the African American travelers were part of another discussion
altogether. As the elderly gentleman's point suggested, we were on a pilgrimage to Africa. Such
a journey takes place in mythical time; in this case, it involved a temporal displacement of the
current moment in which the international representation of an actual place, Senegal, and
contemporary African political culture could only be (at worst) a Eurocentric distortion and (at
best) an irrelevant waste of time.
There are important ironies here. The erasure of current events in Senegal was sealed by their
conveyance to us within a U.S. racial politics in which white men, once again (as some of the
tourists might have said), became the experts. The African American tourists thus resisted the
information on cultural propriety in Senegal even though, under different circumstances, they
might have wished to know it. And yet, even within a matrix of erasures and overdetermined
insensitivities, African American efforts to create cultural ties with Africans do still sometimes
succeed, if not always in the ways the pilgrims imagine, in bearing significant fruit in the form
of culturally rich and innovative entrepreneurial alliances—such as this tour.
making memories
The trip to Goree Island was the next day, and it became the first symbolic marking of the
difference of this part of the journey and the events of the previous day. This segment provided
the first inkling of the distinction between tourist and pilgrim, the deeper meaning of the tour.
It was our first stop of "homeland" significance: a trip on the ferry to the renowned site of the
slave fort on the island. And Goree Island was a name already known to some. Poet Nikki
Giovanni writes:
It is all but impossible to be a Black American and not know Senegal. So many of us made our way to
the New World through Gori Island. Through a fort and a hole in the ground where even yet one hears
the moaning of the captives. What made those people survive, to replicate themselves—to live? It had to
be indomitable spirit that would not be cowed by the cold from the ocean journey or the cold in the hearts
of their captors. What warmth they would find together, not as members of different communities, not as
members of different religions, but as people of the same color from the same continent with, admittedly,
the same problems—and more significantly the same possibilities. [1991 :v]
Historically, Goree's importance lies in its critical place in maritime history. Spice traders,
explorers, and missionaries found the island a convenient transit lounge while en route to the
Orient. The island, first called Palma by the Portuguese, changed stewardship several times; the
16th century found the Dutch in control of it; by the 17th century, the French and British
contested over the region (Barry 1998). The island was then renamed Goree; its location made
it a strategic military base. As a point of transit and later a military post, the island also played
a role in the transfer of slaves in vessels traveling to Portugal. This coincided with the
development of sugar cane as a lucrative crop in the Americas (Haardt 1992). Today, historians
debate the role Goree played in the slave trade.13
To some historians, the evidence is that the
fort at Goree played only a minor part in the slave trade; however, this site and numerous others
have become symbolically significant for African Americans as well as tour company ventures.
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Figure 3. The House of Slaves, Goree Island.
In part, this symbolic charge has to do with more recent developments in the island's history.
In the 19th century, Goree Island became an administrate and educational center for West
African students. In the 20th century, people like the Director General of UNESCO, Mr. M'Bow,
became interested in preserving the island because of its architectural heritage. He sought and
received commemorative status for it and, as a result, Goree Island is now included on
U NESCO's list of historica I monuments as a world heritage site—a place set aside for restoration
and preservation. The island's slave trading history is invoked in development and planning
literature on the site: "Goree holds memories of the infamous trade that once condemned
thousands of the sons and daughters of Africa, if not to death, then to an exile from which none
returned" (M'Bow 1985:11).
Yet we did return. The process of homecoming began on the short distance we traveled by
ferry. The physical space we had to cover to reach the island seemed representative of the
distance many of us had begun to feel from our state of mind at the time of our arrival. This
excursion offered an opportunity to establish a sense of "home.' the place where all the fears
about the past as well as the hope for its renewal were invested. In reading about the island
later, I discovered a statement that rang true to my own experience of the place: "A visit to
Goree is a journey through space and time" (M'Bow 1985:55).
The walk from the ferry provided several apprehensive moments and perhaps even a sense
of awe brought about by the meeting of the myths of our African home with the material site,
the slave fort, the place where it all began. The group solemnly proceeded through the town
passageways. Soon we entered the great doors of the Maison des Esclaves, the House of Slaves.
Once we entered, the doors closed behind us, keeping all those who were not a part of our
newly forming community outside of the courtyard. Our group wandered about the two levels
of the imposing structure.
The ground floor had several small rooms that fanned around a staircase leading to the upper
rooms (see Figure 3). The heat of the day drove many of our group to seek respite on the top
floor, where the large paneless window frames overlooked the Atlantic Ocean and offered a
comforting reprieve from the tropical heat. The circular staircase ascends to rooms big enough
to accommodate several large pieces of European furniture. We were quickly reminded that
tourists as pilgrims 921
this top floor would not have been our place in history, however; these rooms were reserved
for merchants as well as traffickers in slaves. The spatial expanse of the rooms drastically
contrasted with the small cubicles on the bottom floor, which, we were told, had housed
numerous African men and women for several weeks at a time, chained to one another while
they were held as captive cargo to be shipped to the Caribbean and the United States.
After a period of time in which we wandered about in this contained space, gathering first
impressions, Mr. Ndiaye, the curator, appeared at the top of the opposing staircase and began
narrating the history of the fort in French, which our tour guide translated into English. In contrast
to the earlier encounter at the embassy, the group listened attentively while the curator told us
about the organization of the fort. In a dramatic rendering that evoked the heaviness of the
moment, Mr. Ndiaye spoke of the capture of people to be taken to the New World. Many of
the pilgrims were plainly sobered by this story, silenced by the realization of the significance
of this site. Distress settled in as Mr. Ndiaye's account compressed the present against the past,
recreating the horrors of the slave trade. Many group members, both men and women, were
moved to tears. His narrative was becoming our "remembered" history. Again, I cite the
historical account of UNESCO to convey a sense of the representations of Goree:
In damp, dark cellars, or torture cells for any who rebelled, the importees languished for weeks, waiting
for the voyage from which there could be no return. And here, when they were put on board, each slave
was branded with the mark of his owner. Then the slaves were crowded into the holds, where many were
doomed to perish before they reached their destination. [M'Bow 1985:11]
The curator's narrative of the history of Goree Island confirmed a sense of collective history
for those participants whose ancestors had been taken to North America: we were once again
"home." Many members of our group wandered around the building a second time now, again
entering the small rooms on the ground floor. Something had changed after hearing the
presentation. Although we were a large crowd in a small space, there was a hush. Many people
took photographs as if to capture the memory of this moment. A freelance photographer was
also present in case any of the many cameras brought by the pilgrims failed. Some pilgrims
filled empty film canisters and small bags with the sand inside of the fort as a material memento
of the journey. Bill Haley offered a prayer and poured libations for those who had come before,
including a tribute to the memory of Alex Haley, who died in 1992. We were then urged by
the museum curator to enter a small room where the walls displayed chain irons that had been
used to imprison humans. Log books of the slavers, cataloguing the movement of thousands of
people, were also on display in a dark room. Certificates—written verification of our visit to
Goree—were available for purchase.
The mood, now dreadfully solemn, remained subdued for several hours after the visit. After
exiting the fort we approached a church, and some people prayed. We stayed on the island for
roughly four hours afterward, and people were now moved to speak more freely with each other
than many had previously. This bonding experience proved exceptionally potent in creating a
deeper connection. Yet the pensive and reflective period was disrupted by the swarm of peddlers
that surrounded the group once we were no longer protected by the walls of the fort. The
historical return met present time, and we were urged back into our tourist status: "Hello, my
brother, hello, my sister, won't you buy this; it is cheap." The parade of entrepreneurs offering
the same items was overpowering; some of us were distracted from our former mood and
purchased souvenirs.14
We were expecting a performance that was eventually cancelled; it was
billed as a tribute to slaves. Crossed disjunctions and connections filled the long wait.
As pilgrims we had now taken our first step in the collective experience of regenerating an
emotional connection to what had only previously been a more distant set of fragmentary
semblances. Images of ship hulls packed with Africans are African American memories in part
because artists and filmmakers have rendered these images for us so concretely. At Goree, we
922 american ethnologist
were transported back through time; through our ancestral connection, we were once again
there.
Confirming or creating an identity that is reunited with the African past is an integral part of
the pilgrimage tour. Theoretical discussions about cultural identity and diaspora emphasize the
semblance of images and diverse forms that come together to shape diasporic subjects. Stuart
Hall writes: "The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual
'past,' since our relation to it, like the child's relation to the mother, is always-already 'after the
break.' It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities
are the points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and
culture" (1990:226).
One such critical site for framing the African experience in discourses of U.S. African
American culture and history is the Middle Passage, an event that signifies the moment of
severed ties, the voyage that transported Africans, made into commodities, to the New World.
Pictures of rows of African bodies chained together without room to move for weeks at a time
have helped shape a contemporary memory of that voyage.
The horrors of the Atlantic slave trade have led some African Americans to claim this as our
holocaust.15
It is an image of travel that repetitively figures difference between Africans and
other immigrants, impressing upon us the uniqueness of the status of Africans. Africans arrived
in the New World not as immigrants, migrants, or explorers, but as captured bodies. The Middle
Passage also creates the point of origin for African American history as a collective project of
memory, trauma, and healing. It serves as a reminder of the physical and psychic separation
from "home."16
The return to Goree Island, then, called up images of the Middle Passage that
were readily available for many people on the tour. It invoked imaginings of the horror, the
trauma of that experience that had everything to do with the ways people understood their own
relationships to self and community. The journey to the slave fort filled the abyss of memory
and tied it to the narrative of history; it resonated with an already strong African American
"structure of feeling" (Williams 1966:48).
The tour and the rendering of the slave experience into a narrative conspired along with the
heat of the day, the small windowless rooms, and the chains on the walls to convey a sense of
experience, a filling-in of memory. Because of the strength of already cogent images of the
Middle Passage, the trip to Goree Island seemed to prick the unconscious, (re)calling the trauma
of slavery and the reuniting with "Mother Africa," the mother lost centuries ago and longed for
since. The gathering of sand as a memento was an effort to hold on to the experience in a
tangible way once we departed. Almost anything, even sand, could serve as a token of
remembrance.
The participants' sense of self could not go unaffected by this experience; we were transformed
by the experience of "being there." A sense of the past was created by the interplay of
already familiar images of slavery and those material objects, views, and stories that bring these
to life as "memory." The power of a visit to Goree Island, then, relies on the senses: the material
feel of the visit, the sensory experience of public discourses of slave history, and the ability of
these, taken together, to provoke the possibility of a curative of community ills.'5
At once the
multiple spheres of significance come to the fore. Horrors remembered so close to the body can
lead to a collective rededication.
"come to Senegal, gateway to Juffrey"
Interestingly, although this tour was a Koofs-like homeland journey, it did not start at Alex
Haley's destination—Juffrey, Kunte Kinte's village. We visited Juffrey in a reverse order of the
departure of Africans for the New World. Much of the tour took place in Senegal, and, in
retrospect, perhaps this reversed order served a critical symbolic purpose: to begin at the place
tourists as pilgrims 923
of the dispersal of Africans to North America centuries ago and then to work one's way back
"home." This explanation serves the logic of tour as rite of passage, but there are other equally
plausible explanations. The tour organizers, as Senegalese, were able to make use of the
competition for tourist attention between Senegal and the Gambia and in the process to
construct a border-hopping evocation of our history as Africans without loyalties to a single
modern nation but with responsibilities as continental citizens. This was nationalism of a
different sort—a cultural nationalism familiar to African Americans, one in which nation, as a
geographically localized space, is not the way the world was framed. In this spirit, the tour
brought us through ceremonies of kinship and maturation and blurred present-day distinctions
of African ethnicity, nationality, and regionalism.
After the excursion to Goree Island, our tour group continued its introduction to our newly
reclaimed African kin: we visited markets and artisan cooperatives; we were entertained at an
evening banquet; and many moments were felt deeply even as they were punctuated with
commercial engagement. Everywhere we were accosted by the kinship invocations of the
ever-present street vendors: "My brother, my sister. .." Without a sense of national difference,
we traveled from Senegal to the Gambia, an eight-hour bus trip that many travelers found
difficult.17
Some of the travelers found the commentary offered by our tour guide an annoying
interruption to their own conversations. One young woman on my bus wondered aloud, "I wish
he'd stop talking; he's getting on my nerves." The tour guide's description during the long
excursion interfered with the conversation the tourist wanted to have with her friends. His
running commentary, delivered over an amplified system, left little space for interactive,
competitive storytelling, which was intergral to the trip. Others around me in the back of the
bus said they regretted they had chosen a seat in the back. For from the back, passengers cringed
at the bus driver's fast speed and vehicular gymnastics around roads familiar to him but not the
rest of us.
We arrived in Banjul, the capital of the Gambia, with barely enough time to prepare for the
evening's events—a banquet followed by a "naming ceremony" which was to become a
moment of symbolic regeneration. After a meal of nondescript tourist food, a griot welcomed
us and told us of the significance of naming: "When a child is born, he is not named for seven
days and then a name is given to the griot, who announces the name to the crowd." African
adults are not ordinarily celebrated in naming ceremonies by being given names, but we were
not (yet) African adults. Thus, we were each offered an African name. The name was given in
a whisper and then announced to the group at large. Grumblings from those who had already
taken African names livened the conversation at various tables. The idea that every one of the
travelers was a neophyte with respect to reclaiming Africa and African history and culture was
upsetting to those who had long ago changed their names; this ceremony allowed little room
for acknowledging mutual reception and appreciation. While some of the tourists saw this
meeting as a mutual bond that bridged the gulf between Africans and African Americans, the
tour organizers evidently saw it as part of a standard itinerary they provided for tour groups—not
just African Americans.18
To those in charge, the distinctions among tourists seemed irrelevant.
We were constructed as a mass, and American at that. The naming ritual made sense to me as
a rite of passage, conferring our new identities and signifying rebirth as changed beings. What
seemed less clear to those immediately taken aback by this new status was our place as initiates.
As perceived by tour organizers, we were—as Turner suggests in his discussion of the liminal
phase—tabulae rasae. Still, for most participants the process of transformation had begun. We
had faced the trauma of departure, and we were ready to receive once again our birthright and
place. By shedding our former identities, we continued the process of returning home. Also
present at this evening event was an elderly woman, a distant relative of Alex Haley and, by
extension, Kunte Kinte. We were told that she would travel along with us the next day to her
village, Juffrey, the village made famous by Alex Haley's search for his roots.
924 american ethnologist
Before we proceeded to Juffrey, however, another important stop was on the schedule. The
day following the naming ceremony included a visit to the S.O.S. children's orphanage. Prior
to coming on the tour, group members had been instructed to bring old magazines and school
supplies for the orphanage children. Here again lay a moment of disjunction between story and
reality. The idea of African orphans seemed unreal to many of us, who had grown up with the
notion that African people were never without family because, it was said, all Africans are part
of an extended family.'9
And, indeed, this was one of the explanations used by African
Americans to distinguish slavery in Africa from slavery in the New World. The notion that we
were going to visit children in the institutionalized setting of an orphanage was also arresting
because the mythic time of the tour seemed to exclude the current political realities of
Africa—including refugees. Yet it was precisely within this imagined sense of Africa that the
tour participants experienced the orphanage as moving. Who were the real orphans—these
children, or we African Americans with no family to remember us here? As group members
brought out the school supplies we had carried across the Atlantic for these children—including
Ronald McDonald's school kits (a ruler, pencil, and eraser in a Ronald McDonald plastic
bag)—we rededicated ourselves to our "African families." We could now become family
members through reincorporation in Turner's sense of the term. With reincorporation comes
responsibilities. This invitation offered an instructive moment, in which those of us estranged
from our African families could learn what the expectations and responsibilities of family
members might be. As we toured the children's dormitories, we were told of the disciplinary
regime of order and religious instruction, no doubt included to impress Western tourists who
might want to know how their donations were being spent. This account seemed designed to
prove that the orphanage experience would build strong moral character and a sense of
responsibility in the children of the village home.20
After a day in the capital of the Gambia we traveled up-country, at last, to the village of Juffrey.
During this leg of the trip, T-shirts featuring pictures of Alex Haley and copies of Roofs were
distributed to the travelers, adding to the other tokens of the tour. Once we arrived in Juffrey,
children met the bus with a chorus of calls: "Toubob, Toubob." (Toubob means "white person"
or European, but no one translated the word into English; thus, most of the tourists remained
blissfully ignorant of what might otherwise have been a point of deep confusion and alienation.)
We were then brought into the village, where the story of the kin of Alex Haley was told by the
griot. Drummers and town dignitaries greeted us and ushered us to the bantaba (town meeting
place). There Binta Kinte, the imam (religious leader), and the akaloo (village head) delivered
prayers and speeches welcoming us home, offering thanks for our safe arrival and kind thoughts
for our future journey.
Juffrey, like the orphanage, provided another moment for us as tourists and pilgrims to be
instructed on the meaning of kinship—specifically, on how to stay connected to our newfound
relatives. In a message delivered in Mandinka and relayed through an interpreter, a village
official said: "It is very nice of you to visit us here and to travel this far to get here. We want to
welcome you home. We hope your stay will be very pleasant. But you must remember that we
would like to visit you, too. You must make it possible for us to travel to the United States to
visit you." In fact, U.S. immigration policy greatly hampers the easy family visits one might want
to initiate. This was another intervention of contemporary realities into the mythic frame of the
retreat. But the gradual process of moving from the slave fort and the historical departure of
Africans to this place of receiving present-day responsibilities fit within a context of the neophyte
moving toward responsible adulthood.
The trip to Juffrey was another moment of deeply felt emotion, again filling the place saved
for an African home with the details of an actual site—a village, an event—from which memory
and meaning could blossom. As in the case of Goree Island, some pilgrims found a cathartic
tourists as pilgrims 925
release in this visit and in the thought of being home; others listened attentively as the dignitaries
told of the importance of this return journey.
As we walked to an adjoining town, Alberta, encumbered by children pressing for our
addresses (a familiar part of the tourist experience), some touched a well-worn stump, part of a
tree referred to as the "freedom tree." We were told this was the place of freedom: if one
managed to escape while being taken on board the ships bound for the New World and could
swim to shore and touch this tree, that person would have gained his or her freedom. Somehow
the idea that there were rules in this contest between life and death, family and expropriation,
prompted a weird moment of reflection. In the background were old, deteriorated colonial
buildings that had once served as the quarters of the colonial officers. Historically laden, the
setting was a very powerful one. We had moved from the horror of captivity to an appreciation
of freedom in the context of broken kinship ties, now rekindled. As North American singer and
songwriter Tracy Chapman suggested after her visit to Goree, "Things can change" (see note
16). Here we were offered the hope of new, responsibly connected lives.
Yet even the most moving moments of deep immersion in the pilgrimage tour seemed to be
followed by breaks; high emotional moments were tempered by opportunities to shop for
souvenirs. Soon after the trip to Juffrey, we were in Senegal again, lodged in a resort for our final
days together. We went unrecognized by the resort employees; there was no welcoming of kin
here. In fact, some travelers felt that some of the hotel employees courted the white guests,
treating them more cordially. Back in Dakar, the vendors followed us everywhere: "My brother,
my sister..."
The effort to sell and buy culture marked the journey with a constant counterpoint; no
experience could lie outside of the marketing of anything possible. In moments that I experienced
with extreme embarrassment, the instant kinship was reciprocated in the crudest of
"American tourist" ways: one of our travelers, for example, successfully offered the sweaty shirt
off his back in exchange for local crafts; a bargain is a bargain, after all. Shortly after this, one
of the tour guides lost his shirt as he intervened in an altercation between a tourist and seller as
we waited for the ferry. After the tourists recovered from the jet lag of the first day, the tour was
plagued with entrepreneurial contests between buyers and sellers, and an endless competition
ensued over who could get the best deal. I wondered how far this competitive strategy might
have gone if the bargainers had converted their C.F.A. to U.S. equivalencies and realized the
meager sums to which they had reduced the traders' prices. Additionally disturbing were the
assumptions made on the basis of images of Africa generated by the U.S. media. Misconceptions
about Africa were framed within a narrative of underdevelopment; the idea that Africans lacked
business sense was used to explain the poverty of the continent. Once again abstracting Africa
out of contemporary geopolitical realities, the mythic space of recuperation and rebuilding
failed to provide a frame wide enough to accommodate an understanding of the conditions of
life in Africa.
On the final day, there was one more banquet. The tourist-pilgrims were urged to wear their
newly tailored African clothes to the final festivities. This was the evening of our departure,
and the celebration was much like a graduation ceremony, with musicians and speeches. We
were each individually invited to the stage and congratulated on completing a difficult
journey. We could now return to our homes with the knowledge—properly feted—that we
could carry the strength of this process of rebirth with us for the rest of our lives. Clearly, this
tour was meant to be a life-changing experience. We were given certificates by the tour
convener, William Haley, attesting to our completion of the homeland journey. People
exchanged addresses and said goodbye as if we would not be traveling together back to
New York later that evening. Yet this, too, was a process already figured in Turner's analytic
frame— the process of reincorporation.
926 american ethnologist
At the end, everything seemed possible: memory, solidarity, regeneration. All of the cultural
misunderstandings that framed the ironies of the trip seemed full of productive potential: stories
of reunion that blurred distinction; a moment of growth for both African and African American
makers of selves and livelihoods. On the one hand, so much of what was there at that final
ceremony was what we had brought with us—even our African clothes. Many of the travelers
had brought African clothes made in New York in those voluminous suitcases. In this sense,
much of the Africa we had managed to appreciate was not so different from the U.S-made Africa
already a part of many people's lives through the tailors and hairdressers of our urban centers.
On the other hand, we had tapped a vein of West African entrepreneurship, eager to present to
us the marketers' Africa. Our experience at least had the advantages of reverent attention and
heartfelt—if transient, privileged, and awkward—solidarity. Perhaps something would come of
it. And yet one may still ask about the visions we pilgrims carried with us.
the domestication of dreams
What can be said about identity formation and the specificity of the current moment in
shaping identity and political culture? What of these "sponsored identities" (Davila 1997) that
generate a particular relationship to concepts of self and community within globalization? The
transatlantic reunion sponsored by the McDonald's homeland tour united places and peoples
normally dispersed and helped create what was for many of the U.S. participants a deeply
moving experience. At the same time, it is important to ask about the limits of this vision. The
corporate sponsorship fostered a view that, as my informant responses indicated, helped contain
and frame those encounters in specific ways. Informal conversations with a few of the travelers
suggested they felt that what Africa needed was economic development. Such assumptions
mirror the dreams of modernization. And yet some of these same people noted the economic
development failures of their own communities in the United States. Less clear was their analysis
of the historical and larger structural factors that keep Africa in a precarious position in relation
to the world economy. And yet some of the responses of the tourists seemed to indicate an
openness to understanding the effects of global capitalism. But how is this knowledge gained
at this historical moment of liberal capital in contrast to the 1960s, for example? Their localized
view of the causes of poverty reminded me of the ways, today self-improvement and atonement
are held out as the stuff to fill the gap between poverty and success.
In contrast, many African American cultural nationalists of the 1960s movements defined
their projects as attempts to build an alternative vision outside of a U.S. politics and logic. Many
claimed new identities by rejecting family names—what were referred to as slave names—and
by taking on "African" names; many opted for "African" spiritual alternatives to Christianity.
Cultural nationalisms of various forms seemed to suggest there was some place of opposition
outside of the regime of the West—and for many, that place was Africa. I was not surprised that
there were moments of annoyance on the part of some of the older tour participants when their
efforts to reconnect to Africa prior to this journey seemed to go unrecognized.
Indeed, there is a deep sense of continuity between these early "alternative" identity makings
and the contemporary search for roots. Yet the current moment of identity making is also
distinctive. In striking contrast to the political organizing of this earlier period is the current
proliferation of autobiographies and self-help books that now take up a great deal of space in
bookstores and in African American book sections. Social organizing around the recent Million
Man March in 1996 and the Million Women March in 1997 mobilized large numbers of African
American men and women in gender-segregated rallies, the explicit focus of which was
atonement and community development through self-reflection. What was less clear in these
events was an understanding of something larger than a collection of individual selves. In
tourists as pilgrims 927
contrast to the critique of imperialism and global expansion that would have been a part of an
earlier moment of mobilizing, there is now a domestication of dreams—a vision that turns
inward rather than challenging corporate strategies and logics. Oppositional identities no longer
appear to be autonomous from global commerce, even to their most radically passionate
adherents; instead, they are inescapably intertwined. The business of identity is a productive
strategy for corporate gains.
This brings us back to Turner's model of ritual process which emphasizes the ways ritual
helps create and sustain group cohesion. Certainly, the tour I have described created a strong
sense of unity. Yet perhaps it is also useful to consider this ritual solidarity in relation to its
self-conscious production, that is, in relation to commercial strategy. From this perspective,
ritual takes on some of the features of ideology—one powerful commitment within many.
Maurice Bloch's dialogue with Turner is relevant (Bloch 1989); ritual is not the only expression
that might come from a given community. Ritual can be repetitive, inward-looking, celebratory
of the powers that be; there are other alternatives.
In considering African American homeland tours, how might ritual serve the purposes of a
powerful corporation? Frank (1997) persuasively argues that the very strategies that framed
oppositional culture and rebellion against conformity and suburban life are now the things
businesses actively seek to market. The rhetoric of individuality and choice circulate throughout
ad campaigns, presenting mass-market goods as unique and even subversive choices. Furthermore,
the images and ideologies of powerful advertising campaigns insert their presence
globally. "Local development" projects struggle for the notice of corporate sponsorship where
philanthropic organizations and international agencies once provided support. Prominent in
this corporate advertising are images of African Americans, which figure boldly in selling
"America's" global dreams. These images are transmitted not just to African American consumers.
Their stylish attitudes of opposition-as-consumption are marketed with products around the
world. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, consumers can now witness the entertaining antics
and passionate identity struggles of African Americans in search of the perfect product. These
images sell American goods and American style, not just African American causes. To the extent
that African Americans absorb themselves in the inward-looking rituals of identity making within
this commercial context, we become icons of American corporate expansion.
Even as anthropologists respect the power of diasporic collective memory, the McDonald's
tour and other corporate-sponsored dreams prompt an important caveat: it is crucial to think
about the political visions and translocal collaborations they make possible and impossible.
The McDonald's tour I have described brought participants into an identity journey that blocked
out much of contemporary politics, both African and American, even as it gave us a sense of
connection. I have tried to craft my description of the tour to evoke this journey of community
and self-discovery: its deliberate, measured rhythm; its ability to keep participants focused on
the journey itself; its creation of an imagined community of pilgrims outside of the space and
time of African or American debates and differences. This discussion highlights the limits of a
ritual return to the past as a way to forge ties between Africa and diasporic communities. I
suggest that one must be attentive to the conditions that help finance and facilitate these "return"
journeys.
If, as cultural analysts, our study of the politics of identity formation is to offer a sense of the
simultaneous and contradictory aspects of these projects, we must tack back and forth between
large scale theories of transnational processes and the specific projects in which these transformative
elements are thought to land. Models for the study of global processes, particularly those
that foreground disjuncture, such as Appadurai's scapes (1990) or Castells's (1997) or Hannerz's
(1996) theories of networks and global conneaions, also require attention to the rituals that
shape critical aspects of late 20th-century subjectivities.
928 amerlcan ethnologist
notes
Acknowledgments. This article was first presented at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Center for
Cultural Studies, in May 1996. A number of people have contributed critical comments that have greatly
enhanced the development of this article. I extend my thanks to Kathryn Chetkovich, James Clifford, Jean
Comaroff, Frank Holmquist, Debra Klein, Donald Moore, Renate Rosaldo, Anna Tsing, E. Frances White,
and the reviewers of American Ethnologist.
1. Joan Scott's (1991) essay on experience makes the important point that the process by which
experience is formed cannot be taken for granted. Hall (1990) points to the intricate process of memory in
identity formation in diasporic communities. Subjective experience as described in this article refers back
to the implications of Appadurai's (1990) model where "experience" is constituted through various kinds
of media.
2. Victor Turner's discussion of the process of ritual and communitas lays some of the ground work for
an interpretation of the tour, but this interpretative frame seemed already a part of the tour guides' toolkit.
It is the movement through various stages, of ritual markings of place and time, that became integral elements
to the tourist journey. Rituals enliven events; they perform moments of social history by tying practice and
performance into a kind of structure of feeling that can generate a transformative effect. Although a great
deal of Turner's work addressed the ritual processes in pre-capitalist societies, in later years Turner also
turned his lens to analyze what he refers to as spontaneous communities. A spontaneous community, he
offers, is a "phase, a moment, not a permanent condition" (1969:138). What one seeks is a transformative
experience that goes to the root of each person's being. Obviously moved by moments of deep encounter
with "remembered" pasts, many people on the McDonald's tour expressed a sense of belonging.
3. For a discussion of contemporary business practices and the modelling of needs and wants by
corporate strategies, see Frank and Weiland 1997.
4. Clifford (1997) also insightfully explores the intellectual and political debates about diaspora. This
interrogation forces cultural analysts to explain what one is referring to when discussing the concept of
diaspora. When I conducted research in the Gambia at an earlier period, people often thought that African
American referred to Africans who had recently migrated to the United States. Thus the activities of black
Americans with long ancestry in the New World fit into an older formulation of the Black Atlantic. As
Clifford's work implies, this raises the need for further discussion about the various meanings and
communities within diaspora.
5. To collapse all nationalisms into one category blurs the distinctions in the variety of nationalisms that
are grouped under the rubric of black nationalism. The ideologies informing Garveyism in the early part of
the 20th century and contemporary U.S. black Muslims, as just two examples, are not in tension with
capitalism. The nationalism of the Black Panthers and Congress of African People, two 1960s-based
nationalisms with a global perspective, actively critiqued capitalism and turned to other places—Tanzania,
Mozambique, Cuba, and China, for example—for models of alternative political visions. While all of these
share a privileging of race, there are differences in the ways politics was imagined. Also, these nationalisms
must be seen within dominant national identity formulations that generated exclusionary practices to which
these "minority" nationalisms were articulated. For an extensive discussion of the ways Africa and ideas of
gender figured into the cultural politics of African American nationalists, see White 1990.
6. Some scholars actively challenge secular-sacred and commercial-spiritual dichotomies in their
descriptions of pilgrimage. Delaney (1990), for example, expands the notion of a particular kind of
pilgrimage, the ha//, to discuss the yearly secular return journeys of Turkish Emigres to their natal villages.
She argues that people familiar with Muslim sacred journeys draw on it as a model readily available to them
in their secular travels home. Similarly, Reader and Walter's (1993) collection of essays on secular
pilgrimages also expands beyond a dichotomous relationship between sacred and secular. Pilgrimages to
sites such as Elvis Presley's grave incorporate elements more frequently associated with religious journeys.
At the other end of this discussion, scholars have examined the sacralization of consumerism and the
secularization of religion (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989). My focus overlaps with these discussions on
the way commercial pilgrimage blurs the boundaries of categorial distinction.
7. Johnathon Briggs's (1996) undergraduate thesis on figurations of African Americans in advertisements
illustrates the important role of African American advertising companies in generating and promoting images
of African American life. Here we see that more is at work than corporate inclusion; the active presence of
image managers in the form of African American advertising companies plays a central role in generating
representations of African Americans and their associations with particular products.
8. The connection between commercialized subjectivities and histories is not a new aspect of capitalist
culture. Thomas Frank's (1997) study of advertising and youth consumerism offers an insightful history of
the long relationship between marketing and the "culture" of targeted groups. His particular interest is
American 1960s counterculture groups and the ways capitalism shaped them. Frank's analysis is helpful in
relation to my own argument in that he focuses on the strategies of businesses in creating oppositional
images, rather than reading the images as self-evidently anti-commercial.
9. For a sense of how McDonald's inserts itself locally, see Watson's 1997 edited volume on McDonald's
presence in Asia.
10. Financial support for my participation was provided by the Department of Anthropology at Stanford
University. Tour organizer William Haley graciously granted me permission to travel with the group.
tourists as pilgrims 929
11. While correcting the final version of this article, I discovered that Olga Idriss Davis (1997) also
analyzes Goree Island as a Turnerian pilgrimage site. She sees Goree as a place ripe for the transformation
of self, and her analysis traces the rhetorical ways the tour captures African American's need of (re)connection
to Africa. The coincidence in our use of Turner confirms my assertion that the tour guides promoted
this homeland site as a ritual place, strategically aimed at creating a powerfully moving experience for
African Americans. It is the use of the trope of the ritual return journey that is compelling to me, at once a
marketing tool as well as an effective strategy for confirming a sense of identity.
12. The recent popular interest in homeland tours has carved a particular ethnic niche that is distinct
from conventional tours. Edward Bruner (1996) has written about the development of tourism and diasporic
imagining in Ghana.
13. In the context of a long debate over the number of people taken in the slave trade, historian Philip
Curtin has argued that Goree never amounted to one of the significant sites (see Magner 1995); however,
Barry (1998:61-65) argues that Curtin ignores the symbolic significance of Goree to African diasporic
history.
14. Each of the winners received $1,000 in prize money. One of the winners, however, refused to spend
her prize money during the tour. She held tight with the hope of paying off her bills once she returned to
the United States.
15. Gilroy (1993) and Bauman (1989) note the significance of the slave trade and holocaust to the very
idea of modernity. The parallels between African Americans' discussions of historical recovery and memory
and Jewish histories of the horrors of life during the holocaust are striking especially in terms of their
categories and narrative conventions (e.g., Antze and Lambek 1996; Hartman 1997).
16. The textual figuring of Goree Island as a place of significance in African American stories can be seen
in the following exchange between novelist Alice Walker and musician Tracy Chapman, who use their
"memories" of slavery and the power at that site to inspire their campaign against violence against women:
AW: Here we are, sitting on the steps of what is called the House of Slaves, and I wondered what you
have been thinking about and what you've been feeling about genital mutilation?
TC: Coming to this place probably felt like the end for so many people; there must have been so much
uncertainty and fear. It just makes me think about what's been done to women and that they're being
mutilated.... I stand here as a free person as much as it's possible in this world, and it's possible that
things can change, [quoted in Walker and Parma 1993:346]
Alice Walker's efforts to render Africa in various forms—in fiction and in human rights campaigns such as
the film Warrior Marks—raise a number of questions about representation and the place of African
Americans in global debates between African Americans and Africa. Walker uses Goree Island as a place
for African Americans to imagine both an enslaved past and a freer future. The removal of Goree from its
contemporary West African context does not weaken its symbolic significance; on the contrary, it strengthens
it.
17. The white participants were even more awkwardly positioned after the visit to Goree. Two white
tourists sat in the back of the bus, attempting perhaps to show their solidarity with the majority of the tourists.
This was not easy since all of us had just traveled through something that left us emotionally drained—and
that connected African Americans in a way that for a time, at least, excluded white Americans. The remaining
five white Americans sat in the front of the bus. There were other signs of strain from the emotional stress
of the trip. During one of the stops, for example, one of the minority white passengers fell to the ground.
Some people offered to help him to his feet, but he rejected their efforts, evidently preferring to struggle on
his own.
18. The itinerary, indeed was followed by a number of tour agencies. For example, Spector Travel is an
agency in Boston whose itinerary is quite similar to that of the McDonald's tour.
19. /Abandoned Baobab (1992), by Ken Bugel (a pseudonym) is a compelling "factional" autobiography
of a Senegalese woman estranged from her mother and (eventually) her entire family. In the novel, she moves
to Europe and longs to address her sense of loss of home and family. In an imporant way, this work captures
emotional tensions of separation and loss expressed by some African Americans.
20. The tour was much like excursions to demonstration factories in China and Turkey, each accompanied
by a tourist relations staffperson who anticipates all questions and demonstrates the excellence of the
conditions provided for employees.
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accepted November 17, 1998
final version submitted February 23, 1999
Paulla A. Ebron
Dept. of Anthropology
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2145
pebron@leland.stanford.edu
932 american ethnologist