Authenticity and its Discontents

I finally figured out how Mali manages to charge so much and deliver so very little in the way of services and infrastructure. Their strategy is two-fold. First, they don't offer the locals a choice: Malians can like it or lump it. I have noticed that West Africans almost never complain about poor service, so this part of te strategy works quite well. But how do they keep the tourists from complaining, especially given that most of them are French? Normally they would go on strike.

The secret is in Mali Tourism's marketing syrategy, and it's ingenious in its simplicity. They've marketed themselves as "Authentic Africa." And what do most Westerners think of as "authentically African"? Animals, villages, underdevelopment, violent conflict, disease, famine, djembes, basically whatever the media shows us. We certainly don't think of air conditioned buses and well developed tourism infrastructure.

So the tourists - mostly French - who I met in Mali were there looking for an "authentic" experience. And since they mostly hadn't visited other African countries they believed that Mali's terrible bus service was also "authentically African," and therefore an essential part of their African experience, albeit an unpleasant one.

This discussion begs the question, what the heck is an "authentic" experience? And why are people willing to pay so much for one?

Authenticity is a term that is meant to be applied to objects: this painting is an authentic Wooster, not a fake like that one over there. It means that that object is the real thing. But I can't have a fake experience. Everything I have experienced in Africa is authentically African, from the absurd to the sublime.

As for the answer to the second question, why are people willing to pay so much for an "authentic" experience, well, I just don't know. If someone tells me that this bus trip will be airconditioned when it actually won't be, then I got authentically duped. If I paid for an airconditioned bus ride and instead got a sweltering greenhouse on wheels, then I got authentically ripped off. And so did the French tourists.