Ambassador Wanle Akinboboye is a name synonymous with tourism in Nigeria and the far reaches of Africa. Having built La Campagne Tropicana, the first of its kind, African themed resort more than two decades ago, he has remained fervently dedicated to the cause of building the continent and taking it to greater heights. Walking through the resort, a tourist is at first enamoured by the ethereal beauty of a place where nature is allowed to exist alongside modernity. From the lively monkeys swinging from tree to tree to the chalets like ‘Amosan’ and ’Obieze’ scattered around the beachfront property, La Campagne cuts the picture of the perfect getaway. In a chat with TOMI FALADE, Amb. Akinboboye reveals how La Campagne came to be, and how he has successfully presented the African culture in an untarnished, unblemished light.
How was La Campagne Tropicana conceptualised? Was it simply to create a business or was it to create a solution within Nigeria’s economy?
LaCampagne came from the vision of a movement called continent building. I was very young then and we had the mindset of ‘anything is possible’, ‘anything can be done’. I was barely 27 when I finished my Master’s Degree from Florida International University (FIU) and our focus was, ‘how do we build this continent?’ I think La Campagne was first built from the anger of a young revolutionary person who felt that how can the second largest continent in the world that is approximately 30.2 Sq Km of area, with all the known natural resources in the world embedded; be the poorest in the world? How can 30.2 million Sq Km of area, 12million Sq miles, with all the natural resources in the world there be the poorest continent in the world? The mindset then was simply to fix it and get it done.
If something is wrong and you are angry about it, you just get with it and begin the process of that change. I focused on the three major areas I have expertise in, which is tourism, security and entertainment; entertainment as it marries with tourism because you can’t have tourism without entertainment. So I felt that the first thing we had to do was to create an authentic African themed resort, weaved around the over 340 different cultures in Nigeria, and then, with about 120 million people. I see Nigeria as the cultural capital of the world based on the number of different cultures that we have.
We had to weave the resort around our culture in a cosmopolitan way, and presented in a very classy manner. Every culture evolves at some point – the British people used to live in caves. What most people have done is to take their culture, polish it and represent it in a classy manner the way the Japanese, the Chinese, the Taiwanese are doing. None of those cultures can even begin to compete with African culture. So I decided that we would build an authentic African resort that we would replicate throughout the world.
We came into the bush of Akodo Ise, which is further down Ikegun. This is about the third location we have been. At Akodo Ise where we camped to begin the process, I camped with the villagers for about a month before they had some family issues amongst themselves. So I left the place to Lapia. It was the same issues I found there before I came to Ikegun. We wanted to build an African themed resort that is weaved around our culture, and I wanted.
It to be far away from the city and town where we can have total control of our environment. At that time there was no Ajah. The only thing that was there was just Chevron. After Chevron it was just bush. As a matter of fact, a friend that I talked to when I first returned took me to Lekki Phase 1. I told him it was too close to the city. He told me that everyone that had come said it was too far, and now I was saying it was too close. But he didn’t know what I was thinking.
If Marriott can have 3900 branches, bought over all of the Proteas and they are selling their culture throughout the world, then we can also do that. There is no better place for you to sell your culture than through hospitality and tourism. That’s because, 85% of people that travel to Nigeria, for example, do not have access to your homes, to the way you eat, drink or celebrate. If 5 or 10% of them are lucky to be invited to your event, it is usually too rowdy or too clustered that they do not really get to understand the essence.
Also, in continent building, you cannot run to places like the UN, UNICEF and tell them to help you build your continent. They look at you and ask exactly what you want to do. You have to go into the bush, create something, multiply it and replicate it in as many places as possible throughout the world. That is how you begin a process, and then you hope that others would copy it.
What would you say is a key impact on the average tourist?
You can travel as a business tourist, you can travel as a religious tourist or educational tourist, archaeological tourist, adventure tourist, but the first thing you learn from the minute you land in that town is the culture of the people. Educational tourism is constant in all forms of tourism. If you come to Nigeria for religious tourism, or maybe to the Redeemed Camp from any part of the world, by the time you get to the airport, one of the first expressions you may hear is ‘na wa o’.
Before you know it, before that religious tourist leaves, he or she would already start saying things like ‘no wahala’. They would have learnt that language and culture. So when people do travel to a particular destination, they travel to learn. You don’t travel to a particular destination to acquire a cheap imitation or experience a cheap imitation of your culture. If I come from the US, and I stay in a Hilton Hotel, when I close my curtains and I sit in the very comfortable five-star room, I could be anywhere in the world. I could be in New York or Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago. I could be anywhere because it is the same once you close the curtains. But that isn’t what a traveller travels for. He or she has travelled to Africa to experience Africa.
It usually takes a concerted effort for people to travel because travel is very expensive. If you are lucky to have a lot of time and you have the money, you want to maximise your travel and enjoy it. As a young boy who has watched a number of Indian movies, and you have seen the dances and heard the songs, you promise yourself that when you grow up, you’ll like to see India. When you finally acquire the money, and you are able to find a bit of time, you fly all the way to Bombay and you stay in a Hilton, not Taj Mahal, that means you do not really get to see the culture or the things that were part of the reason why you decided to travel to India. Most people who travel to the continent of Africa travel to see Africa.
What Africans have not done is that we have not realised that what we must polish is that African culture, make it classy, cosmopolitan, and extremely comfortable. We have this mindset that we must present Africa in its raw format. We look at the things that our forefathers had done 500 years ago and present it the same way today. We do not realise that we can take that and modernise it without losing the essence. This makes it an experience for tourists, something they have never seen before, something you have total advantage and control over because no one can compare with you when it becomes your culture. Even within the continent of Africa, a Ghanaian cannot be more Nigerian than a Nigerian.
So to have an advantage, you must take advantage of your advantage. That gives you total control. We are the only continent that has over 1.2 billion people in Diaspora through different means; from slavery to educational travel, to economic travel, these people are living in Diaspora. We can tap into that and transform that into wealth for us. If Dubai with just about 650,000 population, naturalising an additional maybe 4.5million people, making a total of about 5.2 million people; can attract over 26 million tourists on an annual basis, you can imagine what the continent of Africa can do with 1.2billion people.
What about the security arm of the business?
The security arm of the business was started at a point where you go from getting to the place where you buy your own franchise and have your own business. We changed how people look at security. Graduates got involved in it. That energy then has transformed into over 3 million jobs because everybody has copied it. Everywhere you go, you see corporate guards now.
You once said during a lecture that an authentic African resort is a way to pump your culture into foreigners who visit. What major value would you say that pumping our culture into foreigners would bring us as Africans?
In 1835, February 2, a guy addressed the parliament called Lord Macaulay, and he said to the parliament in England that “gentlemen, until we remove from these people their pride, culture and what they stand for and we give them our culture and make them feel that our culture is superior to theirs, we cannot begin to even think of defeating the continent of Africa because they are very strong in values.” It was a concerted effort since then for them to slowly remove from us our culture for commerce.
We all forget that the world is a business place; we get emotional as Africans and get angry that the Europeans are perpetrators, then we decide to go and report perpetrators to perpetrators and expect to get some form of release. They probably look at us and laugh. When you get people to buy into your culture, it flourishes. For example, the talking drum we hang on our doorposts here at La Campagne, the president of the World Conference of Mayors and other mayors came here, about 28 of them, and every single one of them bought talking drums and took back to the U.S, but they had a problem.
The Mayor hung the drum and put a sign by it, ‘beat my African drum, that is my doorbell’, and it became like an exotic experience for people in that city, District Heights in Maryland. Every day they forget the drum outside, it would be gone by the next morning. He’ll order a new one and the same thing would happen. He lost almost 50 drums because people were constantly stealing them. Whenever he was driving down a street, he would see them beating the talking drum, but being a mayor, he would just smile and drive off.
With that, what we have done first is to change the application of drum beating and put it into hospitality. In drum beating in Nigeria, it is either you are from the Ayan family or you are a musician, and that has limited the demand for it. But when you change that application to a doorbell, for example, you don’t have to be an expert to beat it. That means you have transformed that application to a situation where your visitor would beat it just to tell you he or she wants to come in. Changing that application has created tremendous wealth for the talking drum manufacturers. You have expanded the demand.
Coming to the mats we use. Mats, before, were looked at as articles for poor people. Yorubas would say that ‘may your wife never sleep on a mat’. The mat weaving families were becoming almost extinct; no one was buying mats anymore. Even the cleaner would buy a small foam and put a cloth on it. We moved it from the floor and transformed it into an article of ostentation. A lot of my friends have built their houses and copied the style. The mats that we use in roofing one chalet, according to the guy who makes them, is equivalent to what he would sell in two years. You can now imagine what would happen to our industry and craftsmen, artists, talking-drum makers by the time we create a thousand resorts like this.
If you are the only one consuming your culture, then you will be poor very soon. You must make a concerted effort to make your culture become a vogue. At my office in New York City, when we go to any Chinese restaurant, you can see the kind of punishment the Caucasians go through trying to eat with chopsticks. They struggle with it because they want to belong, and they throw food all over the table. The Chinese are just there enjoying themselves. They have basically taken their culture, polished it and presented it to the world. We have to make sure that we create a need, not just a want, for our culture, for us to prosper.
Imagine if one million Chinese people decide that the new vogue is African braids, and they all come to Nigeria to do braids, you can imagine the trickle-down effect of that. Arrival for one million people, what they would spend on hotel rooms… it is pretty simple. If you go on CNN and sell these braids, you would be shocked how many people will come and do it here, especially if you attach some kind of spiritual attribute to it. The world is a marketplace, so we have no business being angry because we have not put anything on the world table.
They are not just going to come and give you their hard earned money, you have to create something to take it from them. We have to keep creating. The world is still ‘trade by barter’, and the only difference now is the currency. It is what you produce that you will sell, and it is that money that you will use to buy what you do not produce. My definition of poverty is the inability to acquire what another man has produced. If you do not want to be poor, you must constantly produce. We must create a platform where people can patronise the continent. We need to stop begging.
By Tomi Falade
Source: independent.ng
