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"Go Back to Africa", a long-running racist repression against African-Americans, Africans and other black people in North America and Europe, is currently undergoing a social media metamorphosis .
Black & Abroad, an Atlanta-based travel and leisure company targeting black travelers, reiterates this derogatory statement with a new tourist campaign encouraging African Americans to return to Africa.
The company recently partnered with FCB / SIX, a data-driven creative agency, to create an AI platform that collects real-time messages on social networks of black travelers on any given site. the continent. When vacationers post photos with the hashtag #gobacktoafrica, the system powered by Google Vision scans faces looking for people of color and places to select the posts to display on the campaign's website. There, African Americans are encouraged to roam the country and see black travelers on vacation in Africa.
Promoting Africa as a destination of choice for blacks around the world is not new. The early twentieth century saw the rise of the "Back to Africa" movement, a campaign galvanized by pan-African activist Marcus Garvey, who sought to transport African Americans to Africa in the hope of acquiring a more great social and economic independence. But for Black & Abroad, the social media campaign is an attempt to break an "artificial obstacle to travel" for African Americans with regard to African tourism and, in doing so, to support African economies.
"We hope this campaign will create a pipeline for black travelers to come to the continent and spend their money," said Eric Martin, co-founder of Black & Abroad. In addition to removing the "offensive" power of the statement, the campaign was also an attempt to draw the attention of African tourism boards to the potential of African-American travel in Africa.
According to the latest tourism report published by the African Development Bank, this sector accounted for 9.3 million direct jobs in Africa in 2017. The burgeoning sector led on the continent by countries like Kenya, the United South Africa and Tanzania has also been a means of diversifying the economy of each country. .
While African-American tourism in Africa has gained momentum in recent years with initiatives such as the "Year of Return," African Americans tend to drive African countries away from vacation, said Kent Johnson. Martin's partner at Black & Abroad. "Part of our job is to educate them differently," he says, and this process includes seeing black faces on vacation in unlikely destinations.
The company takes a group of African-Americans on their first trip to Ghana in August for the "Year of the Return" celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of the first documented arrival of African slaves to Jamestown, Virginia.
"We want to show our people that we have a place on the continent," Johnson said.
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