CULTURAL tourism in Tanzania has been developing since 1996, under the stewardship of the Tanzania Tourist Board (TTB) in collaboration with Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism and the Netherlands development organisation .Cultural tourism was initiated by youth in local community in northern Tanzania. The product came as a result of Maasai youth group that was used to dance alongside the northern safari road accessing Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro and the Serengeti major tourist attractions in the area. During these volunteering dances, they were given a small change or tip for doing an interesting entertainment along the way. As it became popular, the youth group realised that, they are losing by lacking formal way of selling their cultural product. At the same time National Tourism Policy had stipulated community involvement in Tourism operation giving a room for various community-based tourism initiatives to be kick-started.
Tanzania had to define its cultural tourism product to be more precise. In the Tanzania context however, cultural tourism adopts a community-based tourism approach in which the people are directly involved in designing, organising tours and showing tourists aspects of their lives in the area they live in. While economic benefit is derived from this activity, some cross cultural exchange between visitors and the local people is also developed. It is people tourism that enables tourists to experience the local people’s way of life, offering insights into the values, beliefs and traditions in the host communities’ own environments.
The aim was and is to develop and promote cultural excursions, organised by local people in their natural environment where they live today. Cultural Tourism development took an approach of sustainable pro-poor Tourism. This is a way of doing tourism so that it focuses specifically on unlocking opportunities for the poor to benefit more within tourism, rather than expanding the overall size of the sector. Sustainable pro-poor tourism goes well beyond ecotourism and community based tourism. It is an approach that attempts to maximise the potential of tourism for eradicating poverty by developing appropriate strategies in co-operation with all major groups/stakeholders central government, local governments, tourism operators, and local communities to have a fair distribution of benefits.
In the same vein, cultural tourism is gaining popularity in Hanang District, Manyara Region.
Of late, the new tourism package has been earning good foreign exchange (forex) to Barbaig—the largest group of Tatoga-speaking people who migrated south to East Africa from the Nile Valley in North Africa more than a thousand years ago. Living on the plains surrounding mount Hanang, communities have established cultural tourist sites in their localities.
Linguists indicate that they entered what is now Kenya late in the first millennium AD where they congregated around Mount Elgon up until around 250 years ago. In the late 1800s, German explorers found them on the Serengeti plains of German East Africa now Tanzania.
Archaeological evidence suggests that they were still in the Ngorongoro highlands until around 150 years ago, before they were chased out by the Maasai, who live there to this day, still calling the area Osupuko loo Ltatua (Mountains of the Tatoga).
The Barbaig communities of Bausuto village in the district, views cultural tourism as unexploited ‘pearl’ in the area, where people live by hunting, farming, and animal husbandry. There are many tourists who go in the area to see the Barbaig cultural practices and it has become their main source of income.
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