Tanzania: The Royal Tour – Musings from a Tanzanian Re/Viewing Party

Do not bother to look for Tanzania: The Royal Tour on YouTube if you live outside of America. It has been geo-blocked by PBS – America’s Public Broadcasting Service – and removed from all the Tanzanian YouTube channels that offered it for free viewing in May immediately after its release. Within a day or two of watching it with my family I wanted to watch it again for this piece, but it was already too late. Ah, the joys of American exploitation.

In May or June of 2021, rumors started flying about something called a Royal Tour and how it was coming to Tanzania. I waited, knowing that in due time our social grapevine would yield a more refined information product, and it did. The Royal Tour started filming in Tanzania around September, and by the end of the year a low-key promotion campaign was kicking off to let us know that this wondrous film about our tourism industry would be revealed to us soon.

I am not a generous viewer when it comes to films about Africa that are not made by Africans. This is rooted in a childhood when I was exposed to Eddie Murphy as Prince Stupid Name from Made Up Country in Coming to America. I hated the bits that were set in “Africa.” The Gods Must be Crazy movies didn’t help. I came into the Royal Tour situation bearing a well-curated grudge against Hollywood and America when it comes to depictions of Africa and Africans.

The very first hurdle on my Royal Tour journey was the name: Tanzania is a Republic and a United one at that. This led me to finding out that the producer and host Peter Greenberg is “an award-winning journalist” who has been making this series of travel pieces for a number of years. So far Greenberg has filmed his highly scripted television specials in Mexico, Ecuador, Israel, Rwanda, and Poland. The premise is simple: seasoned American journalist is invited to “experience” a country with the Head of State as his host, getting the ‘royal treatment.’

Ah.

Unfortunately, in Tanzania this wasn’t really communicated well to us, as Tanzania: The Royal Tour was very specifically marketed as a tourism promotion effort, an exercise in branding. I am not averse to that, though I did think that it was beneath my Head of State to go gallivanting about the country pointing at things for a man who could have hired a perfectly serviceable tour company to take him and his crew around. So, imagine my surprise when I found myself enjoying this television special.

Tanzania is a beautiful country brimming with natural resources and gorgeous people. I live here, I know. As I type this, the ‘winter’ scene outside my window is already ridiculously picturesque for an urban view. Large trees, the sound of birdsong, cirrus clouds painted pink and gold by the late-rising sun against yet a cerulean blue sky… or is azure today? I have heard the men outside greeting each other: today will be a noisy day as one of Dar es Salaam’s two major football teams might have won its second championship of the year. If I walk out, I will be greeted with our trademark warm, huge Tanzanian smiles and inquiries about my health. I live in paradise, a boat ride away from Zinj.

Seeing the actual beauty and vibrancy of my city Dar es Salaam in the opening scene of the Royal Tour was gratifying. It sets the rest of the film up well even if we had to ignore the voice-over. Eventually we got to meet our hosts as an over-the-top motorcade arrives at Ikulu and Peter Greenberg alights from a ridiculously large black car to be received by President Samia Suluhu Hassan herself at the entrance of State House. And this is where we find out just how heavy-handed the scripted dialogue is.

The viewer is forced to suffer through some faux-casual conversation as Greenberg—who invites the President to ‘call me Peter’ demonstrates how he establishes a rapport with his Very Important Host. In this case it didn’t work. Madam President was excruciatingly conscious of the cameras, the conversation was stilted and when she told him to “take off your jacket, Pirra, you won’t need it where we are going” let’s just say that the Tanzanian audience had itself a good laugh. This was clearly written by someone who is tone-deaf to our national culture of banter.

And yet, it took very little time for things to improve. Samia is a Zanzibari woman from a wee townlet in Unguja. She is a career politician who has worked in civil service, the NGO sector and has been an appointed as well as an elected Member of Parliament before she became our Vice President in 2015. A woman in her 60s, she is seasoned and has travelled the world extensively especially while representing the late John Pombe Magufuli who chose not to accept many invitations from abroad during his tenure. Her English is accented with a hint of the delightful Zanzibari lilt and yes, she does pronounce Peter as Pirra which is standard for our Bantu tongues. But where she shines is when she feels at home, travelling around Tanzania.

I stopped watching the Royal Tour with Peter at this point and watched my President showing off her country for the next 45 minutes. As a social commentator, part of my job is to develop a fascination with the incumbents and study them as individuals. I had seen footage of President Samia addressing her party’s Women’s League (or whatever it is called, who cares) that was released in social media immediately after she announced the death of her predecessor, Magufuli on the evening of Wednesday March 17^th, 2022, at about 11pm. She would be sworn in on the 19^th of March 2022.

In the Women’s Caucus she was a confident speaker, warm and funny but also candid. Her speech was comprehensive, but it was not long. I liked her immediately, having been starved of good oratory from my Head of State for a long time by then. I watched her like a hawk as she was sworn in, as she presided over her predecessor’s State Funeral—Tanzanian Presidents are kind of a big deal in the African pantheon. I watched her handling of Magufuli’s widow: mindful, tender, and respectful. I watched her very first speeches as Head of State (HoS) as she addressed us on a frequent basis, getting us used to seeing her and her leadership style. The Royal Tour became for me another source of material for the further analysis of Samia Suluhu Hassan as President of the United Republic of Tanzania.

She did a stellar job. What stood out for me were the very brief moments that were not edited out by Greenberg and co. where she spoke to fellow Tanzanians in Kiswahili. Beneath the stresses of modern life, many Tanzanians are happy people, and it shows. We smile easily and enjoy conviviality. My President was fun to watch as she switched between her different “modes.” She had the snap of a teacher while talking to students in her home townlet, but they did not seem to fear her so much as they felt uneasy in front of the cameras and guests. She is clearly not a stranger there.

She has a habit of greeting people when entering a room or vehicle, including non-verbally. She will talk to staff and civilians directly, sometimes to their evident surprise and delight. She can fish, and she can apparently drive a safari vehicle in gentle conditions so long as she can hand the wheel back to a professional when she has had enough.

She has a sly sense of humor which she employs with some relish, knowing that it is easily missed by those who expect a hijab-wearing woman of a certain age to be staid. She is perfectly aware of the Tanzanian Charm Offensive and uses it sparingly but with devastating effect. There are Kenyans who are still smitten by her from her State Visit to Nairobi to mend fences last year.

In the Royal Tour, she allowed us to see how much she loves her country and is painfully aware of the demands of her job—most poignantly shown as she allowed Greenberg and crew to film Tanzania’s elephant tusk warehouse. We have what may be the world’s biggest collection of confiscated African Elephant tusks gathered from poaching activities She admitted: we don’t know what to do with them. Destroying them seems wrong. Selling them would encourage the trade. It is a quandary. I imagine her every working day is filled with a multitude of quandaries, as it must be, heading this country.

The rest of the film was bog standard animals-and-stuff footage. Very pretty, utterly unoriginal with the glaring exception of how the film handled the Maasai section. I can understand why the Maasai were chosen, but ranting about that will have to happen another day. Suffice to say that the minute Greenberg introduced them using words like “primitive,” the viewing party turned sour.  Greenberg’s weird introduction of President Hassan in the beginning was off-key but we forgave him for he is an old white American male ‘prize winning journalist’ who pandereth to an invisible non-African audience. But the Maasai bit? That was a travesty. Watching President Samia stand by as it took place, occasionally participating, was painful.

In hindsight, considering the 2022 evictions— my term— of Maasai from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and deadly land dispute at Loliondo, I would recommend watching Tanzania: The Royal Tour to everyone who has an interest in the matter so that they might suffer the contradiction and cognitive dissonance of this public relations façade side by side with the subsequent footage of people getting shot off the land.

Therein lies the rub. Up to this point I bet you were thinking this is nothing but a puff piece about President Samia Suluhu Hassan. It isn’t, I assure you.  Those will come later in 2023 after her 2-year probation is up and she reveals which of her myriad personae she will employ in aid of her winning the 2025 Elections. This is a piece about using what footage is available—highly manipulated or not—to get a sense of the woman who has the final word on just about every aspect of our public lives right now.

It matters that she is self-possessed and observant. It matters that she chose to show her human side. It matters that she greets people wherever she is, practicing Utu. It matters that she used the platform to show Tanzanians the closed-off Tanzanite mine in Mererani, as well as the elephant tusk warehouse.

It matters that she used Peter Greenberg and the pretext of a very expensive hour-long tourism advert to reveal something of herself to her fellow Tanzanians that cannot happen during our official events where she is President Samia Suluhu Hassan: Head of State, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Chief Hangaya. If Tanzanian Presidents cannot be complex and capable of multiplicity, they worry me. This gorgeous country of the smiling people is not, in fact, for the weak of mind nor the faint of heart. It is a highly organized, labyrinthine social construct with roots that go deep into the history of humanity itself. It isn’t Pirra’s fault that the documentary he thought he was producing is an entirely different product from a Tanzanian perspective, how could he have known and why should he care? What a happy accident.

To close out the viewing party we had a discussion that lasted for over an hour on what worked and what didn’t. Tanzania: The Royal Tour is hugely inadequate in presenting Tanzania to the world, this is completely understandable considering the intended audience gets spoken to as though they would find National Geographic Magazines a “difficult read.” The critics…sorry… “viewers” in this case were a retired career civil servant who has found every President since Nyerere to be inadequate, a sweet-tempered and highly cynical taste curator who knows her production values and her script analysis, and me–your friendly neighborhood columnist and provider of unsolicited opinions.

To conclude we* approved of this piece of work. It is flawed but it will serve its purpose and perhaps the country will recoup its costs through increased tourism. For me, it generated a lot of ideas on what we could do better, which I hope to present to whomever might be interested in my—again, unsolicited— advice.

*The sweet-tempered but highly cynical viewer would like to specify that they do not “approve of this piece of work.” The retired civil servant was not consulted because the author didn’t want to, okay? She knows what she’s doing, Mama.

Ultimately, I hope to run it by the youngest member of our family, who recently became the latest one of us to experience Ngorongoro Crater and the game parks and of course Zanzibar—the jewels of our tourism industry. He has a keen eye, a sharp mind and absolutely no tolerance for nonsense. Together we represent only a sliver of the range of Tanzanian opinions on this Royal Tour business, but perhaps not one that should be dismissed on the basis of being a very focused minority opinion with a hint of an agenda behind it.

On the basis of this work, I will watch Greenberg’s other royal tours specifically to see how the other Heads of State come through. There are too many good travel documentarians out there to watch Royal Tours for the “country insight” because as everyone knows you cannot get a real ‘feel’ for a country by hanging out with the President or Prime Minister. I had to scrub the excessive footage of Tanzanian soldiers and other service people in uniforms from my mind—if you believe Greenberg you would be under the impression that President Samia is cruising about town in a ridiculous motorcade on a daily basis which isn’t true. We are cantankerous urbanites in Dar es Salaam and would let her know if she annoyed us with excessive traffic hold-ups.

On that note, let me end. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the urban wildlife is making its presence felt and I have to make brunch today including spice chai with handfuls of citronella, mint, cardamom, and cloves because I really do live in paradise. And later today, I have to start drafting a piece about the Maasai and their evictions from Ngorongoro and Loliondo what it means that President Samia Suluhu Hassan of the gentle voice and subtle charm has appointed newly retired Chief of the Defense Forces General Venance Mabeyo—a career soldier—to the Board of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA). Because I really do live in Tanzania.