We’ve talked about the Andaman Islands, some 300 miles off the Burmese coast, in an article on the death of the last speaker of Bo published on February 4th, 2010. Today we are heading back to reflect on the issue of Human safaris : tours organized within  tribes, minority or endangered populations.

Brief history:

The Andaman strip is located in the Bay of Bengal, between India and Burma. It is home to several indigenous populations who could be the descendants of the first human migrations that left Africa some 70 000 years ago. Thus these people stand as the guardians of an exceptional linguistic and cultural heritage possibly dating back from the Pre-Neolithic.

Since the 18th century, the archipelago has be the scene of successive waves of colonization, each of which brought along its share of diseases and violence, decimating indigenous populations.

Only  4 of these populations remain:

– The Great Andamanese, currently about a few dozen people.

– The Sentinelese, on whom very little is known since they forcibly chase away any newcomer on their island. Estimations of their number range from 50 to 250, and they’re said to count among the most isolated people in the world.

– The Onge, with less than a hundred representatives.

– The Jarawa, who first came in contact with non indigenous populations around 1997. They could be around 300.

The fate of the Jarawa tribe accounts for one among many other colonized peoples, who slowly become a minority on their own native land, and continue to be gradually dispossessed and displaced. They very often end up in reservations, dependant of possible subsidies, and usually suffer a high rate of alcoholism and suicide. The territory first granted to the Jarawa tribe has reduced, and a road has been built right across it, a road for colonists, poachers and lumberjacks to reach the very core of the Jarawa reservation, along with the destruction of natural resources and the arrival of foreign diseases. (The last devastating epidemics killed about 10% of the Jarawa population in 1999.)

“Human safaris”

Yet any of this ever stopped several travel companies which set up tours for their customer to “visit” the Jarawa tribe. And this massive, unsupervised introduction of tourists into an already threatened culture is now a major concern to many ethnologists who fear an acceleration of the community’s decline.

Survival International has launched a whole campaign against these tours. And several companies were contacted. To this day, only one, Andaman Island Adventure, has accepted to stop promoting the tour.