ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the changes and challenges brought about by tourism development in the post-independence period. It analyses the critical issues in tourism in Kenya resulting from unplanned development. Despite tourism's contribution to the Kenyan economy, it is clear that it is not sustainable. Kenya's tourism development is based on a number of objectives specified in the country's national development plans. Although the objectives spell out the desired economic outcomes of tourism development and the preservation of biodiversity aimed at making it sustainable, they in themselves do not meet the goals of planning. Government response to the crisis facing tourism has been to offer national development objectives for tourism and to commission a study on a proposed national tourism masterplan. A number of critical reviews have dismissed tourism as a final form of colonialism in which Europeans subjugate Africans. Tourism has thus led to the commoditization of culture.
