Construction of the Cameroon destination: between reality and fiction

The various actors, mechanisms and media used to promote Cameroon as a tourist destination call into question the logic behind this activity. It is a question of considering these discourses as a dynamic of construction of a national fiction, articulated to an international apparatus of ideological production intended to ensure tourism promotion. It is a question of considering the way in which the discourse of tourism promotion interacts with the dominant discourses of the national arena, in particular the political, media and commercial discourses. Althusser's notion of ideology envisages the discourse of tourism promotion as a tool of political and economic domination, and those of intertextuality, capture and subversion reveal the collusive and contradictory logics that insert the discourse of tourism promotion into its national environment. Beforehand, the semiotic tools of image analysis synthesised by Martine Joly, and the concept of consumer values modelled by Jean-Marie Floch will have served to identify the semiotic mechanisms of production of the Cameroon fiction.