Automobile clubs established in the first decade of the twentieth century in colonial Africa encouraged motor touring by printing road reports, maps and travel narratives. These cultivated public imagination about places accessible by car, and were also practical navigational guides. The detail supplemented larger-scale touring guides produced by European shipping companies, and independently published destination guides. Clubs' motor touring aids included information about sights and the availability of accommodation, fuel and repairs, increasingly in neighbouring countries and beyond. Motorcar ownership and club membership were a largely ‘European’ (White) privilege which kept drive tourism racially exclusive and socio-economically middle class. After the Second World War, organized motor touring between different African countries became a collaborative project steered by an African branch of the Alliance Internationale de Tourisme. The decline of cross-border automobile touring coincided with geopolitical changes in Africa in the 1960s, the rise of air travel, and automobile club preoccupation with domestic motoring and road improvement.
