This paper develops a conceptualisation of safari tourism as an arena of nature negotiation. The circuit of culture model of cultural communication is modified for the institutional specificities of tourism and is used as a framework within which the encoding and decoding strategies respectively employed by tourism marketing texts and tourists are elaborated. From an analysis of tourist brochures, the tourism marketing of East African nature is described as utilising a primeval archetype, reproducing a romantic discourse which places the wild animals and primitive cultures in prehistory. From interviews of tourists in East Africa, the paper outlines how tourists develop their own experientially-based interpretations of East Africa, drawing on knowledges of other texts, personal experience and social dialogue, from the period of anticipation prior to the holiday, the safari experience itself and during subsequent reflection. These interpretations of East African society and nature are far more sophisticated than the idealisations reproduced in tourism marketing. However, the paper notes that tourists' interpretations are partial accounts which are unable to draw on hidden discourses, including those which contradict the primeval nature archetype, such as the early history of civilisation in East Africa, as well as those which would expose historical and contemporary struggles to define and utilise the nature of East African national parks and game reserves.