Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya by Edward Steinhart Chris Youé Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya. By Edward Steinhart. Oxford: James Currey. Nairobi: EAEP. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Perched on the top shelf of my office bookcase are roughly two dozen books devoted to colonial adventures, most on big game hunting, most published in the decade after World War II. François Sommer’s Man and Beast in Africa (1953) has a dust-cover proclaiming “Profusely Illustrated with a Foreword by Ernest Hemingway.” Hunter (1952) by J.A. Hunter [sic.] is also well-illustrated: opposite p. 51 is a photo of a ferocious “black-maned lion.;” below, a demure “Young [bare-breasted] Ma[a]sai Girl.” Hunter has a chapter devoted to the “Rogue Elephant,” which appears to be obligatory, as Heinrich Oberjohann’s Wild Elephant Chase (n.d., but 1953) and Major P. J. Pretorius’ Jungle Man (1947) (highly recommended by Jan Smuts) also have treatises on this phenomenon1. I inherited these books from Dr Don Hillman, a humanitarian pediatrician whose world-wide adventures with his wife Elizabeth make him one of the original médicins sans frontières. Dr Hillman, who passed away earlier this year, was one of those ordinary men who made a difference (his lengthy obituary appears inthe Globe and Mail, 25 October 2006). I do not share his taste in literature but I am grateful for his gift, a gift which takes on much more meaning now that I have had a chance to read, and review, Edward Steinhart’s superb social history of hunting in Kenya. I come from a generation reared on the colonial critique, an undergraduate in the late 1960s under the tutelage, amongst others, of John Mackenzie, a scholar whose Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1988), stands as a benchmark in this genre of history, a work to which Steinhart pays due homage. White adventure literature with its tall tales, faux heroics, uppercrust speak, unbridled brutality and bit-part Africans - Africans were, as Steinhart shows, much more than that - is emblematic of colonial oppression, although it is not hard to understand why someone like Don Hillman as a young man would be drawn to such works. Steinhart’s title - Black Poachers, White Hunters -captures colonial ideology, as Steinhart makes clear: “A ‘hunting violation’ is what they called it when ‘whites’ were involved; ‘poaching’ was the parallel and identical crime when applied to Africans.” (pp. 168–69). When the likes of Man and Beast and Jungle Man became ex libris Don Hillman, the “hunt” was already in transition – “from feudal brutality to bourgeois sensibility” – when the rifle was being upstaged by the camera, when “image” was displacing “sacrifice.” (p. 141). The earlier manifestations of hunting in the feudal, brutal age is most often associated with the safari, a term popularized and anglicized by Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909 eight-month extravaganza on Kenya soil, but the safari had reached its nadir by the time the Allies had defeated Hitler. The “champagne” safari had fizzled out because of the advent of air travel, motorized transport in the bush, the camera, and, not least, the decline of the aristocracy (and its Transatlantic emulators). All this is meticulously documented in Black Poachers, White Hunters. Using extensive vignettes of Kenya’s white dramatis personae, Steinhart explains the “curious contradiction” of high society hunters as being both destroyers and protectors (conservers) of wildlife (p. 93). The latter part of the book is devoted to the hunting-conservation dichotomy. Although he refers to his monograph as a “narrative,” it is both that and a social analysis. Choosing very carefully-matched examples of three Kenyan districts (Kwale, Kitui, Meru) with similar social structures and political histories (in terms of colonial/postcolonial experiences, including the fact that all these districts have National Parks), Steinhart proceeds to investigate African hunting in the pre- and early colonial eras, moving onto the white hunters, then to “Black & White Together” (the heading for Part III) before concluding with the conservation section. This is chronological and thematic; narrative and analysis...