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

Abstract

The casual observer might be forgiven for assuming that just about everything of interest had been researched and written about colonial Kenya. The territory carved out of eastern Africa in the 1880s and 1890s by the Imperial British East Africa Company, through agreement with the German Government, has attracted—or so it seems—more scholarly attention than almost any other British colony in Africa. From the travails of the early settlers and the f ledgeling administration before the First World War, to the violence and shame of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s, historians have been drawn to this most complex, mesmerising and troubled of countries. In large part, this fascination stems from the presence of the small but powerful, and intriguingly heterogeneous, white settler community which attempted—according to popular contemporary perception, at least—to build a veritable Eden in the highlands of the southern interior of Kenya. Their story has been told through novel, film, memoir and scholarly monograph; yet Edward Steinhart, a historian of some considerable standing who has previously worked on western Uganda, has succeeded in approaching the history of colonial Kenya from a direction which brings new insights to that story. His concern is hunting; and the history of hunting, it quickly becomes clear, tells us a great deal about the environmental, social and indeed political history of Kenya. Many Europeans—as well as Americans, including such celebrities as Theodore Roosevelt and, rather later, Ernest Hemingway—came to Kenya to hunt. For many it was sport; for others it was a livelihood. But Steinhart is not simply interested in white hunters. Africans were hunters, too, until they became the all-important porters and guides for white safaris, and subsequently they became the poachers of the book's title. Indeed, Steinhart goes to great lengths to demonstrate the importance of hunting to Kenya's pastoral and agricultural communities, something which has been consistently overlooked in the extant literature. Doubtless this is to some extent rooted in the racial interpretation of hunting which accompanied the first white hunters in Kenya, who exported the norms and ethos of the aristocratic hunt to the new territory from the early 1900s onward. Through this social prism—created around notions about man's relationship to both land and game—did Africans come to be viewed as inherently inferior, subservient, and lacking the capacity to control or shape their environment. Moreover, it is Steinhart's contention that the process of marginalising and criminalising Africans in the context of hunting and the environment is completed in more recent times by the increasingly powerful conservationist community. This book will be of great interest to students of the social history of colonial Kenya, and to students of African geography and environment. In this study, Steinhart succeeds where so many fail (if they even attempt it) in combining scholarly rigour—the book is admirably well researched—with wonderful readability, and this important contribution to African colonial history is indeed an enjoyable read.