Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 299

Thirty years ago, little or no scholarly attention had been directed towards hunting and its role in imperialism, particularly in Africa. There were, of course, literally dozens of books by hunters themselves, proudly describing their exploits, as well as widespread products of their hunting in museums and country houses. Since then, a number of scholars have turned their attention to this important environmental topic and it has now reached that mature stage where it is necessary to consider what each new book adds to an already rich historiography.

Thompsell herself is quite clear: she is dealing with sports hunting through a sequence of phases from the pre-colonial period through the intermediate stage of the establishment of European power and into the early decades of the colonial period. More particularly, Thompsell is concerned to demonstrate that through big game hunting, Africans were able to control the movements and access of hunters to the game they required. Africans, particularly chiefs but also those who provided essential services in leading ‘caravans’, held the levers of power for a number of decades, including the knowledge of the location of game, the characteristics of various animals, and the capacity to supply trackers and other auxiliaries of the hunt. Indeed, she goes further and suggests that it was precisely these controls over one of the most significant of all activities in the European approach to Africa that enabled some chiefs to maintain traditional authority systems when colonial power was being established. Moreover, she sets out to demonstrate that hunting was not always the supremely masculine activity it has frequently been portrayed as being, but that a fair number of women (obviously, elite women with the money to indulge this passion) were involved and were accepted into the magic hunting circle in Africa, even if their access to institutions in Britain – such as the Royal Geographical Society and the conservation associations – was severely limited into the twentieth century. Yet these women avoided becoming honorary men, bringing instead a distinctive set of characteristics and attributes to the sporting hunt and its significant result in trophy collection. Thompsell considers whether these enterprising women hunters could be considered as ‘new women’ in the freedoms that they pursued. Yet, it is surely the case that those women in Britain who were considered to be ‘new’ in terms of gender freedoms, politics, employment, and intellectual ideas would have deprecated the kind of elite and inevitably well-heeled women who chose to use Africa as their field for exploratory and shooting experiences.

Such sports hunting was distinguished from commercial hunting for the saleable products of the hunt (not just ivory, but also skins, horns and trophies), which Thompsell suggests was an activity much looked down upon by those pursuing hunting for sport. This also eliminates from her consideration hunting as a subsidy (both in terms of its products and in the form of meat for workers) for the establishment of colonial power, for missionary expansion, and for the provision of infrastructure as in railway building, or again as a means of subsidising initial white settlement and the clearing of land for agriculture. Indeed, while the book adds some interesting new material to the literature of hunting, its limitations lie in the fact that it fails to pull together so many other aspects of the relationship among Europeans, Africans, the fauna of Africa, and the environment generally. In the case of Africans, the great game of Africa presented both an immense danger and an opportunity. Animals posed a threat to crops and sometimes to human life, such that all kinds of devices and human endeavour had to be used to keep wild animals off both cultivated land and domestic stock. In some cases that helps to explain why Africans were so often relatively eager to help European hunters. However, most African areas were regions of periodic drought, consequent crop failure and sometimes famine. At such a time, the great faunal resources of the continent could become vital to survival and Africans had long developed many hunting techniques for the supply of meat – and also perhaps for commercial products suitable for sale. Moreover, once Europeans arrived to create capitalist agriculture, the effects upon animal populations were manifold. Settlers would asset-strip the beasts upon their extensive lands (that is, throughout southern Africa up to the Zambezi and beyond as well as in East Africa) in order to kick-start both the economics and the physical clearance of the land in its conversion into commercially productive farms. In an oral history project I conducted in Zimbabwe in the 1970s, almost all my African informants noted the retreat of animals from the land, the disappearance of their opportunities to hunt them, and of the inter-relationship of faunal populations and agriculture, traditional and colonial.

While it is true that Thompsell asserts that her focus on sport precludes such a wider consideration of the role of hunting, it does still seem like a major omission from the book, perhaps influenced by her apparent concentration upon publications and archives available in the United States and in Britain, with apparently little experience of Africa itself or understanding of environmental issues upon the ground. Moreover, if the focus is on sport, it would have been good to have had some consideration of the remarkable number of safari companies which grew up, notably in East Africa, to service the shooting passions of the hunting fraternity once colonial rule had been established. While some work has been done here, we still await a fully comprehensive economic evaluation of these developments. Nevertheless, the book has many acute observations and makes a very real and original contribution to the literature of hunting. While it points to the ways in which Africans maintained power and turned the hunt into an inter-racial joint operation, as well as offering a fresh analysis of the gendered sphere of hunting, nevertheless it would have been interesting if it had taken the longer view – however briefly – of the role of Africans in modern game preservation and sports hunting, and in the manner in which so many of the farms and plantations created in the colonial period have now been turned over to the lucrative tourist activity of game viewing.