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  • Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire by Angela Thompsell
  • Dane Kennedy (bio)
Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire, Angela Thompsell; 229 pp. 229. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, £63.00, $100.00.

Ever since the 1988 publication of John M. MacKenzie's path-breaking The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism, European imperialists' enthusiastic slaughter of vast numbers of wild animals in Africa and elsewhere has attracted the attention of historians, who have pointed to its role in shaping an imperial ethos, attitudes toward nature, conceptions of masculinity, and more. In Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire, Angela Thompsell covers some of the ground originally explored by MacKenzie, but she directs our attention to several issues he neglected, the most notable being the influence Africans exerted over British hunters in the decades prior to colonial conquest and the involvement of elite women in this masculine enterprise in the decades after conquest.

Until the late nineteenth century, the South African interior was the main frontier for big game hunters, who were motivated mostly by the profits they made from the sale of ivory and hides. Thompsell focuses on the period after 1870, when the frontier shifted from South to Central and especially East (rarely West) Africa, with a new breed of gentlemen hunters pursuing their prey for social and cultural, rather than economic, reasons. They sought trophies, scientific specimens, and a sense of manhood. After the turn of the century, big game safaris became increasingly popular with wealthy tourists, including a small but notable number of women.

For the gentlemen hunters who roamed through regions as yet unconquered by European empires, the success of their endeavors depended on cooperation with Africans. The two strongest chapters in Thompsell's book examine the conditions and consequences of this cooperation. White hunters often required the permission of African rulers to pass through their territories. They depended on local peoples to supply food and shelter and provide guides and translators. They relied on experienced trackers who knew the terrain and its wildlife. They turned to experienced crews of porters to transport them and their supplies across unfamiliar and difficult territory. Thompsell provides a sensitive, insightful analysis of these layers of dependency and their implications for British hunters' engagement with Africans. She argues that their relationship, though marked by tensions and occasional violence, was often a reciprocal one, bringing benefits to both parties. It became "a site of intersectionality," with hunters forging blood pacts with indigenous rulers and establishing friendships with their trackers and other guides (76). They also most likely had intimate, if temporary, relations with African women, though written records on this matter are largely silent. [End Page 703]

Thompsell turns in the second half of the book to the hunt as an expression of masculinity, and what this meant for the women who began to participate in safaris after colonial rule was established across the continent. This new political environment reduced the influence Africans exerted over hunting expeditions and increased oversight by European authorities, making it easier for a few daring, mainly upper-class women to take up the sport. Though they were engaging in a highly masculine activity, they maintained an aura of femininity. Even Marguerite Roby, a "society adventuress" who brutally flogged her African porters during a hunting expedition in the Belgian Congo, assumed a fetchingly feminine pose in the photographic frontispiece to her book about the journey, and the British press treated her with the respect reserved for women of her class (120). Thompsell notes that none of the so-called white peril fears that afflicted white settler societies in Africa extended to the safari: this was a realm wherein British women were presumed safe in the company of African men.

While this examination of women who hunted big game is interesting, its significance is unclear. Thompsell acknowledges that these "Dianas," as the press was fond of calling them, were rarities whose behavior conformed to British gender norms in some respects, while contravening them in others (120). So it is hard to see what these women's stories tell...

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