Black Poachers, White Hunters: a social history of hunting in colonial Kenya (review)

It may seem brave these days, or possibly ‘old-fashioned’, to begin a history by declaring a Marxian perspective, but that is what Steinhart does here. In many ways his position is appropriate, because Black Poachers, White Hunters emphasizes the class-based nature of European hunting in colonial Kenya and uses class to help us understand how the great big-game safari tradition developed and then changed from guns to cameras as the main tool. In Part I we learn how the hunting safari we all think of as performed in the 1920s and 1930s was the product of a transplanted British aristocratic foxhunt blended with local hunting and caravan practices. Kenya in particular was the destination for Britain’s landed classes.

Part II examines the white hunters, who they were and where they came from. While at times the prose reads as an extended list, the section does provide an informative background of who was in the region hunting, and why. We have rich descriptions of explorers, administrators, ladies, gentlemen, scientists and missionaries. What we do not have described in any detail are the Arab-Swahili settlers who keep popping up in the early parts of the book. Even if they were more interested in running coastal entrepôts for trade caravans, coastal merchants had great influence upon ivory hunting practices and certainly hunted for the pot when on caravan. Here we learn more about characters of the kind famously portrayed in Out of Africa.

In Part III, although it is titled as a dichotomy, ‘Black and White Together’, Steinhart examines how three traditions came together in the early colonial period to form the big-game safari: Arab-Swahili caravan practices, European aristocratic hunting traditions and the caravan and natural history practices of the Kamba and Yako porters who taught the foreigners about African travel and flora and fauna. Steinhart makes great use of the numerous travel narratives available from the period and carefully extracts the African experience from the dominant European sources. Rightly, he evokes Mary Louise Pratt and her idea of the ‘contact zone’. Caravans were certainly places where cultures collided and class hierarchies were acted out. He also examines here how the camera came to be the dominant safari tool – a shift having more to do with the changing class background of safari-goers than overall ideological changes.

Part IV describes the moves in Kenya towards ever-stricter preservation policies, culminating in the 1977 ban on all hunting. Contributions of leading conservationists are described along with wider influences. The Second World War and a simultaneous drought brought an increase in illegal hunting and a post-war crackdown on this poaching. After the war, large parks were set up – despite protests – to preserve wildlife, and slowly but surely the Kenyan state (colonial and then independent) came to be seen as the owner/protector of all wildlife. This last point is interesting because it demonstrates the continuity between the colonial and independent states, especially in matters relating to environmental policy. But Steinhart does not allow the increasing power of a form of environmentalism to explain these policy shifts completely. The largest claim of the book rests upon his argument that the move from game conservation to preservation was not a result of changing sentiments towards animals, but ‘the result of changes in the class position and relations of hunters to a wider society’ (p. 212).

While this last point is shown for his European historical actors, it is less clear how this argument works for the other residents of Kenya. And this brings me to a final point of critique: it is a pity that Steinhart did not extend the class argument he uses to explain changes in European hunting practices to the history of African hunting that he skilfully incorporates into this book. Part I of the book, which...