Abstract
The participation of women hunters, and perhaps even more so that of honeymooning couples, necessarily altered the image of big game hunting in Africa. A graver challenge to the reputation of hunting as a sport, however, arose from the ability of the average sportsman or woman to make a relatively short safari in East Africa and return to Britain laden down with impressive trophies, including those of lions, rhinoceros and even an elephant or two. How difficult or dangerous could African hunting be if every sportsman and woman seemed guaranteed of success? Even worse, some of the most respected hunters of the day claimed that real hunting was still extremely difficult, but what these vacationing hunters were doing was simply shooting animals. Without the knowledge of African animals and ecologies that could only come from several years’ experience, they argued, those who came to Africa to hunt on vacation, no matter how keen, could do no more than shoot the animals to which their Somali guide or White Hunter had led them.1 One did not need to read the critiques of veteran hunters, either, to sense the growing gap between the idealized culture of rugged, frontier hunting and the rhetoric of domesticated comfort and ease emerging out of the safari industry. A 1907 article in the Daily Express, entitled ‘Lions at Three a Penny’, played on the accounts of a tourism promoter to the point of making a safari in British East Africa sound like a tame, prefabricated experience.
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Notes
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Denis D. Lyell, ed., African Adventure: Letters from Famous Big-Game Hunters (London: John Murray, 1935), 50–1. It is no coincidence that this rhetorical shift correlated with the expansion of colonial control and settlement. Having defeated or incorporated most African states, there was no longer a need to justify their removal, and the notion that Africa should be preserved in a state of primitivism rather than saved from it removed any danger of accomplishing the civilizing mission.
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For examples, see Andrew A. Anderson, Twenty-Five Years in a Waggon in the Gold Regions of Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1887), 2:92.
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Evidence that sportsmen—and a very few sportswomen—were hunting in West Africa can be found in Rowland Ward, Records of Big Game: With Their Distribution, Characteristics, Dimensions, Weights, and Horn & Tusk Measurements (London: Rowland Ward, 1910).
One of the first travelogues to devote even a chapter to West African sport was, Boyd Alexander and Percy Amaury Talbot, From the Niger to the Nile, 2 vols. (London: E. Arnold, 1907).
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William P. Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel: 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
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Frederick J. Jackson, Early Days in East Africa (1930; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), 381; Notably, Roosevelt’s travelogue did not go into a second edition in Britain as it did in the United States, but different reasons have been advanced to explain this.
See Michael Brander, The Big Game Hunters (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), 141.
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John C. Willoughby, East Africa and Its Big Game: The Narrative of a Sporting Trip from Zanzibar to the Borders of the Masai (London: Longmans, Green, 1889), 136; This meal may not have been typical. It was prepared by another hunter named Jackson, possibly F. J. Jackson, who was hunting in the area around the same time, and who was hosting Willoughby at his camp.
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Thompsell, A. (2015). ‘To Make a Fetish of Roughing It’: Reimagining Hunting in the Age of Safaris, 1900–1914. In: Hunting Africa. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494436_6
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