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(Kearton undated: 14)
This is not such a paradox if one remembers that early preservationists were rarely
anti-hunting, but simply advocates of restricting access to game to proper
'sportsmen' (MacKenzie 1988:295-311).
Hunting, whether with rifle or camera, remained the preserve of the white man.
3
Indigenous African groups were excluded from this new preservationist hunting
code. As a number of historians have shown, the discourses of preservation and
conservation of which camera hunting was part were intimately tied to the politics of
colonial rule in Africa (Anderson and Grove 1987; Beinart 1989; MacKenzie 1988).
Many conservation strategies excluded Africans from their traditional hunting
grounds, controlling them through new spaces of 'reserves' and 'national parks'.
Indeed, preservationist efforts throughout the twentieth century to establish spaces
solely for 'wildlife', such as 'national parks', drew upon and reinforced ideas that Africa
was a primeval wilderness. Thus, the 'preservation' of 'nature' within spaces such as
the Serengeti National Park witnessed a corresponding exclusion of African
indigenous groups and practices deemed 'out of place' (Neumann 1995a). This
colonial vision of preserving the pristine wilderness of Africa, coupled with an
underlying faith in scientific theories of racial evolution and the 'struggle for
existence', also supported the characterisation of Africans as closer to the animal
ancestry of the human race than Europeans. Such discourses of social Darwinism
and preservation were central to both the hunting ethos and its associate practices
such as camera hunting (Mackenzie 1987). In 1902 Edward North Buxton,
champion of big-game preservation and camera hunting, suggested:
We are establishing Reserves in which all kinds of wild beasts are to be left to
fight it out. Can we not extend such a measure to some of the human species,
to this extent—that they shall govern themselves, and the strong shall prevail?
(Buxton 1902:40)
Indeed, for many hunters and naturalists Africans were 'savage' peoples seen as a
form of 'wildlife' to be managed, controlled and even hunted by Europeans. For
military men like Major Hugh Chauncey Stigand, a famous big-game hunter, writer
and natural historian, hunting and soldiering were blended together in the
'tracking', 'stalking' and 'marking down' of both animals and human 'savages'
(Brander 1988:144-151; Stigand 1907). Moreover, Stigand's
Hunting the Elephant
contained a chapter on 'Stalking the African', which included his recollections of
warfare against various human enemies (Stigand 1913:309-324). Such associations
in practice and language fed into the discourse of 'camera hunting'. The hunter
Charles Peel, with whom I began this chapter, thus compared Africans to 'tall
monkeys' and described 'stalking them with a view to taking their pictures' (Peel
1927:61). In this way, the practice of camera hunting was an instrumental part of a
colonial discourse in which Africans were excluded from their own environments
and resources. Similarly, Europeans claimed that Africans could not be 'sportsmen'
