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since they hunted only for love of meat and for the lust of killing (Stigand and Lyell
1906:5). Thus, although useful for tracking animals, Africans had no 'sporting
instinct' comparable with that of 'white men' (Stigand 1913: 17). Furthermore, as
photographic safaris became even more bulky than simple shooting trips, they still
commanded the labour of Africans as trackers, guides and porters. Although
cameras replaced guns, 'gun bearers' simply became 'camera bearers' (Dugmore
1925:13). Similarly, gun laws, game laws and administrative policies and game
reserves transformed indigenous African hunters into 'poachers'. There is certainly a
complex history to such shifts, and, although my central concern here has been with
the role of camera hunting in constructing African wildlife as a domain of pristine
nature to be preserved by and for Europeans, it is also important to note the
extensive resistance offered by different groups of Africans to colonial conservation
policies (Beinart 1989: 156-8; Grove 1990). Indeed, local and global struggles over
conservation agendas continue in much of Africa today (Neumann 1995b).
Conclusion
I began this chapter by noting how the fabrication of African wildlife (in this case
through one giraffe) to audiences in Britain in the early part of the twentieth
century involved practices of taxidermy and photography operating within
discourses of empire, race and nature. As I have gone on to show, such practices
involved particular forms of spatial encounter. Both animal photography and
taxidermy depended upon a sense of physical closeness of human and animal,
eroding the distance between the wild animal (and its habitats) and the hunter-
photographer (and 'his' homelands). Such spatial encounters were the very basis of
the thrill for both the hunter-photographers and the viewers of their photographed
and stuffed trophies. Despite these effects of proximity, however, the display of wild
animals in spaces far removed from their natural habitat served simultaneously to
maintain the distance between the 'wild' and the 'non-wild'; the 'civilised' and the
'savage'. There was also considerable slippage in the attitudes and practices of white
Europeans between the wild spaces of Africa, on the one hand, and the indigenous
inhabitants of such spaces, both animal and human, on the other. The designation
of African people as 'wild' or 'savage' tied closely with social Darwinist thinking in
legitimating forms of colonial domination, including that enacted through
conservation policy (MacKenzie 1987, 1988).
The major difference between photography and taxidermy in representing
animals, and indeed the key to the conservationist claims of the camera hunters, was
that to photograph an animal need not, unlike taxidermy, involve killing it. As the
American taxidermist and naturalist Carl Akeley (1924:45) noted in commending
hunting with cameras, 'when that game is over the animals are still alive to play
another day'. The contrast between the activities of individual hunters in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the large-scale, professionalised
photographic safaris in Africa of the 1920s and 1930s might therefore be interpreted
as signalling a wider transformation in European attitudes towards wild animals: a
