Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Eastern African Studies)

For centuries, Kenya’s game-laden plains and forests were the rewarding hunting grounds of her native African population. Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting there in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts. This both created and enforced an image of African inferiority and subordination. Ultimately conservationists came to claim sovereignty over African wildlife, completing the transformation of indigenous hunters into criminal poachers and seeking to eliminate them altogether from the “sportsman’s paradise” of Kenya. ABOUT THE AUTHOR---Edward I. Steinhart is an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University, Lubbock.