Abstract
In September of 1878, F. C. Selous met up with three of his friends in the eastern part of present-day Zimbabwe. All four men were in pursuit of ivory, and the three other hunters, Albert Cross, Matthew Clarkson and George Wood, told Selous that when they first arrived in the area, they ‘found it expedient to pay … [the presiding chief] a visit, to obtain his gracious permission to go and “kill the elephants nicely”’. According to Selous, this chief’s name was ‘Situngweesa’ and he was ‘considered a very powerful “Umlimo” or god’ by the Ndebele, who dominated the region.1 This was not entirely correct, but scholars have identified the man as Pasipamire, who lived at Chitungwiza and was the recognized medium for an important spirit named Chaminuka, who is generally regarded as a royal ancestor of the Shona.2 As such, Pasipamire was a man of influence amongst both the Shona and the Ndebele, and until the hunters requested his permission
their boys would only hunt in a listless, half-hearted sort of way, constantly saying, ‘What is the use of your hunting elephants in Situngweesa’s country without first getting his permission to do so?’ But when, by the help of presents, the old fellow’s good word was obtained, and [George] Wood’s head Kafir had been given a long … enchanted reed … they at once seemed changed beings and hunted with the greatest alacrity.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Frederick Courteney Selous, A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa: Being a Narrative of Nine Years Spent amongst the Game of the Far Interior of South Africa (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1881), 354–5.
Frederick Courteney Selous, Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa: Being the Narrative of the Last Eleven Years Spent by the Author on the Zambesi and Its Tributaries; with an Account of the Colonisation of Mashunaland and the Progress of the Gold Industry in That Country (London: R. Ward, 1893), 114–15.
Terence O. Ranger, ‘The Death of Chaminuka: Spirit Mediums, Nationalism and the Guerilla War in Zimbabwe’, African Affairs 81, no. 324 (1 July 1982): 349–69, doi:10.2307/721579.
David Lan, Guns & Rain: Guerrillas & Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 6.
D. P. Abraham, ‘The Roles of ‘Chaminuka’ and the Mhondoro Cults in Shona Political History’, in The Zambesian Past: Studies in Central African History, ed. Richard Brown and Eric T. Stokes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966).
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 28.
Luise White, ‘Blood Brotherhood Revisited: Kinship, Relationship, and the Body in East and Central Africa’, Africa 64, no. 03 (1994): 359, doi:10.2307/1160786.
Alfred Arkell-Hardwick, An Ivory Trader in North Kenia: The Record of an Expedition through Kikuyu to Galla-Land in East Equatorial Africa. With an Account of the Rendili and Burkeneji Tribes (London: Longmans, Green, 1903), 147.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Zande Blood-Brotherhood’, Africa 6, no. 4 (1 October 1933): 372, doi:10.2307/1155555.
Ewart Scott Grogan and Arthur Henry Sharp, From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1902), 192.
Baron Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire: Early Efforts in Nyasaland and Uganda (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1893), 330.
Lotte Hughes, Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 136.
Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 56–7.
Arthur H. Neumann, Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa: Being an Account of Three Years’ Ivory Hunting under Mount Kenia and among the Ndorobo Savages of the Lorogi Mountains, Including a Trip to the North End of Lake Rudolph (London: Rowland Ward, 1898), 42.
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), 110.
E. J. Glave, In Savage Africa: Or, Six Years of Adventure in Congo-Land (London: S. Low, Marston, 1893), 46–7, 61.
John Tinney McCutcheon, In Africa; Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1910), 282.
The Kibosho now identify themselves as being a branch of the Chagga. Matthew V. Bender, ‘Being “Chagga”: Natural Resources, Political Activism, and Identity on Kilimanjaro’, The Journal of African History 54, no. 02 (July 2013): 199–220, doi:10.1017/S0021853713000273.
Chauncey Hugh Stigand, To Abyssinia through an Unknown Land: An Account of a Journey through Unexplored Regions of British East Africa by Lake Rudolf to the Kingdom of Menelek (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1910), 116, 118.
Alfred St H. Gibbons, Exploration and Hunting in Central Africa 1895–96 (London: Methuen, 1898), 72.
For examples, see Andrew A. Anderson, Twenty-Five Years in a Waggon in the Gold Regions of Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1887), 1: 40–1.
G. C. Swayne, Seventeen Trips through Somaliland: A Record of Exploration & Big Game Shooting, 1885 to 1893 (London: R. Ward, 1895), 229–30.
Stigand, To Abyssinia through an Unknown Land, 258; Wilmott ‘Thormanby’ Wilmott Dixon, Kings of the Rod, Rifle and Gun (London: Hutchinson, 1901), 2: 585–6.
Arthur Donaldson Smith, Through Unknown African Countries: The First Expedition from Somaliland to Lake Lamu (London: Edward Arnold, 1896), 25.
Stephen J. Rockel, Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006), 120.
Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 90–1.
For an example of how hunters perceived these relations, see Joseph A. Moloney, With Captain Stairs to Katanga (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1893),160, 219.
Ruth Rempel, ‘“No Better than a Slave or Outcast”: Skill, Identity, and Power among the Porters of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1887–1890’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 43, no. 2 (January 2010): 279–318.
C. Gordon James, ‘Diary of My Hunting Trip, July 20-September 18’, Typescript, (1918), 16–17, A1190f, Historical Papers, University of Witswatersrand.
The inability of Western doctors and medicine to impact the weather provides an interesting counterpoint to this example. William John Ansorge, Under the African Sun: A Description of the Native Races in Uganda, Sporting Adventures and Other Experiences (London: W. Heinemann, 1899), 74.
W. N. McMillan, ‘Crocodile and Buffalo’, Field, 11 April 1914, 760.
A. E. Leatham, Sport in Five Continents (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1912), 128.
A. H. E. Mosse, My Somali Book, a Record of Two Shooting Trips (London: S. Low, Marston, 1913), 143–4.
Stuart A. Marks, Large Mammals and a Brave People: Subsistence Hunters in Zambia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 88.
Edward I. Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), 55–6.
Victor W. Turner, Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 11.
For a helpful overview of this epistemology, see David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 1–15.
Marks, Large Mammals and a Brave People, 222; See also, Edith L. B. Turner, The Spirit and the Drum: A Memoir of Africa (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 123–4.
W. M. J. van Binsbergen, ‘“Then Give Him to the Crocodiles”: Violence, State Formation, and Cultural Discontinuity in West Central Zambia, 1600–2000’, in The Dynamics of Power and the Rule of Law: Essays on Africa and Beyond, in Honour of Emile Adriaan B. van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, ed. W. M. J. van Binsbergen (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2003), 197–219.
Jan M. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 104, 109–10.
Kathryn M. De Luna, ‘Hunting Reputations: Talent, Individualism, and Community-Building in Precolonial South Central Africa’, The Journal of African History 53, no. 03 (November 2012): 280, doi:10.1017/S002185371200045X.
David James Maxwell, Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People, 1870s–1990s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 56–7.
Owen Letcher, Big Game Hunting in North-Eastern Rhodesia (London: John Long, 1911), 82.
David Macpherson, Little Birds and Elephants: The Diary and Short Stories of David Macpherson’s Wanderings in Portuguese East Africa and Nyasaland 1928–1929, ed. Isabel Macpherson (Blonay, Switzerland: Denham House, 2005), 281.
James Sutherland, The Adventures of an Elephant Hunter (London: MacMillan, 1912), 217.
W. Robert Foran, The Elephant Hunters of the Lado (Clinton, NJ: Amwell Press, 1981), 103, 111, 162–3.
Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton, A Sporting Trip through Abyssinia: A Narrative of a Nine Months’ Journey from the Plains of the Hawash to the Snows of Simien (London: R. Ward, 1902), 36; Swayne, Seventeen Trips through Somaliland, 260–1.
James Dunbar-Brunton, Big Game Hunting in Central Africa (London: Andrew Melrose, 1912), 30.
For an example of potential strains, see Thaddeus Sunseri, ‘“Dispersing the Fields”: Railway Labor and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 32, no. 3 (January 1998): 558–83, doi:10.2307/486328.
J. W. Glynn, ‘Sport in the Transvaal’, pt. 2, Field, 24 January 1885, 98.
Subaltern, ‘Sport in Somaliland’, pt. 4, Field, 12 August 1893, 247–8.
Mrs Fred [Edith] Maturin, Adventures beyond the Zambesi, of the O’Flaherty, the Insular Miss, the Soldier Man, and the Rebel-Woman (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1913), 262.
For a poignant example see, Ferdinand Oyono, Houseboy, trans. John Reed, 2012 ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1966).
Frederick J. Jackson, Early Days in East Africa (1930; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), 104–5; Prior to his colony scheme, Matthews had given at least one former gunbearer a management position on his estate when the man became too old for safari work.
Jane I. Guyer, ‘Traditions of Invention in Equatorial Africa’, African Studies Review 39, no. 3 (December 1996): 2, doi:10.2307/524941.
Agnes Herbert, Two Dianas in Somaliland: The Record of a Shooting Trip, 2nd ed. (London: John Lane, 1908), 120.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Angela Thompsell
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thompsell, A. (2015). Guns and Reeds: Africanizing British Big Game Hunting. In: Hunting Africa. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494436_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494436_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-49442-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49443-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)