Hunting, Wildlife, and Imperialism in Southern Africa

Imperial networks in northern North America flowed initially along the waterways that gave access to the trade-associated hunting, trapping, timber extraction, and related activities. Hunting was essential to many indigenous societies, and required relatively little investment for the first wave of traders and settlers. It generated valuable resources in a number of colonized zones. But hunting frontiers in the British Empire differed. In part, the reasons were environmental. The assemblage of species in North America and Africa were possibly more similar 15,000 years ago ‘when the American West looked much as [the] Serengeti plains do today’. Large mammals including mammoths, big cats, and wild horses roamed the northern hemisphere prairies. Climate change, combined with the impact of rapid human migration through the Americas 10–12,000 years ago, resulted in many extinctions so that the wildlife of the two areas had become distinctive by the onset of European colonization. This opened up divergent opportunities for consumption and trade. Southern Africa was a frontier of heat rather than cold. There were no animals with the thick glossy fur favoured by Europeans for outer garments or for felt. Southern Africa’s most prized hunted commodity—aside from meat—was equally unpredictable. While mammoths had been exterminated in North America, an elephant species with large tusks survived into the modern era in Africa. Environmental factors also shaped the technology of hunting and carriage. Southern Africa lacked navigable rivers and lakes; Canada’s abundance of water was matched by South Africa’s dearth. Although the spread of firearms and horses was common to both regions, South Africa’s transport sinews were dusty, rutted ox-wagon tracks across the veld rather than the cool, wooded lakes and streams along which canoes could be paddled. In part, differences resulted from the chance value of particular animal products. Southern Africa was home to an extraordinary range of large mammals. The richness of wildlife can be judged by the variety of predators at the top of the food chain—lions, leopards, cheetahs, caracals, hyenas, wild dogs, jackals, as well as smaller cats. The antelope population was unparalleled in the diversity of its species. But variety did not in itself translate into value.

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