Hunting

John MacKenzie has made the case that colonial hunting sheds light on everything from power to gender relations, the link between metropolitan propaganda and the role of the colonies as spaces of exhilaration, adventure and opportunity.

If showmanship inspired interest and excitement, if museums developed scientific observation as a rational recreation, then literature, contemporary iconography, and juvenile training were designed to transmit the moral superstructures of the hunting and natural history ethos to the masses, above all the young.

As any visit to a colonial-era natural history collection or retreat of the leisured classes is likely to confirm, colonial hunting became a powerful magnet and ideal indeed. Its mate­rial legacy remains with us in the form of desiccated trophies harvested from creatures great and small, ranging from antelopes to hippopotamuses. Here too, nobility and emulation mattered deeply. Again in the words of MacKenzie: ‘Every right-thinking Englishman wished to possess a tiger skin.’⁵⁷ Indeed, the phenomenon extended well beyond Britain. The internationalisation of colonial hunting, for instance, is attested by the United States Consul’s enquiry in November 1916 about regulations concerning the hunting of elephants in French Indochina.⁵⁸

Like many other aspects of colonial power relations, periodisation is critical when assessing the colonial hunt. By the turn of the twentieth century, many marksmen heaped scorn on their predecessors for having undertaken ‘hecatombs’. Moderation was not the only yardstick in action. Indeed, in the early twentieth century hunting restrictions of all sorts were being implemented in a wide range of colonial areas. Some were modest, like the 1909 French decision in Laos to ban elephant hunting by means of pit-traps,⁵⁹ others bolder, like the creation of vast reserves or the ban placed on hunting females or certain species altogether. Here, too, situations varied.

To some, it seemed that colonial hunting itself was going to the dogs. By the 1920s, MacKenzie tells us, ‘[Robert] Baden-Powell lamented the fact that subalterns in India were giving up pig-sticking for poodle-faking at the hill stations’ (poodle-faking being period slang for flirting to gain influence in the Raj).⁶¹ No doubt much to Baden-Powell’s regret, hunting itself was no longer a masculine preserve; the increasing participation of British women in the activity marked a seismic shift. Mary Procida sees this trend at work in the 1920s. She deduces from it that: ‘by adopting more masculinized personas and embracing masculine activities, many Anglo-Indian women integrated themselves into the public world of the empire... The empire may have been masculine but it certainly was not exclusively male.’⁶²

However, other dimensions of the colonial hunt experienced little change. Thus, colonial hunting remained ‘a ritual of prestige and dominance’⁶³ well into the twentieth century, and one adopted by post-colonial elites in a wide range of societies. The Vietnamese Ngo Dinh Nhug (younger brother of Ngo Dinh Diem) and Emperor Bao Dai were both avid hunters, for instance. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, himself a product of the French colonial army, utilised hunting in the Central African Republic to forge a special rapport with then French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing.