attempting to stop poaching. In medieval
England, poaching was a capital offence,
and even in Georgian England, the Black
Act had condemned poachers of the
landowner’s game to
transportation, or
worse. The Victorian
sporting estate had
generated a complex
and extensive hierarchy
of employees devoted
to protecting their mas-
ter’s game from the
depredations of the
landless and lawless
poacher. In Africa, sub-
sistence hunting was
generally seen to be
haphazard, inefficient,
wasteful and cruel.
Colonial observers
thought it distracted
rural people from gain-
ful employment in cash
crop production or
wage labour. It was
widely proscribed by formal law, and the
problem of poaching became an increas-
ingly important issue in conservation as
the twentieth century progressed. R.W.G.
Hingston represented the dominant view of
sporting conservationists in the first half of
the twentieth century, when he told the
Royal Geographical Society in 1931 that
that the decline of the African fauna was
primarily due to ‘the native hunter’.^25This portrayal of the destructiveness of
local subsistence hunting was only part of
a more complex set of ideas about poach-
ing. There was a certain romantic flavour
to the entreprise of the lone poacher.
Colonial attitudes were influenced by an
affectionate romantic exasperation felt for
poachers in Britain in the early twentieth
century. In the spirit of Robin Hood, the
skillful lone poacher, outwitting the blun-
dering forces of the law to put meat onthe table, fitted a familiar and popular lit-
erary stereotype, for example in Richard
Jeffries’ book The Amateur Poacher, or in
the way John Buchan portrayed his sport-
ing gentlemen poaching salmon and stags
from hapless neighbours in the fictional
adventure John Macnab.^26 Poachers in
colonial Africa were also sometimes
regarded with paternalistic tolerance for
their sad lack of perception of the damag-
ing effects of their undisciplined ways.Hingston reflects this tolerance of individ-
ual peasant subsistence hunting, writing
“when he hunts as an individual with his
primitive weapons with the object of killing
everything obtainable he probably does
not cause any greater destruction than
does the discriminating sportsman with his
modern weapons”. In a similar vein,
Edward North Buxton (founder of the
Society for the Preservation of the Wild
Fauna of the Empire in 1903) pointed out
in 1902 that animals were the Africans
‘birthright’, and that “from time immemori-
al the destruction caused by the indige-
nous inhabitants has not appreciably
diminished the stock”.^27 In delegation by
the Society for the Preservation of the
Fauna of the Wild Empire (SPFE) to lobby
the British Colonial Secretary in 1905, he
argued that it would not be either expedi-
ent to interfere with “ancestral methods”
such as pitfalls and traps that
had been used “for an indefi-
nite period”.^28In the 1920s and 1930s, the
Colonial Office and individual
Governors were sometimes a
more sensitive to the needs
of local hunters than conser-
vationists wished. In 1928,
the Society for the
Preservation of the Fauna of
the Empire proposed
(through the Colonial Office)
that Forest Reserves in Nigeria should beHistory, cculture aand cconservation
In AAfrica, ssubsistence
hunting wwas ggeneral-
ly sseen tto bbe hhaphaz-
ard, iinefficient, wwaste-
ful aand ccruel. CColonial
observers tthought iit
distracted rrural ppeople
from ggainful eemploy-
ment iin ccash ccrop ppro-
duction oor wwage
labour. IIt wwas wwidely
proscribed bby fformal
law, aand tthe pproblem
of ppoaching bbecame aan
increasingly iimpor-
tant iissue iin cconserva-
tion aas tthe ttwentieth
century pprogressed.
“Personally, II aam
inclined tto tthink
that SStatesmen
and CColonial
Governments hhave
often ggiven pper-
haps aan uundue
attention tto tthe
rights oof nnatives
compared wwith
other mmatters”.