made into reserves “for the indigenous
fauna”, but this was rejected by the
Governor because preservation would
interfere with the hunting rights of the
considerable number of people living in the
Forest Reserves.^29 At the end of his tenure
as secretary of the SPFE, C.W. Hobley
noted that in the Sudan and in some parts
of West Africa, there was a school of
thought which would “recognise vested
rights of natives to the Elephant”.^30 Sir
Peter Chalmers Mitchell commented
“Personally, I am inclined to think that
Statesmen and Colonial Governments have
often given perhaps an undue attention to
the rights of natives compared with other
matters”.^31The limits of tolerance
The tolerance of African hunting to which
romantic ideas about poaching gave rise
was easily exhausted. In particular it was
dispelled when hunters achieved efficiency
in killing. Sir Henry Seton-Karr, a promi-nent hunter and founder
member of the SPWFE,
squarely blamed the problem
of diminishing game at the
door of the ‘depredations’ of
natives (along with their fel-
low ill-doers, unsporting set-
tlers).^32 Hingston argued
that “when natives hunt col-
lectively, they then have the
power to cause serious
depletion through wholesale
and indiscriminate methods
employed”. There is no
romance to such hunting^33.
The use of guns by African
hunters was particularly
problematic. Buxton urged
that “special care should be
taken to prevent modern
weapons getting into the
hands of the natives”, and
other members of the early
SPWFE delegation thought
that even natives without guns should be
prohibited from hunting because the effec-
tiveness of their hunting techniques had
already been improved by colonialism.^34Had some traditional balance between ill-
armed and relatively un-ambitious indige-
nous hunters and abundant populations of
their prey had been upset? Certainly it was
obvious by the first decade of the twenti-
eth century that colonialism was triggering
diverse economic and social change.
Buxton observed that Pax Britannic’ had
created new opportunities for killing game.
There were Kamba hunters “at every water
hole” on the Athi Plains because the
Maasai were not there to keep them away,
and “everything that walked was killed
with poison arrows”. Responsible colonial
government should step in to control such
hunting: “as we allow the natives to kill
game to a certain extent by preventing
fighting among them, we should also pre-
vent their trapping and killing on a largeConservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
Figure 3.The incorporation of poverty alleviation and the business
sector into conservation programmes is a key feature of the ‘new
conservation’ of the 1990s. A farm worker at Flower Valley, a com-
mercial flower farm harvesting wild blooms in the South African
Fynbos(www.fauna-flora.com/around/africa/flower_valley.html).
(Courtesy Juan Moreias).