Black Poachers, White Hunters — 2005 ·

A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya

By Edward I. Steinhart

“This exciting, accessible, and challenging book is a timely addition to the literature.... Steinhart use fascinating oral testimony to reconstruct African hunting histories and traditions in Kenya's eastern region...."

African Affairs

“The simple genius of this fascinating study is that it integrates the histories of hunting by African people in Kenya and hunting by white residents and visitors to the colony.”

American Historical Review

“(A) superb social history of hunting in Kenya.... The individual work and the series represent a significant achievement in Africanist scholarship.”

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

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For centuries, Kenya’s game-laden plains and forests were the rewarding hunting grounds of her native African population. Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting there in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts. This both created and enforced an image of African inferiority and subordination. Ultimately, conservationists came to claim sovereignty over African wildlife, completing the transformation of indigenous hunters into criminal poachers and seeking to eliminate them altogether from the “sportsman’s paradise” of Kenya.

Edward I. Steinhart is a professor of history at Texas Tech University, Lubbock.