The Nature of German Imperialism

Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa

Bernhard Gissibl

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785331763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

Today, the East African state of Tanzania is renowned for wildlife preserves such as the Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Selous Game Reserve. Yet few know that most of these initiatives emerged from decades of German colonial rule. This book gives the first full account of Tanzanian wildlife conservation up until World War I, focusing upon elephant hunting and the ivory trade as vital factors in a shift from exploitation to preservation that increasingly excluded indigenous Africans. Analyzing the formative interactions between colonial governance and the natural world, The Nature of German Imperialism situates East African wildlife policies within the global emergence of conservationist sensibilities around 1900.

PART I

Big Men, Big Game between Precolony and Colony

CHAPTER 1

Tusks, Trust, and Trade

Ecologies of Hunting in Precolonial East Africa

The lion is my father, and you, elephant, are my kinsman.

—Hunting song of the Kimbu, Western Tanzania

Nineteenth-century East Africa was neither a paradise of peaceful coexistence between “natural” man and animal, nor a site of an eternal struggle for survival between humans and wildlife, as colonial observers would have it. Humans and wild animals coexisted in dynamic adaptation, and hunting was the main way of human interaction with them. Hunting was a highly differentiated and dynamic activity, and the growth of the caravan trade during the nineteenth century increased its economic, political, social, and symbolic significance. Ivory in particular attained an enormous commodity value, which encouraged elephant hunting and rendered it one of the most commercialized economic activities in nineteenth-century East Africa. Rather than an atavistic reminder of a waning primeval way of life, the pursuit and killing of wild animals even by hunter-gatherer societies became a modern activity. It was the main way in which East Africans participated in the networks of late nineteenth-century globalization.

This chapter maps the nineteenth-century East African hunting world at the eve of European colonial rule. It portrays hunting first as an activity that sustained an economy of subsistence in which the appropriation of animals was firmly embedded in the social and spiritual order of the respective community. This function continued to coexist with the hunting to supply the more-than-local networks of trade forged by the caravan trade. The growth of the trade in ivory provided an opportunity to procure economic and symbolical capital that was actively embraced by many East African societies. Focusing on the hunting of elephants, the chapter analyzes the social, political, and cultural consequences of increased ivory hunting. Contrary to the assumptions of earlier research that portrayed precolonial Tanzanian societies in full control of their environments, it is argued here that the ivory hunting stimulated by trade was a socially and ecologically disruptive activity that stabilized as well as destabilized political authority and enabled big men, hunter kings, and other political entrepreneurs to accumulate wealth and power. Although by no means obliterated, a relationship of trust in the wealth of nature was increasingly supplemented by more instrumental attitudes of hunters toward their prey.

Communities of Hunting—Settlement, Subsistence, and the Ecology of Wildlife Control

The expansion of trade and the ongoing human colonization of previously unsettled land were the two fundamental processes that determined East African history in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the ongoing colonization of territory by African communities was comparatively recent in most parts of the area that would later become German East Africa. Apart from the coast and the interlacustrine kingdoms, many parts still resembled a “frontier region, where society was fluid, highly adaptable, and capable of absorbing outsiders easily.”¹ Historians have stressed the social capacities to exert ecological control in precolonial Tanganyika,² yet the vagaries of climate and drought, warfare, and the impact of the trade in slaves and ivory rendered people’s control of their environment precarious and unstable.³ Highly variable rainfall patterns, the recurrence of droughts, the changing quality of soils, and the limited availability of permanent water supplies all influenced settlement patterns and population density. In many areas, the presence of the tsetse fly and the associated risk of human and animal sleeping sickness denied settlement or disallowed the keeping of cattle. Consequently, people had to be mobile on different scales, and rather than being organized in timeless and immobile tribes, African societies and social organizations were constantly shifting and reforming.⁴

Precolonial demography is a contested terrain, and the figures delivered by colonial statistics express a desire to bureaucratic control rather than accurate numbers of inhabitants.⁵ Nonetheless, the roughly five inhabitants per square kilometer suggested by the earliest German population statistics of 1902–3 suggest that areas occupied by wildlife outnumbered the pockets of cultivation⁶: in 1910, a German geographer described Tanganyika as essentially a “wilderness with islands of culture.”⁷ Patches of settlement were surrounded by extensive uninhabited bush and woodlands, where water was scarce and soil fertility low. German travelers and colonialists called these tracts of land Grenzwildnisse. They were margins where chiefly authority became elusive; they were spaces of transition crossed by links of trade and exchange; they were spiritual landscapes and locations of temporary utilization, where substances for ritual practices and medicine could be obtained. Above all, they were male domains where wild animals were stalked and trapped.

Together with poor soils, unreliable rainfall, and diseases, wild animals counted among the major threats to human livelihood. Their hunting was an ecological necessity to mitigate environmental adversities and a vital accompaniment of migration, settlement, and cultivation. Although virtually all East African societies practiced some form of wildlife control, its intensity and importance varied considerably in different environmental contexts. Wild animals were few in densely settled and cultivated areas such as the coastal belt or the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Chagga farmers on Mount Kilimanjaro, for example, had a reputation for hunting very little,⁸ but this did not prevent Kilimanjaro chiefs from seizing the opportunities of the ivory trade to extend or at least stabilize their position among their rivalling neighbors. Rindi of Moshi, for example, strengthened his authority by recruiting bands of specialized elephant hunters from Ukamba and Uteita. The ivory thus gained was traded, among others, for firearms with Swahili merchants from Pangani.⁹ Shambaa agriculturalists in the Usambara Mountains practiced a similar cooperation with Kamba elephant hunters, who had established settlements in the Pangani Valley as early as the eighteenth century. Themselves hunting to supplement their diet, the Shambaa were not directly engaged in elephant hunting and the ivory trade, but benefited from it by the exchange of vegetables against meat with Kamba hunters.¹⁰

On the other end of the spectrum were foraging hunter-gatherer societies like the Hadzabe and the Sandawe who eked out their living under the inhospitable conditions of the dry miombo plains of central and northern Tanganyika.¹¹ While their foraging way of life can be regarded as adaptation to marginal environmental surroundings, the hunting and gathering of those groups in northern Tanganyika and southern Kenya, which in German and British colonial parlance were referred to as Dorobo, Ndorobo, or Wandorobbo was embedded into regional systems of exchange. Dorobo a derogatory term from the Maa language to refer to “those without cattle”, denoted an occupational rather than an ethnic identity. Their hunting and gathering formed part of a regional system of trade and exchange crystallizing around Maasai pastoralism, in which the procuring of meat, hides, and tusks represented an economic specialization complementary to the surrounding agriculturalists and pastoralists.¹² Generally, hunting played a more important role in tsetse-infested areas where the danger of trypanosomiasis disallowed the breeding of cattle. This was the case in most parts of southern Tanganyika. But hunting fulfilled several vital functions also in societies whose subsistence rested to a large degree on livestock or agriculture. It was a strategy of survival during times of famine and ecological stress, and it was a means to obtain supplementary protein and important items for exchange in regional and interregional systems of trade, such as ivory, horns, and skins.

If the importance of hunting varied among different societies and in different environmental contexts, so did purpose, form, and technique. In order to catch or kill animals, East African societies had a broad range of techniques at their disposal. Groups of hunters could lurk at frequented passages or waterholes, or they could actively drive or stalk animals. The English explorer Richard Burton, traversing Tanganyika in 1857–58, asserted that at the end of the rains,

armed with bows and arrows, and with rungu or knobkerries, the villagers have a battue of small antelopes, hares, and birds. During the hot season also, when the waters dry up, they watch by night at the tanks and pools, and they thus secure the larger kinds of game.¹³

Apart from the weaponry mentioned by Burton, the nineteenth century witnessed the increased utilization of muzzle-loading guns that were phased out in European armies and flooded East and Central Africa via the networks of the caravan trade. Moreover, East African societies had a differentiated set of traps at their disposal. European travel accounts as well as early ethnographies testify to the almost universal use of pits, traps, nets, and snares of various size and function, sometimes used in combination with fences of plaited thornbush or nets fabricated from dried bark. These passive forms of hunting only increased under colonial rule to circumvent the ever more rigid circumscription of Africans’ hunting rights.

Trapping and communal game drives appear to have been the forms of hunting with the least social restrictions. Several sources testify to “whole villages” participating in game drives, which would probably have included women.¹⁴ Hunting and stalking, on the other hand, were almost exclusively male prerogatives, as substantiated by most contemporary colonial observers and later ethnographies based on oral history. Apart from gender, expertise, also skill, and the knowledge of hunting rituals restricted access to the chase. So did the ecological and social power relations that governed the appropriation of wild animals. While all men were potential hunters, the organization of collective hunts was often the duty of the chief. Hunting animals like buffalo, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and especially elephants, was a specialized and highly ritualized undertaking accessible only to a selected few. Their pursuit not only meant the confrontation with potentially dangerous animals, but was also connected with the invasion of the spiritually hostile environments of forest and savanna. Only few hunters and waganga (sg. mganga, healer/medicine person) knew about the necessary medicines and ritual precautions, so that the French Missionary Cado Picarda, superior of the Holy Ghost Fathers’ mission at Mandera in the Wami Valley, described hunters as forming “une classe à part,” distinguished by a “rituel complet de pratiques superstitieuses.”¹⁵

These ritual practices fulfilled important social and ecological functions. By restricting access to the hunt, they guaranteed exclusiveness and functioned as a measure of conservation. But they also had an inclusive dimension, indicating as they did the general state of social and spiritual affairs of a community. The ritual requirements of a successful hunt concerned and involved the whole family, lineage, village, or chiefdom, making it an inclusive activity where the spheres of humans, animals, and ancestral spirits met.¹⁶ Ethnographic information available from early colonial and missionary observers in German East Africa corroborates the role of hunting as an important marker of the political, moral, social, and spiritual ecology of East African societies. The German missionary Joseph Busse, who worked in Rungwe near Lake Nyassa in the 1930s, noticed that

before the men embark upon the chase, all quarrels in the village must be settled. … While the hunters are in the field, those remaining back in the village are neither supposed to argue nor to violate an...