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.After Roosevelt, more stories and more famous Americans followed wholinked Africa with hunting in the American mind.Dozens of Edgar Rice Bur-roughs s Tarzan stories inspired young men from the 1920s onward to yearn forAfrican jungle adventures.15 And beginning in the 1920s, the safari appearedin hit films such as King Solomon s Mines and the extensive Tarzan series.In the1930s Ernest Hemingway described his version of the safari in Green Hills ofAfrica (1935) and in two short stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and TheMacomber Affair (1936).The early 1950s were banner years for safari films,0813343860-Keim 5/27/08 11:23 AM Page 136136 Chapter 9: Safariwith the appearance of a Hollywood remake of Haggard s King Solomon s Mines(1950) and Mogambo (1953).The MGM on-location filming of King Solomon sMines in East Africa entailed the largest safari since Roosevelt s, but it was soonoutdone by the expedition for Mogambo.All in all, the stars (including Gre-gory Peck, Joan Bennett, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, and ClarkGable), the big movie releases, and the stories kept the safari and its glamourin the public eye.16The white hunter in Africa became a minor American genre in the same waythe cowboy in the American West became a major one.Indeed, one could arguethat, about the time the American West had been conquered, Africa under colo-nial rule was opened up to white hunters.The African safari became analogousto the conquest of the American West, in the sense that both demonstrated theWestern urge to dominate man and nature.The similarity is only partial, how-ever, because the celebrated hunters of the American West were solitary, werenot wealthy, and did not need a caravan of assistants.The Decline of the Great White Hunting SafariIn the American popular mind, the big-game safari was associated almost en-tirely with the British settler colony of Kenya, even though it was possible tohunt big game in many other places.As white power in Kenya receded afterWorld War II, the glamour of the hunting safari declined.In his sympathetichistory of the Kenya safari, Bartle Bull notes:After the war everything seemed more intense, less carefree, a lit-tle more commercial, a little less romantic.There were fewer Eu-ropean clients, more Americans, all with less time than the olddays.Thousands of Africans, after service in the war, took a differ-ent view of colonial relationships.Ambition crept into the Africanattitude.Kenya s whites were less confident of the future.Author-ity was suspect.One could not so easily take one s staff for granted,although life in camp was less changed than in town.As the pop-ulation increased and agriculture spread, wild game and unspoiledbush were always a little harder to find.17Bull mourns the passing of an era; Roosevelt would have understood com-pletely.But the decline of the safari as Bull portrays it was not caused by a lack0813343860-Keim 5/27/08 11:23 AM Page 137The Decline of the Great White Hunting Safari 137of animals but by an end to the conditions that made it possible to maintainthe colonial illusion of power.In the quotation above, Bull identifies the con-ditions for the successful safari: dissatisfaction with the intensity of modernlife, yearning for adventure and freedom from domestic life, confidence in thefuture, wild nature in abundance, and the subservience of other men.As whitecolonialism faded and modern life crept in, the illusion could not be main-tained.Kenya s anticolonial agitation in the 1950s and its independence in 1963physically disrupted the land and drastically reduced the influence of whites.More important, Kenyan independence, together with the eventual independ-ence of all tropical African countries, took a psychological toll on whites andmade the safari more like just hunting and less like the ultimate experience ofdominance over man and nature.Since the 1970s, other factors have modified the safari experience.Contin-ued modernization and rapid population growth in Africa have severely threat-ened many habitats and forced Africans to manage wildlife ever more carefully.The Kenyan government decided in 1977 to ban hunting entirely in order topreserve what wildlife remained.Such bans have become a contentious issue,however.Hunters and many conservationists argue that when hunting is al-lowed, the profits from licenses can help finance conservation and developmentprojects, which, among other results, convince ordinary Africans that animalsare their cohabitants and benefactors rather than their competitors.The 1984 global Convention on International Trade in Endangered Speciesof Wild Fauna and Flora, commonly known as CITES, recognized that hunt-ing could be an acceptable way to conserve wildlife.But CITES restrictions onthe international movement of some kinds of coveted trophies have causedmany in Africa to criticize the convention as another Western attempt to keepAfricans poor by preventing them from making a living.Such arguments areheard most strongly in southern Africa, where game management is relativelyefficient.From the perspective of CITES, although some countries may beable to allow hunting and increase their wildlife populations, many cannot.Forexample, because it is impossible to differentiate between trade in ivory legallyobtained in well-managed southern African game parks and trade in poachedivory from somewhere else on the continent, it is necessary to ban trade in allivory to save the elephant.18Smith Hempstone, US ambassador to Kenya from 1989 to 1993, claims thatall wildlife experts in Kenya favor restoring high-fee hunting, but they avoidsaying so publicly because they and their organizations depend financially on0813343860-Keim 5/27/08 11:23 AM Page 138138 Chapter 9: SafariAmerican and European tree-huggers, green extremists who do not want to seea drop of blood shed, even if it means extinction of a species. 19 Hempstone, ahunter, may be right.Tanzania banned hunting in the 1980s, but after findingthat game was still declining and that it needed the revenue from hunting li-censes for conservation and development efforts, it lifted the ban.Zimbabwehas increased its game populations since independence in 1980 by allowingAfricans to use their land to attract hunters, who pay for the experience.Weshould note, however, that the wildlife experts in Kenya whom Hempstonecriticizes also know that high profits from hunting (or from other sorts oftourism) do not necessarily go to ordinary Africans or to nature conservation.It is still possible to go on a hunting safari in Africa.The client will proba-bly still have a white guide now called a professional hunter instead of a white hunter. But otherwise, the surface experience is considerably differentfrom the classic white man s safari of past decades.Hunting parties no longergo out with huge retinues, and Land Rovers substitute for porters.Camps tendto be permanent and may consist of modern lodges rather than tents.The li-cense fees for killing are extraordinarily high.20 Most such hunting is now donein southern Africa, where safaris are closely regulated by governments and fre-quently undertaken on private property.The clientele is also different.BartleBull writes that for most, [today s] safari is a holiday in which stress and hard-ship may not be desirable
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