Animals, prey, and enemies: hunting and killing in an African counter-insurgency

Abstract

Historians of Africa have frequently claimed that the violence of colonial conquest, and the slaughter of fauna that accompanied it, was reproduced in the repression of anti-colonial and nationalist insurgencies. Indeed the vocabularies of hunting, tracking and killing often seeped into the practices of counter-insurgencies. Using interviews, archives, and most of all the sizeable body of memoirs and novels by former Rhodesian soldiers, this article argues that the hunting of African animals and the hunting of African insurgents were markedly different. Animals were natural; they were innocent and instinctive, as were African trackers in government employment: they should not be hunted. The Africans who should be hunted were not the enemy, however, but allies and would-be allies who became prey. Thus the conduct of late twentieth century counter-insurgency was markedly different from that of nineteenth century hunting even as it reclassified prey and protected species as hunters...