White Hunter - Notable White Hunters

Notable White Hunters

White hunters were colorful and romantic figures, often from privileged English backgrounds, who embraced a life of danger and adventure. The first acclaimed white hunters in East Africa were Alan Black, Bill Judd, Frederick Selous (remembered as the namesake of the Selous Scouts and whose real-life adventures inspired Sir H. Rider Haggard to create the fictional Allan Quatermain), and R.J. Cunninghame (sometimes spelled Cuningham), all of whom began their exploits at the end of the 19th century. In 1909 Cunninghame was selected to lead what was probably the best-publicized African safari, Theodore Roosevelt's excursion into British East Africa. Roosevelt's fame and popularity, and his gift for generating publicity, prompted a craze for safaris among those who could afford the sizeable price tag. After the First World War, when Germany's colonial lands in East Africa were ceded to Britain, eager customers poured into Africa, creating a market for the skills of several more decades of hunters.

Among the better-known white hunters who succeeded Cunninghame's generation were W.D.M. Bell, later known as “Karamoja” Bell; Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who was, between 1914 and 1926, married to Out of Africa author Karen Blixen; Denys Finch-Hatton, later her lover;Frederick Russell Burnham, Chief of Scouts in the Second Boer War to (Lord Roberts and known as "England's American Scout"; John A. Hunter; and Philip Percival and Frank M. "Bunny" Allen, whose safaris with Ernest Hemingway led the author to write Green Hills of Africa, True at First Light, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Although their business was killing, and they flourished in a colonial environment now understood as politically and economically oppressive, the white hunters are not so easily defined: they followed what they saw as a strict ethical code of sportsmanship, and they openly deplored the excesses of their more callow clients. Most importantly, they were among the first to launch efforts to conserve and protect Africa's wildlife against overhunting and extinction.