Negotiating with Gunbearers: Re-evaluating African Labor, American Narratives, and the Turn-of-the-Century Safari

By 1900, there was a flourishing safari economy in East Africa, in which African men—many of them highly skilled and sought-after—sold their labor to safari agents or negotiated directly with visiting hunters for pay and employment opportunities. The agency of these skilled workers was consistently denied or concealed, however, by contemporary narratives about the safari written by white hunters and published for American reading audiences. Such narratives almost always depicted the hunter as controlling local labor and characterized them as unskilled and undisciplined-- as “children of the wilderness,” in Theodore Roosevelt’s memorable phrasing.  By describing safari workers as undisciplined children, or, alternately, as subjects for ethnographic observation, white hunters told a story to Anglophone readers which conformed to racial beliefs of the day. Although many of these narratives have since been analyzed by historians, however, the depiction of Africans as unskilled labor has seldom been called into question, as historians have focused instead on the hunter/writer or on the colonial relationships depicted in the narratives themselves. My intention in this presentation is to explore the role of African labor in the safari,  and then to place it into conversation with its narrative representations.  By recognizing safari workers as skilled employees who played a vital role in the development of a modern tourist economy in East Africa, we can both re-position them as agents and individuals with histories of their own, and complicate our current readings of the portrayals of labor, race and imperial tourism in the narratives written by American hunters.