White hunter

By the start of the 20th century, as part of the "scramble for Africa", European colonial powers had taken possession of territories on the eastern half of the continent—territories now recognized as the nations of Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania.

[citation needed] Although the origins of the phrase cannot be confirmed, the first European to go by the title of "white hunter" is generally considered to have been Alan Black.

[1] Around the start of the 20th century, East African hunting safaris became a fashionable pursuit among members of the privileged classes, particularly in Britain and the United States.

[5] The British colonial government also turned big-game hunting into a source of revenue, charging the tourists and hunters licensing fees for permission to kill the game animals.

In 1909, a £50 hunting license (equivalent to £6,600 in 2023) in the East Africa Protectorate entitled its purchaser to kill two buffaloes, two hippos, one eland, 22 zebras, six oryxes, four waterbucks, one greater kudu, four lesser kudus, 10 topis, 26 hartebeests, 229 other antelope, 84 colobus monkeys, and unlimited lions and leopards (lions and leopards killed livestock and were classified as vermin).

[11] Among the better-known white hunters who succeeded Cunninghame's generation were W. D. M. Bell, later known as "Karamoja" Bell;[12] 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."

[13] Perhaps the first fictional Victorian adventure hero was Allan Quatermain, a white hunter who appeared in books by H. Rider Haggard, starting with King Solomon's Mines (1885).

Geoffrey Household's novel Rogue Male (1939) featured a white hunter going after Adolf Hitler; it was filmed twice, first as Man Hunt (1941) and, a generation later, under the original title (1976).

Captain C. G. Biggar (Cuthbert Gervase 'Bwana' Brabazon-Biggar), a supporting character in the P. G. Wodehouse comic novel Ring for Jeeves (1953), is another example of the white hunter.

Peter Capstick, a white hunter and an author of books on the subject, suggested that the word "great" may have been added by American popular culture.