Cecily Shoots a Rhinoceros: Big Game Hunting in British Somaliland and the 1900 Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa

In 1900, seven European nations gathered in London to agree the Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa. The Convention sought to regulate game hunting across the African continent, in response to the decimation of wildlife that unregulated hunting for sport and ivory had caused. Six years later, Agnes Herbert and her cousin Cecily set out from London to British Somaliland on a big game hunt. In this article, I explore the interrelationships of memoirs, such as Agnes Herbert’s, with law and literary imagination in the creation of a colonial conservation culture. I do so by invoking Foucault’s thinking about heterotopias. I unpack the temporal modalities in which ideas about big game operate in administrative and literary texts: both the idea of a lost golden age and, more particularly, the futurities of big game that they construct and debate through ideas of “preservation.”