The Ivory Trade: a product of colonialism and violence

African trade began as it did in so many other communities around the world: as a way to exchange commodities within a small community for the benefit of everyone involved. Following the popular path that the emergence of trade tends to take, trades that originated in small communities became associated with specific means of production and the necessary resources that originate within particular communities. The African continent became divided most simply into three sections: the Northern trans-Saharan trade, Western Atlantic trade and Eastern Indian Ocean trade (Wetu). Situated in the East, bordering the Indian Ocean and direct trade routes to Asian countries such as India, Thailand, Indonesia, and China. Early Asian demand for ivory relied on the internal trade of ivory from Eastern countries to Tanzania for exportation across the Indian Ocean.

Until the 1850s, ivory was traded mostly internally or to Asia, however, due to increased European popularity, ivory became an even more demanded commodity. In 1857, European countries officially began to participate in imperialist activities in Africa, and became reliant on the abundance of elephants in East Africa and Tanzania to supply this lucrative yet deadly trade.

While pre-colonial Tanzanian economy relied heavily on individual/family sized farming of agricultural products and livestock, fishing, and hunting to prosper, the late 19th century ivory trade caused a transition from family-based sustenance to specialized economic roles that sustained the trade, including elephant hunters (Kideghesho).

Europeans explored the region beginning in the 1840s, but after founding the German East Africa Company, the German Karl Peters was the first European to gain government approval to colonize the Tanganyika region, which he renamed German East Africa (Austen, 20). German colonists produced crops and relied on the agricultural labor force of African Tanzanians to make profits from this expansive land use. 

At the same time as Germans began colonizing the mainland Tanganyika, British efforts to control the island of Zanzibar were commencing. The Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890 required Germany to relinquish their control of Zanzibar to British rule, which was intent on gaining control of the now very important port of East Africa to the rest of the world (“Anglo-German Treaty”).

1891 marked the first year of organized revolt against German rule in Tanzania (Lambert). After almost two decades of African and German violence and protest despite continuing German rule, World War I and subsequent British invasions into Tanzania caused the Germans to surrender. Despite efforts between the years 1891 and 1916 made by African Tanzanians such as the Abushiri revolt of 1888 and the Maji Maji revolt that lasted from 1905 to 1907, the guerilla warfare efforts of Britain defeated German colonists and Tanzanian’s efforts for autonomy in one foul fight. 

Germany established its control over Tanganyika violently, using murder to control the population and threaten rulers that disobeyed their orders along with high taxes and forced labor (Beverton). These policies of violence rendered Karl Peters, “Milkono wa Damu”, meaning “Man with Blood on His Hands” (Beverton). 

The Abushiri Revolt of 1888 is written about most often in a way that villanizes local Arabs and Swahili tribesmen of Tanzania. The revolt is named for its most prominent leader, Abushiri ibh Salim al-Harthi who was a coastal planter and led the theft of the German East Africa Company goods (Gutenburg). Germans killed Abushiri after capturing him after the revolt, stifling the revolt for the moment, yet leaving its historical influence to deflate Germany’s desire to maintain control of the Eastern Coast and enter further into the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty discussed earlier. 

The Maji Maji Revolt lasted from 1905 to 1907 and had the most significant impact on German colonial rule. A turning point came in 1905 when a disastrous drought came to Tanganyika. The importance and sacredness of water reached such a point that a prophet claimed that they knew of a “Maji Maji”, meaning “sacred water”, that would help to protect locals from the deadly bullets used by the Germans (Beverton). 

Attacks beginning in 1905 spread across the region, as rebels gained support against the German colonists until an attack on October 21, 1905 during which the German offensive killed hundreds of regels. By 1907, 75,000 Maji Maji warriors had been killed by violence and the use of starvation inflicted by Germans who destroyed agricultural fields that sustained locals (Beverton). 

The Maji Maji Revolt is considered unsuccessful, but while this long revolt did not cause Germany to relinquish their colonial hold on Tanganyika, it did cause German reform due to the realized seriousness and potential violence of Tanganyika locals. It also became a source of inspiration for revolts and struggles against colonial rule to come. 

British imperialism throughout the 19th century was driven by the general need for new sources of raw materials, the creation of an open market, and to increase access to global capital investments (Mbogoni, 3). Britain justified colonial pursuits by assuming “racial, cultural, and moral superiority” and that it was their duty to “civilize their African colonial subjects” (Mbogoni, 3). By the 1950s, the British had infiltrated Tanzania and had developed a European population of 25,000 (Mbogoni, 6). Colonization occurred most notably on the mainland of Tanzania because the British quickly determined the island of Zanzibar to be overcome by health issues that determined it unfit for colonial life (Mbogoni, 9). 

Zanzibar became divided between northern and southern regions due to “relative harmony in the Southern Highlands to latent hostility in the Northern Province” (Mbogoni, 6). 

Northern colonist farm owners contributed to the aggravated relationship between races in the mid-1950s due to their stringent views on land ownership. These years saw a rise in personal and property-based violence including thievery and assault (Mbogoni, 6) which resulted in colonist land owners fulfilling the role of police protection. According to Mbogoni, “the Crown became the “owner” of all “waste and unclaimed” land, in many cases by concession or forfeiture” (59), implying that the british colonists owned the wealth of the land. This relationship between European farmers and the local Tanzanians mirrored the historical relationship that existed between white landowners and African slaves in the United States. The siege mentality that persisted in Northern Tanzania seemed to develop the foundation of a community in which land ownership and autonomy was reserved for the elite, and racial prejudices become a justification for cruel behavior and assumed criminality. 

Mount Meru is Africa’s fourth-highest mountain located in the North-East of Tanzania. Its base is made up of fertile land that constituted the foundation of a farming and agriculture-based society around it. German colonization of the Mount Meru region involved forced labor and taxation however, it was the British colonists who took the unjust action towards expelling Meru people from their land. On November 17th, 1951, European officers ordered 300 families to leave their homes around Mount Meru in what was “code-named Operation Exodus” (Mesaki). The Meru inhabitants protested this exodus non-violently but British officials proceeded to burn down houses and the school and church of the town and the 13 day long process resulted in 25 arrests and two deaths (Mesaki).

As a result of this forced eviction, Rafael Mbise and other Meru members devised the Committee of the Meru Citizen’s Union and flew to the United Nations headquarters in New York on June 9th, 1952, to speak about the injustices of the Mount Meru Case. Despite this global attention and resistance, the United Nations failed to see this instance of injustice as more than a local case “blown out of proportion” (Mesaki, 20) and the protest essentially ended as a failure. However, the Mount Meru Case has been interpreted as the beginning of the end to colonial empire rule in Tanganyika.

Colonial regimes legitimized the expulsion of native communities from their land through the use of environmental justifications. They classified African land usage as inefficient and environmentally harmful and held the eurocentric view that their alternative uses of land were far more efficient, similar to their methods of poaching elephants. Where Africans would use wood from the Kilombero Valley, to build canoes, Europeans wanted to use the same wood as timber to increase its commercial value and make a profit from the valley’s natural resources. 

Elephant were hunted before their ivory became the commodity that it is known as today. Being over eleven feet tall and around 13,000 pounds, elephants posed an immediate threat to local crops, so farmers would hunt elephants to protect their established land and deter other elephants from following in their path. However, the weapons that Tanzanians used did not necessarily kill the elephant. Instead, the introduction of firearms took on that role and instigated the change from subsistence and protective hunting to “what ultimately became a species-endangering massacre” (Mbogoni, 34). 

The story of George Gilman Rushby, a famous European ivory poacher, shows the racialized status of ivory hunting in Tanganyika. Memorialized often as a hero against man eating lions, Rushby contributed to the glorification of big game hunting. He at times exceeded the limit of elephants a hunter could kill before their license was retracted, but was able to regain his hunting privileges due to laws that allowed hunting, but regulated the amount of ivory that the hunters could keep or were required to hand over to the British government. Tanganyika was known for its lack of rules and regulations pertaining to the european hunting of elephants and other animals, but extremely strict restrictions baring Africans from hunting the same creatures for similar profitable purposes, or even in the case of self-defense or protection. These racist regulations created a stigma around illegal hunting and contributed again, to the criminalization of Africans. In 1955, there were 394 convictions of illegal hunting and in 1958, the number of convictions was up to 859 (Mbogoni, 42), almost exclusively made up of Africans. 

The snares and traps that contrasted to British weaponry were deemed excessively cruel in comparison and combined with the difficulty of obtaining a hunting license without the white skin of a colonist, these factors created a construct of illegality that perpetuates racial hierarchies. 

The connotations associated with poaching and hunting were solidified through skin color as poaching came to signify the illegal killing of wildlife by Africans, while hunting was a glorified white-man’s sport. While today Tanzania is stereotyped by its expansive wilderness alive with wildlife, the same land of Tanganyika throughout the 1940s and 50s was teeming with white masculinity.

The history of trophy hunting in Tanzania has been regulated since 1891 by a series of Wildlife Ordinances and Conservation Acts. The Wildlife Conservation Act of 1974 established protected wildlife reserves, control of animal hunting, and the necessary registration of hunters but was repealed by the most recent Wildlife Conservation Act of 2009. This Act aimed to enhance the conservation of endangered animals such as elephants by creating specifically defined wildlife zones such and to “enable Tanzania to effectively contribute to and benefit from international efforts and measures to protect and enhance global biodiversity” (“The Wildlife Conservation Act.”, 8) 

Despite the seemingly implied disconnect between conservation and the big-game hunting of critically endangered animals, trophy hunting has been redefined as a conservationist tactic. Appealing to an elite white male demographic, the concept of trophy hunting is meant to incentivize the conservation of wildlife, according to the Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority report from September of 2018. Tourists can pay around $15,000 to kill and elephant in addition to the $14,000-20,000 spent on organizing a hunting expedition in Tanzania (“Tanzania Has Lifted”). This revenue is said to be delegated towards conservation tactics such as anti-poaching programs and payment of rangers (Nkuwi) but also perpetuates the racial structure of colonist game hunting as an environmentally-friendly practice.

National Park rangers are put in dangerous, life-threatening positions every day and fill a role that is nearly unimaginable in the United States. Rangers begin their day training at a base camp in preparation for patrols that last up to nine consecutive days, during which they are “within earshot of lions, but far more at risk from other human beings” (Leithead). The existence of a legal ivory trade allows the underground trade of illegal ivory too. Locals are driven to engage in the illegal poaching of ivory due to a lack of work and widespread poverty. 

Rebel groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), operating out of central Africa, draw their funding from illegal ivory trading. Since 1987, the LRA has terrorized communities, abducting over 67,000 youth to grow their extent of power (“Lord's Resistance Army.”). 

Groups such as the LRA threaten the elephants themselves as well as those who spend their days protecting them. 

In an interview with Ben, an American Ranger visiting Tanzania for the International Ranger Federation Conference, a Park Ranger at Serengeti National Park named Gabriel said that “even animals, we are not allowed to shoot. You just chase them. You have to scare them. Same for the poachers, the gun is just to protect yourself” (“Interview with Gabriel”). The need of an AK-47 for purely self-defense is demonstrative of the dangerous lives of rangers amongst ivory poachers. 

In order to protect the decreasing population of elephants, National Parks in Tanzania have become war zones created by violent poaching gangs and the development of new anti poaching strategies that rely on military weaponry, training, and tactics (Hopkins, Marcelle, and Courtney Brooks). 

The intention of this story map is not to provide a comprehensive history of Tanzanian colonization, but to highlight historical moments whose connection to the current racialized ivory trade is often ignored. The influence of German and British colonization contributed to the perception of expansive wildlife reserves in Tanzania, and other African countries with a large tourism economy, as a white-man’s playground. The ivory trade is polarized today between wealthy white participants in trophy hunting, and Africans who are forced into the violent lifestyle of poaching. Colonialist history has shaped the ivory trade in an elusive way that is not discussed in the contemporary ivory trade discourse which instead assumes that poaching is a result of more recent local government corruption. 

The very literally landscape of Tanzania, of bountiful wildlife and space, conforms to a Eurocentric viewpoint and can only be dismantled through the inclusion of instances of racial injustices and contrasting periods of protest and rebellion in the common knowledge that defines a space. The Ivory trade destroys more than the stability of African elephant populations and the ecosystems that they inhabit and perpetuates more than environmental injustices and that has to be known. 

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