Essay: Hunting Methods of the People of Africa

Sample Essay

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Ancient Egyptians

The ancient Egyptians used to undertake a ritual hunting of a long horned bull. The bull was caught with lasso, which was a rope with a weighted end. It was then fettered and its foreleg was cut off. It was then ritually slaughtered by tearing out the heart (Kyle).

San People

The nomadic San people inhabited the area of the Cape of Good Hope for a about a hundred thousand years until the nineteenth century when they were forced to flee their lands and their communities destroyed by the ravages of colonialism. Cave paintings they have left behind depict hunting of antelopes with the use of nets strung up in their path. One picture depicts five humanoid figures chasing antelopes and driving them into the nets (Manhire, Parkington and Yates).

Waata Oromo

In the 1950’s Colonial Kenya, it was discovered that the Waata Oromo hunter gatherers of the Tsavo region used poison tipped arrows for the hunting of elephants. This was a revelation to the British colonist who had till then believed that the use of large bored rifles was essential to the hunting of elephants (Steinhart).

Mbuti Hunter Gatherers

The small statured Mbuti Pygmy tribes of Ituri rain forests of the Democratic republic of Congo subsist mainly by hunting ungulates like the forest hog, the dwarf antelopes, the okapi, the buffalo, the sitatunga, the bongo, the duiker, the chevrotain and the red river hog. They have two main strategies for hunting game. The earliest method used by the Mbuti was the solitary hunting method, with the use of the bow and arrow and poisoned barbs. Around 400 years ago contact with the Bantu agriculturalists yielded the technology of making nets. Now most Mbuti tribes employ the communal hunting method with the use of beaters and trackers working in cooperation to drive the prey into their nets. This labor intensive method of hunting however, yields only marginally more food in terms of kilograms per person than the solitary hunting method (Wilkie and Curran).

Among the Mbuti net hunters, both men and women participate in the hunt. Women are given the job of beating and flushing out the prey while the men man the nets and capture the animals. When there are not sufficient amounts of men and teenage boys present women also handle the nets. McCreedy describes an incident where when the men had gone off on a boar hunting trip for a few days, “a woman encountered a bush pig near the camp, and the women at the camp chased it with spears” (Noss and Hewlett).

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