Transient Workspaces is an ambitious book centering on hunting as a complex technology and lens for understanding everyday African agency. Clapperton Mavhunga opens the study with a 2013 account of poachers killing ninety elephants at once. Reports of the incident highlight the dramatic loss of elephant numbers, but more importantly for Mavhunga, they reveal an underlying surprise at the sophistication of their methods. The core argument of the book dissuades the reader from any such shock. Africa here is a place of technological innovation, especially in the rural margins. Mavhunga is writing against long-standing narratives, especially salient in the history of technology, that situate Africa merely as a place of Western technological transfer. His study is also a searing commentary on scholarship that criminalizes African hunting. Indeed, local narratives portray hunters not as poachers but as heroes. In weaving the histories of the environment and technology together, Mavhunga argues that the legacy of African creativity in the forest offers the way forward in debates over game reserves and local community engagement.
In the first chapters, Mavhunga unpacks the meaning of transient workspaces. In Chapter One, hunting is mobile work and deeply entwined with understandings of the forest as sacred. In Chapter Two, Mavhunga presents the forest as classroom and laboratory where hunters and apprentices employ a range of techniques and tools including the use of poisons, bows and arrows, and the tracking of vultures to locate prey killed by animal predators. Hunters pray for success, obey social taboos, and gain skill in tracking, setting snares, and shooting; these actions together constitute the technological hunt. Successful hunters are lauded upon their return. While this precolonial portrait of vaShona and maTshangana cosmology is rich, it is somewhat idyllic, and technological change seems to begin in the nineteenth century. Chapter Three traces the complicated arrival of guns and their transformation by hunters into usable weapons that, like all weapons of the hunt, require social and spiritual preparation.
The next section follows the interactions of African hunters, European poachers, and the colonial state. In Chapters Four and Five, the colonial state seeks the labor of African hunters to reduce wild game, thereby reducing the tsetse fly aggravation to white settlers. From the perspective of hunters, ‘tsetse work’ was really a way to continue working in the forest, regardless of any state goals. The region, at the intersection of Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and Mozambique, was distant from any colonial administration, and tsetse hunters easily managed their work with minimal white supervision. The same forests, known as Crook's Corner, attracted European poachers who similarly sought to evade the state. As narrated in Chapter Six, poachers recruited local hunters as guides and trackers and tended to take only ivory, leaving the meat for local communities. Cecil Barnard, known as Bvekenya, epitomized the ways in which Europeans adapted local practices of the hunt. He established ties with master African hunters, took young men as apprentices, and married local women whose families all benefitted from the social prestige of Bvekenya the hunter. Together these sections masterfully argue for an understanding of technology that shifts focus away from Western technological imports such as guns to the actions and cosmologies of African hunters and their communities.
The closing chapters examine the increasing criminalization of African hunting and its ongoing practice as state critique. With the creation of the Gonarezhou Game Reserve, entire communities were forcibly removed from land. In Chapter Seven, we see nationalist leaders exiled near the park, and they quickly capitalized on local grievances. In turn, hunters worked for liberation providing meat to guerilla camps and fighting. In the final chapter, the new leaders of independent Zimbabwe did not return parklands to the former owners. Rather, they pursued poachers. At the same time, local hunters gained fame for poaching from the state to give meat to the people. When conservation programs began to distribute meat and limited benefits from international safari hunting, the heroes lost out. The stepped up arrests highlight the entangled politics of hunting and conservation, but also the failure to learn from these masters of the forest.
Mavhunga's overall narrative is inherently masculine. He stresses that mastery of the hunt was crucial for society, and for men to gain social prestige. Women in the book offer critical support for the social infrastructure of hunting, but the reader is left wondering what women-centered technologies of work and community building would look like? This is an important question as Mavhunga offers his study as a template for African histories that approach their narratives from African-centered epistemologies. Ultimately, Mavhunga's book is a story of everyday people and technology, colonialism upended, the environment, and politics. Drawn together these multiple threads offer an insightful analysis about African resilience that speaks beyond this captivating tale of the hunt.
