Buffalo Hunting: From a Commodity to a High-Value Game Species

Abstract

Makanga country, now in Mozambique. Edouard Foa, a French explorer, is struggling to gain an audience with the powerful and feared Chief Tchanetta Mendoza. Foa had come there on his way to cross the continent by foot from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, after having threatened Foa, the Chief consented to grant him a clearance to walk across and hunt on this land. At that time, the country was rich in game and Tchanetta forbade unnecessary shooting. Because Arabs used to come there from the North once a year for times immemorial, the Chief had them hunt elephants exclusively, measuring the powder for each hunter himself. Buffalo (Syncerus caffer), antelope, and other game were reserved to indigenous hunters for feeding his people. The tribute to be paid to the Chief for hunting elephant was one tusk per elephant killed. When the beast had fallen, the tusk that was on the ground side was the property of the Chief of the territory. Locally, in Portuguese, this tax was named 'o dente da terra', the Earth's tooth (Foa, 1900).The price to pay for the right to hunt existed long before Foa. As early as the sixteenth century, Portuguese records state that no elephant could be killed and consumed without the consent of the Chief in the lands south of the Zambezi, where the 'dente da terra' tax already existed by unwritten law (Manyanga and Pangeti, 2017). Such hunting levies were not only restricted to this area. In western Tanzania, Foa had to pay the 'hongo', a tribute to walk and hunt on a Chief's land (Foa, 1900).