Egy kolonialista vadász a szocialista Magyarországról : Kelet-Afrika felfedezése a hidegháború idején = A Colonial Hunter from the Socialist Hungary Discovering East Africa During the Cold War

Csaplár-Degovics, Krisztián (2025) Egy kolonialista vadász a szocialista Magyarországról : Kelet-Afrika felfedezése a hidegháború idején = A Colonial Hunter from the Socialist Hungary Discovering East Africa During the Cold War. VILÁGTÖRTÉNET, 15(47) (1). pp. 113-147. ISSN 0083-6265

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Abstract

The biggest hunting exhibition of all time was the first World Hunting Exhibition in Budapest in 1971. The exhibition was attended by the representatives of 52 countries from four continents. The 35-day event attracted 2 million visitors, including 200,000 foreign hunters and hundreds of celebrities, including Prince Philip of Edinburgh and Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Among others, East African countries that had just been liberated from colonial rule also set up a pavilion in Budapest. One of the main aims of their inaugural events was to ensure that, despite the collapse of colonial rule, it would still be possible to organize safaris or international hunts, which were a major source of income for the national economies. White hunter men, however, were no longer to be recruited in the transatlantic states, but in the socialist Eastern European countries. Ferenc Ignácz also became interested in hunting in Africa. Ignácz visited East Africa (Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya) three times, where he spent several months hunting with the support of the local authorities. Ignácz’s 1970s adventures could have taken place in the 19th century and had strong colonial overtones. According to his monograph on the voyages, Ignácz hunted to collect trophies for museums in Hungary (his scientific arguments were Enlightenment clichés). While at the beginning of his travels he referred to himself as an Eastern European socialist everyday man with a little minority complex, after a few weeks in Africa he was already displaying the racist and supremacist views of the former European colonialists. His writing about his experiences is strongly reminiscent of 19th century colonial hunting literature. On the one hand, the study aims to investigate how a socialist man from Eastern Europe was able to go hunting on the African continent during the decades of the Cold War, and what kind of political climate and cooperation made this possible. On the other hand, I would like to explore the intellectual roots that explain how a citizen of an obviously not former colonial country (Hungary had no African colonies), an everyday person socialized in an Eastern European socialist system, could have adopted the typical colonial attitudes of former colonial nations (e.g. the British) in the field within weeks.

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