Wildlife literature, photography, and film on Africa have long been popular in Western countries and beyond. Academic literature on visual representations of Africa discusses how the camera has colonized and possessed African people, nature, and places. Both James Ryan and Paul Landau have developed Susan Sontag's analogy of shooting with camera and rifle, comparing the power dynamics at work. Our aim is to expand interpretations of media on African wildlife, and to understand them in the context of more complex and changing power relationships rather than to focus simply on their imperial and neocolonial dimensions. Visual images included universalist ideas and approaches that in part grew out of scientific concerns. Literature and film found resonance with popular audiences and helped to shape new attitudes and approaches to animals. We suggest that these media representations were a significant, and neglected, element of modern environmentalism. They were generated in Africa and celebratory of its animals and landscape---and sometimes of its people. This was a new aesthetic arising from a Western vision but powerfully influenced by locations, animals, and people in Africa.
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