The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
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patterns of gun deployment.13
MAP 2.1. The Upper Zambezi in the nineteenth century.
By understanding guns in terms of their own varied idioms of power and sociocultural forms, the peoples of the upper Zambezi operated as agents of re-innovation. In the process, they created the conditions that enabled them to engage with a technology that, in other frameworks, might have been regarded as merely obsolete and inadequate.
SLOW BEGINNINGS IN BAROTSELAND
As has been argued in chapter 1, the appearance of the gun along the present-day border between Zambia and Angola was part of broader processes of violent socioeconomic change. The advancing frontier of the Angolan slave trade—centered on the Portuguese coastal town of Benguela and driven by Luso-African and Umbundu-speaking entrepreneurs (locally known as “Mambari”)—reached the upper Zambezi area in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Further regional transformations owed less to the Atlantic economy than to the northern ripples of the demographic dislocations of the South African Mfecane. The most dramatic population movement to affect the region under discussion was that which led a group of Sotho-speaking migrants and refugees, the Kololo, to overrun what has been presented in chapter 1 as the area’s most complex and stratified polity, the Luyana kingdom of the upper Zambezi floodplain and surrounding districts, in the early 1840s.
Unlike Walima Kalusa, who has recently described Barotseland and the Caprivi Strip under the Kololo as awash with guns,14 I view Livingstone and Silva Porto’s overall paucity of references to European-made weapons in the area, the “immense” number of elephants and other game near both Linyati and Sesheke and in the floodplain,15 the weapons’ abnormally high prices,16 and—last but not least—the reported poor marksmanship of the Kololo as indications that firearms were still rare in Barotseland in the 1850s.17 A few Kololo royals had some “wretched” guns which they “wretchedly used,”18 and King Sekeletu’s opponent, Mpepe, the governor of Naliele, was given “a small cannon”—or “a large blunderbuss to be mounted as a cannon”—by Silva Porto in 1853.19 But stabbing and throwing spears and shields made of hides remained the dominant Kololo weapons throughout the decade—as is also borne out by the facility with which another pioneer trader, the South African James Chapman, conned Ponwane, “the headman of Linyati,” and other Kololo grandees in 1853. Having been asked to “repair some guns,” he took advantage of their “ignorance” of Western arms, “selected 5 of the easiest and repaired them for a tusk worth £15, at which rate [he] pocketed [his] pride.”20 It was this same “ignorance” on the part of the Kololo that apparently prompted the Batawana chief Letsholathebe, of present-day northern Botswana, to challenge Sekeletu’s authority by appropriating some of the latter’s ivory. Having recently acquired guns, Livingstone explained, Letsholathebe now considered himself “more than a match” for the less well-armed Kololo.21
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