INTRODUCTION

       Firearms and the History of Technology in Africa

      THE POLICE post in Bunkeya, Mwami Msiri’s old imperial capital in the present Territoire de Lubudi of southern Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo (“DR Congo”), is a shabby—if colorful—place. On a pleasant day early in August 2011, Robert Ross, Pierre Kalenga, and I entered it to announce our presence in town for a brief stint of research. The plan was to bring to an end our dealings with the local representatives of the Agence Nationale des Renseignements (or “ANR,” somewhat optimistically described to me as “the Congolese FBI”) as soon as diplomacy and politeness made it possible. In the event, something caught our attention and made us stay longer than we envisaged: a heap of rusty firearms occupying a sizeable portion of the floor surface of the tiny room into which we had been ushered. The guns in question comprised a dizzying variety of models, though percussion-lock muzzle-loaders were the most numerous. What all of these firearms had in common, however, was that they had been manufactured locally, using gun scraps, homemade pieces, and industrial parts. Upon inquiry, we discovered that the guns—commonly going under the obviously onomatopoeic name of “poupous”—had been subject to precautionary confiscation from local residents in the spring of 1997, when Laurent D. Kabila’s forces had entered the town during the campaign that would shortly thereafter result in the overthrow of long-serving dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

      “Surely they don’t work now?” I asked.

      “No, but many of them were already useless back in 1997,” was the reply of one of the two officers.

      FIGURE 0.1. Homemade poupous, Bunkeya, DR Congo. Photograph by the author, August 2011.

      “Why keep them, then?” I inquired, rather unimaginatively.

      “Who knows? Most villagers have them. It’s part of being a man . . . a père de famille.”

      At one level, of course, Bunkeya’s poupous—accessible tools of self-protection in a country where threats of violence and predation have often been part and parcel of the daily lives of ordinary people—encapsulate the troubled postcolonial history of the Congo. At another, they illustrate the historical relation between the Yeke of Katanga and hunting, an activity with which the poupous have been closely associated from the early decades of the twentieth century. Once central to the workings of Msiri’s warlord state and the livelihoods of the people of the district, hunting continues to play a marginal, seasonal role in the domestic economy of some Yeke households.

      But, as the final remark of the ANR officer suggests, there is more to guns than meets the eye, and their social role in southern Katanga—and, as I will argue, elsewhere—cannot be reduced to their military and economic functions. Although regional specialists have been slow to acknowledge the phenomenon, a “surplus of meaning” has clearly been inscribed upon this technological artifact.¹ Besides working as defensive and hunting tools, Bunkeya’s poupous have also been endowed with a host of less predictable symbolic attributes. As adumbrated by my informant, in some contexts homemade guns were and are probably less valued as operating weapons than as markers of masculinity and signs of patriarchal status and self-reliance. The reasons why one bundle of cultural meanings prevailed over several different possible combinations are eminently historical. That is, they become accessible to historians only when they are appraised in the light of the specific experiences and worldviews of the people concerned and the changes they underwent across different historical frameworks. In the case of the Yeke, the story would have to begin with their emergence as a gun-rich, conquering elite in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the time of Katanga’s direct incorporation into the long-distance trades in ivory and slaves.

      Novelists have long sensed that the power of objects extends well beyond their immediate service functions. Thus, Joseph Bridau, one of the Comédie humaine’s characters, lamented the passing of the golden age of French aristocracy in the following terms: “The fan of the grande dame is broken. . . . The fan is now used only for fanning. Once a thing is nothing more than what it is, it’s too useful to serve the cause of luxury.”² More than a hundred and fifty years later, historians of technology and material culture have come round to Balzac’s intuition, and the view is now widely shared that artifacts are polysemous; that is, they embody different meanings and fulfill several purposes, both simultaneously and diachronically. In this respect, Katangese guns are not at all unique. But their physical attributes are less easily reducible to a mere manifestation of the human tendency to endow objects and technologies with symbolic significance. Notwithstanding the disparaging assessment of the automatic rifle–carrying ANR officer, when the poupous first made their appearance in Bunkeya in the early twentieth century, they represented a triumphant marriage of local inventiveness and high user demand. The craftsmanship and eclecticism that they exhibit demand our attention, for they speak of long-drawn-out, locally rooted processes of technological engagement and domestication. These processes