The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
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“proverbial old chestnut,”41 historians have rarely gone beyond describing the “role” of guns in warfare and seeking to assess the extent to which their introduction “impacted” on African societies, primarily by bringing about changes in military tactics and organization.42 Early scholarly attention to firearms (aptly illustrated by two special issues of the Journal of African History devoted to the subject in 197143) must be placed in the context of a more general preoccupation with the modalities of the Euro-African encounter at the end of the nineteenth century, a key concern of the first generations of professional historians of Africa. Whatever the reasons behind this early flurry of interest in firearms, the literature it spawned showed, in the words of Bill Storey, “little awareness of the dynamic relationship between society and technology.”44 This literature’s deterministic underpinnings are both indisputable and understandable. Their survival into the present, however, is hardly justifiable, given the intellectual advances summarized so far. As pointed out by a perceptive scholar, the long shadow of technological determinism accounts for a deep-seated inability to think of African firearms as anything other than military or hunting tools.45 As some recent outstanding work demonstrates, the study of African warfare (and, indeed, hunting) remains critically important,46 but one of this book’s central contentions is that only when less predictable patterns of gun usage are taken into account does it become possible to do justice to the full panoply of African understandings of guns in the precolonial and early colonial period.
Meanwhile, disregard for the social construction of technology and the role of African users as agents of re-innovation also accounts for the traction still enjoyed by arguments that either downplay the overall significance of imported weapons on account of their technical shortcomings (see chapter 2 for a fuller discussion), or, at best, state the impossibility of generalization—based on the fact, for example, that “guns were important in particular places at particular times . . . but equally there are times when the scholarly pursuit of the gun is at best a red herring.”47 Richard Reid is certainly correct in implying that guns elicited varied reactions in eastern and central Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century; what remains to be fully explained are the reasons why the outcomes of processes of technological engagement could diverge so dramatically.
Some efforts towards the adoption of constructivist perspectives in the study of guns in Africa have recently been carried out, although these, too, have suffered from a number of limitations that the present work seeks to overcome. In Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa, Storey sets out to extend the analysis of firearms beyond the confines of military history and to “examine the ways in which technology, politics, and society are mutually constituted.” Unlike all the studies that preceded it, Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa rightly refuses to attribute “agency to guns,” even as it teases out their “importance . . . for social and political change.”48 Yet Storey is principally concerned with interracial relations in a colonial context, and the book’s overarching theme is the analysis of the extent to which successive debates about gun ownership and trade contributed to define notions of citizenship and hierarchies of race and power on the imperial frontier. Thus, while both the utility and sign value of guns to settler communities are explored in great depth, readers learn rather less about the ways in which Africans—both within and outside the Cape Colony—domesticated the new technology. Scattered here and there are indications that Africans—no less than settlers—attributed complex cultural meanings to firearms and deployed them for a variety of internal purposes. Storey, for instance, mentions in passing that Africans in the Transkei regarded firearms as insignia of masculinity and that the Sotho resisted disarmament because, by the 1870s, “guns had become linked to the authority of the chiefs.”49 But these insights are not systematically developed. Drawing mainly on official sources and settler newspapers, Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa cannot convey a full appreciation of the complexities of African sociocultural structures. Because of this, the history of African-owned guns presented by Storey is still primarily a history of their service functions. The same is true of Jeff Ramsay’s article-length study, which merely hints at the “significance of firearms as symbolic markers as well as material instruments” in nineteenth-century Botswana.50
A more rounded treatment of the subject could have been expected of Clapperton Mavhunga, whose history of Gonarezhou National Park, in southeastern Zimbabwe, over the past hundred and fifty years is explicitly presented as an attempt to “work at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies . . . and African Studies” by charting the “interactions of people, technology and nature.”51 However, despite a more “Afro-centric” focus than Storey’s book, Mavhunga’s work remains, at heart, an environmental history only occasionally lifted by constructivist perspectives. Mavhunga is certainly not unaware of the dialectical relationships between technology and gender identities,52 but, even here, cultural issues are only tangentially addressed. While making the critical point that, “in the face of local village mobile workshops,” “the European’s instruments” sometimes “acquired uses neither the European designers nor the hunters had bargained for,”53 Mavhunga’s discussion of firearms hardly moves beyond the material aspects of technology transfer and the use value of imported weapons. This limiting approach is also characteristic of Mavhunga’s earlier work.54
Although imperfectly executed, Mavhunga’s central argument—that the study of precolonial Africa has something to offer to science and technology studies—remains valid nonetheless. I maintain that a focus on one specific technological artifact—in this case, firearms—can go some way towards winning the same argument. In many respects, guns in precolonial central Africa work for me as the bicycle does for David Arnold and Erich DeWald in the context of colonial India and Vietnam: as a comparatively accessible and originally exogenous technology whose rapid—though not universal—spread enables one “to observe the wide variety of social uses and cultural understandings to which it gave rise.”55 By the nineteenth century, as will be argued below and in chapter 1, the interior of central Africa encompassed an array of political and cultural systems. This heterogeneity offers ample scope for comparison and makes it possible to illuminate the extent to which different societies responded differently to the same kind of technology, a point that an exclusive focus on relatively homogeneous—if, of course, highly stratified—Western societies tends to obfuscate. Following from this is the emphasis on technological disengagement in the third part of the book. The rejection of a given technology is one aspect of “the agency of potential users” that has “remained largely unexplored in domestication approaches.”56 One of this book’s objectives is to show that acts of willful resistance were no less socioculturally determined than strategies of adoption.
As with any subject of historical inquiry, the trajectory of firearms could have been tackled from a variety of standpoints. It is therefore important to spell out at the outset what this book does not set out to do. The dynamics of the global arms trade—the subject of some well-researched recent works57—fall outside the scope of this book, which is more concerned with the African endpoints of such international small arms transfer systems as came to full fruition in the nineteenth century. Related to this is the fact that this book does not seek to present a comprehensive quantitative analysis (though, when available, quantitative data are interspersed in the narrative). This is, first, because patchy import records from the relevant coastal entry points in Portuguese and Zanzibari hands do not embrace the entire firearms trade, much of which took the form of smuggling.58 It is thus unlikely that significantly more precise figures will ever be arrived at than the nineteenth-century estimates already in circulation (to which reference will be made in due course). Second, even if complete and reliable import statistics were available, they would not cast any light on the distribution of firearms in the interior, for which we must rather rely on the eyewitness accounts of literate observers (about which more will be said below). But the most important reason for not embarking on a quantitative study is that raw numbers are a poor indicator of patterns of domestication. What really matters to me are the uses to which central African actors put their guns, and such uses—be