The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
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traders—cannot be inferred from numbers alone. Once more, I find myself in agreement with Arnold and DeWald. Commenting on the comparatively small number of bicycles imported into colonial India and Vietnam, they explain that “the importance of the bicycle can best be measured less in terms of ‘global diffusion’ . . . than of the way in which it became implicated in the lifestyles and work regimes of a significant section of the population, and was caught up in issues of race, class, and gender, and of national identity and colonial state power.”59 Mutatis mutandis, I am making the same point with regards to precolonial central Africa.
More controversially, perhaps, this book is only tangentially concerned with the realm of the supernatural. Partly, this is in reaction to the once liberating but now increasingly formulaic tendency to portray Africans as “viscerally” religious beings, either “empowered or oppressed,” but never left unaffected, by “invisible forces.”60 It is also a result of my contention that spiritual appraisals of guns, though not infrequent, were not the key factor influencing central Africa’s terms of engagement with the new technology in the precolonial and early colonial eras. These factors, I argue, are instead to be located in a much broader understanding of social structures—one which, of course, encompasses religious manifestations but is by no means confined to them. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Lozi monarchs bolstered their newly regained position and asserted the modernity and worthiness of the social order they dominated by centralizing the gun trade of the upper Zambezi floodplain into their own hands and by inserting firearms into royal symbolism. At precisely the same time, the Yeke of warlord Msiri put them at the service of an unprecedented, market-driven system of economic spoliation in southern Katanga. And while Chokwe and Luvale hunters were incorporating them into their societies as irreplaceable markers of masculinity and individually owned tools for the production of human and animal capital, guns were willfully resisted in eastern Zambia and Malawi by Ngoni fighters bent on scaling their regimental organization through the display of heroic honor in hand-to-hand combat. In North-Western Zambia, meanwhile, kiKaonde-speakers had begun to employ them as a polyvalent currency as well. To be sure, all of these disparate “worldly” uses and understandings of firearms, and the attested proficiency of Central African gun-menders—a central theme of the chapters included in part two of this book and one which is also briefly touched upon in important essays by Joseph Miller, Jean-Luc Vellut, and Maria Emilia Madeira Santos61—do not rule out the possibility that some Africans at least appealed to supernatural forces to account for the ultimate functioning of firearms and to enhance their lethality (for one artifact showing evidence of such an appeal, see chapter 2, figure 2.2). Nor do these worldly uses and understandings mean that guns were not deployed, just like other weapons, in religious ceremonies intended to obtain the blessing of ancestors—not least in the context of ritually empowered activities, such as hunting and warfare.62 But they certainly suggest that exoticizing readings of the relationship between Africans and firearms do not tell the full story, or even the most important part of it. A stress on invisible entities and forces, moreover, runs the unintended risk of driving a wedge between technology and human initiative—which is precisely what this book sets out to avoid.
My refusal to analyze technology as an independent variable—and, more generally, to attribute “agency” (whether “primary” or, as per Alfred Gell, “secondary”) to material things—may be questioned by scholars such as Nicole Boivin, who has recently argued that the very physicality of objects or technologies, their “materiality,” grants them the power to “act as agents independently of people.”63 My sense is that, no matter how sophisticated, attempts inspired by Actor Network Theory to overcome socially constructivist positions invariably end up reintroducing forms of technological determinism—or even evolutionism!—through the back door. While I make no apology for clinging to the essence of what Boivin belittles as “humanistic and idealistic thought,” I am also readily prepared to concede the well-taken point, that the emphasis on the processes through which society conditions technology has sometimes led us to lose sight of the equally “urgent task of understanding how technology concurrently shapes society.”64 This book seeks to avoid this pitfall by examining both the ways in which firearms were incorporated into existing sociocultural relationships and the ways in which such acts of vernacularization rebounded on, and led to change within, the same sociocultural settings. Thus, to use Ann Stahl’s terminology, this book is not a “history of a material,” but a “material history”—a history, that is, built on the premise that “bodily engagement with material worlds” is both an effect and a cause of the “social and ideational realm.”65 The simplest possible way of summarizing my philosophical standpoint is that while I am loath to efface the ontological difference between objects and people—or between technologies and social relations—I am willing to accept that these domains transform one another. While being fitted into contexts, technological objects contribute to the formation of the same contexts.66
The history of European hunting and its interactions with African practices and ecological knowledge in the age of empire has already been expertly told with reference to a number of localities.67 The same is true of the relationship between gun ownership and settler identities in specific colonial contexts.68 Neither of these two subjects (for the study of which abundant sources could have been mobilized) is thus central to my purposes. My interest, once again, lies in guns in African hands, and in how guns changed—and were changed by—different African societies in the late precolonial period and beyond.
The final caveat to be introduced at this stage is that this book is not a technical compendium. Gun enthusiasts and encyclopedists should steer well clear of it. Granted, an understanding of the technical properties of successive models (and perhaps even a modicum of what Otto Sibum calls “gestural,” or experiential, “knowledge”69) is necessary meaningfully to write about them, but firearms as collectable objects, sporting tools, or aesthetic products are of no intrinsic interest to me. Guns, in my reading, are no more (and no less!) than a useful prism through which to examine some of the most significant and abiding aspects of the history of central Africa in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. One of my most sincere hopes is that my efforts, circumscribed and provisional as they are, might still go some way towards revitalizing engagement with a region of the continent and a period of its history that, despite having lain very close to the heart of the Africanist canon only a few decades ago, have lately suffered from serious scholarly neglect.
DEFINITIONS AND OVERVIEW
Drawing on a range of theoretical concepts originating from outside the field of African studies, this book offers the first detailed history of firearms in central Africa between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Intended as an exploration of the intersections between technology, society, politics, and culture, it adopts a comparative perspective to chart, and account for, different user and potential user reactions to the same externally introduced technology.
All of the case studies presented in this volume belong to what might be loosely called the interior of central Africa—or, more precisely, the central portion of the southern savanna, the vast stretch of open grasslands and woodlands lying between the Congo basin rainforest and the Zambezi River, to the north and south, respectively, Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi, in the east, and the upper Zambezi and upper Kasai Rivers, in the west.70 Over the past millennium, this macro-region of central Africa has been characterized by a blend of unity and diversity, and the interplay of continuity and transformation. Prevailing ecological conditions dictated the basic parameters of historical development for the Bantu-speaking colonists who made the area their home. Defining structural forces included the overall sparseness of population and the scarcity of the natural resources at its disposal. From the standpoint of Fernand Braudel’s “geo-history,” then, the central savanna should be viewed as the site of a centuries-long, unspectacular struggle on the part of farmers, fisherfolk, and, less commonly, cattle keepers to make the most of their harsh environment.
Social and economic “trends” more relevant to the subject and chronological framework