The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
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in the historical experience of the peoples of the central savanna. By c. 1700, large-scale, centralizing kingdoms were being formed in comparatively favorable ecological locales, distinguishable from surrounding districts by the availability of either fertile alluvial soils or locally and regionally tradable resources, or both. By this stage, however, centers of dynastic power still resembled relatively isolated islands in a sea of micro-polities shaped by the “equalising pressure” of predominantly matrilineal descent rules and the fissiparous tendencies of village life.71 At first, the significance of external commercial influences—of which firearms would eventually become a most fundamental by-product—was limited; when and where it did take place, historical change was still primarily the result of the playing out of endogenous forces. In the nineteenth century, however, the trade in such tropical commodities as ivory and slaves became more and more important to the political economy of the region. By the middle decades of the same century the central savanna had turned into a veritable commercial crossroads: the meeting point of two converging frontiers of long-distance trade anchored in the seaports of present-day Angola, on the one hand, and Tanzania and Mozambique, on the other. The compressed time frame within which the bulk of the central savanna came to be incorporated into global exchange networks is an additional reason for treating it as a discrete historical unit in the late precolonial period.
Within the broad framework of this shared historical experience, however, internal diversity remained salient. Indeed, it became sharper, because the peoples of the savanna responded differently to the challenges and opportunities ushered in by the advance of merchant capital. The nineteenth century in east-central Africa was no doubt traumatic, and the notion of “military revolution” has recently been deployed to describe the increasingly violent and militarized nature of politics in this era of long-distance trade.72 Still, preexisting hierarchies and patterns of governance were not uniformly obliterated by the rise of “new men” and their openly predatory and entrepreneurial political formations.73 Meanwhile, not all militarized new states owed their raison d’être to involvement in global commerce, and there remained numerous clusters of decentralized authority that avoided incorporation into expansive states—regardless of whether the latter were the heirs of time-honored political traditions or the products of new economic circumstances. Even at the height of international trade and political turmoil, the lives of a large number of central African peoples continued to be organized around small-scale sociopolitical structures.
My reliance on the category of “gun society” also calls for a brief introductory commentary. In this volume, the expression is used in the most general and loose possible sense: a gun society is one in which firearms are put to momentous productive, military, and/or other symbolic uses, over a sustained period of time and by a politically or numerically significant portion of the population. To be sure, a more analytically precise, Marxist-influenced definition could have been adopted, with gun societies being described as societies in which the majority of the available guns are utilized as tools of production—that is to say, as hunting implements or military weapons destined to secure both human and material booty. In the event, however, since one of the book’s key objectives is precisely to foreground the variety of sociocultural—as opposed to narrowly military or economic—uses attributed to guns in the central African interior, a less restrictive definition was deemed more appropriate.74
The central savanna’s diversity-in-unity opens up an exciting range of comparative possibilities for the historian interested in investigating conflicting local responses to the same kind of imported technology. This book thus contrasts such gun societies as existed on the upper Zambezi—the border area between present-day Zambia and Angola—and in Katanga, southern DR Congo, in the nineteenth century with communities—primarily the Ngoni of eastern Zambia and Malawi—characterized instead by processes of technological disengagement. Critical as it is, however, the dichotomy between adoption and rejection does not exhaust the history of firearms in the central savanna, for gun societies differed from one another in numerous important respects. The case studies presented in the second part of the book serve to underscore this point. Besides boasting sufficiently detailed sources, the upper Zambezi and Katanga regions comprised a range of political and cultural systems: from ancient monarchical societies to “stateless” ones, passing through new market-oriented warlord polities. These disparities were reflected in different patterns of gun domestication, for different were the configurations of preexisting sociopolitical interests with which the new technology interacted.
Chapter 1, a broad survey of the political and economic history of the central savanna in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, works as an overture. Aimed at the nonspecialist reader, it is intended to enable him/her to negotiate his/her way around the more specific stories of technological engagement—and disengagement—that follow it. It provides a sense of the workings of power and international trade in the macro-region with which the book is concerned, foregrounds the diversity-in-unity that characterized it, and introduces the theme of firearms and the various functions that they could be made to perform.
Chapters 2 and 3 chart the emergence of gun societies on the upper Zambezi and in parts of Katanga in the nineteenth century. Their principal contention is that firearms mattered more to the late precolonial history of these areas than existing studies are prepared to concede. The argument, however, is not couched in simple quantitative terms, not least because such an approach sidesteps the difficult question of the technical weaknesses of the hardware of violence that global trade was then making available to inland societies. Rather, in keeping with the book’s theoretical framework, the two chapters contend that the diffusion and popularity of muskets in the two areas can best be understood by examining, first, the ways in which central African peoples learned to minimize the deficiencies of imported weapons, using them profitably for both economic and military purposes, and, second, the acts of domestication through which they infused the new technology with local meanings that were sometimes at variance with those that it had originally been assigned in the contexts of its production. This heterogeneous process of technological consumption, it will be shown, was in every instance informed by the social and political circumstances in which the imported technology was received.
Looking ahead, chapter 5 serves as a counterpoint to the book’s second and third chapters. It discusses precolonial military conservatism among the Ngoni of Zambia and Malawi, who resisted the adoption of firearms for war purposes, as they regarded the new technology as corrupting and emasculating. Sociocultural opposition, here, had to do with the fact that firearms threatened hegemonic notions of masculinity and honor constructed around combat à l’arme blanche. In so doing, they also threatened to foreclose the opportunities for individual advancement inbuilt in Ngoni polities and their age-grade regimental systems.
The paradoxical outcomes of the imposition of colonial rule from the end of the nineteenth century are described in chapters 4 and 6. Gun laws in British Northern Rhodesia came eventually to be regarded as essential “pacification” tools, serving to symbolize the curtailment of African citizenship rights on which the edifice of European domination was predicated. They thus spelled the end of the gun-centered systems of social relationships that had dominated the upper Zambezi region throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The case of the Yeke of southern Katanga was different, mainly on account of their close alliance with the Congo Free State and its armed forces during the conquest and initial exploitation of the area in the 1890s. The irony is that, in southern Katanga, where early colonial rule was violent and pervasive, African-owned guns ended up retaining a more central—though by no means unaltered—role than they did in comparatively lightly administered North-Western Rhodesia. Conversely, in both Malawi and, especially, eastern Zambia, the arrival of the Europeans, the military defeat they inflicted on the lightly armed Ngoni, and the enforced end of the latter’s raiding economy brought about a marked (and, once more, paradoxical) ideological realignment. Local honor discourses and the military technologies around