The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
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race,” partly on account of their enthusiasm for edged weapons and close combat. This led to large-scale recruitment of Ngoni into colonial paramilitary police forces. Under the new circumstances, the gun became everything it had not been in the precolonial context, gradually replacing the assegai as the central symbol of Ngoni masculinity and major vehicle for individual improvement.
The conclusion draws together these various themes and explores their contemporary relevance.
SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY
This book draws mainly on nineteenth-century travelogues, written records of oral tradition and literature, linguistic evidence, and early colonial material. As a commercial watershed and arena of sustained political and cultural exchanges, the central savanna attracted a considerable number of literate witnesses over the course of the nineteenth century. Their published and unpublished accounts vary in quality, often depending on the motives of the authors concerned. Thus, whereas full ethnographic descriptions are sometimes available (the works of such explorers as Antonio Gamitto, David Livingstone, and Henrique de Carvalho spring to mind in this context), other accounts—especially those of traders drawn to the region for primarily economic purposes—are more sketchy and less conducive to in-depth historical treatment.
These limitations, of course, are to be expected and form part of the daily staple of every historian. More intractable are the problems posed by the increasingly racialized context out of which the reports of nineteenth-century witnesses emerged. As documented by an extensive literature,75 “Orientalist” biases permeate these sources, not least when they address the subject of non-Western warfare and its tools. Richard Reid has thus shown that on the eve of, and during, the “Scramble for Africa,” African violence was often depicted as senseless, the result of savage passion rather than cold calculation.76 These Victorian fantasies, of course, worked towards legitimizing the resort to extreme violence on the part of the Europeans themselves. In the context of the present discussion, however, the key point to be retained is that students of firearms must be fully alive to the extent to which many nineteenth-century Western observers felt inclined to belittle African life and ways of waging war, in general, and African marksmanship and knowledge of guns, in particular. The limited attention such observers devoted to matters of tactics is partly a consequence of this intellectual proclivity, and it explains this book’s inability to offer more than perfunctory treatment of actual military maneuvers.77
To be sure, then, the historian of African firearms must come to grips with the sway of pervasive racially infused stereotypes in the available written sources. What needs to be avoided at all costs, however, is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. While accepting that Western travelogues are, to an extent, “discourses” that cannot be taken at face value, I, like Roy Bridges, maintain that text is not everything and that “the depiction of the ‘Other’ is, whatever the distortions, in some way related to what they were actually like.”78 Once more, the argument has been made most forcefully by Reid. European and other non-African observers of precolonial life and its conflicts “often reached the wrong overall conclusions . . . owing to the frameworks in which they were doing the business of observing and then writing . . . But they absorbed an enormous amount of what was going on around them, and understood a great deal more than they have frequently been given credit for.”79 Their accounts, moreover, never completely silenced African voices—just like their heroic descriptions of “lonely” itineraries though “uncharted wildernesses” never fully disguised their practical reliance on African intermediaries, skills, and manpower.80 Much of the information that travelers recorded was derived from Africans. Though often rendered “virtually invisible,” the African informant remains inscribed in the record, “his presence felt in much of the data and interpretation that frequently [was] posited as the author’s own. Indeed, in the very texts that are held to be the clearest expressions of European prejudice, written by the harbingers of a new imperial order, we can also, if we listen carefully enough, hear a multitude of African voices.”81
In sum, for all of the “racial, cultural and political shortcomings” of their authors,82 the nineteenth-century accounts of traders, explorers, missionaries, and hunters continue to offer significant opportunities to the historian of late precolonial Africa. Their value to students of socioeconomic change, in general, and technology, in particular, emerges with special clarity when these sources are weighed against oral ones. As pointed out by William Clarence-Smith several years ago, the key problem with the traditions of high political offices is their selectivity, which, in turn, is the direct effect of their “serving to reproduce the superstructures of a given society.” Because of this, oral traditions—Clarence-Smith’s neo-Annalist critique contended—hardly lent themselves to writing anything other than elite political history in the narrowest possible sense.83 Although Jan Vansina was no doubt correct in replying that Clarence-Smith had overlooked the multiplicity of oral forms subsumed under the category of “oral tradition,”84 the core of Clarence-Smith’s argument holds more than a grain of truth: if political traditions were all there was, historians interested in precolonial social and economic dynamics would find themselves in a very tight corner indeed. Their task, moreover, is not made any easier by the realization that only limited trust can be placed in focused oral interviews centering on a period at several generations remove from the present. The few interviews that I carried out with renowned community historians in southern Katanga and eastern Zambia suggest that significant local historical knowledge continues to exist—especially, perhaps, about the modalities of the colonial encounter at the end of the nineteenth century. In only a handful of cases, however, was such knowledge independent of locally available published accounts and did it extend to the specific subject of this work.85 Western travelogues allow the historian in some part to overcome such stringencies.
So, in theory at least, does historical linguistics (to which Vansina himself eventually turned his attention from the 1980s). Insofar as they embody evidence about the past, words are documents in their own right. The problem with our topic is that, not infrequently, guns were given onomatopoeic names (such as the poupous of Swahili-speaking southern Congo with which this introduction began) or drily descriptive ones (often semantically related to words for “fire,” “noise,” “smoke,” or similar qualities). For obvious reasons, words of this type are scarcely conducive to historical treatment. Still, the vocabulary of gun societies does permit us to draw useful inferences. A particularly rich lexicon about firearms, for instance, is a sure indication of profound and intimate technological engagement, on the origin and nature of which some of the words in question might cast a specific light. Songs—as shown by numerous specialists86—are another important resource for the historian of precolonial central Africa, in general, and the student of firearms, in particular. Though published and unpublished collections of songs do not cover all the localities and societies I am interested in, the songs I do draw upon provide important windows into local cultural identities and economic practices, and the extent to which guns came to be entangled in both.87
Early missionary sources (mainly those produced by the Free Church of Scotland, active around Lake Malawi from the mid-1870s, the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, whose representatives first visited the upper Zambezi in the late 1870s, and the Plymouth Brethren, in Katanga since 1886) and official and unofficial colonial records (from the terrifyingly explicit personal papers of Congo Free State official Clément “Nkulukulu” Brasseur to the more anodyne reports of the British administration in Northern Rhodesia) have been employed primarily to investigate aspects of the colonial encounter, the formulation and implementation of gun control laws, and early patterns of colonial police recruitment. When compiled by perceptive, ethnographically minded observers, however, these sources also illuminate at least some of the workings of the processes of technological domestication during the decades that preceded their authors’ arrival on the central African scene.
Finally, of course, there is the information that can be extracted from surviving precolonial and early colonial guns themselves. Some of these weapons have remained in local hands. Others are preserved in both African and European museums. A few specimens appear in the photographs included in the book. As the relevant captions clarify, whenever possible, I availed myself of the opportunity to draw on expert technical knowledge and advice