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 Though published and unpublished collections of songs do not cover all the localities and societies I am interested in, the songs I do draw upon provide important windows into local cultural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 to “read” such material evidence.
In sum, the trajectory of firearms in central Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was variegated and multistranded. So, too, must be the sources that permit us to study it.
PART I
Contexts
1
Power and International Trade in the Savanna
THIS CHAPTER offers a preliminary overview of the main drivers of the history of the central African interior. Its principal aim is to contextualize the case studies presented in parts two and three of this book by exploring, first, the workings of power in the central savanna from c. 1700 and, second, the changes in governmentality precipitated by its growing involvement in global trading networks over the course of the nineteenth century. As Steven Feierman and other historians of eastern Africa have argued, such changes were often revolutionary, leading to the emergence of new social groups, new polities, and new ways of enforcing authority.1 In the troubled nineteenth century, individual charisma and military success became undoubtedly more central to the wielding of political power than they had been in previous centuries. Still, the impact of violent innovation was not the same everywhere. The “hereditary” and “mystical” principles of political organization discussed in the first section of this chapter did not disappear overnight, and an exclusive stress on historical ruptures runs the risk of obfuscating patterns of continuity.2 The experiences of dislocation and turmoil were pervasive, but so were attempts to neutralize or adapt to them. Commercially driven violence and the increasing availability of firearms could provide the bases for the growth of new warlord polities and related mercenary groups, and they could bring to a premature end preexisting state-building efforts. But they could also be harnessed by, and thus inject new life into, the latter. Broad generalizations, then, are not the best way to address the changing political culture of the central savanna in the nineteenth century. Neither should the one-sidedly gruesome descriptions that many coeval Western observers indulged in be swallowed hook, line, and sinker. What can be said with certainty is that the intrusion of merchant capital and its African spearheads left central Africa more politically and culturally heterogeneous than it had ever been at any time in its long past.
The chapter also introduces the theme of firearms, describing the timing and modalities of their arrival on the central savanna and offering some initial indications of the disparate reactions that they gave rise to. The interaction between the peoples of the central African interior and firearms must be regarded as an instance of cross-cultural technological consumption. African understandings of guns were as complex as they were contingent, and one of the overarching arguments of this book is that the meanings and functions that the peoples of the central savanna attributed to firearms were shaped by preexisting sociocultural relationships and political interests. Without an appreciation of the multiplicity and diversity of such relationships and interests, it is impossible to grasp the logic behind the heterogeneity in patterns of gun domestication that characterized the region. Guns, as later chapters will show, were appropriated differently by different groups, for different were the sociopolitical contexts into which the new technology came to be fitted.
The final objective of this chapter is to introduce nonspecialist readers to the intricacies of the precolonial history of a macro-region that is frequently overlooked in recent general syntheses. It is therefore unashamedly encyclopedic in tone and structure. Since it paints with a broad brush and covers a wide array of areas, peoples, and themes, the chapter might perhaps be regarded as a kind of legenda, to which readers might want occasionally to refer back as they proceed with the rest of the book.
THE CENTRAL SAVANNA TO THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
This section concentrates on the workings of power in the interior of central Africa before external trading influences began to make themselves uniformly felt in the nineteenth century. Any such discussion must begin by stressing that the vast stretch of open grasslands and woodlands found between the Congo basin rainforest and the Zambezi River offered an altogether unpropitious environment for political entrepreneurs. In this region of “pedestrians and paddlers,”3 state building involved the consolidation of structures and institutions that brought together for regulatory and extractive purposes several descent groups, the main units in central African political relations over the past thousand years or more.4
