and eastern Zambia.
Besides contending with the forces of merchant capital, the societies of the central savanna also had to deal with the extensive ripples of the South African Mfecane. Several reasons have been adduced to explain the turmoil that affected present-day KwaZulu-Natal and neighboring areas early in the nineteenth century. It has been argued, for instance, that conflict over scarce resources increased from about 1750 as a result of either demographic growth, climatic change, or both. Other scholars have preferred to relate competition among northern Nguni-speakers to the expansion of the trade flowing out of Portuguese-dominated Delagoa Bay in southern Mozambique.81 Whatever its ultimate causes, increasing tension in KwaZulu-Natal precipitated processes of centralization and enlargement of political scale. Among the northern Nguni, state formation took one very specific course. Age sets, or amabutho, had been a distinctive feature of social organization in the area for decades, if not centuries. In their original form, the amabutho consisted of groupings of young men “brought together by chiefs for short periods to be taken through the rites of circumcision and perhaps to engage in certain services, such as hunting.”82 In the deteriorating political landscape of the late eighteenth century, local leaders transformed these age sets into labor and war regiments. So reconfigured, the amabutho took on the character of standing armies: they were both a consequence and a cause of the increasing level of militarism obtaining among the northern Nguni.
By the late eighteenth century, a number of opposing power blocs—the principal of which were the Ngwane, the Ndwandwe, and the Mthetwa—had emerged. Conflict between them eventually span out of control, precipitating the so-called Mfecane, a series of wars and migrations that transformed the sociopolitical landscape not only of KwaZulu-Natal, but of the broader southern African region as well. Among the protagonists of the turmoil were Sebitwane—the Sotho-speaking chief of the aforementioned Kololo, the migrant group who conquered and ruled the upper Zambezi floodplain and the Caprivi Strip between the early 1840s and the Luyana/Lozi reconquista of 1864—and Zwangendaba Jere, the war leader to whom the principal Ngoni groups of present-day eastern Zambia and Malawi trace their origin. Coming into their own in the second half of the nineteenth century, the conquering Ngoni kingdoms spawned by the Mfecane affected roughly the same areas as those into which Chikunda “transfrontiersmen” were then expanding. As will be seen in chapter 5, the Ngoni approach both to international commerce and to firearms, its most fundamental of by-products, differed from that of the Chikunda. But, even though the Ngoni’s military preparedness had nothing to do with access to firearms, and was rather the result of the “meritocratic” aspects inherent in Ngoni age-set regiment systems, its effects undoubtedly magnified the violence and insecurity that accompanied the inland advance of the frontier of merchant capital.
. . .
The primary aim of this chapter was to supply the reader with enough background data to engage with the chapters that follow. Given their imbrication in large-scale sociopolitical developments, firearms have already repeatedly cropped up in the discussion, providing some indication of the varied reactions they elicited, and the different meanings and functions attributed to them, across the central savanna. It is now time to explore these reactions and productions more systematically.
PART II
Guns and Society on the Upper Zambezi and in Katanga
2
The Domestication of the Musket on the Upper Zambezi
HOW DID the diversity-in-unity described in chapter 1 affect patterns of gun domestication in the interior of central Africa? This chapter begins to address the question by charting the relations between firearms and the peoples of the upper Zambezi, the area to which we first turn on account of its comparatively early exposure to the new technology. In the previous chapter, the point has already been adumbrated that central African responses to firearms were not uniform: different societies understood guns differently, attributing them culturally specific meanings and functions; the transformative effects of guns themselves varied accordingly. This chapter teases out some of the possible outcomes of cross-cultural technological consumption in the central savanna by contrasting gun holding among the rigidly hierarchical Luyana/Lozi of the upper Zambezi floodplain with the situation obtaining among the smaller-scale hunting and raiding groups to their north and northeast. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it will be argued, newly restored Lozi elites reasserted the sway of the monarchical dispensation following a period of foreign domination by centralizing the gun trade of the floodplain and by inserting firearms into royal symbolism. In more politically fragmented contexts, however, the domestication of externally introduced firearms conformed to a different pattern. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that among Luvale and Kaonde hunters imported muskets were deployed less as means of political centralization and monarchical celebration than as individually owned tools of commodity production and markers of masculinity. Among the Kaonde, moreover, muskets were also reconstructed as a form of currency.
The chapter also tackles the difficult question of the practical effectiveness of the guns made available to central African societies over the course of the nineteenth century. In dealing with this “proverbial old chestnut,”1 historians of such diverse territories as eighteenth-century Madagascar and nineteenth-century central Sudan have pointed to the technical deficiencies of imported guns in the context of arguments against overstating their overall significance.2 Although such perspectives play down the historical centrality of firearms, their underpinnings, in keeping with much of the history of technology in Africa, remain fundamentally deterministic: if the technology was not sufficiently “developed,” then its “impact” on society could not possibly have been profound.
The hold of these views is evident in the literature pertaining to the border region between present-day Zambia and Angola. Joseph Miller, for instance, regarded the “unreliability” of European trade guns—only a “small percentage” of which “survived the first few attempts to fire them”—as one of the principal causes of the continuity in military hardware and organization that characterized the Angolan interior in the eighteenth century.3 In a similar vein, Achim von Oppen’s study of the precolonial economy of the upper Zambezi and Kasai region in the nineteenth century presents the “remarkably poor” performance and “very limited durability” of the lazarinas or lazarinos (see figures 2.1 and 2.2), the often untested flintlock muzzle-loaders that dominated the trade between the central Angolan plateau and the Zambezi headwaters in the nineteenth century, as indications that neither the reported disappearance of elephants in the area from c. 1850 nor the depletion of game in general can be ascribed with any certainty to the spread of guns.4
FIGURE 2.1. Lazarina, Musée Royal de l’Armée, Brussels, Belgium. Photograph by the author, July 2012. Initially produced in the eighteenth century by the Portuguese manufacturer Lázaro Lazarino Legítimo of Braga, by the middle of the following century, the time in which Liège began seriously to compete with Birmingham in the production of Africa-bound trade guns, the bulk of the muskets imported into Angola consisted of Belgian imitations. According to the explorer Serpa Pinto, the Belgian-made lazarinas employed and traded by the Ovimbundu of central Angola in the second half of the nineteenth century were “but a clumsy imitation of the perfect weapon turned out by the celebrated” Lázaro Lazarino. Alexandre A. da Rocha de Serpa Pinto, How I Crossed Africa, tr. Alfred Elwes (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1881), 1:179.
