to view and photograph some of the firearms held at the Livingstone Museum.
Few of my close personal friends are to be found within the (occasionally suffocating) walls of the academy. But, precisely because they are few, my academic comrades are all the more precious to me. My greatest debt goes to Harri Englund, upon whose friendship and unselfish readiness to offer advice I have always been able to count. Despite his busy schedule, Harri has always found time to comment on the various chunks of the manuscript that I mercilessly inflicted on him. I have, moreover, very fond memories of our short stint of joint fieldwork in Zambia’s Eastern Province (my rabid envy of his proficiency in Chichewa notwithstanding). In Canterbury, Pratik Chakrabarti, Nandini Bhattacharya, Leonie James, Ambrogio Caiani, and Jackie Waller have been rocks of support, spoiling me with their hospitality and generally keeping me on the straight and narrow. Walima Kalusa and Joanna Lewis are both excellent historians and great mates; my knowledge of the central African past has been much enriched by our frequent, rambunctious conversations. Despite having to deal with personal tragedy, Jan-Bart Gewald has remained an exceptionally big-hearted friend over the last ten years or so. Jan-Bart and his late wife, Gertie, also played a critical role in drafting the research proposal that secured the funds without which this book could never have been written. Long may you run, settler boy! Exception made for his interest in ornithology (which, I am convinced, rather cramped our style in southern Congo), Robert Ross was a great traveling companion, whose curiosity and imaginativeness always kept me on my intellectual toes. Robert, too, gave the manuscript a careful reading and made a number of vital suggestions about how best to structure it. Ian Phimister and I have at least one thing in common: the feeling that forbearance might well be an overrated virtue. If this is not the basis of a solid friendship, then I don’t know what is. Ian was also kind enough repeatedly to host me in his Bloemfontein lair, where parts of this book were first presented to wonderfully attentive audiences, and, later, prepared for publication. Other research seminars and conferences where I discussed my initial findings took place at SOAS (University of London), the University of Kent, and Leiden University. I am obliged to the attendees for their stimulating comments.
Having until recently been the only Africanist in the School of History of the University of Kent, the feeling of intellectual isolation is not unknown to me. I am therefore sincerely grateful to my PhD students, Jack Hogan, John Kegel, and Peter Nicholls, for having made my Kentish “Bantustan” a less lonely place. Besides learning to put up with my tactlessness and impatience, and producing an excellent set of maps, Jack also generously shared much useful primary material from his outstanding work on the abolition of slavery in western Zambia. Since 2012, my third-year special subject—“Kingdoms of the Savannah: The Political History of Central Africa, c. 1700 to c. 1900”—has attracted a number of terrific students. I am both gratified and touched by their readiness to be challenged by a comparatively recondite—and uniquely complicated—subject. For those among them who are contemplating Africanist careers, the message is simple: there’s still plenty of room in the savanna.
This book was made possible by a three-year-long grant from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek and the related concession of an extended study leave by the University of Kent in 2009–2011. Naturally, I am much indebted to both organizations. A very early version of chapter 2 has been published as “Reassessing the Significance of Firearms in Central Africa: The Case of North-Western Zambia to the 1920s” in the Journal of African History. Sections of chapters 5 and 6 are reprinted by permission of the publishers from “‘They Disdain Firearms’: The Relationship between Guns and the Ngoni of Eastern Zambia to the Early Twentieth Century,” in A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire, which volume I had the pleasure of editing alongside Karen Jones and David Welch. Also, I am grateful to Gillian Berchowitz, the director of Ohio University Press, and the editors of its splendid New African Histories series. Jean Allman, Allen Isaacman, and Derek Peterson all took a keen interest in the project, waited patiently for the manuscript, and then offered perceptive remarks about how best to go about improving it.
My daughter Davina, around whom my world revolves, has been clamoring for a dedication for quite some time. Finally, here it is, bambina: questo libro é tutto per te.
A Note on Hereditary Titles
Hereditary titles are italicized throughout to distinguish them from personal names. I use standard roman type only when the title in question is accompanied by the name of its holder, or when the context makes it plain that I am alluding to one particular, if unnamed, individual incumbent. Thus, for example, I write the “Ruund of the Mwant Yav” to refer to the people who acknowledged the sway of an undetermined number of successive holders of the royal title (Mwant Yav), but the “Ruund of Mwant Yav Mukaz” to describe the followers of one specific king—in this case, Mukaz, who briefly held the reins of power in the Ruund heartland in the 1880s.
INTRODUCTION
Firearms and the History of Technology in Africa
THE POLICE post in Bunkeya, Mwami Msiri’s old imperial capital in the present Territoire de Lubudi of southern Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo (“DR Congo”), is a shabby—if colorful—place. On a pleasant day early in August 2011, Robert Ross, Pierre Kalenga, and I entered it to announce our presence in town for a brief stint of research. The plan was to bring to an end our dealings with the local representatives of the Agence Nationale des Renseignements (or “ANR,” somewhat optimistically described to me as “the Congolese FBI”) as soon as diplomacy and politeness made it possible. In the event, something caught our attention and made us stay longer than we envisaged: a heap of rusty firearms occupying a sizeable portion of the floor surface of the tiny room into which we had been ushered. The guns in question comprised a dizzying variety of models, though percussion-lock muzzle-loaders were the most numerous. What all of these firearms had in common, however, was that they had been manufactured locally, using gun scraps, homemade pieces, and industrial parts. Upon inquiry, we discovered that the guns—commonly going under the obviously onomatopoeic name of “poupous”—had been subject to precautionary confiscation from local residents in the spring of 1997, when Laurent D. Kabila’s forces had entered the town during the campaign that would shortly thereafter result in the overthrow of long-serving dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
“Surely they don’t work now?” I asked.
“No, but many of them were already useless back in 1997,” was the reply of one of the two officers.
FIGURE 0.1. Homemade poupous, Bunkeya, DR Congo. Photograph by the author, August 2011.
“Why keep them, then?” I inquired, rather unimaginatively.
“Who knows? Most villagers have them. It’s part of being a man . . . a père de famille.”
At one level, of course, Bunkeya’s poupous—accessible tools of self-protection in a country where threats of violence and predation have often been part and parcel of the daily lives of ordinary people—encapsulate the troubled postcolonial history of the Congo. At another, they illustrate the historical relation between the Yeke of Katanga and hunting, an activity with which the poupous have been closely associated from the early decades of the twentieth century. Once central to the workings of Msiri’s warlord state and the livelihoods of the people of the district, hunting continues to play a marginal, seasonal role in the domestic economy of some Yeke households.
But,
