Katanga—and, as I will argue, elsewhere—cannot be reduced to their military and economic functions. Although regional specialists have been slow to acknowledge the phenomenon, a “surplus of meaning” has clearly been inscribed upon this technological artifact.1 Besides working as defensive and hunting tools, Bunkeya’s poupous have also been endowed with a host of less predictable symbolic attributes. As adumbrated by my informant, in some contexts homemade guns were and are probably less valued as operating weapons than as markers of masculinity and signs of patriarchal status and self-reliance. The reasons why one bundle of cultural meanings prevailed over several different possible combinations are eminently historical. That is, they become accessible to historians only when they are appraised in the light of the specific experiences and worldviews of the people concerned and the changes they underwent across different historical frameworks. In the case of the Yeke, the story would have to begin with their emergence as a gun-rich, conquering elite in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the time of Katanga’s direct incorporation into the long-distance trades in ivory and slaves.
Novelists have long sensed that the power of objects extends well beyond their immediate service functions. Thus, Joseph Bridau, one of the Comédie humaine’s characters, lamented the passing of the golden age of French aristocracy in the following terms: “The fan of the grande dame is broken. . . . The fan is now used only for fanning. Once a thing is nothing more than what it is, it’s too useful to serve the cause of luxury.”2 More than a hundred and fifty years later, historians of technology and material culture have come round to Balzac’s intuition, and the view is now widely shared that artifacts are polysemous; that is, they embody different meanings and fulfill several purposes, both simultaneously and diachronically. In this respect, Katangese guns are not at all unique. But their physical attributes are less easily reducible to a mere manifestation of the human tendency to endow objects and technologies with symbolic significance. Notwithstanding the disparaging assessment of the automatic rifle–carrying ANR officer, when the poupous first made their appearance in Bunkeya in the early twentieth century, they represented a triumphant marriage of local inventiveness and high user demand. The craftsmanship and eclecticism that they exhibit demand our attention, for they speak of long-drawn-out, locally rooted processes of technological engagement and domestication. These processes lie at the heart of this book, which approaches the trajectory of firearms in central Africa from a culturally sensitive perspective that embraces both the practical applications of guns and the set of values and meanings that they have been taken to encompass.
Focusing as it does on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the early history of central Africa’s entanglements with gun technology—the exercise is mired in complexity. Given the nature and limitations of the available source material, the holistic treatment of firearms that I advocate will sometimes remain more of an ideal towards which to strive than a tangible realization. But the current “foreshortening of African history” recently decried by Richard Reid makes the effort worthwhile.3 This book, then, is driven by a double ambition, seeking both to make a stand against the increasing marginalization of African precolonial history in the academy and to take up David Edgerton’s call to shift the study of technology away from its “historically familiar surroundings.”4 My two overarching aims, in fact, are closely interlaced, for one key strategy to rekindle scholarly interest in precolonial history is to establish a dialogue with theories and concepts originating from other disciplines and historical fields. It is to a quick discussion of these literatures that the next two sections of this introduction are dedicated.
SOCIETY AND TECHNOLOGY
There used to be a time in which the relation between technology and society was understood in simple unidirectional terms: technological progress was the work of exceptional individuals, who deployed their genius and scientific prowess to invent the artifacts that mechanically transformed society and drove it forward, towards ever-increasing levels of well-being and/or mastery over previously unharnessed forces of nature. In this reading, technological evolution possessed a kind of inner, implacable logic. The great contribution of “social construction of technology” (SCOT) approaches has been to complicate this linear model of development and to hand back to users of technology their historical role. Beginning with the work of Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, whose “manifesto” first appeared in the mid-1980s,5 SCOT theorists showed that technologies were invariably the outcomes of compromises—compromises that called into question the inventors’ ostensible isolation from society and politics and that highlighted the inanity of any attempt to distinguish “between a world of engineering on the one hand and a world of the social on the other.”6 In so doing, they began to bring to the fore what they termed the “interpretative flexibility” of technology: the fact that a given technological artifact is open to more than one understanding and that its applications, far from always being the predetermined outcome of the intentions of inventors, are often also the result of the choices and predilections of users. What SCOT illuminated, then, was the agency of users in shaping technological innovation—and, therefore, producers’ strategies—by attributing both predictable and unanticipated functions to specific artifacts. The histories of technologies, in sum, reveal that the latter have frequently been “employed in ways quite different from those for which they were originally intended.”7
However, as pointed out by Ronald Kline and, again, Pinch in a famous intervention, the SCOT paradigm did suffer from some “important weaknesses” in its early formulation.8 Constructivist students of technology reconceptualized the inventor/user nexus, but did not quite explode it. As agents of technological change, users were rightly conceived of as belonging to “social groups,” but only rarely did SCOT theorists engage with these same groups’ internal composition and the dynamics of power that underlay them. The focus of this scholarship—as Gabrielle Hecht remarked—remained squarely on the “construction of technology,” rather than “on the construction of culture or politics.”9 This atrophied picture of social relations (what Pinch and Bijker themselves referred to in passing as the “wider sociopolitical milieu”10) was accompanied by a narrow focus on the functional—as opposed to the symbolic—properties of technologies.11
It is at this level that consumption studies, an important branch of “material culture studies” in the UK,12 have proved especially useful in shifting the field forward. By locating consumers in much broader networks of relations than did early constructivist students of technology, sociologists and anthropologists, in particular, have articulated “the importance of the sign value rather than the utility value of things.”13 Objects, in this perspective, are “socially and culturally salient entities,” which “change in defiance of their material stability” and which are endowed with expressive and symbolic attributes.14 To put it differently, they provide a means of communication, an idiom through which to convey a variety of aims relating to individual and collective identities. The meanings conferred to commodities by consumers “express cultural categories and principles, cultivate ideals, create and sustain lifestyles, construct notions of the self, and create (and survive) social change.”15 Material things, students of consumption have established, are embedded in human social relations, which they help forge, consolidate, and even subvert.
This concern for the “material constitution of sociality” has shaped the recent work of historians of material culture and their important debate about the origins and workings of modern consumer society.16 The power of things to construct identities and signify status is central to much of this scholarship—as attested, for instance, by Deborah Cohen’s influential study of the interiors of middle-class homes in nineteenth-century Britain.17 In Cohen’s expert hands, the story of Victorian domestic possessions is the story of their transformation from signs of sinful worldliness to means of individual self-expression in the face of the homogenizing pressures of mass society.
Within science and technology studies, a marriage of sorts between the findings of SCOT and anthropological approaches to consumption has been effected by analyses that adopt so-called “domestication” perspectives. As deployed
