the context of the commodity’s increasing rarity and such preexisting cultural parameters as Akan color symbolism and notions of purity.37 In other words, gin—like every other imported commodity—was always “likely to be incorporated into African consumptive patterns in ways that [made] sense in the context of existing yet continually changing world views, rather than according to the intended uses of the foreign producers.”38
The history of clothes has revealed similar findings. In an important essay, Jean Comaroff describes, inter alia, the “host of imaginative possibilities” that the missionary-promoted spread of European apparel opened up for Tswana chiefs and, to a lesser extent, commoners from the early decades of the nineteenth century. The consumption of imported clothing throughout much of the century was infused with “local signs and values” and was shaped by indigenous social hierarchies and political interests. Particularly indicative of this “promiscuous syncretism” was the case of the Bakwena ruler, Sechele, who in 1860 commissioned a Western-style suit to be made out of leopard skin. Here, contrary to what even some of his own subjects assumed, the chief was not merely giving in to mimicry and emulation of encroaching Europeans. On the contrary, by combining the autochthonous symbolism of the leopard skin with the prestige-enhancing attributes of European dress, he was making an “effort to mediate the two exclusive systems of authority at war in his world, striving perhaps to fashion a power greater than the sum of its parts.”39 More generally, the centrality of “local circumstances” and “local fields of power” in the remaking of Western-style dress and the values inscribed in them is one of the main threads of Fashioning Africa, a fascinating collection whose editor, Jean Allman, reminds us that “the meanings of one particular item of clothing can be, and often are, completely transformed when moved across time and space. . . . While Western-style dress may have been ‘foreign’ in origin, its gendered, social, and political meanings were constructed locally. . . . In short, fashion may be a language spoken everywhere, but it is never a universal language.”40
While highlighting the multiple possible outcomes of domestication/creolization processes, all of these various histories of externally introduced consumer goods in Africa point to the centrality of preexisting social, political, and economic structures in orienting patterns of engagement with a given commodity or technology as it moves across cultural contexts. As will be seen, my reading of the history of firearms in precolonial and early colonial central Africa takes this insight to heart.
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF FIREARMS IN AFRICA
The history of technology in Africa—as the previous section has begun to argue—is both comparatively undeveloped and still largely steeped in obsolete paradigms. Firearms represent only a partial exception to the general rule, for while much has been written about this “proverbial old chestnut,”41 historians have rarely gone beyond describing the “role” of guns in warfare and seeking to assess the extent to which their introduction “impacted” on African societies, primarily by bringing about changes in military tactics and organization.42 Early scholarly attention to firearms (aptly illustrated by two special issues of the Journal of African History devoted to the subject in 197143) must be placed in the context of a more general preoccupation with the modalities of the Euro-African encounter at the end of the nineteenth century, a key concern of the first generations of professional historians of Africa. Whatever the reasons behind this early flurry of interest in firearms, the literature it spawned showed, in the words of Bill Storey, “little awareness of the dynamic relationship between society and technology.”44 This literature’s deterministic underpinnings are both indisputable and understandable. Their survival into the present, however, is hardly justifiable, given the intellectual advances summarized so far. As pointed out by a perceptive scholar, the long shadow of technological determinism accounts for a deep-seated inability to think of African firearms as anything other than military or hunting tools.45 As some recent outstanding work demonstrates, the study of African warfare (and, indeed, hunting) remains critically important,46 but one of this book’s central contentions is that only when less predictable patterns of gun usage are taken into account does it become possible to do justice to the full panoply of African understandings of guns in the precolonial and early colonial period.
Meanwhile, disregard for the social construction of technology and the role of African users as agents of re-innovation also accounts for the traction still enjoyed by arguments that either downplay the overall significance of imported weapons on account of their technical shortcomings (see chapter 2 for a fuller discussion), or, at best, state the impossibility of generalization—based on the fact, for example, that “guns were important in particular places at particular times . . . but equally there are times when the scholarly pursuit of the gun is at best a red herring.”47 Richard Reid is certainly correct in implying that guns elicited varied reactions in eastern and central Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century; what remains to be fully explained are the reasons why the outcomes of processes of technological engagement could diverge so dramatically.
Some efforts towards the adoption of constructivist perspectives in the study of guns in Africa have recently been carried out, although these, too, have suffered from a number of limitations that the present work seeks to overcome. In Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa, Storey sets out to extend the analysis of firearms beyond the confines of military history and to “examine the ways in which technology, politics, and society are mutually constituted.” Unlike all the studies that preceded it, Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa rightly refuses to attribute “agency to guns,” even as it teases out their “importance . . . for social and political change.”48 Yet Storey is principally concerned with interracial relations in a colonial context, and the book’s overarching theme is the analysis of the extent to which successive debates about gun ownership and trade contributed to define notions of citizenship and hierarchies of race and power on the imperial frontier. Thus, while both the utility and sign value of guns to settler communities are explored in great depth, readers learn rather less about the ways in which Africans—both within and outside the Cape Colony—domesticated the new technology. Scattered here and there are indications that Africans—no less than settlers—attributed complex cultural meanings to firearms and deployed them for a variety of internal purposes. Storey, for instance, mentions in passing that Africans in the Transkei regarded firearms as insignia of masculinity and that the Sotho resisted disarmament because, by the 1870s, “guns had become linked to the authority of the chiefs.”49 But these insights are not systematically developed. Drawing mainly on official sources and settler newspapers, Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa cannot convey a full appreciation of the complexities of African sociocultural structures. Because of this, the history of African-owned guns presented by Storey is still primarily a history of their service functions. The same is true of Jeff Ramsay’s article-length study, which merely hints at the “significance of firearms as symbolic markers as well as material instruments” in nineteenth-century Botswana.50
A more rounded treatment of the subject could have been expected of Clapperton Mavhunga, whose history of Gonarezhou National Park, in southeastern Zimbabwe, over the past hundred and fifty years is explicitly presented as an attempt to “work at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies . . . and African Studies” by charting the “interactions of people, technology and nature.”51 However, despite a more “Afro-centric” focus than Storey’s book, Mavhunga’s work remains, at heart, an environmental history only occasionally lifted by constructivist perspectives. Mavhunga is certainly not unaware of the dialectical relationships between technology and gender identities,52 but, even here, cultural issues are only tangentially addressed. While making the critical point that, “in the face of local village mobile workshops,” “the European’s instruments” sometimes “acquired uses neither the European designers nor the hunters had bargained for,”53 Mavhunga’s discussion of firearms hardly moves beyond the material aspects of technology transfer and the use value of imported weapons. This limiting
