imperfectly executed, Mavhunga’s central argument—that the study of precolonial Africa has something to offer to science and technology studies—remains valid nonetheless. I maintain that a focus on one specific technological artifact—in this case, firearms—can go some way towards winning the same argument. In many respects, guns in precolonial central Africa work for me as the bicycle does for David Arnold and Erich DeWald in the context of colonial India and Vietnam: as a comparatively accessible and originally exogenous technology whose rapid—though not universal—spread enables one “to observe the wide variety of social uses and cultural understandings to which it gave rise.”55 By the nineteenth century, as will be argued below and in chapter 1, the interior of central Africa encompassed an array of political and cultural systems. This heterogeneity offers ample scope for comparison and makes it possible to illuminate the extent to which different societies responded differently to the same kind of technology, a point that an exclusive focus on relatively homogeneous—if, of course, highly stratified—Western societies tends to obfuscate. Following from this is the emphasis on technological disengagement in the third part of the book. The rejection of a given technology is one aspect of “the agency of potential users” that has “remained largely unexplored in domestication approaches.”56 One of this book’s objectives is to show that acts of willful resistance were no less socioculturally determined than strategies of adoption.
As with any subject of historical inquiry, the trajectory of firearms could have been tackled from a variety of standpoints. It is therefore important to spell out at the outset what this book does not set out to do. The dynamics of the global arms trade—the subject of some well-researched recent works57—fall outside the scope of this book, which is more concerned with the African endpoints of such international small arms transfer systems as came to full fruition in the nineteenth century. Related to this is the fact that this book does not seek to present a comprehensive quantitative analysis (though, when available, quantitative data are interspersed in the narrative). This is, first, because patchy import records from the relevant coastal entry points in Portuguese and Zanzibari hands do not embrace the entire firearms trade, much of which took the form of smuggling.58 It is thus unlikely that significantly more precise figures will ever be arrived at than the nineteenth-century estimates already in circulation (to which reference will be made in due course). Second, even if complete and reliable import statistics were available, they would not cast any light on the distribution of firearms in the interior, for which we must rather rely on the eyewitness accounts of literate observers (about which more will be said below). But the most important reason for not embarking on a quantitative study is that raw numbers are a poor indicator of patterns of domestication. What really matters to me are the uses to which central African actors put their guns, and such uses—be they practical or symbolic, conventional or innovative, consistent or inconsistent with the intentions of producers and traders—cannot be inferred from numbers alone. Once more, I find myself in agreement with Arnold and DeWald. Commenting on the comparatively small number of bicycles imported into colonial India and Vietnam, they explain that “the importance of the bicycle can best be measured less in terms of ‘global diffusion’ . . . than of the way in which it became implicated in the lifestyles and work regimes of a significant section of the population, and was caught up in issues of race, class, and gender, and of national identity and colonial state power.”59 Mutatis mutandis, I am making the same point with regards to precolonial central Africa.
More controversially, perhaps, this book is only tangentially concerned with the realm of the supernatural. Partly, this is in reaction to the once liberating but now increasingly formulaic tendency to portray Africans as “viscerally” religious beings, either “empowered or oppressed,” but never left unaffected, by “invisible forces.”60 It is also a result of my contention that spiritual appraisals of guns, though not infrequent, were not the key factor influencing central Africa’s terms of engagement with the new technology in the precolonial and early colonial eras. These factors, I argue, are instead to be located in a much broader understanding of social structures—one which, of course, encompasses religious manifestations but is by no means confined to them. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Lozi monarchs bolstered their newly regained position and asserted the modernity and worthiness of the social order they dominated by centralizing the gun trade of the upper Zambezi floodplain into their own hands and by inserting firearms into royal symbolism. At precisely the same time, the Yeke of warlord Msiri put them at the service of an unprecedented, market-driven system of economic spoliation in southern Katanga. And while Chokwe and Luvale hunters were incorporating them into their societies as irreplaceable markers of masculinity and individually owned tools for the production of human and animal capital, guns were willfully resisted in eastern Zambia and Malawi by Ngoni fighters bent on scaling their regimental organization through the display of heroic honor in hand-to-hand combat. In North-Western Zambia, meanwhile, kiKaonde-speakers had begun to employ them as a polyvalent currency as well. To be sure, all of these disparate “worldly” uses and understandings of firearms, and the attested proficiency of Central African gun-menders—a central theme of the chapters included in part two of this book and one which is also briefly touched upon in important essays by Joseph Miller, Jean-Luc Vellut, and Maria Emilia Madeira Santos61—do not rule out the possibility that some Africans at least appealed to supernatural forces to account for the ultimate functioning of firearms and to enhance their lethality (for one artifact showing evidence of such an appeal, see chapter 2, figure 2.2). Nor do these worldly uses and understandings mean that guns were not deployed, just like other weapons, in religious ceremonies intended to obtain the blessing of ancestors—not least in the context of ritually empowered activities, such as hunting and warfare.62 But they certainly suggest that exoticizing readings of the relationship between Africans and firearms do not tell the full story, or even the most important part of it. A stress on invisible entities and forces, moreover, runs the unintended risk of driving a wedge between technology and human initiative—which is precisely what this book sets out to avoid.
My refusal to analyze technology as an independent variable—and, more generally, to attribute “agency” (whether “primary” or, as per Alfred Gell, “secondary”) to material things—may be questioned by scholars such as Nicole Boivin, who has recently argued that the very physicality of objects or technologies, their “materiality,” grants them the power to “act as agents independently of people.”63 My sense is that, no matter how sophisticated, attempts inspired by Actor Network Theory to overcome socially constructivist positions invariably end up reintroducing forms of technological determinism—or even evolutionism!—through the back door. While I make no apology for clinging to the essence of what Boivin belittles as “humanistic and idealistic thought,” I am also readily prepared to concede the well-taken point, that the emphasis on the processes through which society conditions technology has sometimes led us to lose sight of the equally “urgent task of understanding how technology concurrently shapes society.”64 This book seeks to avoid this pitfall by examining both the ways in which firearms were incorporated into existing sociocultural relationships and the ways in which such acts of vernacularization rebounded on, and led to change within, the same sociocultural settings. Thus, to use Ann Stahl’s terminology, this book is not a “history of a material,” but a “material history”—a history, that is, built on the premise that “bodily engagement with material worlds” is both an effect and a cause of the “social and ideational realm.”65 The simplest possible way of summarizing my philosophical standpoint is that while I am loath to efface the ontological difference between objects and people—or between technologies and social relations—I am willing to accept that these domains transform one another. While being fitted into contexts, technological objects contribute to the formation of the same contexts.66
The history of European hunting and its interactions with African practices and ecological knowledge in the age of empire
