The same is true of the relationship between gun ownership and settler identities in specific colonial contexts.68 Neither of these two subjects (for the study of which abundant sources could have been mobilized) is thus central to my purposes. My interest, once again, lies in guns in African hands, and in how guns changed—and were changed by—different African societies in the late precolonial period and beyond.
The final caveat to be introduced at this stage is that this book is not a technical compendium. Gun enthusiasts and encyclopedists should steer well clear of it. Granted, an understanding of the technical properties of successive models (and perhaps even a modicum of what Otto Sibum calls “gestural,” or experiential, “knowledge”69) is necessary meaningfully to write about them, but firearms as collectable objects, sporting tools, or aesthetic products are of no intrinsic interest to me. Guns, in my reading, are no more (and no less!) than a useful prism through which to examine some of the most significant and abiding aspects of the history of central Africa in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. One of my most sincere hopes is that my efforts, circumscribed and provisional as they are, might still go some way towards revitalizing engagement with a region of the continent and a period of its history that, despite having lain very close to the heart of the Africanist canon only a few decades ago, have lately suffered from serious scholarly neglect.
DEFINITIONS AND OVERVIEW
Drawing on a range of theoretical concepts originating from outside the field of African studies, this book offers the first detailed history of firearms in central Africa between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Intended as an exploration of the intersections between technology, society, politics, and culture, it adopts a comparative perspective to chart, and account for, different user and potential user reactions to the same externally introduced technology.
All of the case studies presented in this volume belong to what might be loosely called the interior of central Africa—or, more precisely, the central portion of the southern savanna, the vast stretch of open grasslands and woodlands lying between the Congo basin rainforest and the Zambezi River, to the north and south, respectively, Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi, in the east, and the upper Zambezi and upper Kasai Rivers, in the west.70 Over the past millennium, this macro-region of central Africa has been characterized by a blend of unity and diversity, and the interplay of continuity and transformation. Prevailing ecological conditions dictated the basic parameters of historical development for the Bantu-speaking colonists who made the area their home. Defining structural forces included the overall sparseness of population and the scarcity of the natural resources at its disposal. From the standpoint of Fernand Braudel’s “geo-history,” then, the central savanna should be viewed as the site of a centuries-long, unspectacular struggle on the part of farmers, fisherfolk, and, less commonly, cattle keepers to make the most of their harsh environment.
Social and economic “trends” more relevant to the subject and chronological framework of this book also reveal significant underlying commonalities in the historical experience of the peoples of the central savanna. By c. 1700, large-scale, centralizing kingdoms were being formed in comparatively favorable ecological locales, distinguishable from surrounding districts by the availability of either fertile alluvial soils or locally and regionally tradable resources, or both. By this stage, however, centers of dynastic power still resembled relatively isolated islands in a sea of micro-polities shaped by the “equalising pressure” of predominantly matrilineal descent rules and the fissiparous tendencies of village life.71 At first, the significance of external commercial influences—of which firearms would eventually become a most fundamental by-product—was limited; when and where it did take place, historical change was still primarily the result of the playing out of endogenous forces. In the nineteenth century, however, the trade in such tropical commodities as ivory and slaves became more and more important to the political economy of the region. By the middle decades of the same century the central savanna had turned into a veritable commercial crossroads: the meeting point of two converging frontiers of long-distance trade anchored in the seaports of present-day Angola, on the one hand, and Tanzania and Mozambique, on the other. The compressed time frame within which the bulk of the central savanna came to be incorporated into global exchange networks is an additional reason for treating it as a discrete historical unit in the late precolonial period.
Within the broad framework of this shared historical experience, however, internal diversity remained salient. Indeed, it became sharper, because the peoples of the savanna responded differently to the challenges and opportunities ushered in by the advance of merchant capital. The nineteenth century in east-central Africa was no doubt traumatic, and the notion of “military revolution” has recently been deployed to describe the increasingly violent and militarized nature of politics in this era of long-distance trade.72 Still, preexisting hierarchies and patterns of governance were not uniformly obliterated by the rise of “new men” and their openly predatory and entrepreneurial political formations.73 Meanwhile, not all militarized new states owed their raison d’être to involvement in global commerce, and there remained numerous clusters of decentralized authority that avoided incorporation into expansive states—regardless of whether the latter were the heirs of time-honored political traditions or the products of new economic circumstances. Even at the height of international trade and political turmoil, the lives of a large number of central African peoples continued to be organized around small-scale sociopolitical structures.
My reliance on the category of “gun society” also calls for a brief introductory commentary. In this volume, the expression is used in the most general and loose possible sense: a gun society is one in which firearms are put to momentous productive, military, and/or other symbolic uses, over a sustained period of time and by a politically or numerically significant portion of the population. To be sure, a more analytically precise, Marxist-influenced definition could have been adopted, with gun societies being described as societies in which the majority of the available guns are utilized as tools of production—that is to say, as hunting implements or military weapons destined to secure both human and material booty. In the event, however, since one of the book’s key objectives is precisely to foreground the variety of sociocultural—as opposed to narrowly military or economic—uses attributed to guns in the central African interior, a less restrictive definition was deemed more appropriate.74
The central savanna’s diversity-in-unity opens up an exciting range of comparative possibilities for the historian interested in investigating conflicting local responses to the same kind of imported technology. This book thus contrasts such gun societies as existed on the upper Zambezi—the border area between present-day Zambia and Angola—and in Katanga, southern DR Congo, in the nineteenth century with communities—primarily the Ngoni of eastern Zambia and Malawi—characterized instead by processes of technological disengagement. Critical as it is, however, the dichotomy between adoption and rejection does not exhaust the history of firearms in the central savanna, for gun societies differed from one another in numerous important respects. The case studies presented in the second part of the book serve to underscore this point. Besides boasting sufficiently detailed sources, the upper Zambezi and Katanga regions comprised a range of political and cultural systems: from ancient monarchical societies to “stateless” ones, passing through new market-oriented warlord polities. These disparities were reflected in different patterns of gun domestication, for different were the configurations of preexisting sociopolitical interests with which the new technology interacted.
Chapter 1, a broad survey of the political and economic history of the central savanna in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, works as an overture. Aimed at the nonspecialist reader, it is intended to enable him/her to negotiate his/her way around the more specific stories of technological engagement—and disengagement—that follow it. It provides a sense of the workings of power and international trade in the macro-region with which the book is concerned, foregrounds the diversity-in-unity that characterized it, and introduces the theme of firearms and the various functions that they could be made to perform.
