2 and 3 chart the emergence of gun societies on the upper Zambezi and in parts of Katanga in the nineteenth century. Their principal contention is that firearms mattered more to the late precolonial history of these areas than existing studies are prepared to concede. The argument, however, is not couched in simple quantitative terms, not least because such an approach sidesteps the difficult question of the technical weaknesses of the hardware of violence that global trade was then making available to inland societies. Rather, in keeping with the book’s theoretical framework, the two chapters contend that the diffusion and popularity of muskets in the two areas can best be understood by examining, first, the ways in which central African peoples learned to minimize the deficiencies of imported weapons, using them profitably for both economic and military purposes, and, second, the acts of domestication through which they infused the new technology with local meanings that were sometimes at variance with those that it had originally been assigned in the contexts of its production. This heterogeneous process of technological consumption, it will be shown, was in every instance informed by the social and political circumstances in which the imported technology was received.
Looking ahead, chapter 5 serves as a counterpoint to the book’s second and third chapters. It discusses precolonial military conservatism among the Ngoni of Zambia and Malawi, who resisted the adoption of firearms for war purposes, as they regarded the new technology as corrupting and emasculating. Sociocultural opposition, here, had to do with the fact that firearms threatened hegemonic notions of masculinity and honor constructed around combat à l’arme blanche. In so doing, they also threatened to foreclose the opportunities for individual advancement inbuilt in Ngoni polities and their age-grade regimental systems.
The paradoxical outcomes of the imposition of colonial rule from the end of the nineteenth century are described in chapters 4 and 6. Gun laws in British Northern Rhodesia came eventually to be regarded as essential “pacification” tools, serving to symbolize the curtailment of African citizenship rights on which the edifice of European domination was predicated. They thus spelled the end of the gun-centered systems of social relationships that had dominated the upper Zambezi region throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The case of the Yeke of southern Katanga was different, mainly on account of their close alliance with the Congo Free State and its armed forces during the conquest and initial exploitation of the area in the 1890s. The irony is that, in southern Katanga, where early colonial rule was violent and pervasive, African-owned guns ended up retaining a more central—though by no means unaltered—role than they did in comparatively lightly administered North-Western Rhodesia. Conversely, in both Malawi and, especially, eastern Zambia, the arrival of the Europeans, the military defeat they inflicted on the lightly armed Ngoni, and the enforced end of the latter’s raiding economy brought about a marked (and, once more, paradoxical) ideological realignment. Local honor discourses and the military technologies around which they revolved impressed British policy makers, who construed the Ngoni of Zambia as a “martial race,” partly on account of their enthusiasm for edged weapons and close combat. This led to large-scale recruitment of Ngoni into colonial paramilitary police forces. Under the new circumstances, the gun became everything it had not been in the precolonial context, gradually replacing the assegai as the central symbol of Ngoni masculinity and major vehicle for individual improvement.
The conclusion draws together these various themes and explores their contemporary relevance.
SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY
This book draws mainly on nineteenth-century travelogues, written records of oral tradition and literature, linguistic evidence, and early colonial material. As a commercial watershed and arena of sustained political and cultural exchanges, the central savanna attracted a considerable number of literate witnesses over the course of the nineteenth century. Their published and unpublished accounts vary in quality, often depending on the motives of the authors concerned. Thus, whereas full ethnographic descriptions are sometimes available (the works of such explorers as Antonio Gamitto, David Livingstone, and Henrique de Carvalho spring to mind in this context), other accounts—especially those of traders drawn to the region for primarily economic purposes—are more sketchy and less conducive to in-depth historical treatment.
These limitations, of course, are to be expected and form part of the daily staple of every historian. More intractable are the problems posed by the increasingly racialized context out of which the reports of nineteenth-century witnesses emerged. As documented by an extensive literature,75 “Orientalist” biases permeate these sources, not least when they address the subject of non-Western warfare and its tools. Richard Reid has thus shown that on the eve of, and during, the “Scramble for Africa,” African violence was often depicted as senseless, the result of savage passion rather than cold calculation.76 These Victorian fantasies, of course, worked towards legitimizing the resort to extreme violence on the part of the Europeans themselves. In the context of the present discussion, however, the key point to be retained is that students of firearms must be fully alive to the extent to which many nineteenth-century Western observers felt inclined to belittle African life and ways of waging war, in general, and African marksmanship and knowledge of guns, in particular. The limited attention such observers devoted to matters of tactics is partly a consequence of this intellectual proclivity, and it explains this book’s inability to offer more than perfunctory treatment of actual military maneuvers.77
To be sure, then, the historian of African firearms must come to grips with the sway of pervasive racially infused stereotypes in the available written sources. What needs to be avoided at all costs, however, is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. While accepting that Western travelogues are, to an extent, “discourses” that cannot be taken at face value, I, like Roy Bridges, maintain that text is not everything and that “the depiction of the ‘Other’ is, whatever the distortions, in some way related to what they were actually like.”78 Once more, the argument has been made most forcefully by Reid. European and other non-African observers of precolonial life and its conflicts “often reached the wrong overall conclusions . . . owing to the frameworks in which they were doing the business of observing and then writing . . . But they absorbed an enormous amount of what was going on around them, and understood a great deal more than they have frequently been given credit for.”79 Their accounts, moreover, never completely silenced African voices—just like their heroic descriptions of “lonely” itineraries though “uncharted wildernesses” never fully disguised their practical reliance on African intermediaries, skills, and manpower.80 Much of the information that travelers recorded was derived from Africans. Though often rendered “virtually invisible,” the African informant remains inscribed in the record, “his presence felt in much of the data and interpretation that frequently [was] posited as the author’s own. Indeed, in the very texts that are held to be the clearest expressions of European prejudice, written by the harbingers of a new imperial order, we can also, if we listen carefully enough, hear a multitude of African voices.”81
In sum, for all of the “racial, cultural and political shortcomings” of their authors,82 the nineteenth-century accounts of traders, explorers, missionaries, and hunters continue to offer significant opportunities to the historian of late precolonial Africa. Their value to students of socioeconomic change, in general, and technology, in particular, emerges with special clarity when these sources are weighed against oral ones. As pointed out by William Clarence-Smith several years ago, the key problem with the traditions of high political offices is their selectivity, which, in turn, is the direct effect of their “serving to reproduce the superstructures of a given society.” Because of this, oral traditions—Clarence-Smith’s neo-Annalist critique contended—hardly lent themselves to writing anything other than elite political history in the narrowest possible sense.83 Although Jan Vansina was no doubt correct in replying that Clarence-Smith had overlooked the
