The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
As a result, while the overall cohesiveness of the Bemba “federation” might not have increased greatly, each Bena Ngandu chief, dealing on his own terms with coastal traders, used imported commodities to augment his “ability to attract and reward supporters.”74 As will be seen in the next chapter, after overthrowing the Kololo in the 1864, the Lozi maintained their erstwhile conquerors’ open-door policy vis-à-vis foreign traders, but reverted to being a slave-importing—as opposed to slave-exporting—society. This, and Litungas Sipopa and Lewanika’s skills in retaining ultimate control over foreign trade and the circulation of charismatic goods—firearms included—that came with it, help explain why the kingdom did not experience the same decline as the Ruund and Luba states underwent, and why it would eventually negotiate its incorporation into emerging colonial structures at the end of the century from a position of comparative strength.
FURTHER CHALLENGES FROM THE SOUTH
A significant role in extending the sway of merchant capital over parts of the central savanna was also played by Portuguese settlements in Zambezia, in the lower Zambezi Valley in present-day central Mozambique. In the eighteenth century, perhaps the majority of the slaves obtained by the lower Zambezi’s prazeiros—the Africanized descendants of the land-grant holders originally recognized by the Portuguese Crown in the seventeenth century—were retained on their estates (prazos) and put to productive uses.75 Some of their number, however, were organized into standing armies and entrusted with the task of policing the sprawling concessions and enforcing the subjugation of both their free and unfree cultivators. Occupying a most ambiguous social location, armed slaves, known locally as chikunda, were both “the objects of domination and the means by which the prazeiros controlled the peasantry and accumulated wealth.”76 In time, the chikunda—who also worked for their owners as elephant hunters, slave raiders, and long-distance traders—gave birth to a distinctive ethnic identity, one structured around such cultural markers as a “disdain for agricultural labor”—which the Chikunda construed as the preserve of women, common slaves, and subjugated peasants—and the glorification of masculine, martial pursuits such as warfare and hunting, with the notable aid of imported and partly homemade firearms.77
Slave exports from Quelimane boomed early in the nineteenth century, when the port to the north of the mouth of the Zambezi began to attract Brazilian and other ships bent on escaping abolitionist efforts along the Atlantic coast of Africa.78 The intensification of the southern slave trade meant that the Chikunda were no longer regarded as members of a comparatively privileged slave community, but, increasingly, as mere chattel for export. The Chikunda reacted violently to the new state of affairs, and slave insurrections and large-scale flights became the order of the day on the lower Zambezi. By the middle of the century, the prazo system had completely collapsed. Its fall resulted in the de facto emancipation of thousands of former armed slaves.79 As Allen and Barbara Isaacman have expertly shown,80 newly freed Chikunda had a number of options open to them in the new circumstances. Some continued to operate within the Portuguese sphere, working as professional hunters and porters for Luso-African traders (collectively known as muzungus). Other Chikunda—whom the Isaacmans refer to as “transfrontiersmen”—moved permanently away from the lower Zambezi. While some of these migrants ended up selling their military and hunting skills to vulnerable Chewa, Nsenga, and Gwembe Tonga communities, other Chikunda turned into state builders. Led by muzungu adventurers, Chikunda polities sprang up near the Luangwa-Zambezi confluence from the 1860s. Some at least of these new formations—especially those of the warlords Kanyemba and Matakenya—were veritable conquest states, resembling in many respects the creations of Msiri and other Congolese warlords. The products of the slave and ivory frontiers, Chikunda warlord states resorted to large-scale raiding and taxed local inhabitants mercilessly. With guns being deployed as their principal tools of commodity production, Chikunda conquerors made a significant contribution to regional instability, laying waste to large areas of present-day southern, central, and eastern Zambia.
Besides contending with the forces of merchant capital, the societies of the central savanna also had to deal with the extensive ripples of the South African Mfecane. Several reasons have been adduced to explain the turmoil that affected present-day KwaZulu-Natal and neighboring areas early in the nineteenth century. It has been argued, for instance, that conflict over scarce resources increased from about 1750 as a result of either demographic growth, climatic change, or both. Other scholars have preferred to relate competition among northern Nguni-speakers to the expansion of the trade flowing out of Portuguese-dominated Delagoa Bay in southern Mozambique.81 Whatever its ultimate causes, increasing tension in KwaZulu-Natal precipitated processes of centralization and enlargement of political scale. Among the northern Nguni, state formation took one very specific course. Age sets, or amabutho, had been a distinctive feature of social organization in the area for decades, if not centuries. In their original form, the amabutho consisted of groupings of young men “brought together by chiefs for short periods to be taken through the rites of circumcision and perhaps to engage in certain services, such as hunting.”82 In the deteriorating political landscape of the late eighteenth century, local leaders transformed these age sets into labor and war regiments. So reconfigured, the amabutho took on the character of standing armies: they were both a consequence and a cause of the increasing level of militarism obtaining among the northern Nguni.
By the late eighteenth century, a number of opposing power blocs—the principal of which were the Ngwane, the Ndwandwe, and the Mthetwa—had emerged. Conflict between them eventually span out of control, precipitating the so-called Mfecane, a series of wars and migrations that transformed the sociopolitical landscape not only of KwaZulu-Natal, but of the broader southern African region as well. Among the protagonists of the turmoil were Sebitwane—the Sotho-speaking chief of the aforementioned Kololo, the migrant group who conquered and ruled the upper Zambezi floodplain and the Caprivi Strip between the early 1840s and the Luyana/Lozi reconquista of 1864—and Zwangendaba Jere, the war leader to whom the principal Ngoni groups of present-day eastern Zambia and Malawi trace their origin. Coming into their own in the second half of the nineteenth century, the conquering Ngoni kingdoms spawned by the Mfecane affected roughly the same areas as those into which Chikunda “transfrontiersmen” were then expanding. As will be seen in chapter 5, the Ngoni approach both to international commerce and to firearms, its most fundamental of by-products, differed from that of the Chikunda. But, even though the Ngoni’s military preparedness had nothing to do with access to firearms, and was rather the result of the “meritocratic” aspects inherent in Ngoni age-set regiment systems, its effects undoubtedly magnified the violence and insecurity that accompanied the inland advance of the frontier of merchant capital.
. . .
The primary aim of this chapter was to supply the reader with enough background data to engage with the chapters that follow. Given their imbrication in large-scale sociopolitical developments, firearms have already repeatedly cropped up in the discussion, providing some indication of the varied reactions they elicited, and the different meanings and functions attributed to them, across the central savanna. It is now time to explore these reactions and productions more systematically.
PART II
Guns and Society on the Upper Zambezi and in Katanga
2
The Domestication of the Musket on the Upper Zambezi
HOW DID the diversity-in-unity described in chapter 1 affect patterns of gun domestication in the interior of central Africa? This chapter begins to address the question by charting the relations between firearms and the peoples of the upper Zambezi, the area to which we first turn on account of its comparatively early exposure to the new technology. In the previous chapter, the point has already been adumbrated that central African responses to firearms were not uniform: different societies understood guns differently, attributing them culturally specific meanings and functions; the transformative effects of