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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 guns themselves varied accordingly. This chapter teases out some of the possible outcomes of cross-cultural technological consumption in the central savanna by contrasting gun holding among the rigidly hierarchical Luyana/Lozi of the upper Zambezi floodplain with the situation obtaining among the smaller-scale hunting and raiding groups to their north and northeast. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it will be argued, newly restored Lozi elites reasserted the sway of the monarchical dispensation following a period of foreign domination by centralizing the gun trade of the floodplain and by inserting firearms into royal symbolism. In more politically fragmented contexts, however, the domestication of externally introduced firearms conformed to a different pattern. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that among Luvale and Kaonde hunters imported muskets were deployed less as means of political centralization and monarchical celebration than as individually owned tools of commodity production and markers of masculinity. Among the Kaonde, moreover, muskets were also reconstructed as a form of currency.

The chapter also tackles the difficult question of the practical effectiveness of the guns made available to central African societies over the course of the nineteenth century. In dealing with this “proverbial old chestnut,”¹ historians of such diverse territories as eighteenth-century Madagascar and nineteenth-century central Sudan have pointed to the technical deficiencies of imported guns in the context of arguments against overstating their overall significance.² Although such perspectives play down the historical centrality of firearms, their underpinnings, in keeping with much of the history of technology in Africa, remain fundamentally deterministic: if the technology was not sufficiently “developed,” then its “impact” on society could not possibly have been profound.

The hold of these views is evident in the literature pertaining to the border region between present-day Zambia and Angola. Joseph Miller, for instance, regarded the “unreliability” of European trade guns—only a “small percentage” of which “survived the first few attempts to fire them”—as one of the principal causes of the continuity in military hardware and organization that characterized the Angolan interior in the eighteenth century.³ In a similar vein, Achim von Oppen’s study of the precolonial economy of the upper Zambezi and Kasai region in the nineteenth century presents the “remarkably poor” performance and “very limited durability” of the lazarinas or lazarinos (see figures 2.1 and 2.2), the often untested flintlock muzzle-loaders that dominated the trade between the central Angolan plateau and the Zambezi headwaters in the nineteenth century, as indications that neither the reported disappearance of elephants in the area from c. 1850 nor the depletion of game in general can be ascribed with any certainty to the spread of guns.⁴

FIGURE 2.1. Lazarina, Musée Royal de l’Armée, Brussels, Belgium. Photograph by the author, July 2012. Initially produced in the eighteenth century by the Portuguese manufacturer Lázaro Lazarino Legítimo of Braga, by the middle of the following century, the time in which Liège began seriously to compete with Birmingham in the production of Africa-bound trade guns, the bulk of the muskets imported into Angola consisted of Belgian imitations. According to the explorer Serpa Pinto, the Belgian-made lazarinas employed and traded by the Ovimbundu of central Angola in the second half of the nineteenth century were “but a clumsy imitation of the perfect weapon turned out by the celebrated” Lázaro Lazarino. Alexandre A. da Rocha de Serpa Pinto, How I Crossed Africa, tr. Alfred Elwes (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1881), 1:179. Perhaps because of its comparatively late production date (Liège, c. 1900), the piece reproduced here would seem to belie Serpa Pinto’s trenchant remarks. Unusually for African trade muskets, the barrel of this lazarina was tested at the Liège proof house, whose marks it bears, alongside the (fake) label “Lazaro Lazarino Legitimo Debraga.” Obvious African inscriptions include the wooden stick used as a ramrod and the two amulets attached to the trigger piece. (See figure 2.2, below.) My thanks to Paul Dubrunfaut, keeper of firearms at the Musée Royal de l’Armée, for sharing information about the musket in his safekeeping. Courtesy of the Musée Royal de l’Armée, Brussels. See also Jean-Luc Vellut, “L’économie internationale des côtes de Guinée Inférieure au XIXe siècle,” in Actas de I reunião internacional de história de África: Relação Europa-África no 3° quartel do séc. XIX, ed. Maria Emilia Madeira Santos (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1989), 172–73; Emrys Chew, Arming the Periphery: The Arms Trade in the Indian Ocean during the Age of Global Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 86–90.

FIGURE 2.2. Lazarina, Musée Royal de l’Armée, Brussels, Belgium (detail). Photograph by the author, July 2012. One of the two charms is a string of dried snake skin; the other consists of an elongated pouch containing medicinal powder. Despite the patrimony of shooting skills accumulated by African gun users on the upper Zambezi, supernatural assistance was often considered necessary to ensure accurate firing and the success of the hunt. Courtesy of the Musée Royal de l’Armée, Brussels.

This chapter offers an alternative reading of the available evidence. By reexamining the movement and dynamics of the gun frontier in the upper Zambezi area, it contends that scholarly opinion that minimizes the centrality of imported guns on account of their technical shortcomings is misleading on at least three counts. First, the alleged weaknesses of the new technology are hard to reconcile with the upper Zambezi’s unquenchable demand for European-made guns from the early nineteenth century onwards and the fact that, as Miller himself is aware, firearms always constituted “the ‘very soul of commerce’ in the exchange of people for goods” in the Angolan interior. “No Africans dealing with the foreigners,” Miller elaborated, “could pass up the opportunity to acquire a gun and a supply of powder, and Africans would refuse all other wares and withdraw from negotiations if the assortment of goods offered lacked these essential components.”⁵ If firearms had really been invariably inefficient, and therefore of only marginal economic and military significance, then it is not at all clear why the bulk of the inhabitants of the region consistently insisted on obtaining them throughout the era of the long-distance trade.⁶ To put it differently: it behooves historians to try to account for the reported African “passion” for muskets and for their “indispensability” to trade in the interior.⁷

Second, as already pointed out by Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, an exclusive emphasis on the technical shortcomings of trade guns trivializes the proficiency of nineteenth-century central African master ironsmiths.⁸ Far from being the unchangeable “relic[s] of a very distant past,” African ironworkers—Colleen Kriger has powerfully argued—displayed a clear and sustained ability to react to changed historical conditions, adapting their work and techniques “to new surroundings and opportunities. . . . Their history involves more than the initial introduction of iron into society, and ironworking was not a complete, self-contained package of tools and processes that was introduced once and then simply continued for centuries.”⁹ The sparse but compelling evidence examined in this and the next chapter suggests that African ironworkers not infrequently possessed the specialized skills and knowhow necessary to overcome or minimize the inherent deficiencies of the new technology.¹⁰ These skills, no doubt, contributed to enhance such already considerable social prestige and professional autonomy as they had attained over the course of previous centuries. As remarked by Rory Pilossof, the full history has yet to be written of the “lively small-scale firearm repair and service industry” that developed in precolonial Africa.¹¹ The data presented here reinforce Pilossof’s contention.

Third, and most important, to stress the poor quality of a given technology is often to ignore the latter’s “interpretative flexibility”—the fact, that is, that “there is no one essential use that can be deduced from the artifact itself.”¹² Over the course of the nineteenth century central Africa’s gun societies adopted firearms for an array of practical and symbolic uses. Going beyond the military and economic spheres, such uses were sometimes at variance with those for which the weapons had originally been manufactured in their European settings. In other words, in assessing the historical significance of guns on the upper Zambezi, what Clapperton Mavhunga calls the specific “roles that Africans gave to firearms in contexts internal to their circumstances” need to be explored alongside more predictable patterns of gun deployment.¹³

MAP 2.1. The Upper Zambezi in the nineteenth century.

By understanding guns in terms of their own varied idioms of power and sociocultural forms, the peoples of the upper Zambezi operated as agents of re-innovation. In the process, they created the conditions that enabled them to engage with a technology that, in other frameworks, might have been regarded as merely obsolete and inadequate.

SLOW BEGINNINGS IN BAROTSELAND

As has been argued in chapter 1, the appearance of the gun along the present-day border between Zambia and Angola was part of broader processes of violent socioeconomic change. The advancing frontier of the Angolan slave trade—centered on the Portuguese coastal town of Benguela and driven by Luso-African and Umbundu-speaking entrepreneurs (locally known as “Mambari”)—reached the upper Zambezi area in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Further regional transformations owed less to the Atlantic economy than to the northern ripples of the demographic dislocations of the South African Mfecane. The most dramatic population movement to affect the region under discussion was that which led a group of Sotho-speaking migrants and refugees, the Kololo, to overrun what has been presented in chapter 1 as the area’s most complex and stratified polity, the Luyana kingdom of the upper Zambezi floodplain and surrounding districts, in the early 1840s.

Unlike Walima Kalusa, who has recently described Barotseland and the Caprivi Strip under the Kololo as awash with guns,¹⁴ I view Livingstone and Silva Porto’s overall paucity of references to European-made weapons in the area, the “immense” number of elephants and other game near both Linyati and Sesheke and in the floodplain,¹⁵ the weapons’ abnormally high prices,¹⁶ and—last but not least—the reported poor marksmanship of the Kololo as indications that firearms were still rare in Barotseland in the 1850s.¹⁷ A few Kololo royals had some “wretched” guns which they “wretchedly used,”¹⁸ and King Sekeletu’s opponent, Mpepe, the governor of Naliele, was given “a small cannon”—or “a large blunderbuss to be mounted as a cannon”—by Silva Porto in 1853.¹⁹ But stabbing and throwing spears and shields made of hides remained the dominant Kololo weapons throughout the decade—as is also borne out by the facility with which another pioneer trader, the South African James Chapman, conned Ponwane, “the headman of Linyati,” and other Kololo grandees in 1853. Having been asked to “repair some guns,” he took advantage of their “ignorance” of Western arms, “selected 5 of the easiest and repaired them for a tusk worth £15, at which rate [he] pocketed [his] pride.”²⁰ It was this same “ignorance” on the part of the Kololo that apparently prompted the Batawana chief Letsholathebe, of present-day northern Botswana, to challenge Sekeletu’s authority by appropriating some of the latter’s ivory. Having recently acquired guns, Livingstone explained, Letsholathebe now considered himself “more than a match” for the less well-armed Kololo.²¹