Group items tagged

anity among Africans. Partly through the en

missionaries, more Africans took up firearm

sons, most prominently to gain security and to

began to grow scarce, in the middle of the cent

began to grow scarce, in the middle of the ce

LOGY AND CULT

LOGY AND CULTURE OCTOBER 2004 VOL. 45 upper hand in colonial politics. Settler perceptions of the threa

upper hand in colonial politics. Settler perceptions of the threat posed by armed Africans persuaded British conservatives to portray Afri

skilled with firearms, even as they otherwise characterized Afri

racially inferior. The common perception that Boer frontiersm

superior marksmen

superior marksmen had, by the end of the nineteenth century,

historians use sources to assess technological skill? It is an issue of fundamental importance because skill exists at the intersection of the human and the material. Even so, historians tend to overlook the methodological challenge, shortchanging analysis in their discussions of skill. Historians of industrialization in Europe and North America, for example, have written about the ways in which the loss of skill related to the loss of worker pow

n the best available study on that specific subject, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians^ Patrick Malone describes how European settlers introduced guns to New England, pointing out that Native Americans adapted them most adroitly to the local environment. The Native Americans learned to shoot well and combined that capability with their skills in forest warfare to gain a temporary military advantage, until English colonists learned how to fight with guns in forests, too.3 Malone's study is based largely on colonial sources, though, and he does

consider the possibility that English descriptions of Native Americans' skill with guns might have aimed at portraying them as more dangerous than they really may have been, which would have furthered the colonials' aims to dispossess them.

ith weapons, a facility that enabled them to resist colonialism for a while. The Xhosa were both good and bad marksmen, while the Mfengu were skilled and dangerous. The Sotho were "indifferently armed and were poor shots" before the 1870s, when they became "crack marksmen." The Zulu never integrated firearms completely into their military tactics, but by the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 some Zulu shot well because, according to a British government source, they had received instruction from redcoat deserters

Contradictory views of skill are not unique to historians of firearms and colonialism. Little in the historiography of technology goes beyond labor historians' concern with worker de-skilli

were debated extensively in southern Africa in the nineteenth century. Everyday practice as it related to firearms, as well as the representation of everyday practice, was highly ideological, as may be seen in the efforts of those who wished to regulate the spread of guns. Nineteenth-century settler politicians often made highly politicized claims about skill and

an muskets, and so were favored more by hunters than by soldiers.10 OCTOBER 2004 VOL. 45 In the early nineteenth century, military and civilian firearms incorporated a number of technical improvements. Percussion locks came into wide service by the 1840s.11 At around the same time, improvements in ammunition persuaded most soldiers and civilians to replace their smoothbores with more accurate rifles.12 And, finally, by the 1860s design improvements in breech-loading firearms made it possible for most soldiers and civilians to switch from muzzle loaders to breechloa

. Hunting could even provide a better income than cattle farming. The naturalist William Burchell, who traveled in the interior in 1812, observed how Africans became involved in a cash economy as European trade networks reached into the interior.14 Many African hunters worked for European traders, who employed them as trackers and supplied them with guns and ammunitio

t. By hunting, this people would obtain food in a manner so much more agreeable than by agriculture, that grain would probably become but a secondary resource; but the evil would remedy itself, and the more eagerly they pursued the chase, and the more numerous were the guns and the hunters, the sooner would the game be destroyed or driven out of the coun

orated in this fashion sterloop, the star barrel.20 Cape and American guns both demonstrate a hybrid vigor in design, as local needs interacted with traditional patterns. In eastern North America hunters tended to use smaller- caliber firearms because they hunted smaller animals, like deer, while westerners, who might encounter bison, elk, or grizzly bears, preferred larger calibers, though rarely as large as the southern African four-bore.21 Cape gunsmiths and their American counterparts alike were sensitive to both the needs of local hunters and recent technological developments. They refitted flintlock muskets with percussion locks, and in so

ca's emerging capitalist economy, frequently using their wages to buy guns. African gun ownership concerned both British and Boer settlers, who saw firearms not only as tools of civilian life on the frontier but also as instruments of political power. It also concerned British and Boer officials, who incorporated disarmament into their plans to despoil Africans of their land. While developing plans to disarm, dispossess, and disenfranchise Africans, British settlerpoliticians argued that whites should take care to maintain their skills with arms - not to denude the environment of animals but to defend against attacks by dangerous Africans.

male citizen could vote, provided he possessed a certain amount of property. Guns had been subject to.a variety of sporadically enforced regulations since the seventeenth century. In the 1870s, permits to purchase firearms could be issued by unsalaried justices of the peace as well as by salaried resident magistrates. Rules for issuing permits were spelled out in the colony's Circular No. 4 of 1874, which instructed resident magistrates to issue gun permits only to Africans who were "fit" to possess guns without defining how, exactly, they were to determine fitness. Justices of the peace received no such instructions, and many settlers felt that they were too liberal in issuing permits.33 Permissive policies were defended by prominent liberals. The Cape Colony's secretary for native affairs, Charles Brownlee, observed that Africans wanted to know "why if they are really British subjects we should be so anxious that they should not possess gu

ife and property of its subjects."56 Communities that were coming under British rule needed to be disarmed. That was the civilized way to diminish risk and increase security. Frere wrote that "a wise government cannot permit any portion of the population, whose attachment to the government is in the least doubtfu

LOGY AND CULTURE OCTOBER 2004 VOL 45 remain generally possessed of arms." In the eighteenth century this had been government policy in Scotland. In the nineteenth century it had been policy in Ireland. In India during the Mutiny Lord Canning had disarmed sepoys suspected of disloyalty. It did not matter that the loyal and the disloyal were treated alike, because the government could not determine, at any given point, exactly who was who. General disarmament was the only practical policy. Even if it proved difficult to confiscate all weapons, if people got out of the habit of carrying guns in public disarmament would eventually be achieved. Based on this rendition of history, Frere proclaimed that the Pea