Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa.pdf - 6 views
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Guns, Race, and Imperialism
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Guns, Race, and Imperialism
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By the 1870s, pseudoscientific racism had taken hold among European
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licymakers, who increasingly believed that it would be difficult to transfer technical skills to colonial subjects. C
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cal knowledge and practices circulated in complex ways; they were not simply transferred from the European core to the colonial periphery, as the development of local firearms in southern Africa makes clear. People living in the colonies made end-user modifications to both imperialist technologies and imperialist ideologies.31
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It was precisely in the 1870s - the Scramble for Africa - that Africans became more deeply enmeshed in southern Africa'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.
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This is the introduction of how guns came in southern Africa , after the Scramble for Africa in 1870s to be precise. African were using their money from their emerging economy to buy guns, this made the Boers and British settlers in Africa to not be settled and they were very concerned about this matter.
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G. 3 Southern Africa in the 1870s. (Map by author and
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To understand colonial gun control, it is important to r
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colonies of
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olitics. The commission's investigations did overturn one stereotype. Throughout the English-speaking world, settlers on the frontier were supposed to be heavily armed and skilled with weapons. Yet the testimony before the commission revealed that settlers in the Eastern Cape were lightly armed and inexperienc
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ces. According to the 50th Ordinance of 1828, all Cape citizens were equal before the law
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y. 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 fitne
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n Africa had different native policies. There were two independent Boer republics across the Orange River from the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (also known as the Transvaal). These restricted citizenship to European men and deprived Africans of all civic rights, including any right to possess weapons. To the east, in the British colony of Natal, guns had to be registered with British magistrates who supervised African chiefs. (African chiefdoms remained substantially intact so that chiefs might administer customary law under the supervision of the colony's lieutenant governor.) Chiefs retained a degree of autonomy in certain other regions along the Cape Colony's borders, such as the Transkei, Lesotho, and Griqualand East, while the Mpondo remained indepen
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s.35 In 1876 the British settlers of the Eastern Cape began to protest what they considered irregularities in the regulation of African gun ownership. The debates that ensued acquired a broad significance for South African politics, and their prominence, in parliament and in newspapers, accented the importance of skills in the use of firearms and highlighted the everyday practice of carrying weapon
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more stringent gun control. Most witnesses opposed the arming of Africans.36 Witnesses and commissioners linked gun ownership to broader policy debates about citizenship that had been going on for some time in the Cape Colony, and that were intensifying dur
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ractically with them if the danger becomes real, are not inclined to agree."37 One regular officer of the British army, Lieutenant Colonel Crossman of the Royal Engineers, agreed with Froude. In a confidential report to Carnarvon on diamond miners in Kimberley, he argued that only long-serving Africans ought to be permitted to purchase guns. "For my own part," he continued, "I would not allow guns to be sold to the natives at all. They do not purchase them for hunting but for purposes of war. They are not satisfied with the common exported article, but endeavour to obtain the best rifles they can purchase, saying 'that as the red [British] soldier uses good rifles they also must have th
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rship. The problem Ella saw was not that guns themselves would make Africans more dangerous, but that the "possessor of [a gun] gets thoughts into his head which might not otherwise get there." Africans did not buy guns with the idea of attacking Europeans, but "when a lot of men with guns get together they might get ideas of that nature into their heads."43 A superficial analysis of these settlers' statements would dismiss them as deterministic. But if we accept the Comaroffs' claim that the everyday material practices of colonialism were associated with hotly contested changes in ontology and epistemology, they take on new significance. Ideas about the use of guns were instrumental in ra
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Justices of the peace received no such instructions, and many settlers felt that they were too liberal in issuing permits
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In 1876, as fear of a Xhosa attack mounted, some settlers and soldiers fretted about whether the Europeans living in the Eastern Cape were well-enough trained in the use of firearms. E. B. Chalmers of the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police testified that few Eastern Cape settlers even owned gun
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Several other settlers also called attention to the state of affairs. According to two witnesses, fewer than half the settlers owned guns, although more knew how to use them, and more of the young men were learning.45 According to another witness, "farmers and their sons" not only lacked arms, they had also lost the skill of riding while carrying a gun.46 It took a great deal of time to manage a farm or wor
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while carrying a gun.46 It took a great deal of time to manage a farm or work at a craft, and settlers frequently lacked the leisure to hunt or take tar
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p. In the 1878 session of the Cape Parliament, Sprigg succeeded in steering through a set of bills that created an all-white militia. He also secured passage of the Peace Preservation Act, which provided for disarming parts of the population; the governor was empowered to proclaim certain districts subject to the act, and could then instruct magistrates to determine who should
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urn in their arms and who might keep them. The act was not in itself discriminatory, but it was understood that Europeans in proclaimed districts would keep their arms and that Africans would turn theirs in. Those who were forced to surrender their weapons would be compensated. According to Sprigg, this measure was necessary "for getting arms out of the hands of disloyal na
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Cape Colony, Sir Bartle Frere, embodied the full range of colonial rhetoric. When liberals challenged the disarmament of Basutoland, Frere mocked liberal arguments that "a native tr
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armed with firearms [is] less formidable than one armed after their own fashion with assegai
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This is a JSTOR article. It speaks about how the economy of Africans was emerging(newly formed or prominent) basically their economy was growing and they got to buy guns. Them (Africans) buying and owning guns came as a threat to the Boers and the colonizers' as they thought that Africans cannot or do not have the skills needed to use guns and they will use them in a bad way influencing each other to misuse their guns. Hence the process of disarming African was introduced whereby they had to have permits to own guns and only whites were allowed to own guns .