Throughout the nineteenth century, their knowledge and use of firearms was to stand the Khoisan and mixed or coloured groups in good stead. On two occasions, their joining the Xhosa in resistance (1799-I802 and I850-3) made the wars on the eastern frontier particularly formidable, while as late as I878 the long duration of the Griqua 'rebellion' was attributed to their long experience of firearm

The significance of the acquisition of a knowledge of firearms by the Khoisan and coloured population was not limited solely to the resistance they were able to mount against white expansion. It was through them that the 'gun frontier' preceded the white man amongst the Nama and Herero of south-west Africa, the Tswana and southern Sotho groups across the Orange River,16 and the Xhosa and allied peoples on the Cape's eastern frontier. Although the arming of all these people on a large scale was a feature of the second half, if not the last third, of the nineteenth century, this first introduction to firearms may have in some ways shaped their response to them

7 The Africans were able to counter the mobile Boer commandos with superior numbers and, probably, with a more efficient social and military organization. Probably also because of the gradualness of the contact between the Xhosa and whites, with fifty years of trading interaction as well as the mediation of the Khoi prior to the more violent conflicts, firearms per se held no terror for the Xhosa. Moreover in this warfare even in the eighteenth century, the Xhosa were able to acquire a certain number of firearm

Batswana were also quick to incorporate gun wielding cavalry into their military formations and tactics.

y Botswana is paralleled by the social and environmental impact of their use in hunting. The acquisition of guns was both a cause and consequence of a surge in the region’s hunting trade from the 1840s; involving the export of ivory, karosses and ostrich feathers from hunting grounds largely falling under the effective control of the Dikgosi of Kweneng, Gammangwato, Gangewaketse and Gatawana. 1

rms 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.4

The Sotho were "indifferently armed and were poor shots" before the 18

lonial descriptions of African peoples of the region, they characterized the Khoisan and Griqua as skilled with weapons, a facility that enabled them to resist colonialism for a w

em. It happens that skills with guns and the perceived and real links to political power weapons and skills conferred were debated extensively in southern Africa in the nineteenth

he much-sought-after elephant, fostered a preference for large-caliber weapons. By the eighteenth century a distinct local pattern of firearms design had begun to emerge, which can be understood as a technological response to the region's ecology and eco