Although Africans sought to fit firearms into the traditional fighting methods, they also recognized the need for new tech niques to take advantage of the n

he introduction of firearms differentially impacted societies of varying complexity; firearms meant some thing quite different to roving bands of hunter-gatherers than they did to states founded on military conquest.25

. British 'Angola guns'—cheap, unproved long-barrel flint lock muskets—dominated the weapons trade along the Atlantic coast. Firearms in the eighteenth century were absolutely central to the trade of people for goods. Although they did not usually comprise the bulk of goods traded—muskets and gunpowder accounted for about 10 percent of the cargo offloaded on the Loango coast (present-day Angola) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, third behind textiles and liquor— trading would seldom take place unless powder and shot were included. Some quantity of guns and gunpowder was a part of virtually every purchase of slaves. No other commodities were so indispensable.26

Europeans fostered the slave trade through their control of guns, which they would trade only for slaves, the guns in turn providing the means to acquire more slaves to buy more guns, and so ad infinitum. In this view, Africans conducted war to supply the slave trade, and sold slaves chiefly to obtain the weaponry that allowed them to seize more slaves. Slave exports rose in direct proportion to the quantity of firearms import