THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY AND CONSUMPTION IN AFRICA
The history of technology in Africa has scarcely received the attention it deserves. Writing in 1983, Ralph Austen and Daniel Headrick bemoaned “the neglect of Africa by general historians of technology.”24 The situation over the past thirty years has not changed a great deal, as even a cursory glance at such specialist journals as Technology and Culture and History and Technology reveals. As a result, the field has until recently been almost completely unaffected by the paradigm shifts summarized above.
On the African continent, despite vivid displays of grassroots inventiveness and eclecticism in the sphere of everyday technology, technological determinism—the notion, that is, that society is the passive recipient of innovation, by which it is “determined”—has enjoyed a much longer lifespan than elsewhere. It is not coincidental that the most influential book on technology in Africa is still Headrick’s Tools of Empire,25 which remains standard reading in most undergraduate courses on imperialism and the history of science and technology.26 In Tools of Empire, European imperial expansion in Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century is presented as the simple, automatic result of innovations in the fields of transport, armament, and medicine affecting, with unprecedented impact, non-Western societies. The manner in which colonial (or soon-to-be-colonial) subjects received, engaged with, appropriated, and sometimes subverted these same technologies falls outside the author’s argument. Headrick’s more recent work has remained, by and large, faithful to this original interpretative scheme: his latest tour de force—a catalogue of inventions, from early modern shipbuilding to twentieth-century air control—is revealingly entitled Power over Peoples.27
Studies of the co-construction of technology and society in Africa are not completely absent. The impetuous spread of new communication technologies, especially mobile telephony, over the past decade or so has given rise to a significant literature.28 Only rarely, however, has this scholarship adopted a more than tokenistic historical perspective. Although there are happy exceptions to the rule—Brian Larkin’s historically informed account of media consumption in Kano, Northern Nigeria, for instance, or the emphasis placed on processes of African appropriation in a recent collection devoted to the history of the motor vehicle29—the points stand that students of past technological change have given African users short shrift and that the latter’s deep history of engagement with externally introduced artifacts remains poorly researched and understood. Writing about a large swathe of the colonial world in the twentieth century, David Arnold has recently pointed to our ignorance as to “what indigenes, rather than colonizers, made of new technologies” and how these same technologies “were locally received and adapted.”30 Valid as they are for the colonial period, Arnold’s remarks are even more cogent in respect to precolonial Africa, to which the bulk of this book is dedicated.
Altogether more impressive have been the achievements of anthropologically oriented Africanist historians who have studied processes of commoditization without presenting the spread of consumer goods as the reprehensible indication of “global homogenization” and the erosion of “cultural differences.”31 Rather, the agency of Africans in forging the practices of their daily lives has been central to a scholarship that—in the words of Timothy Burke—has sought to foreground the collective and individual “acts of will and imagination, engagement and disinterest” that underlie the consumption of commodities.32 In challenging dominant understandings of modern globalization as a purely Western-driven initiative, for instance, Prestholdt has illuminated the nonutilitarian dimensions of Zanzibari consumerism in the second half of the nineteenth century and the extent to which “global symbols,” such as Western manufactures, were deployed in accordance with local norms and “in the service of local image-making practices.”33
A number of social histories of such widespread consumer goods as imported alcohol and clothing have reached compatible conclusions and provided important insights into the “orientational functions” of consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and the workings of the cross-cultural domestication that accompanied it.34 Dmitri van den Bersselaar’s The King of Drinks is a good case in point.35 This excellent social history of Dutch gin in West Africa is especially commendable for casting the spotlight both on African initiative and the chronological dimension of processes of commodity appropriation by southern Ghanaian and Nigerian consumers from the nineteenth century onwards. It was West African consumers—much more than foreign producers and advertisers and colonial policy makers—who were responsible for the paradoxical post–World War I metamorphosis of Dutch gin from “a mass consumer commodity, an iconic consumption item of modernity,” to “a good with restricted, ritual circulation, an aspect of African ‘traditional’ culture, its use bound up with ritual and the authority of those who claim[ed] the sanction of custom.”36 The new local meaning bestowed upon gin may have appeared “wrong” in the eyes of European producers (who nonetheless benefited from it). In reality, it made perfect sense in the context of the commodity’s increasing rarity and such preexisting cultural parameters as Akan color symbolism and notions of purity.37 In other words, gin—like every other imported commodity—was always “likely to be incorporated into African consumptive patterns in ways that [made] sense in the context of existing yet continually changing world views, rather than according to the intended uses of the foreign producers.”38
The history of clothes has revealed similar findings. In an important essay, Jean Comaroff describes, inter alia, the “host of imaginative possibilities” that the missionary-promoted spread of European apparel opened up for Tswana chiefs and, to a lesser extent, commoners from the early decades of the nineteenth century. The consumption of imported clothing throughout much of the century was infused with “local signs and values” and was shaped by indigenous social hierarchies and political interests. Particularly indicative of this “promiscuous syncretism” was the case of the Bakwena ruler, Sechele, who in 1860 commissioned a Western-style suit to be made out of leopard skin. Here, contrary to what even some of his own subjects assumed, the chief was not merely giving in to mimicry and emulation of encroaching Europeans. On the contrary, by combining the autochthonous symbolism of the leopard skin with the prestige-enhancing attributes of European dress, he was making an “effort to mediate the two exclusive systems of authority at war in his world, striving perhaps to fashion a power greater than the sum of its parts.”39 More generally, the centrality of “local circumstances” and “local fields of power” in the remaking of Western-style dress and the values inscribed in them is one of the main threads of Fashioning Africa, a fascinating collection whose editor, Jean Allman, reminds us that “the meanings of one particular item of clothing can be, and often are, completely transformed when moved across time and space. . . . While Western-style dress may have been ‘foreign’ in origin, its gendered, social, and political meanings were constructed locally. . . . In short, fashion may be a language spoken everywhere, but it is never a universal language.”40
While highlighting the multiple possible outcomes of domestication/creolization processes, all of these various histories of externally introduced consumer goods in Africa point to the centrality of preexisting social, political, and economic structures in orienting patterns of engagement with a given commodity or technology as it moves across cultural contexts. As will be seen, my reading of the history of firearms in precolonial and early colonial central Africa takes this insight to heart.
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF FIREARMS IN AFRICA
The history of technology in Africa—as the previous section has begun to argue—is both comparatively undeveloped and still largely steeped in obsolete