Guns, Race and Skill in Nineteenth Century Southern Africa

Abstract

In colonial southern Africa there were plenty of guns and plenty of skilled shooters, or so it seems. South Africa's "gun society" originated in the seventeenth century, when the Dutch East India Company encouraged the European settlers of the Cape of Good Hope to procure firearms and to serve in the militia. The European farmers (called Boers) who crossed the colonial boundaries into the African interior distributed guns to Africans, in spite of company regulations forbidding the practice. Such regulations remained on the books even after the advent of British rule during the Napoleonic Wars. During the early nineteenth century, British liberals overcame conservative opposition and helped trade and labor become technically free. Liberals also encouraged the spread of evangelical Christianity among Africans. Partly through the encouragement of traders and missionaries, more Africans took up firearms. They did so for many reasons, most prominently to gain security and to kill game. By the time game began to grow scarce, in the middle of the century, British and Boer settlement had extended north and east, while conservatives were gaining the [End Page 687] upper hand in colonial politics. Settler perceptions of the threat posed by armed Africans persuaded British conservatives to portray Africans as skilled with firearms, even as they otherwise characterized Africans as racially inferior. The common perception that Boer frontiersmen were superior marksmen had, by the end of the nineteenth century, become more myth than reality. What is real and what is myth when it comes to skill? As far as southern African shooting skills are concerned, the sources contain many contradictions. Enemies were described as skilled and dangerous; friends were described as unskilled and harmless. The contrast highlights a significant methodological problem. If descriptions are ideological and biased, how can 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 power. High-status workers fought to preserve old skills as industrialists introduced new technologies that depended less on them.1 Were worker and capitalist descriptions of skill so heavily freighted with ideology as to mislead historians? Only a few authors have raised the possibility that perceptions of technological skill may reflect perceptions of order.2 Seemingly neutral descriptions may harbor ideologies. Historians of technology need to recognize this, and—more to the point, in this particular case—so do historians of firearms and colonialism. In 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 not [End Page 688] 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. There is only one place to find a scholarly discussion of shooting skills in southern Africa: a special issue of the Journal of African History, published in 1971, on the social history of firearms. The contributors greatly advanced our knowledge of firearms in southern Africa, but they arrived at some unexamined and contradictory conclusions about skill. Relying on colonial descriptions of African peoples of the region, they characterized the Khoisan and Griqua as skilled with weapons, a...