Giacomo Macola. The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics.

Abstract

With The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics, Giacomo Macola has made a major contribution to the history of Africa, and a small one to the history of technology. The book begins by criticizing the histories of guns in Africa written in the 1970s and 1980s for concentrating exclusively on the functional uses of guns for hunting and warfare. The social construction of technology that followed in the 1990s, which stressed the role of users in determining the function of guns, represented a partial advance. In this book, Macola claims to offer a further advance by presenting what he calls the “domestication” perspective (6), in which African guns are embedded in social relations and in personal identities and statuses, as well as in functional uses. The heart of his book, and by far the most significant contribution, is Macola’s description and analysis of the many diverse ethnic groups, from traditional kingdoms to small-scale stateless societies, that occupied south-central Africa—the region between the Great Lakes to the east, Angola to the west, the Congo to the north, and South Africa to the south—in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this savanna region where there were no clear borders, widely scattered populations moved in search of pastures for their cattle, elephants for ivory, and slaves.