Guns of the Khoe-San: the firearms used by indigenes for the first two hundred years of colonisation at the Cape

Abstract

The Cape Khoe-San experienced a significant change in weapons technology when Europeans began colonising the Cape in the seventeenth century. Khoe-San first adapted their military tactics to counter the firearms used by Dutch settlers in conflicts over land possession. With colonisation, many Khoe-San found themselves being incorporated into the colony as hunting and military, both formal and informal, assistants. Deemed sufficiently colonised by the Europeans, there was now an effort to arm Khoe-San with guns. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw great developments in firearm technology. In tracking these developments alongside historical accounts of Khoe-San with firearms, it is noticed that by the first half of the nineteenth century, Khoe-San fighting for the colony were being supplied with the most ideal firearms for colonial warfare in the Cape. This was a marked contrast to the policies of the seventeenth century which sought to keep firearms out of indigenous hands.