William Kelleher Storey . Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa.(African Studies.)New York : Cambridge University Press . 2008 . Pp. xvi, 378. $85.00.

Abstract

Guns have played a major role in the history of South Africa, and their presence continues to blight national life. Surprisingly, historians have largely ignored such weapons and their influence on state formation, power, and citizenship. William Kelleher Storey has written the first account of the spread of guns in South Africa from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. The book is woven around two narratives, the first a formal history that makes extensive and often inventive use of archival materials and existing historiographies, and the second about technologies, citizenship, race, and power, in which Storey seeks to relate the adoption of guns by Africans, the English, and the Boers to patterns of ecological, political, and social change. It is an ambitious project, and Storey has done a huge amount of work in bringing a disparate array of materials into alignment. Africans, Boers, and Britons all used guns for hunting and warfare as well as for the enforcement of power. The possession of matchlock and flintlock muskets allowed the early settlers in the Cape to defeat the Khoi. Skill with guns in hunting quickly became a mark of status. Storey shows how the rise of settler power was in part predicated upon the acquisition of guns by whites and the disarmament of Africans. Consequently, guns played an important part in the creation of colonial states in the Cape, Natal, and the Boer Republics. In passing, Storey makes reference to British gun policy under the Raj.