Technology and Culture

Written by Giacomo Macola, a specialist of African history, this book studies precolonial African societies’ political, social, and cultural relationship with the exogenous technology of firearms. This publication has been well received in the field of African studies as an important contribution to understanding the complex political landscape of the central savannah, a broad region spreading between current-day Angola, Zambia, DR Congo, and Malawi. Macola focuses on the long nineteenth century, a period which another specialist of African history, Richard Reid, has identified as the African military revolution in his book, Warfare in African History (2012). This timeframe corresponds to the rather late involvement of the central savannah region in the gun-slave cycle, due to the penetration of long-distance trading networks expanding from Portuguese Angola on the [End Page 968] Atlantic coast and from Arab-Swahili Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. The book asserts the crucial role of imported firearms in profoundly reshaping the geopolitics of central Africa until the first decades of European colonial rule in the early twentieth century.

Beyond the circles of Africanists, this research more broadly addresses historians of technology as the introduction highlights their general and undeserved neglect of Africa. Macola’s approach is inspired by the constructivist perspectives of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and recent cross-cultural consumption studies. He therefore opposes technological determinism and emphasizes user agency through the concept of domestication. Drawing on a wide range of mainly European sources, Macola provides case studies showing how firearms were adopted in different ways by different societies according to pre-existing contexts. Among the Lozi, the centralized structures of the monarchy enabled their king to make the imported gunpowder technology a royal monopoly and use firearms as royal symbols and political tools to generate or strengthen patronage bonds. In the scattered communities of Luvale hunters, firearms circulated more widely among common men and became a symbol of masculinity. In the Kaonde society, firearms were also used as currency for transactions. Through the example of the oppressive Yeke state which massively imported guns in exchange for slaves, Macola shows that firearms alone were not enough to secure the violent rule of warlords, as this state collapsed when rebels managed to cut supply flows from Portuguese Angola. The case of Ngoni warriors who consistently refused to fight with firearms highlights processes of technological rejection motivated by socio-cultural norms; missile weapons did not fit into the Ngoni system of values based on honor and bravery. Nevertheless, under colonial rule, firearms became a positive symbol of social promotion among the Ngoni after many of them were incorporated in the police force.

In other words, Macola succeeds in showing historians of technology that nineteenth-century central Africa is a very interesting laboratory for studying the cross-cultural appropriation of technology. For readers not well-acquainted with this geographical space, the book proves to be very pedagogical and provides many maps as well as a full chapter of contextualization. Despite little technical information on firearms, Macola’s research is, in my opinion, relevant to historians of military technology. It forces a broadening of the military revolution debate in terms of chronology, spatiality, and interdisciplinarity. Even in recent studies reassessing Parker’s thesis of the “Rise of the West” (The Military Revolution, 1988), sub-Saharan Africa retains an image of “primitive warfare” left by the Zulu (cousins of the Ngoni) fighting with spears against British rifles in the late nineteenth century, for example J. C. Sharman in Empires of the Weak (2019). In contrast, Macola’s book shows how most African precolonial societies, even those far from the coastal areas under early European influence, [End Page 969] became familiar with gunpowder technology. They developed their own techniques to use, repair and improve firearms and even, in some societies, to produce gunpowder and ammunition. The book’s emphasis on the multifaceted political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of firearms underlines the necessity to seek interpretations about the circulation...