Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (review)
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The gun—and technology generally—is still an overlooked theme in African history despite having shaped the continent profoundly in the last 500 years. This offers sufficient incentive for scholarship that conjoins Science and Technology Studies (STS) and African Studies. STS stands to gain by testing its generally Western-derived registers in non-Western geographies; African Studies acquires new heuristics to escape its rather narrow focus on people and include the influence of nonhuman "actants."
William Kelleher Storey's Guns, Race, and Power is located at this STS– African Studies junction, examining the mutual shaping of the gun trade, gun control, shooting skills, race, citizenship, and colonial politics. Storey argues that the colonial authorities exaggerated the shooting skills of Africans in order to justify racist policies, amid intense opposition from liberal officials, missionaries, traders, and Africans. Ultimately, he argues, attempts to disarm Africans met with resistance and generally failed. This is a massive claim with the potential to be read as trivializing the actual competencies of Africans with guns, even while exposing the idiosyncrasies of what Valentin Mudimbe called "the colonial library" in The Invention of Africa (1988).
Out of this archive, Storey selects some 400 monographs, articles, and dissertations, as well as government documents, almost entirely European-written. To preempt criticism about the absence or authenticity of African voices, Storey warns that his book is not a detailed study of gun ownership or a work of statistics. The first four chapters trace the spread of guns in South Africa from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth in order to set the stage for the frontier of interactions between European settlers and Africans. The remaining five chapters are devoted to various co-productions of guns, capitalism, politics, race, citizenship, empire, and warfare.
Storey deploys co-production to examine "the dynamic relationship between society and technology" (p. 7), challenging South African scholars Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore's framing of nineteenth-century Cape Colony as a "gun society" (Marks and Atmore, "Firearms in Southern Africa: A Survey," Journal of African History 12 [1971]). For Storey, a gun society [End Page 237] is "one in which a high percentage of people own a gun," a situation requiring statistical proof that scholars cannot offer. Storey concludes that "the widespread ownership of a technology does not determine a society" (p. 11). The "technological determinist" framing of superior tools of empire engineering Africans into civilization is a myth; local forces demand recognition (p. 140).
Storey couches his address to Leo Marx and Roe Smith's question—Does Technology Drive History? (1994)—within Jean and John Comaroff 's framing of African history as "the dialectics of everyday life" (p. 11). His treatment of firearms-use extends the discussion of skill beyond industrial plant to hunting and fighting with firearms, what he calls mimeomorphic skills (learned through repetition) and polymorphic skills (adaptive use).
Working at the intersection of STS and African history was always going to raise a serious methodological question of registers to use. Storey uses terms like "early modern period" (p. 18) that apply to Western society but are not easily legible in African history. It is never clear where—between Western and non-Western—Storey is or ought to be standing when defining what is and is not skill, thereby over stretching skill into analytical bluntness. Key pronouncements—for example, that the Khoi were "frightened by firearms"—are judgments of Europeans responsible for aggressive behavior (p. 27). The two revolutions Storey cites—of breech loaders and capitalism—are European; Africans are reacting and adapting.
The discourses that Storey says exaggerate African shooting skills as a way of profiling Africans as dangerous (they were a risk) in order to justify their disarmament are themselves facial expressions of much deeper interactions. If we were to do an ethnography on these Africans, are we certain that we would confirm that their "skills" are exaggerated? How sure are we that they would define skills in the way Storey imagines or as the colonists...
