Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (review)

The superficially self-evident statement that colonial South Africa became a "gun society" is actually surprisingly difficult to prove. Even if one accepts the notion that a "gun society" is one in which a high percentage of persons have access to guns (a working premise that not all historians accept, with the debate focused not only on the concept itself but also on the definition of "high percentage"), the statement itself does not automatically hold true. This is because whatever technology is available does not necessarily define the social order. After all, as William Storey observes wryly, nineteenth-century South Africans owned many iron pots, but we do not say that they lived in an "iron-pot society."

Storey's stimulating study explores the pre-twentieth-century history of gun-ownership in what was to become South Africa and Lesotho. While it is true, as other historians have also demonstrated, that the deployment of guns influenced larger sociopolitical and environmental changes, it is hard to make the case for guns as a fetish of the masses. Storey makes the more subtle and interesting claim that guns were sufficiently prevalent to be important to cultural and political changes that developed over time.

After dealing deftly in a chapter with the first hundred and fifty years following the introduction of guns, Storey discusses the next century in greater depth in the next eight chapters. He shows how guns were significant in the shifting and overlapping spheres of trade, settlement, trekboer, and hunting frontiers. Despite desperate efforts, there was no possibility of keeping the new technology in the hands of its original European owners alone, and as early as the 1670s, after a Khoi professional hunter and some others bought guns, providing weapons to any native was declared a capital offense to. Such ur-gun regulation left a shadow on subsequent developments, especially the tension that existed between the desire to keep power in white hands and the need to arm Africans to assist with hunting, trading, and fighting as allies in frontier wars. Consequently, when it proved expedient, indigenous groups were armed; whenever it was no longer expedient, guns were restricted. These tensions persisted until the late nineteenth century.

Certainly guns helped transform the Eastern Cape frontier in the wars of the early to the mid-nineteenth century, when firearms rearranged trade and settlement on the northern frontier and revolutionized how humans interacted with their natural environment. Within fifty years guns had proliferated from the Cape to the entire region south of the Limpopo, becoming significant revenue generators and a fundamental technology of security for the burgeoning states (Boer republics and African chiefdoms). Storey does not sees hunting and war as two separate arenas, but rather as allied pursuits. He says that "ecological degeneration put pressure on people to migrate into other people's territory, which generated conflict, while the hunt was often the training ground for war" (78). Simply put: guns made killing animals and people more efficient.

By the 1870s contestation around who could possess guns was central in struggles over land and citizenship. Technological advances made guns more lethal and their owners more powerful. This happened in the context of a mineral revolution, which turned covetous imperial eyes to South Africa and drew more Africans into the capitalist system, making it easier for them to acquire firearms. The threat of armed Africans allowed politicians to insist on tighter control. Primary evidence from the so-called Langalibalele Affair of 1873-75 (which focused settler fears about the gun trade and African migrant labor) illustrates how changing gun control policies came about amid ideological and industrial shifts in the metropol, but also shows that local circumstance played a significant role.

Clearly Storey cannot discuss guns within every polity, so he selects distinctive or representative examples. Chapters 9 and 10, for example, discuss the Sotho struggle for security and autonomy, considering some elements that are similar to...