Firearm Adoption in the Societies of the Lower Zambezi, 1600-1888
Firearms have been present on the African continent almost from their very inception, with many regions in North Africa as well as a select few coastal areas in West, Central and East Africa either accessing or being in contact with guns from as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, this contact was generally restricted to coastal regions, and once firearms were acquired by local communities, they rarely moved beyond the immediate hinterland in any great numbers until at least the early eighteenth century. One key exception to this is in the Zambezi region of what is now Mozambique, where Portuguese efforts at inland conquest, settlement, and the unique dynamics of the prazos da coroa brought firearms several hundred kilometres into the interior, from as early as the mid-sixteenth century. First carried only by the Portuguese soldiers in the region, local groups quickly gained access to guns through trade, as political gifts, and in the service of the Portuguese. Taking a temporally broad focus, this thesis analyses the introduction of firearms into this area between 1600 and 1888 and their subsequent adoption and domestication by local communities, as well as some discussion of the impacts of their presence and use within this region. Building upon recent studies by William K. Storey, Saheed Aderinto, and particularly Giacomo Macola, the research presented here considers firearms not only as weapons of warfare and tools of economic production, but as artifacts of material culture that were domesticated to hold social and cultural value. The thesis contends that from their early introduction into the Zambezi until the middle of the nineteenth century, firearms were utilised by local communities as much for this social and cultural value, as items of privilege, as they were for their worth as weapons in conflict. This research is based predominantly upon contemporary Portuguese archival documentation held at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino and the Biblioteca da Ajuda in Lisbon, as well as several published collections of primary documentation, alongside preexisting oral history collections for the Zambezi region, held at the Archives of Traditional Music in Bloomington, Indiana. Where possible, these sources have been bolstered with archaeological data gathered from site reports and published works, however the archaeological record for this period of the region’s history remains limited.
Firearms, Material Culture, Africa, Early Modern Period, Zambezi, Prazos da Coroa, Mozambique, Guns
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