‘They Disdain Firearms': The Relationship between Guns and the Ngoni of Eastern Zambia to the Early Twentieth Century 1

The development of increasingly efficient firearms and their contribution to Western imperialism are master themes of nineteenth-century historiography. ² Conversely, the survival of earlier tactical and weapons traditions has received much less scholarly attention, partly, no doubt, because of the Eurocentric and technologically deterministic nature of much contemporary military history. ³ To be sure, continuity in military hardware on the peripheries of European imperial expansion can sometimes be explained away as the simple consequence of commercial isolation and general lack of economic opportunities. Yet wilful resistance to foreign military technology was also frequent and important. Such instances of technological conservatism – this chapter contends – are best interpreted in terms of the local cultural structures and social dynamics that underpinned them. After all, as Marshall Sahlins famously demonstrated, it is on the basis of ‘existing understandings of the cultural order’ that people ‘organize their projects and give significance to their objects’. ⁴