ABSTRACT
For the majority of the European historians of the quarter-century of African history from 1880–1905, during which the European conquest was largely completed, the most important events have been European ones. It is rarely appreciated that a good majority of the states of West Africa, large and small, as well as most of the people living in segmentary societies, opposed European occupation with force. The fact that the invading armies were able to defeat African armies which sometimes outnumbered them 10–1 was due in part to the possession of superior weapons, and in part to the superior manipulation of those weapons which the African armies also possessed. The major development in Western military technology as far as Europe and Africa were concerned was the single-barrel Maxim gun, the force of the recoil of which operated loading, firing, extraction and ejection at the rate of eleven shots a second.
