A Problem of Interpretation

A definitive study of the role of firearms in the history of Africa has yet to be undertaken. In the past decade, however, this subject has engaged the attention of an increasing number of historians. It is clear that, with few exceptions, the impact of firearms prior to the nineteenth century was limited to the coastal areas of Africa, where local rulers took advantage of their strategic commercial position to monopolize the European arms trade. But in the nineteenth century the trade and use of firearms spread to the interior of the continent, contributing to the state-building efforts of such well-known figures as al-hajj Umar, Samori, Rabeh, Tippu Tib, and Msiri.

Yet even in the nineteenth century, when the impact of firearms in other areas of Africa was sudden and dramatic, the states of the Central Sudan remained relatively unaffected by this new military technology. This apparent anomaly, together with the reversion to the traditional pattern of Sudanic military organization in the Sokoto Caliphate after the jihad, has led some scholars to conclude that the ancient mode of warfare was incompatible with the use of firearms. Their proffered explanations involve either the assumption or postulation of an overriding sociocultural resistance to change. It has been suggested, for instance, that guns were not employed extensively in the Sokoto Caliphate because the nature of cavalry warfare has “little place for firearms.”