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“Heading for the Gun”: Skills and Sophistication in an African Guerrilla War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2009

Luise White
Luise White
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Extract

For much of the last seventy-five years African combatants, especially in wars of their own making, have not been seen as masters of the guns they shoot. In Kenya in the 1950s, for example, captured Mau Mau were humiliated: they were taken to shooting ranges where they failed to hit a target with their guns. More recently, rebels in southern Sudan considered guns poor, if effective substitutes for more embodied weapons like spears, while young men in Sierra Leone fought with the weapons at hand such as knives or machetes, because they were too poor to obtain guns. When the armies of Ethiopia and Eritrea fought well and hard with sophisticated weapons, it was said to be the result of Cold War rivalries or national agendas gone berserk. Rhodesia's bush war, Zimbabweans' liberation struggle, suggests something else, a space shaped by technology and clientelism in which guns, most especially guns in guerrilla hands, exemplify very specific European ideas about Africans, that they are skilled and sophisticated.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 236 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2009

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82 Thursh, Of Land and Spirits, 156–57.

83 Reid-Daly, Selous Scouts, 74. In a revised and expanded version of this memoir, Reid-Daly amended the wording: the African “already was one, as was the enemy.” Lt. Col. Reid-Daly, Ron, Pamwwe Chete: The Legend of the Selous Scouts (Weltevreden Park: Covos-Day, 1999), 68Google Scholar.

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88 Reid-Daly liked to boast that he commanded soldiers who had not only trained in Rhodesia but “in Russia, Cuba, China, and Bulgaria as well”; Selous Scouts, 180.

89 Warren, Going Down of the Sun, 231–32; author's field notes, Harare, 2 Aug. 2006.

90 Alexander and McGregor, “War Stories,” 87.

91 A recent popular history of the AK argues precisely that, that it is the local street price of the weapon, not its transnational genealogy, which marks the degree of social order in a country. Kahaner, Larry, AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (New York: John Wiley, 2007), 193Google Scholar.

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