22 May 2014

Last week we concluded the first part of our overview of the implications of the widespread adoption of firearms by communities in nineteenth-century Botswana by observing that their military and consequent political significance was paralleled by the social and environmental impact of their use in hunting.

The acquisition of guns was in this respect both a cause and consequence of a surge in the region’s hunting trade from the 1840s; involving the export of ivory, caresses and ostrich feathers from hunting grounds largely falling under the effective control of the Dikgosi of Kweneng, Gammangwato, Gangewaketse and Gatawana.

Besides leading to a rapid decline in wildlife, and consequent expansion of arable and pastoral lands, hunting with guns reinforced social stratification in many areas. This was exemplified by patterns of subordination and servitude in the Kgalagadi between Batswana notables and Bakgalagari and Khoe or Basarwa communities.

By the late nineteenth century regimental expectations of gun ownership, coupled with a relative decline in commercial hunting, was a material factor that drove men to seek employment at the Kimberley and Gauteng mines. In the fifteen months between April 1873 and June 1874 over 75,000 guns were legally sold in Kimberley alone, which were largely purchased by returning Bapedi and Basotho, as well as Batswana migrants.

The following year, in 1875, the recorded sales stock of firearms by Kimberley traders was in excess of 200,000. Prices ranged from 1-4 pounds for a musket to up to 25 pounds for a top range breechloader.

Like other groups in the region from an early date Batswana were able to produce their own gunpowder as well as shot. Francis Galton, who explored Ngamiland in the early 1850s thus observed that: ‘It is difficult to make good gunpowder, but no skill is required in making powder that will shoot to kill” adding that “The negroes of Africa make it for themselves, burning charcoal, gathering saltpetre from salt-pans, and buying the sulphur from trading caravans; they grind the material on stone.’
 

Also as elsewhere on the continent, smoothbore muskets could often be serviced as well as provided with solid shot by local blacksmiths, an indigenous capacity that in some areas survived until relatively recent times.

Vintage firearms were thus common in parts of rural Botswana into the late twentieth century. The numbers have been reduced due to the surrender of old firearms as a gun control measure. From 2001–2006 the Botswana Police destroyed 5,221 such firearms, an exercise that culminated in an August 2006 public bonfire, lit as part of ‘Police Day’ activities, which torched 1,406 guns, included a noticeable number of muskets and early model breechloaders.

Besides munitions evidence, there are other material manifestations of transformation connected to the spread of guns and associated technology. In 1845 the hunter-trader Roualeyn Gordan Cumming observed, while visiting Sechele’s then centre at Tshonwane (Chonuane), that:
“A short time previous to my arrival, a rumour having reached Sichely that he was likely to be attacked by emigrant Boers, he suddenly resolved to secure his city with a wall of stones, which he at once commenced erecting.

It is now completed, entirely surrounding the town, with loopholes at intervals all along through which to play upon the advancing enemy with the muskets which he resolved to purchase from hunters and traders like myself.”

The settlement’s then resident missionary, the Rev. Dr David Livingstone, similarly described Tshonwane’s fortification: ‘Sechele is building a wall around his town, it contains loopholes for shooting. The shape of the whole is a sort of triangle.’

Today, the remains of defensive walling and entrenchments, dating from the late eighteenth century, can be found throughout eastern Botswana. Among these are the Kanye hill defences of Kgosi Makaba II, which enabled the Bangwaketse to resist a c.1798 attack by armed Griqua and Korrana led by the German fugitive Jan Bloem (Johannes Blum), in what is the earliest known appearance of guns as weapons of war in Botswana. ENDS