Using eyewitness accounts of travelers and missionaries to Africa, the oral history of Africans, and the visual evidence of the weapons themselves, Spring builds a comprehensive cultural and ethnographic survey of traditional arms and armor from several centuries ago to the present.

A comprehensive history of the development and dismantling of South Africa's weapons of mass destruction program.

Why did some central African peoples embrace gun technology in the nineteenth century, and others turn their backs on it? In answering this question, The Gun in Central Africa offers a thorough reassessment of the history of firearms in central Africa. Marrying the insights of Africanist historiography with those of consumption and science and technology studies, Giacomo Macola approaches the subject from a culturally sensitive perspective that encompasses both the practical and the symbolic attributes of firearms. Informed by the view that the power of objects extends beyond their immediate service functions, The Gun in Central Africa presents Africans as agents of technological re-innovation who understood guns in terms of their changing social structures and political interests. By placing firearms at the heart of the analysis, this volume casts new light on processes of state formation and military revolution in the era of the long-distance trade, the workings of central African gender identities and honor cultures, and the politics of the colonial encounter.

In this third volume of his series on traditional African weaponry, the author examines a group of unusual edged weapons showing analogies to agricultural implements. These weapons are characterized by a bent or curved blade with a main concave cutting edge.