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

摘要

For much of the last seventy-five years African combatants, especially in warsnof their own making, have not been seen as masters of the guns they shoot. InnKenya in the 1950s, for example, captured Mau Mau were humiliated: theynwere taken to shooting ranges where they failed to hit a target with theirnguns.n1nMore recently, rebels in southern Sudan considered guns poor, if effec-ntive substitutes for more embodied weapons like spears, while young men innSierra Leone fought with the weapons at hand such as knives or machetes,nbecause they were too poor to obtain guns.n2nWhen the armies of Ethiopianand Eritrea fought well and hard with sophisticated weapons, it was said tonbe the result of Cold War rivalries or national agendas gone berserk.n3nRhodesia’s bush war, Zimbabweans’ liberation struggle, suggests somethingnelse, a space shaped by technology and clientelism in which guns, mostnespecially guns in guerrilla hands, exemplify very specific European ideasnabout Africans, that they are skilled and sophisticated.