Guns, Archives and the Power of History
A talk with Giacomo Macola, Assistant Professor at the Universita La Sapienza, Rome.
Tuesday, 10 March 2020, 5pm
Seminar room 3, Department of African Studies

In 2011, during a banal administrative appointment in a police post in Bunkeya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Giacomo Macola’s attention was caught by a pile of rusty firearms stacked on the floor. These had been manufactured locally and confiscated after the overthrow of infamous dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. Five years later, Macola published The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics (Ohio University Press), which documents the ways firearms were encountered, domesticated or rejected in precolonial and colonial Central African societies. It could be described as an African Game of Thrones, retelling stories of attacks, gun shots and sharpened spears, wounds, alliances, honor and masculinity.

In this discussion, Giacomo Macola will talk about the way his encounter with sources (re)shaped his research interests and led him to explore the symbolic functions of military artefacts. Central to his approach to material cultural history is a plea to reconstruct the social, cultural and political functions of firearms outside of the battlefield. As the launch event of the Working Group: Retrieving and Using Sources in African Studies, the discussion will touch on the diversity, historicity, geography and materiality of sources. The power of history to challenge stereotypical representation of firearms in a region that has been marred with a history of violence will also be discussed.

Giacomo Macola is Assist. Professor at the University La Sapienza, Rome.
Prior to that, he was a lecturer at the Department of History, University of Kent and completed his Ph.D from the School for Oriental and African Studies London. His publications include The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics (2016), Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa: A Biography of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula (2010), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (co-edited with Derek Peterson, 2009).
Email : giacomo.macola@uniroma1.it

Chair: Anaïs Angelo