Over the past several years, scholars have devoted increasing attention to the relatively under-studied history of violence and vulnerability in precolonial eastern Africa. Richard Reid's book is a valuable contribution to this growing body of literature. Focusing on what he describes as ‘the last bastion of the kind of distorted Eurocentric scholarship that characterized African studies before the 1960s’ (p. 3), Reid's history of warfare in precolonial eastern African aims to refute notions of African warfare as simple, crude and lacking in strategies and tactics. More than merely a work of military history, however, the book seeks ‘to understand the role of militarism and warfare in African state, society, economy and culture, and the ways in which these change in the pre-colonial period’ (p. 4).
Despite its title and some effort to discuss the history of warfare in the region's more distant past, the work for the most part focuses on the second half of the nineteenth century. With respect to geographic foci, Reid limits his study to two distinct zones within eastern Africa: lacustrine east-central Africa, which includes present-day central and southern Uganda as well as northern and central Tanzania; and north-eastern Africa, which includes present-day central and northern Ethiopia as well as Eritrea. Reid focuses within these zones on what he terms ‘corridors of conflict’ – areas that witnessed particularly intense conflict in the nineteenth century – and, guided by the availability of sources, primarily directs attention to conflicts that unfolded at the level of the state.
The book is divided into three parts. The introductory section – ‘Theory & Context’ – consists of two chapters that introduce the key themes in the book and seek to connect subsequent chapters on nineteenth-century developments to earlier histories of the relationship between warfare, memories of violence, and state formation. The two chapters in Part 2 – ‘Armies’ – focus on military organization and examine the structure of armies as well as the types of weapons and tactics employed in battle. Part 3 – ‘Process, Impact, & Culture’ – consists of five chapters and provides the bulk of Reid's interpretive insights. The chapters in this section concern the economic aspects of conflict, the relationship between warfare and the development of social structures, conflict resolution and diplomacy, and what Reid calls ‘the culture of conflict’.
By focusing attention on issues such as the make-up of armies, weaponry, tactics and the costs and profits of violent undertakings, Reid seeks to refute notions of African wars as ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ by presenting warfare in eastern Africa as a rational enterprise. This approach allows him both to challenge the ‘economic model’ of African warfare, which presents African wars as a response to external demand, particularly for slaves, and to place African actors and their motivations at the center of the historical narratives he details. The fundamental problem with the focus on overseas influences in the ‘economic model’ of conflict, Reid contends, is that it places Africans in ‘an essentially passive, receptive role, … always reacting rather than initiating’. While acknowledging that external commercial influences shaped the nature of violence in nineteenth-century eastern Africa, Reid argues that in many respects ‘the role of the external dynamic has been exaggerated’ (pp. 110–11). Instead, he proposes a modified version of the ‘economic model’, in which Africans incorporate the products and demands of global commerce into their communities on their own terms, based on existing needs. In his discussion of Ethiopia, for instance, Reid notes how ‘guns were adapted to local tactics, and not the other way around’ (p. 59). Another key example comes from the Great Lakes region, where the slave trade was but one among many factors motivating warfare among regional powers such as Buganda, Urambo and Unyanyembe. Reid contends than in these areas of state-directed warfare, the acquisition of slaves was an outcome rather than the motivating factor behind violence: ‘more slaves might be gathered in the course of conflicts, … but more conflicts were not necessarily fought to achieve this’ (p. 119). According to Reid's model, then, external commercial influences presented Africans with new opportunities to pursue political and material interests based on extant ideologies and conflicts. Rather than resulting in more vigorous economies, however, the violence that accompanied ‘the great struggles for trade and material growth across the region’ ultimately served to undermine economic growth in nineteenth-century eastern Africa.
While Reid's endeavors to present Africans as rational actors in the theatre of warfare are laudable (if not perhaps a bit overstated), his efforts in this regard at times blind him from an appropriate consideration of what he terms ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ matters. Reid often reduces activities in these realms to an overlay for material concerns. Commenting on the importance that warfare be spiritually sanctioned, he writes that ‘reference to the spirit-world permitted, as religion often does, the leaving aside of individual responsibility in these matters’, and further notes how ‘rather more earthly ambition was disguised by a fatalistic approach to life itself’. In making such claims, however, Reid, perhaps unintentionally, relegates healers and practices of public healing to the realm of the irrational. In so doing, he fails to recognize the manner in which these figures and the ideas upon which they drew both shaped and guided politically sanctioned violence. This criticism aside, Reid has produced a useful book that will serve as inspiration for future scholarship on violence and conflict in eastern Africa and beyond.
