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SEP
21
Eye on Africa: Gun Running, Guerrilla Warfare, and Technological Change in the late 19th Century Sou
Date:
Thursday, 21 Sep 2017
Time:
12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Location:
Room 201, International Center
Department:
African Studies Center
Event Details:

About the Presentation

This presentation synthesizes the results of pre-dissertation research in South Africa, conducted with generous support from the Department of History, the MSU Graduate School, and three successive Foreign Language Area Study (FLAS) summer grants from 2014 to 2016. The preliminary evidence recovered from archived documents, oral traditions and artifact collections suggests that Venda chiefs controlled the commercial networks that supplied muzzle-loading muskets to allied communities in northern South Africa, Mozambique and southern Zimbabwe from the 1860s until the late 1890s. Although firearms have a long pedigree as a theme in southern African studies, the geographic and socio-cultural frontiers of Venda-driven gun commerce have been overlooked in most mainstream historical literature. 

About the Speaker

Akil Cornelius is a doctoral candidate in History at Michigan State University. His research fields include precolonial South Africa, migration and mobility studies and material culture studies. His forthcoming dissertation explores the history of the Venda kingdom, nineteenth century South Africa's last independent state, and its people, who resisted European imperialism until 1898.