'Many soldiers in the 24th Division's tank companies and Scout platoons began to collect battlefield souvenirs - especially Soviet AK-47 assault rifles carried by the military. … In one instance, an elaborate Iraqi Defense Ministry compound was broken into by the 2-4 Cavalry, and, under the eyes of its commander … soldiers loaded glassware, trays, sterling silver, gun collections, oversized rugs, and a huge photograph of Saddam Hussein onto tanks and armored cars to take back to America. … The items were to be used … for a Cavalry Ball, to be held after the war…'. In the case of this war, a 'war-souvenir officer' was even appointed to gather war trophies - flags, enemy tanks and artillery pieces, two camels, etc - for display at the Fort Stewart Museum, back in Georgia.

This essay explores the collecting of weapons and war trophies in south and east Africa in the late nineteenth century. The meaning and significance of these objects has altered as they shift between different owners in different realms. Arjun Appadurai's often-quoted observation that objects have no meanings aside from those attributed to them by humans is aptly illustrated by the 'social life' of these weapons and war trophies. As he writes, to understand such meanings we 'have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, and their paths. It is only through analysis of these paths that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things … it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.' In this introduction the focus is specifically on the meaning of these objects once they were collected by military men and others travellers on the frontiers of colonialism and taken back to Europe by soldiers where they functioned as souvenirs of a battle and foreign cultures. In many instances weapons and war trophies are the same thing but as this introduction will illustrate, weapons were not only collected by soldiers but also by travellers and ethnographers, amongst others. In addition, war trophies were also not always weapons, and included many other objects that functioned as reminders of a war or battle.

The Gulf War incident quoted at the outset sounds remarkably similar to the many passages describing the collecting of weapons and war trophies in memoirs of soldiers who fought in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the Battle of Omdurmam in the Sudan in 1898, amongst the many other battles of the period. In south and east Africa in the late nineteenth century, there was recurring conflict with the African communities (and in instances, European settlers such as the Boers) resisting Britain (and other European powers') imperialist ambitions. The self-assurance of the British, in particular, of their position at the pinnacle of Social Darwinism ensured that they tended to often perceive colonial wars simplistically as advancing European civilisation and taming 'native savages'. A remark made after encountering a woman who had survived attack by tribesmen in the Sudan in the 1880s illustrates the overt racism of this mindset: 'The Soudanese are marvels, and they cannot have the same feelings as others. To me they seem lower in the scale of feelings even than the ape tribe, who really seem to feel pain and is a sensitive animal.' Such attitudes together with a religious and moral rectitude justified - in their minds - the destructive thrusts of imperialism and expense of distant wars. A belief that they were creating a new and superior British and Christian world order is vividly illustrated in the young Winston Churchill's book on the conquest of Sudan in 1898. In it he provides a background to this conflict which is saturated with caricatures and stereotypes of the enemy who had in fact persistently resisted European control and exploitation: 'Year after year, and stretching back to an indefinite horizon, we see the figures of the odd and the bizarre potentates on whom the British arms continuously are turned. They pass in a long procession: - The Akhund of Swat; Cetewayo, brandishing an assegai as naked as himself; Kruger, singing a psalm of victory; Osman Digna, the Immortal and the Irretrievable; Theebaw, with his Umbrella; Lobengula, gazing fondly at the pages of Truth; Prempeh, abasing himself in the dust; the Mad Mullah, on his white ass; and, latest of all, the Khalifa in his coach of state. It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane. These extraordinary foreign figures - each with his complete set of crimes, horrible customs, and "minor peculiarities" - march one by one from the dark wings of barbarism up to the bright footlights of civilisation…. The potentates and their trains pass on, some to exile, some to prison, some to death… and their conquerors, taking their possessions, forget even their names. Nor will history record such trash.'

There is disproportionate historical emphasis on the Anglo-Zulu war and the Sudanese conflicts because these encounters engrossed the British more than any of the other wars in their many colonial outposts at the time. Perhaps this bias was related to their pre-conceptions of colonial warfare, and the Zulus and the Madhists matched their imaginative archetypal constructs of warriors: fighting, in their thousands, almost naked, brandishing spears and shields, bravely, often in hostile landscapes. This is in contrast to an enemy like the Boers, who were of European descent and equipped with modern weaponry. The British viewed the Zulu and Mahdists as an enemy 'worthy' of their warfare, and there are many respectful remarks about heroism of the 'fearless' and 'valiant' opponents in the memoirs of these battles. Even though the British ultimately won their campaigns, the enemy often proved that they were not invincible and provided them with dramatic defeats, such as at Isandlwana against the Zulu in January 1879, at battle of Majuba against the Boers on 26 and 27 February 1881, and in the Sudan at Kashgil in 1883 when 10000 Egyptian troops were slaughtered by the followers of El Madhi, and similarly at El Teb in February 1884 when 3500 soldiers were decimated by Mahdists (led here by Uthman Digna, known to the British as Osman Digna). As G.W. Steevens, a British war correspondent, wrote after the 1898 action in the Sudan, 'Our men were perfect, but the Dervishes were superb beyond perfection. It was the largest, best, and bravest army that ever fought against us for Mahdism and it died worthy of the huge empire that Mahdism won and kept so long.' As Major-General Sir Alexander Bruce Tulloch, who was in Natal in 1885, six years after the Anglo-Zulu war, noted: 'Travellers and officials who have had to deal with natives in many parts of the world all agree in stating that the Zulu is the finest specimen of the black man found anywhere….' As will become self-evident, the British admiration for an enemy intensified their desire to collect war trophies, and thus the many Zulu and Sudanese weapons in this essay.

The British fascination with the Zulu at the time of Anglo-Zulu war skewed (and in some instances stills skews) their portrayal of it and overlooks the complexity of the events and the repercussions. This war was not - as is often portrayed - a sequence of gallant battles. A counter-view of the Anglo-Zulu war is well-established in academic publications, but the myths and assumptions of the past are not easily dissipated in the popular consciousness. As Jeff Guy wrote in 1979: 'For nearly a century journalists, military men, and historians have excited their readers with accounts of the formal battles, emphasising the suicidal bravery of the Zulu, the imperturbable courage of the redcoats, the ineffectiveness of the assegai when matched with the breech-loading rifle and the Gatling. The victory at Isandlwana is seen as an historical accident; the consequence of inept leadership and the absence of the screwdrivers needed to open ammunition boxes. But at Ulundi the inevitable victory was won when British fire-power finally persuaded the Zulu of the futility of resistance, breaking the Zulu army and with it the power of the Zulu dynasty. However, this approach, by removing the war from the social and political context in which it was fought and concentrating on the pitched battles, misinterprets the invasion's place and significance in Zulu, and southern African, history.'

Each weapon has a long and involved history before they were appropriated by European soldiers, officials, missionaries and travellers. For the manufacture of weapons ore was mined and smelted, specific trees were felled for wood, and certain wild and domestic animals were killed for their skin. Rituals and religious practices permeated the whole process of production, and consequently the technical and visual characteristics of each type of weapon was laden with meaning. Although the focus here is only on the European ownership of the pieces, it is not the intention to view the accomplishments of African artisans as a tangential aspect of European colonialism. These latter issues are complex and wide ranging, and the various anthropological and ethnographic studies of the respective African societies provide a meaningful context for their manufacture and use.

A latent theme throughout this essay is the status and symbolic power of weapons. This is illustrated by the inscription on the sword with which Emperor Theodore of Abyssinia killed himself at the battle of Magdala: it was engraved 'Presented by Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland to Theodorus Emperor of Abyssinia As a slight token of her gratitude For his kindness to her servant Plowden 1864'. Not only did the British queen choose to present a weapon to an African king, but the king took his life with it when attacked by the queen's troops. African weapons, like all weapons, are laden with references to rank and position for their owners. They were usually prestigious objects, not necessarily used in warfare or hunting, but rather as ceremonial and luxury items, owned by elites. They were the product of labour intensive processes, often using valuable raw materials such as iron or wire which ensured that they would have had meaningful economic worth in African societies. The fact that Europeans actively sought out these weapons suggest that their value and status was immediately apparent even to outside audiences. As Arnoldi, discussing the Ward collection of weapons at the Smithsonian has noted, the tradition to collect weapons was intertwined with the associations of power that they carried: 'Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collections of African and other non-Western weapons were regularly made by Europeans and they constituted a logical and desirable category for collecting because they were such potent symbols of conquest and domination.' Another factor which presumably made them so attractive for European soldiers was the unabashed masculinity associated with them (even though there were complex references to the feminine in the manufacture of iron), which would have appealed to the ethos of heroic masculinity and militarism that permeated British literature and culture, in the later part of nineteenth century until the world wars. The ownership and display of African weapons was part of the persona of military men who sought to portray themselves as chivalrous imperial soldiers who had bravely fought in distant lands against fierce warriors. Thus, both in the realms of the African society in which they were made and used, and in the European context in which they survived, weapons served as emblems of rank and status for men, long after technology has rendered them obsolete.

This issue of technology was another point of interest for European soldiers because African weapons provided a very visible juxtaposition to the technologically advanced arms that they were using. They were collecting these weapons just before the obsolescence of pre-capitalist indigenous arms and the domination of Western-made weapons in African warfare. Often the trauma of the war, and the ensuing disorder in the African societies which fragmented the communities, led to a decline in the manufacture of indigenous weapons because traditional production processes were undermined and undervalued. Fleet Surgeon Henry F. Norbury, who was the principal medical officer of the naval forces landed in South Africa in the years 1877-79, observed this shift on his visit to the eastern Cape: 'When the Amaxosa are at war, perhaps a third carry some fire-arm, of which one sees the most extraordinary variety, from the old flint-lock brass-mounted musket to the present Snider rifle, and everyone carries a bundle of assegais, the blades of which are encased in a kind of quiver of bullock's hide.' This period of transition in technology is aptly portrayed by J Ward in his description of the arsenal at Omdurman in 1898: there was 'a collection of ancient armour, obsolete guns and mitrailleuses the Dervishes had tried to repair, with piles of cast- iron bullets lying besides them, quantities of sabre-proof (woollen padded) helmets, scimitars, daggers, bayonets, rusty muskets, jibbas or Dervish uniforms in gaudy patched barbaric style; rickety horse pistols, flint guns and matchlocks, shields of rhinoceros hide, ancient sandals and leggings, all piled in confusion together.'

Churchill's description of the battle of Omdurman itself illustrates the disparity of technology in this transitional phase. In his prejudiced opinion it was 'the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians. Within the space of five hours the strongest and the best-armed savage army yet arrayed against a modern European Power had been destroyed and dispersed, with hardly any difficulty, comparatively small risk, and insignificant loss to the visitors.' It is this imbalance in firing-power and resources that afforded Britain the upper-hand in their conquest in Africa in the nineteenth century. For instance, in the battle of Omdurman in 1898, only a few thousand of the Khalifa's 50000 soldiers had rifles and the rest were armed with spears, swords, daggers and shields which would explain why approximately half of his soldiers were wounded or killed in the battle, while of the British and Egyptian troops, only 48 men were killed and 382 wounded. If the enemies had been more evenly matched, the British victories would surely have been rarer. As an officer on the campaign against Sekhukhune, the principal chief of the Pedi people, in 1879, observed, 'If they were good shots and had better weapons it would have been impossible to advance against them.' In instances the enemy were skilled marksmen, but their chance of victory was undermined by a lack of sophisticated weaponry. Percy Marling, who was serving with the Mounted Infantry wrote after the belated expedition to retrieve Gordon in Khartoum, 'The bravery of the enemy is simply wonderful, and the worst of it is they are such good shots, people say as good as the Boers.'

There has been a tendency to overlook the use of firearms by African warriors in the second part of the nineteenth century because 'White notions of the noble (even if fearful) savage measured military prowess in terms of charging impi and assagai-brandishing Zulu warriors. African people who did not fit in with this stereotype were not only considered to be lacking in military virtues and competency, but also to be greatly inferior in social and cultural attainments.' By the 1870s, most African communities living in south-west Africa and on the South African highveld, in particular the kingdom of Lesotho and the Pedi, incorporated firearms into their warfare because they need to bolster their defenses against raiding neighbours and the Europeans. Acquiring firearms became easier because of the income migrant labourers from these societies earned on the diamond fields. However, on the whole, the communities in Natal did not acquire the same quantity of arms as was the case elsewhere in southern Africa. Consequently, the Zulu were one of the last of the southern African communities still using traditional weapons to be conquered by colonialism. As Marks and Atmore explain: 'The role of firearms in the powerful Zulu kingdom and its offshoot states, the Gaza, Swazi and Ndebele kingdoms was different to that elsewhere in southern Africa. None of these was subject to direct European control until the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, though they had all been in contact with small groups of white traders, missionaries and settlers for at least fifty years earlier. All of them were organized for a specialized form of raiding warfare against their African neighbours and were, on the whole, extremely successful at this without the use of firearms. Though the rulers of all these kingdoms were anxious to acquire firearms, these were not in general used in their raiding activities…. They were wedded to offensive warfare; [when] faced with white invasions of their territory, they could not change to defensive tactics easily and tried to attack the much better armed forces which were attacking them…. Even when they possessed a fair number of firearms, they did not adapt their tactics and strategy to their use…'.

More specifically, the Zulu viewed firearms as subordinate to the stabbing spear in the Anglo-Zulu war, and tended to discharge guns before confronting the enemy at close quarters. In the central Sudan states firearms were also only belatedly incorporated into their armories in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and also were not integral to their battle tactics. In the instance of the Ethiopians, their shift to modern weapons provided them with the capacity to defeat the Italians in March 1896, even though they had not re-organised their army along European lines. Yet firearms without the necessary technical skills could be less effective than traditional weapons. A contemporary writer on the Sudanese wars of the 1880s made the point that the Egyptian battalions armed with weapons against the Sudanese taught them that 'the rifle in the hands of a bad shot is not nearly such an effective weapon as the shield and spear or sword.' The dependence of the Zulu and the Sudanese on traditional weapons would partly explain why so many of their weapons have survived, as compared with those of societies such as the Sotho and the Pedi, who had discarded them in favour of firearms.

Aside from firearms, the proliferation of other industrially produced weapons and implements such as spears, axes and knives did not always displace them, even though they may have undermined the manufacture of hand-crafted examples. As a European traveller in the 1890s discovered in central southern Africa: 'Some gaudy-looking axes we had also brought excited their unutterable contempt, as the edges broke in use against the extremely hard kinds of wood growing here and while chopping through the bones of heavy game. They brought us their home-made weapons of soft iron, and with many exclamations of derision vaunted the superiority of their own manufacture.'

A fascinating insight into the European obsession with collecting weapons is a statistical analysis of the object types found in the collections of the travellers in Africa in the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna. It is immediately apparent that African weapons were among the most sought-after souvenirs and collectibles: 'Franz Thonner's collection from the Ubangi area, for instance, includes 86 weapons (among them 212 arrows) out of a total of 115 inventoried items, in Han Meyer's case the ratio is 240 weapons out of 650 objects. Alfred Sigl, Emil Holub, Paul Kollmann, and Oscar Baumann also show an obvious prediction in this regard, and only Josef Chavanne seems to have had no particular interest in weapons.' The Catalogue of the Museum of the United Service Institution, published in 1845, confirms this bias, and almost a hundred weapons mostly from south and east Africa are listed. The handbook of the British Museum collection, published in 1910, is similar. In the short section on southern Africa it illustrates 19 pieces which comprise 16 weapons and implements and 3 Shona headrests. The many colonial exhibitions held in London from the latter part of the nineteenth century until the interwar years usually displayed a large selection of African material culture, and significant portions of these exhibits invariably were weapons and implements. At the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867, both the Cape and Natal sent contributions, and the respective catalogues list the array of weapons separately from other implements, utensils and traditional dress. On the occasion of the enormous Stanley and Africa Exhibition in London in 1890, a range of 'weapons, implements, dress and ornaments, etc' were displayed in the 'Native Section'. The objects that received the most attention in The Times reviews were the spears which were dramatically displayed in huge fan-shaped arrangements. There were similar displays at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford and many of the regimental and provincial museums.

The pre-occupation with securing weapons probably peaked with the Anglo-Zulu war when - for various reasons as will be discussed - the British carted off almost every Zulu weapon they came across although, even before this war, spears and shields were sent back as souvenirs of South Africa. Anne Margaret Wilkinson, an Anglican missionary's wife living in Zululand, mentioned in a letter written in 1872 that she was planning to send home 'a very handsome war shield and three spears' which they had collected. A few examples from journals of the Anglo-Zulu war illustrate the frenzied collecting. General Sir Richard Harrison recalled that after the battle of Ulundi, he 'rode up to the king's kraal … I got from there two wooden milk jugs and some assegais and shields.' Philip Robert Anstruther of the 94th Regiment of Foot wrote at the time of the same battle, 'We walked about burning the whole place and picked up shields and assegais. I got five shields & 2 assegais - could not carry more.' He wrote again a few days later describing some shields he was sending home: 'The shields … 4 of them are quite new and are made out of the king's cattle and are the ones chiefs carry…. I picked up a lot of shields, assegais & guns but could not carry them and had to drop them all again except the small shields & assegais.' An observation that probably best describes this sweeping collecting is in a letter home written by Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Arthur Harness of the Royal Artillery: 'It is curious the greediness about these old arms that is displayed. I see a doctor, to whom I gave leave to take 'a few' assegais, making repeated journeys to his tent laden with spoil - and many others also ask for 'one or two' taking armfuls away; the only objection I have is that none are left for some who come late and also really want a couple or so. The firearms are all being destroyed, but not the assegais - those I have given away.'

This obsession to collect souvenirs of war was so strong that life was almost put at risk to secure pieces. In the Sudan in the mid 1880s an interpreter recalled that 'he had gone out with a sergeant in the Engineers, he to pick up curios and the latter to sketch, and while alongside a bush an Arab had come out and nearly chopped the sergeant's head off with one blow of his two-handed sword.' Another example of collecting under dangerous circumstances is to be found in George Mossop's appropriately titled book, Running the Gauntlet: some recollections of adventure. Mossop, who was a young volunteer fighting in Zululand, at the battle of Khambula was ordered to pursue Zulus with the mounted men. As he rode out of the British laager, he saw an apparently dead 'big powerful fellow, and from his neck was hanging a large, beautifully-carved horn snuff-box, attached to a thin rope of sinew. Dismounting, I went to him, and as I was putting out my hand to secure the snuff-box, he suddenly drew up one leg, and with the sole of his foot kicked me in the pit of my stomach, bowling me over…. However, I was not going to be kicked and frightened to death for nothing, and setting to work more cautiously, I secured the snuff-box.'

From the literature it would appear that in south and east Africa the many colonial troops did not express the same interest as the British military officers in collecting weaponry. Perhaps the colonial soldiers were already familiar with the weapons and did not want souvenirs of 'exotic' and 'epic' experience. This is borne out by the fact that we have acquired almost all these late nineteenth-century weapons in Britain and not in the former colonies in south and east Africa. Another factor surely influencing the collecting practices of the British soldiers would be the issue of class: it is probable that the many officers and high-ranking soldiers from prominent British families were familiar with the ethos of collecting and consequently sought artefacts to take back home. An extension of this issue of class and rank is the fact that only the upper echelons of the military would have been permitted - or could afford - to ship quantities of weapons and other objects back to Britain. Think for a moment of the logistics of returning to the camp and to the port of departure with a clump of unwieldy weapons if there were not underlings to assist. As Bennet Burleigh, a war correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph recalled after the battle of Tamaai in the Sudan in March 1884, 'There were hundreds of shields, spears, swords, knives, and other Arab trophies on the field, samples of which I should like to have possessed myself of, but riding nearly fourteen stone and with a light Arab horse below me, as speed was everything I could not afford to handicap myself.'

The were many reasons why Europeans chose to collect these weapons and other objects while in south and east Africa. In the memoirs of battles and travels of the period, the narratives indicate that such pieces more often than not functioned as representations of memory and experiences in a foreign land. The terms they used for describing these pieces included curios, souvenirs, mementoes, relics and trophies. On occasions, collecting was more scientific and the items were described as ethnographic specimens, and in other instances collecting was undertaken by missionaries to be used in their publicity and propaganda efforts. These terms and approaches will be explored further in terms of specific examples.

The efforts of missionary collectors and their profound impact on African tradition of manufacturing art and artefacts. Once a missionary appropriated an indigenous item, it became - as has been remarked upon in relation to Polynesia - 'an artifact of history for missionary discourse, an artifact made to speak at once of its original purpose and the transaction through which it had been detached from that purpose.' A primary reasons why missionaries collected weapons, was to illustrate the barbaric and war-like customs of heathen cultures that need to be pacified by Christian practices. Another reason for their collecting was to provide evidence of the industrial and artisanal skills of their subjects which could potentially be adapted to more productive capitalist endeavors. This mentality is illustrated by the displays and handbook of the International exhibition of 1862 in London: in the catalogue for the Natal section the 'Kaffir manufactures, illustrating native industry and domestic economy: Shields, assegais, clubs, musical instruments, ornaments, implements, models, &c.' are listed under the 'Industrial department', and in the Cape of Good Hope section a similar exhibit was described as 'Specimens of aboriginal industry'.

The fact that almost all the surviving weapons and other material culture are now devoid of the context in which they were collected would confirm that they were seldom acquired within an ethnographic or anthropological framework. The observations made by a commentator on British ethnographic museums in 1909 illustrate how rare such a scientific approach was to collecting as the time: referring to colonials and travellers, he wrote that 'People of this class … are not trained collectors and have little conception of the importance of carefully chronicled data respecting their "curios". The objects have been dumped in the museum with the scant information that the donor has been living in such and such a country…. No importance is attached to the significant fact that on the way home the donor acquired more "curios" at various ports of call many thousand miles apart!'.

An inquiring and systematic approach to collecting and observation tends only to be seen in the journals of travellers and explorers such as Thomas Baines and David Livingstone, among others, and professional and amateur ethnographers such as Emil Holub and H.J. Junod. Often they attempted to assemble a representative sample of the material culture for a specific museum where it remains to this day. The soldier or early tourist whose collections were handed down to descendants, and are to be seen in this essay, were less interested in extending knowledge about other cultures. An insight of how ad-hoc their collecting was is to be found in a fascinating and vast loan exhibition arranged in June 1900 to benefit the 'Loyal South Africa Colonists who are sufferers by the War'. The lenders, who were mostly people of title or prominent in colonial affairs, offered a strange assortment of items that they obviously had thought worthy of carrying back to Britain from South Africa. Weapons were interspersed with specimens of natural history and many other oddities. For example, the loaned items included the fruit of a Boabab tree and other seeds and pods lent by Miss Alice Balfour; 'Mr Theodore Bent's purse: a bag of beads used at Zimbabwe for exchange with the natives', lent by his wife; 'Skin of a very large lion from Lo Magundi district, Mashonaland' (lent by G Seymour Fort) and a 'Zulu's dress, or "moutchi", made of pieces of ox-hide strung together' lent by the Hon Mrs Evelyn Cecil. Amongst Sir Bartle Frere's many loans are 'wooden spoons', 'Specimens of Beadwork (the necklace and bracelets made by Cetewayo's wives)'; a large 'collection of carved sticks, assegais, Knob Kerries, &c.'; 'Nautilus shells from beach of False Bay'; 'Paper Cutter made out of a bone of the elephant shot by HRH the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when in South Africa'; 'Tissue paper cut in patterns, which the Malays use to drape their rooms at festivals', 'Wool Birds'-nest, with pocket, in which cock bird is said to sit and sing'.

The many pages of loans listed in this catalogue affirm that collecting at the time was centred around the personal associations and interactions of the collector. Similar items had different meanings for different collectors and audiences, and the divisions between these terms depended on shifting definitions and attitudes. Often there was not a great deal of differentiation in their eyes between a memento, keepsake, relic, curio or souvenir, as the many quotes below will also illustrate. Their most often-used term is 'curiosity' or 'curio', the latter a late nineteenth-century term that evolved out of the earlier references to 'curiosities' of foreign cultures. In the opinion of Benedict, curiosities serve as a means of verifying the credibility of their owner. She writes, 'Symbolically, curiosities collected from overseas represent travel; seeing and possessing them demonstrates the knowledge of the world, particularly for those whose class and means prohibit them from travel itself…. The visual possession of curiosities either in cabinets at home or by seeing spectacles in the city endows the observer with the ownership of experience, and so with the experience of ownership.'

These words - as opposed to a more neutral term such as 'specimen' - reflect collectors' preoccupation with their own perspective on the item: it was less an object of material culture than something that they found unusual and curious in terms of their own value system. As Kasfir makes the point with reference to Samburu spears, a 'souvenir (from the Latin subvenire, "to come into the mind") is an object of memory, a token of remembrance of a person, a place, or an event - that is an object that stands for something to be remembered. In that sense, its meaning is private and specific to its owner rather than public and collective. Yet certain kinds of objects become accepted repositories of such recollections in particular cultures and time periods … suggesting that there is also social meaning to the souvenir - something that affirms and legitimates the memory for other viewers as well as for its collector. It is also clear that these "memory-objects" function as signs that recall for their owners and other "knowing" viewers a complex set of associated meanings.'

What illustrates the extent of collectors' interest in personal associations - rather than the aesthetic or physical properties of an object - was the desire to own a relic connected with a battle or a person. A few examples will reveal this Victorian bent for relics. Woodgate, on the Abyssinian expedition remarked in a letter that his mother had asked him to send her some of Emperor Theodorus' hair. (To satisfy her, he enclosed 'a piece of hair off a woman in the bazaar'). This request for a lock of hair as a memento was not only a European habit, as J. Theodore Bent travelling in the country of the 'great Makalanga chief called Gambidji' in the 1890s experienced: 'the inhabitants … were almost beside themselves with delight when my wife took down her hair and showed them its length. They greatly prized a gift of a few of these long hairs, which they will doubtless keep as a memento of the first white lady who ever came amongst them.' After the battle of Tamaai in the Sudan, I came across the 'body of the son of Sheik Taheer Magdub, one of the leaders of the rebellion': 'I took the rosary off his neck, as he had no more use for it, as a memento of Tamaai'. A more macabre example is cited by Major-General Sir Hugh McCalmont in his memoirs of a visit to Rorke's Drift a few months after the battle, with one of his men by the name of Walsh: 'there were still a good many skeletons of Zulus who had been killed … to be seen… I was busy making a sketch of the scene … when my attention was attracted by a queer sort of rattling noise that resounded from some little way off, and looking to see what could be the cause of it I espied Walsh … engaged in collecting teeth … and he carried off some forty of these ghoulish treasures in his pocket with the intention of sending them home as keepsakes to his many inamoratas.'

Skulls were often taken as souvenirs under similar circumstances. Field-Marshall Lord Grenfell recalls in his memoirs that a few months after the battle of Ulundi, he visited the 'old fighting ground'. 'I stood at the place … where the Zulus had made their last attack.… I had seen a Zulu Induna hot in the head by Owen's machine-guns, of which there were two at this corner. He was leading his men on and got as close as eighteen yards from the square, for I had measured it after the action. I again paced the eighteen yards and came to my old friend, a splendid skeleton, his bones perfectly white, his flesh eaten off by the white ants. I felt I could not part with him, so I put his skull into my forage bag, and brought it home with me. It now adorns a case in my collection of curiosities.'

A relic or memento could also be an object of material culture, such as a weapon. Sir H.M. Bengough visited the kraal near where the Prince Imperial was killed in the Anglo Zulu war and recalled that he 'brought away as a memento of the sad event a knobkerry stick, which I found in the kraal, and which now hangs in the hall of my house.' In the instance of a famous battle, especially one that was the culmination of a war such as Ulundi on 4 July 1879, every European involved appeared to have wished to own a weapon or object that could serve as a relic embedded with memories of the event. A writer in the history of the 13th regiment in South Africa, published in 1880, just after the Anglo-Zulu war, remarked, 'our mounted forces … cleared and burned all the kraals … and at length it was decided we should return, and every one [should be] … sure of getting some memento of Ulundi: shields, assegais, or anything to commemorate the event.' And as Colonel Henry Harford recalled: 'In my spare time I went over the battlefield of Ulundi and picked up one or two relics in the shape of shields, assegais, etc.' The collecting of relics at Ulundi was obviously very thorough because when Bertram Mitford visited the battlefield a few years later he 'was keenly on the lookout for relics, but could find none; a few bits of broken glass, remnants of ancient gin bottles, lay about and fragments of native property…. On the site of the King's huts I picked up some pieces of a clay bowl, a fragment of an iron three-legged pot, and a smooth round stone such as would be used for polishing floors…. Other relics more curious and valuable there were none.'

A few examples of the usage of the words 'curiosity' and 'curios' will illustrate how loosely it was used. C.W. Robinson remarked in a letter after the battle at Ulundi that there were 'no curiosities or loot whatever - nothing but assegais and Zulu shields as mementoes to take away.' In contrast, other soldiers repeatedly referred to assegais and shields as curiosities and, on occasions, even loot. In the Sudan in the mid 1880s, staff and cavalry were advised '[that if they] wanted any arms as curios they had better pick up what we were collecting in heaps, and that I would make one pile of the best for the officers. On their way back they found a good collection.' Cornelius Vijn, the author of Cetshwayo's Dutchman: being the private journal of a white trader in Zululand during the British invasion wrote that he saw a soldier, who had been sent out to 'capture King's cattle, burn kraals, and plunder all the huts of curiosities,' walk away with four milking bowls over his shoulders, two in front and two behind, four or five girls' bead-fringes round his waist, three men's tail-pieces slung over one shoulder and below the other, like a shawl, a number of bangles on his wrists, on his hat a Zulu's ball of feathers, four or five assegais in one hand and six or seven knobkirries (sic) in the other. The war artist Melton Prior recalled that amid the burning of Ulundi, 'we came across a jolly nice hut', and Sir William Gordon-Cummings said, '"There ought to be something in the place," and he crawled in while I held his horse, and he came out with some nice spears and curiosities.' A passage describing the conquest of Lobengula in 1893 suggests that a curiosity is an item that is unusual, sometimes amusing, and generally not of great financial worth: 'everything in the King's block of buildings [was] entirely destroyed…. There was nothing of value visible, although several curiosities, including the silver elephant given to Lobengula by the Tati Company, were picked up afterwards among the ruins.'

The term 'trophy' is also frequently encountered in accounts of collecting in the region in the late nineteenth century. On closer examination it appears that there are two aspects to its usage: to describe collecting of prized ethnographic and natural history specimens, or, collecting symbols of conquest and warfare. The collectors who sought both weaponry and zoological specimens often travelled through Africa as big-game hunters, and their journals and memoirs are usually a seamless mix of observations on indigenous animals and people. Two examples of the many such collectors are Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming who travelled through southern Africa in the 1840s and Herbert Ward who travelled in the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century. On Gordon-Cumming's return to Britain he published A descriptive catalogue of hunting trophies, native arms, and costume, from the far interior of South Africa…, which he exhibited in London in 1851 on the occasion of the publication of his memoirs. Besides the 16 items of ethnographic interest, the exhibition comprised 152 animal trophies from southern Africa including elephant tusks, horns, and skulls, and 10 North American and European animal trophies, as well as weapons: shields, assegais, battleaxes, rhino-horn knobkerries and 8 karosses, each of which belonged to a specific chief. In the case of the Ward collection, housed at the Smithsonian Museum, 64 percent of the collection consists of weaponry of various types. A historian of the collection is of the opinion that 'the availability of weapons, their durability, as well as the ease with which they could be acquired must … have influenced Ward's collecting program. … Besides satisfying his typological interests Ward was also strongly drawn to these weapons for purely aesthetic reasons. The diversity of their forms and the variety of decoration incised, engraved, and embossed on these weapons clearly appealed to his artistic sensibilities.'

The other aspect of trophy collecting related more specifically to warfare. Weapons were obviously an aspect of such trophy collections, especially if they were symbolic of a conquered enemy, but in some instances the trophies were costume or regalia which represented the soul and strength of a celebrated enemy. A few examples will illustrate this tradition: in the instance of the Abyssinian campaign in 1868, General Sir Robert Napier (1810-1890) kept the emperor's crown and the royal seal and presented them to Queen Victoria. (They were returned by George V as a gesture of Anglo-Ethiopian friendship.) In the opening conflict of the First Anglo-Boer War of 1880-1, the Boer soldiers were pleased to capture the mace of the 94th Regiment at the Battle of Bronkhorstspruit on 20 December 1880, although they did not lay hands on the regimental colours which, in the eyes of the British would have been the ultimate war trophy. Towards the end of the Anglo-Zulu war, Major-General Sir Hugh McCalmont recalled that when they were searching for the Zulu king, they found his 'war dress at a place about forty miles from Ulundi; it consisted of 183 skins of monkeys and cats' which they took back with them to the encampment at Ulundi. Colonel Henry Harford wrote of a search of Cetewayo's 'crown and other paraphernalia' presented to him on the occasion of his Coronation in 1873 by Sir Theophilus Shepstone, representing the Government of Natal' which were apparently excavated shortly before the British arrived at the burial spot.

Often such trophies, invested with power, were ceremonial weapons which would have added significance if presented to another commanding figure. Major Frederick Russell Burnham, D.S.O., Chief of scouts under Lord Roberts, recollected that in the Matabele war of 1893, Lobengula on retreating from Bulawayo set fire to his stores. However, 'one trophy that we managed to salvage was the great knobkerrie of Lobengula himself. This was a single white rhinoceros horn, probably one of the finest existent, with a knob at one end as large as one's fist. The horn was fully four feet in length and had been straightened and beautifully worked.' It was to be given to Cecil Rhodes because 'it seemed particularly fitting that this emblem of authority should pass from the grasp of the most powerful black monarch of Africa into the hands of the strongest white ruler who ever dominated the continent.' Burnham on another occasion 'packed carefully a very fine bow with copper work on it and some poisoned arrows taken from a hostile chief in the north, along with many of the horns, skins, etc., gathered on my expedition, and sent them to Cecil Rhodes.' Similarly, after Woodgate left the battlefields of Natal after the Anglo-Zulu war to sail home, he stopped over in Cape Town where he dined at Government House, and took along a group of Zulu assegais to present to governor.

In the Sudan conflicts, the prized trophies for the British and Egyptian troops were jibbehs and Mahdists banners which served as symbols of Mahdist allegiance and rank. In the campaigns in 1884-5, the British captured them at every opportunity. One banner captured at El Teb was taken to Britain by a midshipman of the HMS Euryalus, Edward Tyndall-Biscoe, and given to Lord Northbrook. Another large red and yellow banner, taken at Tamai, with one side an inscription recording the presentation by the Mahdi of it to the Governor of Tokar, and on the other a text from the Koran, was presented to Queen Victoria by Lieutenant Wilfrid Lloyd of the Royal Horse Artillery at the end of March 1884. After the battles of Atbara, Nakheila and Abu Klea, in 1898 many of the captured jibbehs and banners were deposited in regimental museums. Quantities of swords, spears and chain-armour were also secured at these battles, and one eyewitness recalled after the battle at Nakheila in 1898 that the troops marched back 'Laden with barbaric booty and trophies of war.' Another observer wrote, 'Many of our people go out to collect swords, spears, etc, and two flags are brought in, but I cannot myself strip the dead, and am content with picking up a spear that has been thrown into the zareba at my feet.'

In the decisive battle of Omdurman in 1898 in which Kitchener's troops defeated the Khalifa, there was an abundance of weapons and war trophies to choose from. According to Churchill, 'Great piles of surrendered weapons rose in the streets.' In the Khalifa's war arsenal 'There were plenty of cannons, old and new, as well as machine guns, rifles, pistols, and fowling pieces of all kinds. Musical instruments, war-drums, elephants' tusks used as horns, coats of chain-mail old and new and steel helmets…. There were hundreds of dervish battle flags, including several duplicate black silk banners such as the Khafila carried during the action, and thousands of native spears, swords, and shields.' The most contentious war trophy from this battle was the remains of the Mahdi which had been interned in a tomb in Omdurman: Churchill wrote that 'By Sir H Kitchener's orders the Tomb has been profaned and razed to the ground. The corpse of the Mahdi was dug up. The head was separated from the body, and, to quote the official explanation, 'preserved for future disposal' - a phrase which must in this case be understood to mean, that it was passed from hand to hand till it reached Cairo. Here it remained, an interesting trophy, until the affair came to the ears of Lord Cromer, who ordered it to be immediately reinterred at Wady Halfa. The limbs and trunk were flung into the Nile. Such was the chivalry of the conquerors!'.

Trophy collectors invariably arranged their collections of weaponry and animal heads and other artefacts in dramatic symmetrical displays portraying their achievements as a hunter and traveller in the colonies. The taste for such arrangements, which became very fashionable in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, was rooted in the Gothic revival of the 1830s and its fondness for medieval arms and armour, prominently displayed in an entrance hall or library in a country house. Such graphic displays of weaponry interspersed with zoological trophies also became popular in museum exhibits and the stream of colonial exhibitions in London over the years. As Annie Coombes points out, such displays 'served as a signifier of "capture" and "conquest" … [and] reinforced a specifically male presence in the colonies, since these were signifiers of predominantly masculine pursuits.' This manner of display also extended to modest domestic spaces associated with the colonies, as the photographs of the 'South African Students Union's rooms' in Edinburgh illustrate. The Committee room in which debates and concerts were held had, according to an article in the Cape Illustrated Magazine in July 1895, the appearance of a 'curiosity shop'. 'The walls are decorated by koodo, hartebeest, sable antelope and springbuck horns and other offerings from the land of sport. At the top of the room are (mounted in two cases) some mummified monkeys… [which] are both curious and valuable. On the adjacent wall is a Kafir trophy … consisting of assegais, choppers, wooden spoons, bowls, chains and two carved figures of a man and a woman.'

For many soldiers and travellers, personally securing a war trophy or curiosity was not an adequate appropriation of the object. They desired to stamp their taste and personality on it by adapting it to serve some decorative and symbolic purpose. This Victorian fondness for creating sentimental but impractical objet produced many strange and hybrid pieces utilising African weapons and curiosities. Capt. Raymond John Marker, who was later an Aides-de-camp on Kitchener's staff in the South Africa War of 1899-1902, secured the brass engine plates of a Boer steam engine and on his return home incorporated them in a custom-designed brass stick. Major Anstruther who took part in the campaign against Sekhukhune near Lydenburg in December 1879 recalled that they took 'a magnificent elephant's tusk out of Sekukuni's kraal, weighs 62 lbs and we are going to have it made into a snuff box. I think we have now about a dozen snuff boxes of sorts in the mess but this one will take 2 men to carry it round.' (It was mounted in silver and presented to the Officers' Mess of the 94th Regiment by Lt. Col. Murray where it remained until the disbanding of the Connaught Rangers in 1922 and was transferred to the National Army Museum.) Just after the Anglo-Zulu war, Anstruther wrote home that he was 'sending… 5 shields, some assegais, 3 or 4' and a mat and suggested that his family should 'put a pedestal … [on]to the bottom of the sticks' because 'they would make nice fire screens' for the dining room'. Sir Bartle Frere had similar thoughts and in later years exhibited a 'Fire Screen made of a small Zulu shield, picked up by the exhibitor on the battlefield of Ulundi'. The symbolism of Zulu shields is aptly illustrated by the use of five replicas in a screen in Litchfield Cathedral installed to commemorate the soldiers of the 80th Regiment who died in the war.

Appropriated artefacts were even used to create jewellery, albeit while vandalising the original objects. Major Frederick Russell Burnham, D.S.O., Chief of scouts under Lord Roberts, who fought against the Matabele in 1893 collected beads washed from the Zimbabwe ruins and 'had a jeweller make a ring for my wife, a unique thing, but spoiled by his soldering the beads together solidly. That goldsmith should have been a blacksmith!' C.W. Robinson writing home after the battle at Ulundi bemoaned that he could not find anything that could adorn his wife: there was 'nothing but assegais and Zulu shields as mementoes to take away' and I don't see how you can wear these, so I won't give you any!'

What is often forgotten or overlooked is that there is invariably a mutual desire for curiosities and relics of the encounters. A case in point was the emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore, who in one of the letters that preceded the conflict between him and the British in 1867-8, set out what he would like from Her Majesty's Government, and aside from artisans and machinery, he also requested 'some European curiosities'. Churchill's description of the contents of the arsenal in Omdurman indicate that the Mahdi and Kalifha retained trophies from their many battles over the years including 'a fine drum-major's staff ornamented with gold and surmounted by the Lion of Abyssinia. This was presumably captured from King John's ill-fated army. …[and] General Gordon's telescope, as bright and clean as on the last day he had looked through it from the palace roof…'.

There are surprisingly many anecdotes of African soldiers also seeking such souvenirs and artefacts from the battles. After the Anglo-Zulu war Bertram Mitford travelling in the region of 'Inhlazatye' noted that several Zulu men 'had snuffboxes stuck in their ears, consisting of revolver cartridge cases with stoppers, which they said they had picked up at Isandhlwana.' Thomas B. Jenkinson of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and late Canon of Maritzbug who was in Natal in the 1870s recalled after the war that 'The natives bring us a great number of things found on the battle-field; they must have an immense quantity hidden away. They tell us that if it had not been for the plunder on the field, the whole army would have come on after the fight; but their leaders could not get them on. They say it is clever strategy on our part to take so many things about with the army to engage the enemy's attention. A man brought a pair of opera-glasses yesterday; a variety of things is brought. The commonest of these are pickaxes; they have brought so many of these, that we laugh and say we shall take a contract for a road through Zululand.'

Ludlow saw in one of the huts in John Dunn's village 'a collection of guns, rifles, swords, helmets, bottles, flasks, and property of all kinds captured by the Zulus at Isandula and the Intombe river where one of our convoys was surprised.' He also recalled that after dinner one evening at John Dunn's village 'an Induna came in with Lieutenant Douglas's sword, saddle bags, and watch; also the helmet of the trooper who was killed with him. It made one feel very melancholy to look at the half rusty sword, with the marks of blood on the blade, showing how gallantly its owner had defended himself.' And in the Sudan, after the battle at El Teb when the cavalry was advancing on Tokar, one eye witness recalled they 'entered a straggling village called Dubbah, where, in some large huts, were stacked rifles, the Gatlings lost by Baker Pasha, and a mountain gun. In every hut around were lying more rifles, heaps of bayonets, cartridges, portmanteaus, saddlery, clothes, stationery, material and remnants of all kinds - all taken from the equipment of Baker Pasha's army.' Unfortunately for the Zulu and the Sudanese, European material culture in the form of guns, opera-glasses and pickaxes have not enjoyed the same aesthetic reevaluation as their weapons and other material culture.

The manner in which soldiers and travellers, amongst others, acquired curiosities, souvenirs, trophies, specimens, etc, is also very revealing of their motives and values. The principal means of securing such pieces were looting, purchasing and bartering; the dynamics of which are not always in retrospect easily understood or unravelled.

Looting is a prerogative of the victors, be they the Americans, Romans, or British. Colonel G. Hamilton-Browne, popularly known as 'Maori Browne', who led troops in the 9th Frontier War in the Eastern Cape in 1878, reflected on the issue in his journal after the troops were instructed by their superiors to return goods and food they had looted from deserted settler houses: 'The word loot to a fighting man has a significance that renders it almost sacred. It has buoyed up many a weary and foot-sore warrior on a long and fatiguing march and has encouraged men…. For although, in these degenerate days, it is inveighed against by the Exeter Hall, cum-kid-glove, anti-fighting, peace-at-any-price crowd, yet, it has been the incentive of nearly all wars…. Why, therefore, should the poor, hard-fighting Tommy, be prevented from gathering a little of the fruit, that may have come his way, after he had run all the risks to win battles for his nation, who pocketing the lion's share of the plunder calls him a thief and marauder.'

In the context of southern Africa and the Sudan, the military would rarely have considered their plundering as constituting looting. Looting, in the Victorian sense of the word, referred to capturing goods that were worth significant financial sums or of great cultural significance. In the British army, such loot was usually put up for auction and the proceeds divided among the officers and troops. In the case of the Abyssinian campaign, the valuables looted from the fortress of Magdala in April 1868 realised £5000 at the auction after the battle, which was divided up among the troops. A representative of the British Museum spent a £1000 on 348 books from the king's library which they still own. In the punitive expedition against the Ashanti in 1874 led by Sir Garnet Wolseley, the palace in Kumasi was looted of gold royal regalia and other valuable objects; most of the gold was melted down and sold. In the infamous instance of the British naval punitive expedition against the king of Benin in 1897, the Court of Benin was looted of 2000 bronzes as well as ivories and other artifacts which were afterwards sold, and are now scattered in museums and collections across the world. The was still some vestiges of the division of the spoils in the Sudanese wars, albeit not always fairly in the eyes of some. One observer/soldier after the battle of Tamaai in the Sudan wrote, 'What one and all were disgusted with, was the partition of the loot; the attacking force at Tamaai was, perhaps, 1500, of which about 100 belonged to Mahmoud Ali - the tribesmen got about one-fifteenth, and Mahmoud the balance. You can only … deceive tribesmen [once]. A second it is impossible; once break faith with them, and your power and influence is gone…'.

In the wars of south and east Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century, the soldiers usually retained the curios, war trophies and food taken after a battle. Such items were not put up for sale because they were rarely made from gold, bronze or ivory or other precious materials, or at that time were not viewed as being of major cultural significance. This is not to say that the British soldiers fighting in these battles did not dream of securing valuable loot, and that their enemies were not conscious of such desires. According to Major Frederick Russell, Lobengula 'on retreating had not only set fire to his huts but had also burned up an immense amount of ivory and treasure, along with valuable hides, horns, and skins that he had accumulated in his storehouses. We made a great effort to put out this fire, but it was impossible to do so, and we saved very little of what must have been one of the most extraordinary collections ever made.' W. H. Tomasson, late adjutant of irregular cavalry, vividly recalled - in the style of a 'Boys' own story - the troops hunger for loot at the battle of Ulundi: 'On first entering [the king's residence] Captain Baker stumbled over two bits of wooden-like substance and kicked them out of his way; Lord William Beresford picks them up, and we see they are two elephants' tusks, only one other is taken, and that a small one, which Captain Baker keeps…. Leaving the house we found a troop starting off to burn a kraal still further on… At the bottom corner there was a splendid pile of skins ready to make into shields. After the burning is over we have some time to rest, and go about looking for loot, a freshly turned up piece of soil attracts us, and sticking the assegai we happen to have into the ground it rings on iron, further investigation reveals a large slab of iron, evidently the lid of a safe; at last all is right, and our fortunes are made, we think; that fortune so oft delayed, so long sought for. At last we find out our safe turns out to be a large American cooking stove, planted in the ground about a foot deep. Still we think it must contain valuables, and pulling the boiler lid off discover - what? well, about the last thing we expect to see, a set of blacking brushes. Cruel irony, that condemned us to see our own hopes so shattered, and by so ridiculous an ending. … After this we sit down, and in sight of the still blazing huts share the last bottle of champagne left [to] us in the world.'

Tomasson also recalled that a few days later some representatives of the Zulu king brought two huge tusks of ivory and about 160 head of cattle captured at Isandlwana to the British camp. The ivory was returned, and the cattle kept for some days while the negotiations for peace proceeded. But as Tomasson writes, 'The sight of the ivory aroused the natural desire inherent in every soldier…. Vague stories of the wealth of the King went about. Splendid visions of loot, in the shape of gold dust, ivory, ostrich feathers and diamonds, filled the soldiers' eyes. Incredible stories of the amounts of treasure taken at Isandula were circulated. We believe the real amount was £300. It is needless to say these golden visions were broken, not a man of the Regulars being a sovereign the better for any loot taken. Some of the Irregulars got small sums from deserted kraals. The men took pains to conceal anything they did take, as they were afraid of being made to disgorge.'

The many surviving narratives of the battle of Ulundi confirm that no valuable booty was secured. Major-General W.C.F. Molyneux recalled 'I … reached Ulundi before it was quite destroyed, and got some of the white shields out of the shield house … but the heat was so intense that little looting could be done before it was all destroyed.' Bertram Mitford quoting an eyewitness account of the battle of Ulundi wrote that in Cetywayo's house 'there was nothing … but some old rat traps and three pieces of ivory, which fell to the lot respectively of Commandant Baker, Lord Beresford (who was first in the kraal), and Capt. Cochrane, who fired the house'. Guy C. Dawnay, the big-game hunter, who also fought at Ulundi recalled that they ransacked the king's house 'pretty thoroughly, but there was no loot at all, nothing but here and there a spoon, a shield, a string of medlars dried, fat-jars, &c., &c., it was jumpy work staying long there, as the way out was rather intricate and amidst a mass of blazing huts and fences and clouds of smoke.'

In the South African war, the British desired the support of the black people, and consequently, for the most part, respected and protected their homes. However, the Boer soldiers did not have the resources and supplies of the British, and increasingly in the war resorted to plundering provisions from African communities. Looting therefore, such as there was, was about food, not curios. As the war intensified, there was widespread destruction of settlements and crops of black (and white) people as a result of Kitchener's 'scorched earth policy,' but the earlier Victorian tradition of destruction to secure loot and booty was seldom apparent.

As is implicit in some of these recollections, the British army frowned on imperial forces looting for personal gain, but the colonial forces and regiments raised for specific local wars were not bound by their directives. An extreme case of this was the 'Matabeleland Relief Force' raised in 1896 to quell the Matabele Rebellion. According to the surviving journal of a trooper, they 'were forbidden to keep anything for our selves' but they were 'rather amused at the order for it would have required a clever man to prevent the M.R.F. from looting.' They embarked on a journey of endless plunder: 'whenever we came upon a mission station we always did all the damage we could', and they burnt about 300 kraals and African settlements after seizing any food they could find. The trooper's journal continues: 'Whenever we passed a waggon we looted it - we got every conceivable thing and lived on the best food. There was ten times as much as we could get through and take with us and any amount of stuff was wasted. I remember once after we had all drunk as much champagne as we could we started pouring it down the horses throats…. we were all dressed in silk shirts and other things we had looted … I believe the Bulawayo merchants claimed £45000 compensation from the Chartered Co. for the damage we had done - they certainly didn't welcome those troops that went into Bulawayo, very heartily. The imperial troops went in shortly before us and a smoking concert was given for them and they were received with cheers but when any of our troops came in they would scowl and mutter something about "Plumers Looters"…'.

But as these many recollections illustrate, the many surviving weapons were taken as trophies and relics, and, not in the eyes of the British army, as loot.

In the instance of the Anglo-Zulu war, another means of securing weapons to take back 'home' was from the mounds handed in by the Zulu soldiers after their defeat. Philip Robert Anstruther of the 94th Regiment of Foot wrote home on 12.8.1879 that 'a lot of Zulus have come, I should think nearly 500 and have given up arms & assegais & cows…. I got six assegais but they are not very good ones as I was late in choosing.' Nine days later he wrote again that he had 'got some more assegais and am trying to get some chiefs' sticks for general distribution.' And a few days later concluded that he now had '8 assegais' and was 'waiting for an opportunity to send them home.'

A further source of weapons and souvenirs were purchases from the colonial troops and native levies assisting the imperial soldiers. Anstruther who planned the conversion of the large tusk from Sekhukhune's kraal into a snuffbox, described the incident in a letter home and asked his family not 'say too much' about it because 'the authorities might enquire about it'. He had bought it for £31 'from the men of the irregular horse who got it.' Captain W.E. Montague, of the 84th Regiment fighting in the Anglo-Zulu war, recalled that 'mats, guns, dresses, gourds, pillows, Isandlwana loot, everything which a Zulu thinks worth hiding' was hidden in the rocks near to a kraal they were about to attack; it was 'quickly hauled out, and packed away on the spoiler's backs for sale hereafter in the camp.' The war artist Charles Edwin Fripp who was appointed as special artist for The Graphic for this war observed that 'our native allies revelled in the glory of burning and destroying without any risk to … [themselves], and returned to camp chattering and singing, laden with mealies, strips of meat, and Zulu utensils'. In the Eighth Frontier War against the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape, Lt C H Bell of the Cape Mounted Rifles noted in his journal at the time of the action in the Waterkloof in 1851 that 'The Fingoes found a ready market for their plunder among the officers of the 74th Highlanders, who were soon well supplied with Kafir women's headdresses made of beaded leather, ornaments and curiosities of different description.'

In the Sudan, Major E A De Cosson who served with Sir Gerald Graham's field force at Suakin in April 1888 noted how the local inhabitants entrepreneurially met the demand for souvenirs and war trophies. On the day the expedition was brought to a close, he 'rode into the town in the evening and found the streets thronged with officers buying souvenirs. The native population are waking up to the fact that money is to be made and the women and children offering their silver bangles for sale; shields and swords have run up to ?£5 a piece, and spears to ?£2 or ?£3. There is a little Italian who keeps a curiosity shop, a sort of niche in a wall, and he had new spears manufactured every day. They say an armourer on one of the ships turned an honest penny by making a lot of spear-heads and having them mounted, and that a batch of "real Soudan spears" has already been sent out from Birmingham.'

Weapons and other objects were also acquired directly from their African owners, either through gift, barter or outright purchase. In the many memoirs and journals of the period, there are numerous references to a trade in curios between Europeans and African people. From the narratives, it would appear that the material culture which was available was perhaps expressly made for sale to Europeans. This observation raises a host of related issues about the concept of authenticity and originality and what constitutes early 'tourist art'. It would appear that especially in southern Africa, the boundaries between material culture and 'curios' are fluid and dynamic. This is not the place to explore and interpret this complex issue, but a few examples illustrating the various configurations of exchange and trade, specifically in weapons, will be discussed.

There are instances when neither an offer to barter or purchase could secure the weapon or object after which a European lusted. Evidence of such resistance to exchange refreshingly indicates that Europeans were not always omnipotent in colonial Africa, and that Africans retained their integrity and composure in the face of such demands. Bertram Mitford recalls the frustration of not securing a spear in Zululand because of its symbolic significance and its associations for the owner with the battles he fought during Anglo-Zulu war: 'I saw that one of them carried an assegai with a blade like a small claymore, and seeing, coveted and resolved to have it if possible… I climbed to where they stood; and the warriors greeted me with the usual "Unkos!" and … we speedily became friends…. Then taking up the assegai I began to examine it, suggesting that we should make an exchange, and throwing out all sorts of inducements. Not a bit of it; the jovial warrior would about as soon think of passing with his head-ring - or his head. He had fought with that very weapon "kwa Jim" (Rorke's Drift) &c. &c.; no, he couldn't give it away on any account. It was a splendid specimen of a spear, but on no terms could I obtain it.'

Similarly, Ludlow, travelling in Zululand after the 1879 war described seeing 'a large pile of shields' which 'occupied one side of the hut, and we had a barter with the head man for some of them, but he was very unwilling to sell.' In another instance, Theodore Bent travelling in 'Makalangaland' in the 1890s met with a chief 'Matimbi' who had 'a splendid knife, carved and decorated with brass wire'. Even though they 'coveted' it, he was not prepared to barter and they could not obtain it.

In the spectrum of their interactions over material culture, the gifts by Africans to Europeans are often perhaps the most easily misconstrued. Obviously there was an imbalance of power in the favour of the Europeans, but the anecdotes of such contact (admittedly written by Europeans) often allude to warm and engaging encounters. In focusing on differences in the cultures, as is customary, do we perhaps overlook a similarity: the fact that both Africans and Europeans were mutually curious about each other's material culture. Bertram Mitford describes such an interaction with a headman or chief in Zululand: 'One thing that sent Vumandaba up in my estimation was that he did not begin by asking for anything and everything. … he was greatly delighted with the gift of a large knife and a few other things I had brought…. He made me a present of a likely-looking knob-kerrie "to remember him by", which I have still…' The Fleet Surgeon Henry F. Norbury, who was the principal medical officer of the naval forces landed in South Africa in the years 1877-79 describes an incident in the Eastern Cape when he requested from a young woman 'a very nice bag made of wild cat skin…. She handed it to me, but very reluctantly, and I could perceive how sorry she was to part with it; upon which I returned it. Her face beamed with pleasure…'. Another example is provided by General Sir Bindon Blood: 'I was riding towards Dunn's kraal [in 1879] … when we met a party of Zulu women and girls carrying milk…. I … halted for a moment to talk to the women who were full of remarks, complimentary and otherwise…. Presently I noticed that the young lady had on a very smart waist-belt, and I offered to swop my sword-belt - an old gold-laced one with a silver mounted clasp - for her belt. To my surprise she jumped at the deal - so I took off my belt … and gave it to her, when she slipped behind a bush, made the change, and came back with her belt in her hand ready for me…. The girl was wonderfully pleased with my belt, especially the "slings," swinging against her legs, seemed to delight her. I still have her belt.'

Barter using beads and items of Western material culture was the conventional means of exchange between Europeans and Africans prior to the introduction of colonial currencies in Africa. The Scottish big-game hunter Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, who travelled across southern Africa in the 1840s, describes in detail such a barter with 'Sicomy', the 'King of the Bamanqwato' on 4 July 1844 of a rhinohorn knobkerrie for a cup of gunpowder: 'The king had in his possession a most wonderful knobkerrie, which I was determined to obtain. It was made of the horn of the kobaoba [white rhinoceros] , a very rare species of the rhinoceros, and its chief interest consisted in its extra-ordinary length, which greatly exceeded anything I had ever seen of the kind before, or have since met with. Handing Sicomy my snuff-box, I pointed to the kerry, [and] … I then asked him to present it to me, that I might have something to keep in remembrance of him; but he replied that it belonged to his wife, and he could not part with it. Presently, however, while sipping his coffee, he said that if I chose I might purchase it. I asked him what he required for it, and he answered, the cup which he then held full of gunpowder. Accordingly, when his majesty had drained the cup, I handed him the powder, and became the possessor of the kobaoba kerry, which is now in my possession, and on which I place a very great value.'

In sub-Saharan Africa, and especially in southern and east Africa, African communities in the nineteenth century seldom produced curiosities and souvenirs in European taste in the same way that the Native American Indians and other indigenous societies responded to earning an income in the new economic order. The Native American Indians used their traditional artisanal skills to produce goods which were extensions of European material culture, such as beaded handbags and wastepaper baskets. In south and east Africa, it was generally only once the missionaries' efforts at re-directing the 'industry' of African people had materialised early in the twentieth century, that European forms were produced using indigenous techniques and aesthetics. Consequently, prior to this development, and also parallel to it, traditional material culture was produced for Europeans to purchase, even though this practice often did (and still does) not fit into the European image, as Johannes Fabian observes 'of savages who may "barter" or incidentally part with their objects but who were not expected to have mercantile ambitions.' A characteristic example is described by Rose Pender in her book, No Telegraph; or, a trip to our unconnected colonies, published in 1878, before the influx of soldiers fighting in the Anglo-Zulu war. While staying at Bishopstowe, in the colony of Natal, they visited a kraal where they 'got a number of their curiosities, such as necklets, armlets, assegais, & c. They seem very eager to sell anything, and came in numbers when Mrs Colenso had told them we were ready to buy.'

The potential number of such exchanges was vast because tens of thousands of military men passed through the region in the latter part of the nineteenth century and returned with weapons and war trophies. In the case of the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, there were 6669 colonial and imperial troops initially but, after the defeat at Isandlwana, another 10414 imperial troops were brought to Natal. In the instance of the South Africa War of 1899-1902, according to Pakenham, 365 693 imperial and 82 742 colonial troops (excluding black soldiers and assistants) fought in the war. In addition, Cape Town, Durban and Zanzibar were ports of call for thousands of ships, and many travellers, missionaries and colonial officials spent a few years in these regions and left with weapons as souvenirs.

The extent of trade is evident in the annual statistics of exports from the Colony of Natal which fell into a separate category 'Curiosities'. From these figures, it is clear that the value of exports and number of packages rose dramatically when there were an influx of British soldiers in the colony. In 1879, 48 packages were sent with a value of £318 and in 1900, 200 packages were exported with a value of £1644. These would not appear to be huge amounts but, bearing in mind that these are only the official exports and the tendency to understate the value of goods in transit as well as the relatively small unit cost of African artefacts, it would appear that significant quantities of this material were taken abroad.

The demand for African material culture was soon met by European dealers and traders in the principal ports and towns who specialised in securing such artefacts to sell to visitors. In the 1890s in Cape Town, Mr A Sieradyze advertised his shop in Plein Street (and a branch in the Metropole Hotel) which offered for sale the 'largest stock of Native curios in South Africa' as well as many other items including 'ostrich-feather fans, rhinoceros hide sjamboks, hand-painted silver leaves, etc, etc. According to the catalogue of the Industrial exhibition in Cape Town in 1904-5, he was 'among the most extensive, if not the most extensive, dealer in curios of all kinds in South Africa. He shows at this stand all kinds of fur and feather goods, shells and weapons.' In Natal, the firm HT Peach in Pietermaritzburg published large advertisements in the annual Natal directories in the 1890s offering for sale various goods and curios, and later in the decade also established a branch in Durban. In Drumkey's Year book for east Africa of 1909 there are two 'curio dealers' are listed in Nairobi, six in Zanzibar, and four in Mombasa. In the lists of exports for Uganda curios are listed as a separate category from 'trophies' (stuffed animals, skins and horns and wildlife), and 130 cases of curios were exported in 1905-6 with a value of £135, and in 1906-7 194 cases valued at £218.

A cameo of how these traders secured their stock was recorded by Cherry Kearton in his book, Photographing wild life across the world (London, 1923). Travelling in the region of the Mandarat River in Kenya, he met with a Mr Grigg, the Secretary of the Boma Trading Company, who 'was wanting to buy native curios'. Kearton had 'struck up a kind of friendship with the chief of the local Masai kraal, and through him had already been able to buy a few spears and other curios for myself. On Grigg telling me what he wanted I dropped a hint … with the result that next morning, almost before the sun was up, a crowd of fifty or sixty fully armed Masai … had assembled round our tent. At first business was slow, the prices demanded being far too high; but after a great deal of bargaining the natives realised that we would not pay more than what I had already done, and Grigg was able to buy very nearly everything he wanted at reasonable rates, the Masai readily accepting rupees instead of goods.'

Back in Europe, and especially Britain, dealers specialising in ethnographic artifacts - and what would later be called 'Tribal art' - started trading actively in the material culture and 'curiosities' that had been brought back from the colonies. Col L A D Montague remarked on this trade in ethnographical artefacts, especially weapons, in his book Weapons and implements of savage races (London, 1921): 'Kaffir assegais are not, as a rule, expensive, and can be obtained at about 2s apiece. Some of the specimens figured cost me even less than this, though I have been asked 5s for no better ones. Numbers were brought home after our various South African campaigns.'

The pioneering dealer was W.D. Webster who in the late 1890s issued the first illustrated sale catalogues of ethnographic articles. The other leading dealer was W.O. Oldman who dealt 'in weapons and curiosities', and who also published regular illustrated catalogues. These latter catalogues offer a fascinating insight into the taste of the time for weapons, although occasionally curiosities such as snuff containers and trinkets from south and east Africa were included. Interestingly, those pieces which are highly valued today, such as headrests, very seldom appear in the catalogues. In Oldman's first catalogue, dated 1903, he offered an old 'Zulu shield of buffalo hide' at 7s, an 'old Zulu spear' for 3s, and a 'Zulu knobkerrie' at 3s and also a 'Basuto gun of European make but used and ornamented by natives, perfect, 6.6s'. A few more examples listed in his subsequent catalogues will illustrate the type of southern Africa material in which he dealt: in February 1903, a 'Zulu stabbing spear, large heavy blade, old and rare, 9.6s'; in March 1903, a 'Caffre Knobkerrie, dark polished wood, [which] would make a good walking stick 4s', 'Zulu shield, hide, 28" 1g: said to have belonged to one of the band that killed Pr Imperial' 10.6s'; in July 1903 a 'Mashona Battle-Axe, shaft partly covered brass wire work 5.6', Mashona spear, shaft covered in brass wire work 8.0'; and in October 1903, a 'Mashona knife hilt and sheath of finely carved black wood 12.6s'. In terms of east Africa: in December 1903 he offered a 'Nubian shield of elephant hide 3ft 8 in high, leather sling, fine tone 12.6s', a 'Masai shield of hide painted with heraldic device, old 35s', a 'Masai club of polished rhinoceros horn, curious shape, 20 ½ in long 45s'etc and in list 19, a 'Somali shield, circular, of worked Oryx hide, 25½ in dia (ESA tribe) 32s'.

In last few decades the pioneering publications by Roy Sieber, in particular, have brought utilitarian artifacts to the attention of audiences for African art, and there have been a few publications recently that have continued the theme and focused on weapons and shields. Yet weapons, for many collectors and institutions, are not acquired and displayed alongside African figurative sculpture and the other types of objects that have traditionally been collected. This is perhaps because weapons have generally not yet been subject to the taxonomic shift, described by James Clifford and others, from ethnographic material culture to objects aesthetically displayed in art galleries. This tendency is evident in the catalogue of the southern African art collections housed at the University of Witwatersrand Art Gallery which makes very few references to weapons, and the enormous AFRICA 95 exhibition and catalogue where only the occasional shield is included. The new African galleries at the Louvre also do not include any weapons in their select display. Even an institution such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which has actively and systematically collected southern African material culture, expressly excluded weapons from the parameters of their collecting policy, partly because the Brenthurst Collection, which they have on long-term loan, is weak in this respect. Dewey and Mvenge describe this situation with specific reference to Shona weapons: 'Little was previously known about these axes and knives, and art historians usually dismissed them (as they often did all African weapons) as unworthy of study, considering them to be merely weapons or utilitarian items. The Shona examples were indeed sometimes used for utilitarian purposes but … there also were, and still are, important ritual uses for them. These ritual or ceremonial aspects partly explain why the knives and axes are regarded with such great pride by the Shona people. In addition, they represent a form of artistry where Shona blacksmith-carvers can display their virtuoso handling of several different materials (iron, wood, and brass wire) and over the centuries they have clearly done this with great skill.'

As has been mentioned, there is no doubt that the African makers and users were highly sensitized to the aesthetic attributes of their material culture, and especially to those of ceremonial weapons, yet it would appear that it was seldom for these reasons that they were collected by Europeans. In the years since they were taken away by Europeans, they have been viewed as artefacts of ethnographic interest or curios, but seldom as accomplished works of art. A formal analysis of the abstract aesthetic that characterises the material culture, including weapons, from these regions would reveal a sophisticated play with form and design within each of the regional and/or ethnic aesthetics. As for shields, the large surface area is an obvious area for design and decorative features, which could represent the status of the user, and makers produced endless variations on form and pattern to ensure that each shield stands apart in some small or distinctive way. The many knobkerries and clubs illustrated in this book display the extraordinary inventiveness of the carvers who individuated each piece by altering the size of the sphere on the striking end, incorporated the wood grain into the design, faceted the sphere and placed it asymmetrically on the shaft, polishing it to celebrate the colour of the wood, and, often embellishing the shaft with wirework woven in intricate designs. As one writer in the early twentieth-century described the artistry of southern African knobkerries which often have sections of wirework: 'woven in such a way that it forms a spiral design of alternative brass and iron bands…. The neatness with which the wire is applied is remarkable, and the method of producing the design is by no means clear. The wire is woven across the spiral, so the two kinds of wire are probably in separate layers, one passing over and then under the other on the lines edging the spiral bands. It would certainly puzzle any European craftsman to reproduce this intricate wirework, and the "savage" executing it must have possessed considerable artistic and technical skill.'

A few explanations can be offered to explain the neglect of south and east African weapons by art historians, collectors and public galleries. The foremost reason relates to the skewed political ideology in South Africa for almost all the twentieth century which negated black art and culture to the inferior realm of 'Bantu studies'. This lingering assumption that weapons are the preserve of ethnologists and social anthropologists would explain why the chapter on Zulu metalworking in the seminal exhibition catalogue Zulu treasures (1996) only offers a superficial overview of skin-working.Anthropologists and archeologists have published some informative work on weapons in respect of southern Africa, but the field still lacks integrated and comprehensive a studies such as Colleen E. Kriger's Pride of men: ironworking in 19th-century west central Africa (Oxford, 1999) which draws together archaeological sources, colonial descriptions and surviving traditions as well as a detailed examination of the objects themselves in terms of social, economic, political, technological and aesthetic contexts. Another reason which may be tentatively suggested for the neglect of weapons by the African art world may be related back to issues of masculinity and gender mentioned earlier. As Marsha Bol has observed in relation to American Indian Lakota arts that 'By and large, collectors of Lakota arts were (and are) men. The preponderance of men in museum donor records and the ownership of collections still in private hands supports a particular gender alignment in the Plains that differs from that in other regions. Male collectors seem to have found the artifacts of pre-reservation warrior society particularly fascinating. These collectors were especially fond of the implements of war: bows and arrows, clubs, gun cases, knife sheaths, war society staffs, coup sticks, and shields are disproportionately numerous in museum collections…'.

As Appadurai said, to understand the meanings of objects we have to follow the things themselves. In terms of weapons their meanings have shifted through a sequence of exchanges from Africa to Europe and elsewhere later (including back to Africa). They have been used as material culture and symbols of power in African societies, acquired by Europeans as war trophies, souvenirs, curios, mementos, and ethnographic objects, etc, and their meanings are yet again metamorphosing in response to the cultural needs of the present day. Their intrinsic aesthetic appeal and the rich history will continue to warrant a re-evaluations in the future, from the perspectives probably far removed from those of their original makers and owners, a century ago.