LOCALLY MADE FIREARMS IN AFRICA

FROM AN AMERICAN FRIEND

Guys:  Thought you might find these photos of interest. I had two beautiful blackpowder muskets given to me by a game warden friend in Senegal - taken from "poachers" traditional hunters - sadly stolen with my West African hunting & fishing trophies from storage in the USA.  In Senegal & Guinea you would see hunters with blackpowder muskets wearing a sock over their hand - most often to hide the scars left from a rifle blowing up. They made their own powder from saltpeter taken from the ground and ashes. Also single shot Baikal (Russian) shotguns were popular and they would empty the BBs from the shotshell, melt it down to make a slug, put it back in and then they could take antelope and buffalo. As noted SKS also common in Guinea dure to Sekou Toure's militias.  He had a bottoms-up intel network so that whatever was going on in the country would be passed from village to prefecture to the capital in Conakry each day and then summarized to him - informants everywhere! 

 

Lions, due to decreased game numbers, had become cattle killers in Senegal, Gambia and Guinea, and often with a single shot, a lion would be wounded and attack and kill the shooter. One time I arrived at the camp of chimp researcher Janis Carter (I helped her get into the Fouta Djallon Mountains with my contacts in Guinean military that ran national parks/game dept).  She had lion hunters guiding her.  Beside her tent laid a cub they had killed and they wanted me to go out that night after a female they had wounded - they saw eyes and fired during the previous night.  I told them I wanted to hunt a male lion and to go after a wounded lion you would have to be crazy.  Never got a lion but had to spend half a day in a hut doing religious rituals - took black from bottom of a pot with a bird quill and wrote things on a Koranic board, then washed writings into a calabash and mixed in leaves from a sacred tree/bush, then we had to dip our hands into the water and purify our bodies, then they wrote Arabic onto a sheet of paper folded it, placed twigs from the bush around it and wrapped it in string (I still have it). An Algerian friend recently translated it as best he could as some of it is in Fulani/Fulbe: basically that God is perfect, Victory, Mohamed will protect you and the tribe against lion and other tribes. On another occasion looking for lion, the hunters took me out at night.  I threw up my scoped 375 and turned on the flashlight and realized I would maybe get one shot and if the lion charged I could never pick it up in my scope.  I told they hunters I wanted to return to the village and would not hunt at night - they said - we can't they will call us women - I said I didn't care I wasn't hunting like that.  Never got a lion - could not bait in Francophone countries - usually hunted on foot early in morning or in evening trying to get lion coming from or going to shady thickets along marigots (temporary streams).

 

The village of Kong, Camroon where I hunted bongo say that only the steering column of a Landrover is strong enough to be used in this locally made shotgun.  There you can buy shotshells made in the Congo (Brazzaville).

 

Oh - and in Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou- they not only make shotshells but rifle calibers

 

Regards

xyz