The Gun (2010) by CJ Chivers. Simon & Schuster, New York Cairo's criminals don't take a walk on the wild side -- they take a run. There is a palpable and strengthening sense of inevitability around the deteriorating security situation in post-25 January Revolution Egypt. The crime offensive is taking the country by storm. The front lines in the next battles over Egypt's national and personal security status are now being delineated. The slew of horror stories revolving around members of the alleged "leisure class", mainly female, being harangued and harassed, some sexually, and worst of all robbed of their worldly possessions by baltagiya, or thugs in colloquial Egyptian parlance, has emerged as a never-ending topic of conversation. Muggings take place against the backdrop of poverty and income inequalities. Today the desperados appear to construct their criminal activism on their social, economic and cultural networks. The particulars of these cases vary greatly. Would the Egyptian electorate accept stricter gun laws? If you pose the question today, the answer would almost be yes. Gone are the days when Cairo used to be the safest city of its size in the world. Thugs are now assaulting high school kids without apparent reason. What counts now is that vandalism has become a pastime for the unemployed youth succumbing to the prevailing neo-liberal ethos and machismo. Most of the hoodlums, it is rumoured, were formerly employed on an intermittent basis by the now defunct state security apparatus. The peculiar circumstances of post-revolution Cairo were captured perfectly in a casual conversation with my sons. "Dad do you have a gun? Why don't you get a gun? All my classmates' dads have guns," my 15-year-old son Karim quizzed rather inquisitively the other day. I was overwhelmed with an irrepressible inclination to answer the first question in the negative and the second in the affirmative. Coping mechanisms abound, both for prospective victims and for the perpetrators of the heinous crimes. "Dad, am I too young to have a gun license?" Karim persisted. "And, what about purchasing a gun on the black market?" My excursus on Karim's curiosity perplexed him a great deal. As we fast approach the 30 June deadline to hand in unlicensed weapons in Egypt, the question posed by Karim and other adolescents take on additional poignancy. A nation's most fundamental strength is its resilience. The moral of the story is that arms do not necessarily guarantee national security. Guns are not for our personal protection, and never were. Perhaps guns were critical at some historical period for the protection of personal property and perhaps some people still think that is their primary purpose today. Heroism and possession of guns have traditionally been inextricably intertwined in Hollywood's classic Westerns. The indigenous peoples of North America, the Braves, lost their traditional hunting grounds and eventually their land, the entire continent, precisely because they mastered the art of archery, with bow and arrow, rather than the far more deadly Maxim gun. The Western powers conquered the world in the age of imperialism by mastering the Maxim gun. Another gun, equally lethal, was associated more with the weak, the disadvantaged and the dispossessed. That second gun was the Kalashnikov, better known as the AK-47. Again, my excursus on firearms, history, masculinity, property and power led me to introduce Karim to one of the most intellectual albeit loquacious works on the subject: C J Chivers' The Gun. "In examining the AK-47 in this way, this book attempts to lift the Kalashnikov out of the simplistic and manipulated distillations of its history that have come to define it, inadequately. The carefully packaged history of Soviet times, a cheerful parable for the proletariat, was that the weapon sprang from the mind of a gifted if unlettered sergeant who wanted to present his nation an instrument for its defence," Chivers ingeniously extrapolates. "This was the message made in the Communist Party propaganda mills. It required redaction and lies." Obviously, I made it clear that I do not subscribe to everything Chivers says. But Chivers' description of the gun rests on his explication of power. "One weapon alone has been a consistently lethal presence in modern war: the infantry rifle. Tanks can rout conventional armies. GPS-guided ordnance can scatter combatants. Land mines, suicide bombers, and improvised explosives have attracted more attention in recent years. Yet the rifle remains preeminent. Whenever an idea organises for battle it gathers around its guns. Few weapons are as accessible or can be as readily learned," Chivers notes. "Is it true that Christians are hoarding guns in churches and monasteries? Everyone needs a gun to defend himself." That is the logic of an impressionistic adolescent. Yet adults, too, ascribe to such conspiracy theories. "Does the Egyptian army protect the people of Egypt? Is that not what armies are supposed to do?" Youssef inquired innocently. "Presumably, but it doesn't always work that way. In some countries, armies turn their weapons on their own people. In others, they do so to usurp power," was my lame answer. Everyone knows that Egypt is awash with weapons, with rifles and pistols. Yet to my knowledge no reliable studies have been conducted to prove that Egyptians have become gun-crazed. It is not possible to draw from hearsay a conclusive judgement or inference that Egypt is indeed awash with guns. The public security perception in Egypt is based on irrational fear. Guns are no morning-after tonic for the 25 January Revolution. Yet history abounds with examples of how megalomaniac masterminds played on people's fears to use guns as an ideal method of power and public control. The gun, too, can be an instrument and a tangible symbol of liberation. "The Kalashnikov marks the guerrilla, the terrorist, the child soldier, the dictator, and the thug -- all of whom have found it to be a ready equaliser against morally or materially superior foes. A roster of its handlers holds a history of modern strife." So crime is not restricted to Cairo. This was an eye-opener for my sons who listened to the story of The Gun entranced. Gun possession, I explained could trigger all manner of unintended consequences. "The Egyptian army outfitted itself with Kalashnikovs. Islamic Jihad used a Kalashnikov to assassinate the Egyptian president, Anwar El-Sadat," my sons were even more intrigued when they realised that Kalashnikov was the name of man who invented the legendary gun. The very notion of state-funded extremism is indeed troubling. Chivers take on Washington's embroilment in the Vietnam War is interesting. He basically believes that the Vietnam War was won by the AK-47. It isn't all that surprising, really, that adults and adolescents often think alike. "Even in the jungle," Chivers muses, "the weapon resisted rust." As for matters military, Chivers insists that the humble AK-47 is more effective in guerrilla warfare than the most sophisticated weaponry, and the Vietnam War proved how and why. "Backed by the world's premier economy and fortified by the belief that its sense of innovation was unrivalled throughout the world, the Pentagon had allowed the Soviet Union better than a 15-year head start on designing and organising the production of a nation's most basic fighting tool. The Pentagon faced a gun gap. Its unlucky soldiers and Marines would soon pay for it in blood." Successive United States governments have done the easy bit in articulating the broad principle: guns are the boys' best toys. "The stories of failures in Vietnam have never been fully shaken," as Chivers so succinctly puts it. But there was something more to the subsequent backlash over the Vietnam War -- a sense prevalent among the underdogs and disadvantaged of this world that the sanctimonious US was getting its just deserts. A familiar feeling of triumphalism was expressed when Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda blew up the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York on 9 September 2001. And as if to prove the power of the underling, the smallest of Kalashnikovs was adopted as a symbol of resistance by Al-Qaeda warriors the world over. "Weapons even resembling the smallest Kalashnikovs of all, the AKSU-74, a short-barreled, collapsible-stock design that American gun- enthusiasts call the Krinkov and that Osama bin Laden has been photographed with, could cost more than $2,000 during the most violent period of the most recent war in Iraq. This weapon had by then picked up a regional nickname that gave it jihadist cachet: 'the Osama'." Chivers's bombshell eloquently displays how much first-class power he possesses. He is, however, also especially strong on the depictions of characters that come to life in his writings. Chivers also reveals a gift for superb reportage. "Symbolic power has been harnessed by owners of assault rifles since assault riffles became available. After Salvador Allende rose to the presidency in Chile in 1970, becoming the Western Hemisphere's first elected socialist head of state, Fidel Castro presented him with a folding stock Kalashnikov bearing an inscription on a golden plate: To my good friend Salvador from Fidel, who by different means tries to achieve the same goals. The rifle served as leftist bling, though a golden plate was more Saddam Hussein than Karl Marx," Chivers chides tongue-in-cheek. "Allende could not resist a pose. He was photographed at least once playing with his keepsake rifle, looking down the barrel while pointing it into the air." After all, if Washington is to influence those views it detests, then perhaps it must talk to their owners first. But it never does. There is a reason, I surmise, why Washington resorts to firearms. Well-heeled Washingtonians who enjoy the good life don't give a toss about how the world's poor live. But there is one figure drawn sketchily who concerns Egypt and all Arabs and that is the late president Anwar El-Sadat. "On 6 October 1981, at a military parade in Cairo, assassins within the Egyptian army struck. While a ceremonial convoy passed the reviewing stand, a lieutenant ran toward the dignitaries standing for the pass and review. As an officer with a Kalashnikov, he seemed part of the performance; perhaps he was about to salute. He started firing. At the same time, more soldiers on a troop transport opened fire on the bleachers. Sadat and eleven other people were killed. Egypt passed under martial law," Chivers concludes. Whether the post-25 January Revolution Egyptian electorate and the National Assembly, or parliament, it elects will encourage ordinary citizens to arm themselves with guns remains open to question. Another figure depicted more compellingly, unhagiographically and even movingly in a mess of African magical realism and she is one of the few women who feature in this book that focuses on a man's world. Because she is a woman, however, and even when she is perceived as a witch, she does not know how to handle a gun. "The Lord's Resistence Army, sinister and bizarre, descended from a mystical guerrilla movement founded by Alice Auma, a childless Acholi woman, who by various accounts was either Kony's aunt or his cousin. In 1985, Auma returned from a period of isolation on the banks of the Nile claiming to have been possessed by the spirit of an Italian army officer, who she called Lakwena. His name meant Word of God," Chivers explains. His story about guns is actually about shock and awe, and Alice Lakwena fits in perfectly without him having to get into the nitty gritty of savage African political satire or the nature of African war literature. "In the early months after her supposed possession, Alice passed time aimlessly, working as a healer and oracle in Gulu; an enchanted freak. The spirit of Lakwena grew into a taskmaster." This gives Chivers' book a balmy African aplomb. "Late in 1986 Alice announced that Lakwena has ordered her to organise a movement to overthrow the Ugandan government, which was [and is] led by Yoweri Museveni... At that, Alice Lakwena, a composite of personalities in the form of a young woman with no military experience, became as strange and underqualified a guerrilla leader as the world has known." Largely forgotten today, Alice Lakwena's tragedy is that as a woman she could not master the sinister use of a gun. "She found a following. Uganda was suffering and the Acholi felt abused by Museveni. Her message of rejuvenation appealed. Lakwena organised her recruits into a cultish military wing known as the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, and channeled other spirits to assume each unit's command... As the spirits seemed to alternate within her, she whispered, then raged... Rituals arose around Alice's invocations, Before battle, the soldiers attended purification ceremonies and were rubbed with shea butter oil, which Alice said would render their skin bulletproof... After a few spectacular successes, the movement suffered defeats. The ending arrived on the march to Kampala, Uganda's capital, when the Holy Spirit soldiers, many without weapons and calling for James Bond, were subjected to assault rifle and artillery fire. They were cut down. The survivors were put to flight... [Alice] slinked off for Kenya, where she was granted asylum and faded from view, aside from occasional interviews with journalists, who documented her end as an exiled lush, hooked on gin, spiritless, vowing to return." Guns are boys' toys. Girls are better at sorcery. But this is not a book about enchantresses, it is a book about rifles. "The events in Uganda and Egypt also reflected an unstated but disturbing fact. The calamities that visited these governments had roots in steps intended to increase the government's strength: acquiring assault rifles to be ready for any foe," that was the irony of two Nile Basin nation resorting to the gun to save their skin. The quasi-military regimes of Africa, Asia and the Americas are no more bloodthirsty than the Western powers. The Soviet Union, too, fought many wars. Most of these wars were in self- defence -- or so the Soviet leaders would have us believe. "The Soviet Union maintained its military ranks through obligatory mass conscription, and before teenagers were drafted, they were required to master the assembly and disassembly of the AKM. The training was a part of the Programme of Pre- Conscription Preparation of Youths, a Ministry of Defence curriculum managed by each school's military and physical education instruction. In Soviet schools, rifles were the fourth R... Kalashnikov, for all his official achievements, lived within Soviet constraints, no matter that the series of arms carrying his name had entered the official national culture." Guns and wars never settle climacteric national questions that way. "Mikhail Kalashnikov, in winter, adapted yet again. The collapse of the Soviet Union both harmed and benefited him, and his world changed repeatedly. Financially, the end of the Soviet Union upended Izhevsk and the firearms industry. Defence budgets dried up. Assembly lines fell quiet, and many workers, their salaries unpaid, left in search of work. Much of the labour force that remained was furloughed, called to work when orders needed to be filled but often told to stay home. Conditions on production days were gritty; sections of the factories were lit only by skylights, many workers had no protective clothing, and the ventilation was so poor that the air on days when weapons were assembled had a yellowish, particle-laden cast. Russia sought customers for its weapons. But its introduction to free markets was jarring," remarks Chivers. What then is to be done? The Soviet Union's productive potential did not diminish with its demise. Russia's capacity to generate demand for its weaponry did not diminish. It is among the leading arms exporters in the world today. And, Kalashnikov survived. "As the workers struggled, Mikhail Kalashnikov's stature spared him both material suffering and idleness. He fared, if not well, at least better than many of his generation... he also served as the informal ambassador of the sprawling Russian arms industry. Both the government and the factory had reason to ensure that he did not slide into the penury that enveloped Izhevsk's workforce... Yet his official appearances were sometimes accompanied by an undercurrent of shabbiness, of a geriatric man being used." This book on rifles by Chivers is an enjoyable rummage through two centuries of man's possession of guns, and of a particular man who made all the difference -- Kalashnikov. Chivers and Kalashnikov, actually have something functional in common. They keep the anger of activists alive, challenging conventional wisdom not only to fan the flames of affronting machismo, but to enthrall us, the pacifists and non-violent readers, along the way too. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
