Things do not (always) have the same meaning everywhere; when we insist that only "our" meaning is the "true" meaning, we silence other people's meanings. What passes as universality is someone else's culture and just enough power to spread it, even force it, upon others. The things that words denote never start as universal or available everywhere, their meanings already stabilized; they originate from a particular place, community, society, culture, and nation and then, through travel or mobility, become universal, global. The issue to address is why specific words get to be used when, how, and where they are.Today, our definitions of science, technology, and innovation (STI) originate from countries and cultures that have acquired their dominance of others through global empires-military, capital, and media-and are able to purvey to or even impose upon those without such power their definitions. This asymmetry of definitional power was never lost to commentators in the West, like Edward H. Carr, who emphasized that people care to know and enquire into an event if it is worth knowing. If it is not, they forget about it (Carr 1961, 11). In that same discussion, Carr concluded: "When we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it" (22).Similarly, in this volume the question is neither what the concepts of science, technology, and innovation mean universally or all the time nor what Western STI transferred or diffused to Africa means to Africans. Instead, we seek to put the concepts of STI up for grabs, on sale epistemologically, so that there is no universal or spatiotemporally transcendent definition. We seek to explore what the technological, the scientific, and the innovative might mean from Africa in lieu of outside introductions or influences. It is important to do this now because we feel that the importation and consumption of rigid Western meanings of STI are a serious and dangerous threat to a self-determined African path to the future.The concepts of STI matter at this specific historical moment in Africa because there seems to be a feeling that Africa's time has come. This Africa is rising narrative is all over the World Wide Web, often under the name Afrofuturism. As if to capture its spirit, in 2014 the African Union issued a Science, Technology, and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA 2024), with science, technology, and innovation as the centerpiece of modernity. In the document, the

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An account of technology in Africa from an African perspective, examining hunting in Zimbabwe as an example of an innovative mobile workspace. In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities—including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society in the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practical outcomes. African creativities are found in African mobilities. Mavhunga shows the movement of people as not merely conveyances across space but transient workspaces. Taking indigenous hunting in Zimbabwe as one example, he explores African philosophies of mobilities as spiritually guided and of the forest as a sacred space. Viewing the hunt as guided mobility, Mavhunga considers interesting questions of what constitutes technology under regimes of spirituality. He describes how African hunters extended their knowledge traditions to domesticate the gun, how European colonizers, with no remedy of their own, turned to indigenous hunters for help in combating the deadly tsetse fly, and examines how wildlife conservation regimes have criminalized African hunting rather than enlisting hunters (and their knowledge) as allies in wildlife sustainability. The hunt, Mavhunga writes, is one of many criminalized knowledges and practices to which African people turn in times of economic or political crisis. He argues that these practices need to be decriminalized and examined as technologies of everyday innovation with a view toward constructive engagement, innovating with Africans rather than for them.

This article considers late-nineteenth-century firearms as technology received and used by Africans with a variety of social outcomes. It focuses on the Gonarezhou area of South Eastern Zimbabwe, a rich wildlife habitat now incorporated in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, the largest single wildlife conservation area in the world. When completely established it will cover 100,000 square kilometers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Mozambique. I treat the transfer of firearms here as a societal demand and supply process. The firearms discourse is important to this area, which throughout the last two centuries has experienced sustained poaching and civil war. This is just the recorded period; in reality, firearms-induced exploitation of nature in the area has been going on since 1500. This article is a modest attempt to reconstruct the process of diffusion that brought guns here during the period of European imperial expansion, and the consequences of this transfer, which included the emergence of areas outside the control of European governments, alteration of hunting activities with harmful consequences for the environment, and the development of an extensive trade in human beings to serve the mines and farms of South Africa. The article is a byproduct of a much broader research on Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) among precolonial societies of the southeastern Lowveld (lowlands) of Zimbabwe. Such a perspective emphasizes the deep involvement of African users of firearms in the diffusion process, in contrast to some expectations about the dominant role of Europeans, even as it demonstrates that firearms diffusion in the Great Limpopo area between 1870 and 1920 produced an essentially negative impact.

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