Top 10 Military Weapons in Africa Before Colonization

Summary

• The Zulu iklwa — a short stabbing spear about 90–120 cm long — was not a lone genius's invention but a reform: tradition credits Shaka, while historians note Dingiswayo and earlier arms-makers, and agree Shaka standardised it across his regiments.
• Most of these weapons were forged locally: bloomery iron smelters and specialist smith castes — the Tuareg inæd'æn, the Maasai Kunono clan — made the steel, while European blades and coastal-trade muskets were the exceptions, not the rule.
• Poison is a delivery system, not a weapon: San hunters used slow-acting beetle-larva toxin that killed over hours, while Maasai and Kamba arrows carried Acokanthera bark that can stop a heart — two chemistries, two very different battlefields.
• At Isandlwana on 22 January 1879, some 20,000 Zulu warriors destroyed a British column of about 1,700 troops — proof that tactics, discipline, and weapons built for each other could beat an industrial army's firepower.

The List at a Glance

Selected Details About Each Weapon on the List

1. The Zulu iklwa (modern South Africa)

The iklwa is the most famous African weapon in the world, and the story usually told about it is half true. It was a short stabbing spear about 90–120 cm (3–4 ft) long overall, with a leaf-shaped iron blade roughly 25–40 cm long and 4–6 cm wide, seated on a long tang deep inside a dense hardwood shaft and lashed with wet cow-tail binding that shrank tight as it dried. The whole weapon weighed about a kilogram — light enough to drive repeatedly, one-handed, from behind a shield.

Tradition credits Shaka kaSenzangakhona with inventing it when he took over the Zulu chiefdom around 1816. Historians are more careful: Dingiswayo, the chief under whom Shaka served as a warrior, is also credited with popularising the short stabbing spear, and arms historians argue that a stabbing spear already existed and that Shaka's achievement was standardising it across the amabutho regiments and building a tactical system around it. That system is what mattered: warriors hooked the enemy's shield aside with their own tall cowhide isihlangu, then thrust at short range inside the impondo zankomo, the buffalo-horns encirclement, where a throwing spear would have been useless. The doctrine reached its most famous demonstration at Isandlwana on 22 January 1879, when a Zulu force of about 20,000 destroyed a British column of roughly 1,700 troops. The iklwa stayed in war use until the Anglo-Zulu War ended that year — and then, functionally obsolete, it became a ceremonial object and the defining symbol of the Zulu military identity. [Seven Swords: the iklwa] [Wikipedia: Assegai]

2. The Ethiopian shotel (modern Ethiopia and Eritrea)

If the iklwa solved the problem of getting past a shield by shoving it aside, the shotel solved it by going around. The shotel is a sickle-sword: a deeply curved, near-semicircular blade about 40–64 cm (16–25 in) long on a weapon 76–102 cm (30–40 in) overall, flat and double-edged with a diamond cross-section, set in a three-piece rhinoceros-horn hilt with no guard and carried in a close-fitting decorated leather scabbard. It weighs roughly a kilogram to two. The curve is the whole point: swung over or around an opponent's shield, it could stab at kidneys or lungs where a straight sword could not reach — and hooked under a rider's body, it could rip him from his horse.

The weapon is old. Elite swordsmen called the shotelai were a named force in Emperor Amda Seyon I's imperial host in the 14th century, and the fencing style — jumping, lunging attacks delivered dismounted — was built around the blade's geometry. The swords were forged locally in the northern highlands, though the hilts of rhino horn and the decorated scabbards made each one a status object: the 19th-century traveller William Cornwallis Harris reported that every male subject of Shewa wore one, and Amharic songs celebrated the shotel as a mark of virility. From the mid-19th century the classic form began to fade in the south, replaced by the gurade — straight swords fitted with imported European sabre blades — a reminder that even Africa's most distinctive blades absorbed the industrial age. Royal examples survived as heirlooms: a gold sword passed down from Sahle Selassie to Menelik II. [Wikipedia: Shotel] [Oriental Arms: sickle shotel sword]

3. Zande kpinga and mambele throwing knives (modern CAR, DRC, South Sudan)

The most technically elaborate African throwing weapons came from the northeast Congo basin. The kpinga is a multi-bladed iron throwing knife about 56 cm (22 in) long, typically carrying three blades of different shapes plus a handle; the mambele variant usually has four blades — three on top and one at the side — with a rearward hook or spike designed to hold the wound open if the weapon was pulled out. Every edge was sharpened, the iron finely laminated, and the weapon was thrown with a rotary motion to an effective distance of about 9 metres (30 ft).

What makes the kpinga historically important is that it is one of the few African throwing knives with solid documentary evidence of battlefield use — the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford holds a documented war example (accession 1915.45.1). Zande warriors carried three or four of them hidden inside large oblong shields, the shield's back fitted with an iron disc from which the kpinga hung. In battle they closed to about 10 metres, threw their two to four spears first, then released the kpinga — always preceded by a shouted call to warn their companions, because the weapon was too valuable to throw carelessly, at head height over-arm or knee height under-arm. And "valuable" was literal: the kpinga was "court metal," produced under the patronage of the Avongara clan and issued only to professional warriors; it doubled as a prestige object and formed part of a man's bride-wealth payment. The Zande, Nzakara, Mangbetu, and neighbouring peoples used them in war through the 18th and 19th centuries; by the 20th the surviving pieces were mostly ceremonial or dowry objects. [Wikipedia: Mambele] [Interesting Engineering: the multi-bladed throwing knife]

4. The Nguni assegai (modern South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho)

Before the iklwa, there was the assegai — and before firearms, the assegai was the most common weapon in Africa. It was a light javelin: a wooden shaft tipped with iron, the throwing versions about 150–200 cm (5–6.5 ft) long, light enough to hurl accurately over distance. Nguni blacksmiths forged the iron tips; the shafts were cut from dense hardwoods, including a species literally named for the job — the assegai tree, Curtisia dentata. The Zulu and Xhosa were famed for its use, and the word itself travelled far: it entered English through Berber zagaya, via Arabic and Old French.

The assegai was the universal opening weapon of pre-Shaka Nguni warfare — warriors volleyed their spears into enemy formations from range, then closed for whatever came next. Shaka's reform did not abolish it; it demoted it. The opening volley was still thrown, but the battle was then decided at stabbing range with the iklwa, where a thrown-away spear would have left a warrior unarmed. That demotion tells the larger story of this list: weapons are answers to tactical questions, and when the question changed — from "how do we wound them at distance?" to "how do we kill them up close inside an encirclement?" — the answer changed with it. [Wikipedia: Assegai]

5. Poisoned arrows (San, Maasai, Kamba — Botswana, Namibia, Kenya, Tanzania)

The deadliest thing about a poisoned arrow was never the arrow. The weapons were small light bows with light arrows, and the poison was smeared on the neck of the arrowhead behind the point — never on the very tip, so a hunter could not poison himself with a scratch. A short "linkshaft" joined the poisoned head to the main reed shaft, so that if a struck animal tried to rub the arrow off, the poisoned head stayed embedded while the shaft fell away. The real technology was the chemistry, and Africa had at least two of them.

In the Kalahari, San hunters dug the hemolymph of Diamphidia beetle larvae and pupae from cocoons buried half a metre to a metre underground beneath Commiphora bushes. The active agent, diamphotoxin — a hemolytic protein of about 60 kilodaltons — destroys red blood cells; haemoglobin levels in a victim can fall by as much as 75%. It does not kill quickly. Even a 200 kg giraffe dies slowly, over several hours, as its blood collapses — which is why the San became the world's most famous trackers: the hunt continued on foot, reading spoor for hours until the animal weakened. (Meat from such kills was considered safe to eat, except the flesh cut away around the wound.) In East Africa the chemistry was different and faster: Maasai and Kamba arrows carried bark extract from Acokanthera, the arrow-poison tree, whose cardiac glycoside ouabain attacks the heart directly and can arrest it — National Geographic's reporting confirms the Maasai traditionally tipped arrows with lethal Acokanthera extract. The seeds and roots of Strophanthus kombe, another cardiac-glycoside plant of south-eastern Africa, served the same purpose. One 19th-century anecdote describes a Nandi arrow felling a man within seconds — treat that as anecdote, not measured data — but the direction is right: beetle poison killed over hours, plant poisons could kill far faster. Poisoned arrows were primarily hunting tools, but 19th-century accounts record them in warfare too, and the earliest written reference to poisoned arrows in southern Africa dates to 1779. They remain in legal use in parts of Namibia today. [Wikipedia: Diamphotoxin] [IFL Science: secrets of San poison arrows] [National Geographic: Maasai poison arrows]

6. "Long Dane" flintlock muskets (modern Ghana and Benin)

Gunpowder reached West Africa through trade, not conquest — and the guns that came with it got a Danish name. The flintlock muskets known as "Long Danes" or Dane guns entered through Dano-Norwegian traders before the mid-19th century; the Asante guns were described as very long-barrelled, the barrels often bound in wire or thongs to stop them bursting, and decorated with cowrie shells. By the 19th century the term covered any firearm of the type, because West African blacksmiths had learned to make their own — the Wikipedia history notes the name now applies to indigenously manufactured versions too, and locally made Dane guns are still used for hunting today.

The Asante built a whole system around the weapon. Musketmen carried leather ntoa cartridge belts holding a calabash powderhorn (dauka), a shot-and-flint pouch, and totoa — single-round powder containers. The theoretical range was about 200 yards (180 m), but accurate fire reached only about 30 yards (27 m), and humidity or a sudden downpour could ruin the powder. None of that mattered much in the dense forest, where sightlines were short anyway: Asante gunmen fought with massed close-range volleys, and British observers noted their dexterity — shoulder-firing, complex drill, rapid handling. The guns marched through the Anglo-Asante wars of 1823–1900, including the 1824 campaign in which Governor Charles MacCarthy was killed and beheaded; Dahomey was fielding a standing army of riflemen as early as the 1730s. The political economy was brutal: guns were bought with gold and captives, and the armies the guns built raided for more captives to buy more guns — the gun-slave cycle. But the guns were prestige objects too: the Asantehene's own musketeers carried gold bands on their long Danish muskets and gold-decorated belts. [Wikipedia: Dane gun] [Forensic Fashion: the 1823 Asante warrior]

7. The Tuareg takouba (modern Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Libya)

The takouba is the Saharan warrior's broadsword: about a metre long overall, with a straight double-edged blade averaging 74–84 cm (29–33 in), a rounded point, and often three or more hand-ground fuller grooves running down the blade. The guard is a simple deep cross — and then the Tuareg do something distinctive: the hilt, guard and grip alike, is fully covered in tooled leather, because the Tuareg avoid touching iron with the bare hand. The pommel is always metal — brass, copper, sometimes iron or silver — and the scabbard is elaborately tooled leather. Blade and fitting quality reflected the owner's wealth, and the sword marked warrior status on caravan routes and in inter-clan warfare across the Sahel, used on horseback and on foot.

The takouba was made by the inæd'æn, a smith caste of distinct ethnicity from the warrior class, who speak Ténet — a secret language — and are believed by the imúšaɣ warriors to hold magical powers tied to metalworking. The blades tell a global story: from as early as the 16th century, many were older European trade blades remounted in local hilts — though most surviving examples are entirely African workmanship, and local smiths went on making such blades into the 20th century. Scholars have long since debunked the idea that the takouba is a copy of a medieval European sword; learned opinion holds it an indigenous African type that happened to share a continent-spanning trade in steel. There is even scholarly debate over who was entitled to carry one — only the imúšaɣ warrior class, or their vassals too. [Wikipedia: Takoba]

8. The knobkerrie / iwisa war club (modern South Africa)

Every Zulu warrior who carried an iklwa carried something else too: the iwisa, the knobkerrie — a club carved from a single piece of dense hardwood with an integral round knob for a head. Documented examples run from about 44 cm long with a 10 cm head (an Anglo-Zulu War iwisa in the Ian Knight collection) to larger war clubs around 79 cm (31 in) with 9 cm heads. The preferred woods were the hardest available — heavy-grained species like bloodwood and kiaat — and the single-piece construction mattered: genuine war clubs had no separate head insert, which is how historians distinguish them from the weaker tourist copies made later with inserted shafts.

The iwisa was the close-quarters companion to the stabbing spear: crushing blows in the press of bodies, and sometimes thrown just before the charge. Captured examples traceable to the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War operations in the Ntombe valley show it was there at the sharp end. But the club was also a badge of authority — waved by Zulu leaders as a staff of office — and among the Shona the similar tsvimbo club was thrown as the last weapon in battle, the final argument when everything else was spent. Today the knobkerrie is a national cultural symbol, which is the usual fate of weapons that outlive their wars. [Ian Knight Zulu Gallery: Anglo-Zulu War iwisa] [Forensic Fashion: the Shona warrior]

9. The Maasai war spear (modern Kenya and Tanzania)

A point of housekeeping first: the ol alem is not a spear. Every documented source identifies the ol alem as the Maasai short sword — the seme, a leaf-shaped double-edged blade about 65 cm long worn at the waist after the rites of passage into warriorhood, a weapon of last resort. The broad-bladed weapon people usually mean is the Maasai war spear: the traditional form about 5.5 ft (168 cm) long with a short wooden handle and a broad, heavy iron blade — northern Maasai used longer, narrower blades, southern clans broader ones.

The spear was made by the Kunono, a specialist smith clan, and bought by the Maasai for the price of a calf — a whole bovine economy compressed into a single weapon. It was thrown and thrust: the moran's prized possession in cattle raids and in the brutal 19th-century inter-clan civil wars, and the instrument of the lion hunt, where warriors competed for the honour of first spear on the lion. Note the chronology: the famous long, narrow-bladed Maasai spear is a late-19th-century adoption, possibly borrowed from the Chaga of Kilimanjaro and fuelled by trade prosperity. The broad blade — the older form — is the pre-colonial weapon. [Forensic Fashion: the 1857 Maasai warrior]

10. The Afar and Somali gile dagger (modern Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia)

The last weapon on this list never left daily life. The gile — jile in some spellings, qolxad to the Somali — is the curved dagger of the Horn of Africa: 30–50 cm or more long, a double-edged blade shaped like an asymmetrical leaf, a wooden or buffalo- or rhinoceros-horn handle, and a pommel typically ending in three teeth of bronze, zinc, or silver, the middle tooth the most prominent. It rides in a leather-wrapped wooden sheath with an extra-long tip, sometimes with metal upholstery, and the concave edge is the cutting edge. Older blades were forged; modern ones often reuse salvaged car and truck spring steel — the weapon adapts to whatever iron the century provides.

It is made by Afar and Somali blacksmiths, a long-respected trade and part of the artisanal heritage of Djibouti, and worn daily on the belt by nomads — drawn, under societal and Islamic norms, only in extreme conflict, but used constantly at dances and disputes and for daily tasks: slaughtering sheep, carving wood, cutting hair. The handle's quality signals the wearer's social status, and the dagger is considered a symbol of virility, an indispensable part of the nomad's kit. It is also, uniquely on this list, a national symbol: the gile appears on Djibouti's national emblem and its currency. [Wikipedia: Jile]

FAQ

Were pre-colonial African weapons mostly imported or locally made?

Mostly locally made. Bloomery iron smelting is indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa, with roughly 2,500 years of practice evidenced from modern Cameroon, the DRC, and Zimbabwe, and local blacksmiths forged the iklwa, the shotel, the kpinga, the assegai, the takouba, the spears, and the clubs on this list. The exceptions are real but limited: European blades remounted in takouba hilts from the 16th century, European sabre blades on late-19th-century Ethiopian gurade swords, and flintlock muskets that entered through the coastal trade — though even the Dane gun came to be manufactured by West African smiths themselves.

Which was more decisive — the iklwa or Shaka's tactics?

The tactics. Historians credit the system, not the spear alone: the iklwa was the enabling tool of a tactical package — the isihlangu shield, the buffalo-horns encirclement formation, the amabutho age-regiments, and relentless discipline. At Isandlwana on 22 January 1879 it was the encirclement and the close-quarters doctrine that destroyed the British column; the iklwa was custom-built for exactly that doctrine. The verdict: the tactics were decisive, and the weapon was engineered to serve them.

How did poisoned arrows actually kill — instantly or over hours?

It depends on the poison. The San's beetle-larva toxin, diamphotoxin, is hemolytic: it destroys red blood cells — haemoglobin can fall by up to 75% — and even a 200 kg giraffe dies slowly over several hours, which is why San hunters became legendary trackers, following the weakening animal on foot. Plant poisons are faster: ouabain from Acokanthera bark and the cardiac glycosides of Strophanthus act directly on the heart and can arrest it. "Instant kill" is a myth for beetle poison; for the cardiac plant poisons it is much closer to the truth.

Did African smiths make steel, or only iron?

Both — but variable steel. African bloomery furnaces regularly produced inhomogeneous steel blooms, especially in the large natural-draft furnaces — a distinctive African innovation that needed no bellows. The ancestors of the Haya people in western Tanzania were making carbon steel 2,300–2,000 years ago, using pre-heating that drove furnace temperatures to about 1,800 °C. What African smiths did not commonly do was quench-harden and temper blades, or weld a hard steel edge onto a soft iron body — little metallographic evidence of either exists, and little has been studied. Semi-finished iron and steel bars were widely traded: Sukur, on the Nigeria–Cameroon border, exported thousands of bars a year north to the Lake Chad basin in the 19th century.

Where can you see these weapons today?

Three places to start. The British Museum in London holds major African arms and armour collections, including shotels and throwing knives — its curator Christopher Spring wrote the standard book, "African Arms and Armour." The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford displays over 200 highlights from a 12,000-object arms and armour collection in its Upper Gallery, including a documented Zande kpinga (accession 1915.45.1). And the Fowler Museum at UCLA — with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington DC — hosted "Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths" in 2019, showing 225 iron tools, weapons, and adornments from more than 100 African ethnic groups. [Pitt Rivers Museum: arms and armour] [NPR: "Striking Iron" at the Fowler]

Key Sources

Other sources are named in brackets in the text. All pages pulled October 11, 2026.

• Seven Swords: the iklwa — iklwa dimensions, history, Isandlwana, museum examples.
• Wikipedia: Assegai — throwing-spear design, Nguni use, the Shaka/Dingiswayo attribution, the assegai tree.
• Wikipedia: Shotel — shotel dimensions, the shotelai elite force, the gurade replacement.
• Oriental Arms: sickle shotel sword — Aksum-era origins, shield-hooking use.
• Wikipedia: Mambele — mambele dimensions, Avongara "court metal," dowry role.
• Interesting Engineering: the multi-bladed throwing knife — kpinga design and Zande attribution.
• Wikipedia: Diamphotoxin — beetle-toxin biochemistry and the slow hemolytic kill.
• IFL Science: secrets of San poison arrows — the Chaboo field study, beetle vs plant poisons, the 1779 reference.
• National Geographic: Maasai poison arrows — Acokanthera bark extract and ouabain.
• Wikipedia: Strophanthus kombe — seeds and roots as arrow poison, medicinal use.
• Wikipedia: Dane gun — Dano-Norwegian origin, local West African manufacture.
• Forensic Fashion: the 1823 Asante warrior — Long Dane details, ntoa belts, range figures, the Anglo-Asante wars.
• Wikipedia: Takoba — takouba design, the inæd'æn smith caste, the indigenous-type debate.
• Ian Knight Zulu Gallery: Anglo-Zulu War iwisa — knobkerrie dimensions and war provenance.
• Forensic Fashion: the 1857 Maasai warrior — Maasai war spear, the Kunono smiths, the ol alem correction.
• Wikipedia: Jile — gile dimensions, three-toothed pommel, Djibouti national emblem.
• Pitt Rivers Museum: arms and armour — the documented kpinga (acc. 1915.45.1) and the 12,000-object collection.
• NPR: "Striking Iron" at the Fowler — the 2019 blacksmithing exhibition, 225 iron works.