Trigger Warning: please note the terms and sentiments expressed by cited sources are not the author's own, and their use here does not indicate agreement with them.¹

[The Africans] from farther up in the interior have no other object in coming here than securing a gun for themselves.²

These natives have been pouring in crowds into the diamond fields for seven years, at the rate of 30,000 a year; each gang from thirty to forty men, after a journey on foot often of 1,000 miles, during which many of them die from starvation and cold, remaining and working only about three months – just long enough to supply each member of it with gun and ammunition – and then returning to their land. They carry back no money, but simply a gun; and they come for nothing else. The English government permits the sale of guns to them indiscriminately; and it is a well-established fact that 300.000 have been thus disposed of. ³

The reason why natives come from long distances to this Province to purchase guns instead of obtaining them from traders who reside there is that they can earn the money wherewith to make the purchase instead of having to dispose of cattle or other valuables to them on purpose and possibly also because many of them do not possess sufficient cattle or other property which can be spared to exchange for a gun.⁴

Writing fifty years after the events described, Imperial historian Eric A. Walker wrote in 1928:

There had been a gun traffic in South Africa post memoriam hominum but never anything like the traffic of Kimberley.⁵

One can feel the sense of near outrage in Walker’s words. In the present, it is not so much outrage that is expressed by contemporary observers, but rather surprise that such an extensive and initially unregulated gun trade lay at the basis of the diamond industry in Kimberley. Yet, extensive it was, and its supporters included Cecil John Rhodes, who actively argued for the maintenance of the trade, for how else would workers be enticed to work in the dangerous and difficult circumstances of the Kimberley mines.⁶

In early 1873, two years after the first diamonds had been found at what would soon become the diamond mining town of Kimberley, the German nobleman, traveller and diamond digger, Ernst von Weber, referred to an event that was to have unforeseen and far-reaching consequences for the diamond industry and South Africa as a whole. Von Weber stated:

In the last months, a large shortage of Black labour has developed. At least 6000 new Africans have to arrive [per month], so that the Colesberg Kopje and Du Toits Pan [mines] can be worked to full capacity. Every week, hundreds of Kaffirs leave this place without new ones coming in their place. And for this we owe the Boers in the Orange Free State, who in December attacked a group of Basutos returning to their homeland via Free State territory and engaged them in what was effectively a small battle [eine förmliche kleine Schlacht] in which several people were killed. Since then, the princes of the Zulus, Basutos, and Mahowas have forbidden their people to go to the diamond fields, as their route necessarily leads them through the Orange Free State, and their lives are not safe there.⁷

The direct result of this killing, apart from curtailing labour coming through the Free State, was that the free trade of firearms at Kimberley would come to an end. Indirectly, this led to an increase in diamond smuggling on the part of labour recruits now no longer able to purchase rifles and ammunition in Kimberley, as well as to the establishment of the closed migrant labour compounds. Formally, the compounds were established to curtail IDB (illicit diamond buying), the illegal trade in diamonds. In the 1980s, William Worger and, particularly, Rob Turrell, argued that IDB was a ruse and demonstrated that the compounds effectively limited the bargaining power of labour and drove down wages in Kimberley and the mining industry as a whole.⁸ I would suggest that Worger and Turrell are correct, the closed compound system certainly drove down the wages and limited the bargaining position of labour, but this does not discount the fact that the closed compound system also severely hampered the trade in illicit stones.

Later in that same year (1873), Langalibalele, Chief of the Hlubi who resided in the borderlands of Basutoland and Natal Colony, was ordered by the Secretary for Native Affairs of Natal, Sir Theophilus Shepstone, to surrender and register firearms that had been earned by his tribesmen on the diamond fields. A wry aspect of this was that at that stage, three of Shepstone’s sons were working on the diamond fields where they supplied firearms as wages.⁹ Not surprisingly, Langalibalele refused to hand over the firearms, let alone the owners thereof, and sought to withdraw into the Basutoland Protectorate. Unfortunately for Langalibalele and his people, they were betrayed and attacked by Natal colonists and their auxiliaries. Langalibalele was captured, tried in a kangaroo court and banished to Robben Island, whilst his people were distributed amongst the settler farmers of the Natal colony, and their lands confiscated. The travesty of justice presaged the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, and broke the hitherto warm relations that had existed between the Anglican Bishop Colenso and Shepstone.¹⁰

Guns in southern Africa

Guns have been associated with the coming of European mariners to the coasts of Southern Africa from the late Fifteenth Century onwards. The Portuguese actively deployed 600 arquebusier musketeers in set-piece battle warfare that lasted three days in the Zambezi Valley as early as 1572.¹¹ Marks and Atmore have noted that “a 'gun society' existed at the Cape from the beginning of white settlement there in 1652”.¹² Dutch musketeers ran afoul of the damp mists on the Namibian coast in 1670 and were killed when their muskets failed to shoot on account of wet powder.¹³ In consequence of raiders and refugees emanating from the Cape, the Xhosa were aware of firearms from the early 1700s onwards and began actively acquiring them in the late 1700s.¹⁴ By 1839, it was noted that “large numbers of muskets, [had been acquired by Xhosa] first by smuggling and indeed now openly by traders”, and that they were “becoming more bold and expert in the use of them”.¹⁵ During the war of the Axe in 1846 firearms were common and used to great effect by the Xhosa, who avoided set piece battles and engaged in Guerilla warfare where they, “keep to the bush and take advantage of our men being in the open to fire at them: when we return their fire, we do so with scarcely any effect, having nothing but the bush to fire at”.¹⁶ From the mid-1860s, the Diamond Fields and later Kimberley became the centre for the gun trade in southern Africa. Succinct as always, De Kiewiet wrote, “The diamond fields needed native labourers and the virtual free trade that was permitted at the diggings was excellent bait”.¹⁷ Gun running from Port Natal was an extremely lucrative business in the 1880s.¹⁸

“Guns brought labourers”, and this was as true of the Diamond fields of the 1870s as it was of the Cape Colony and Natal Colony, where migrant labour travelled to acquire firearms and other goods from the 1820s onwards.¹⁹ Firearms were important because they enabled not only the subjugation of African polities but also the maintenance of the independence of African polities.²⁰ They allowed for the acquisition of commodities which had hitherto usually lain beyond the reach of humans; firearms made it possible to hunt elephants, rhinos, buffaloes, lions, and so forth in a manner that did not immediately endanger the life of the hunter. In addition, firearms made it possible to harvest, on a scale hitherto unseen, the wildlife of southern Africa, and to transform it into ivory, hides, pelts, feathers and dried meat.²¹ Ownership of guns and horses, of “the means of destruction” as Jack Goody noted, enabled Southern African communities to devastate other communities, while maintaining the independence of their own.²² The hunting and raiding by commando based societies from the late 1700s onwards is a case in point.²³ It is supremely telling that a IKung man, when asked in 1952 if he had an image of God, replied “God is a man on a horse with a gun”.²⁴

Firearms were not just used as things for killing, but they were also used as things replete with symbolic purpose.²⁵ The work of Macola in Central Africa, van Beek and others in contemporary West Africa, as well as my own ongoing research on the Kaleloze gun in Western Zambia, are examples of this.²⁶ However, it is important not to over-emphasise the symbolic, for it was precisely in southern Africa that the ability of firearms to kill and maim came to the fore. The extermination of wildlife, be it the Quagga or the Cape Lion, both of which were shot to extinction in the 1870s, and the multitude of bloody total wars that afflicted the region between 1850 and 2000, were made possible by firearms carried by individuals.²⁷

Of late, after a lull of half a century, there has been a resurgence in the study of firearms in the history of Africa.²⁸ The global conflicts of the world, be they the Napoleonic wars, the World Wars, the Cold War, or the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT), have all, to some extent, been fought in Africa, and all have had unintended lasting consequences on the continent, particularly with regard to the firearms that remained as surplus after the fighting had ended.²⁹ The transition in western Europe of armies from muskets to rifled firearms during and after the Napoleonic wars meant that the world market came to be flooded with muskets that were no longer used by the enormous standing armies that had been established.³⁰ The muskets, as with the rifles that replaced them, were hand-made and were thus comparatively easy to repair.³¹ The military surplus “Brown Bess”, or “Tower Musket” (so called because its barrel had been proofed at the Tower of London), was the standard exported to southern Africa until the 1870s. Although White has described how “Birmingham gunmakers stamped their guns 'London', while Belgians used Birmingham trade names, slightly misspelt”.³² The enormous rearmament (from muskets to rifles) in Europe's armies was repeated fifty years later when, “between 1867 and 1875, nearly all the European countries rearmed with metallic-cartridge breech-loaders, thus making vast quantities of military weapons obsolete”.³³ This change did not go unnoticed in southern Africa. From the 1870s onwards, colonial forces fought all wars in southern Africa with breech-loader rifles. African polities actively sought breech-loader rifles, but generally remained reliant on muskets, and more often than not, African forces were outnumbered in terms of firearms. It was, in an effort to redress this imbalance, that thousands of men took the 'bait' and entered into the migrant labour system to acquire firearms.³⁴ Frederick Boyle, who was at “New Rush” (Kimberley) in 1871, wrote:

I should suppose that no less than 20,000 rifles, mostly as good arms as one could find, have been sold to natives working at the diamond fields – 10,000 is the lowest estimate I ever heard from those storekeepers who would give me an opinion. It is to buy a gun that Kaffirs cheerfully undergo a whole year’s risk and labour in the claims. Scarcely a man leaves his work without one. I have met returning Zulus and Corannas, in the veldt, by twenties in a company, every one armed.³⁵

The historian de Kiewiet referred to “The guns in the hands of furtive knots of Basuto who scurried through the Free State to Basutoland on their way from the diamond fields”.³⁶ These guns in the hands of returning migrants from Kimberley ensured the victory of Basuto forces against the Boers of the Orange Free State as well as Imperial Britain, and thus ensured the maintenance of the independence of the state founded by Mosheshoe, Basutoland, present-day Lesotho. Similarly, Bapedi migrants armed with firearms earned in Kimberley were able to maintain the independence of their polity in the face of Boer aggression from the South African Republic (SAR) before being finally defeated by Imperial Britain.³⁷

In terms of the Sand River Convention, by which the South African Republic came to be recognised as an independent state in 1852, the British and the SAR undertook not to supply Black Africans with firearms, shot or gunpowder.³⁸ Labour shortages, greed, necessity and the near impossibility of enforcing these provisions meant that there was a steady, ever-increasing transfer of arms and ammunition to African polities beyond the Cape and Natal colonies. Within the South African Republic, the formal admonition contained in the resolution of the Volksraad of September 1858, to its Field-Cornets that firearms and ammunition “shall not be granted or given in exchange to native tribes”, betrays the fact that this was indeed taking place.³⁹ With the discovery of diamonds, and the subsequent flood of capital into the Cape and Natal colonies, as well as the developments associated with this, which included the building of railways, arms and ammunition flooded into southern Africa, primarily to be sold in exchange for that most precious and rare commodity of all, African labour. The formal statistical registers of the Cape of Good Hope and the Natal Colony Blue Books for the period 1872 – 1880, demonstrate the enormous import of firearms into the region.⁴⁰

Writing upon his return to Great Britain, General Sir Arthur Thurlow Cunynghame, erstwhile Lieutenant-Governor of the Cape Colony in 1878, wrote of his experiences in the Cape and described the impact of the flurry of railway building in the Colony, which resulted from the discovery of diamonds:

In 1867 the first diamond was found, and there soon flowed into the colony a tide of wealth as welcome as it was unexpected. Railroads were commenced on a scale I think rather too extended at the commencement. To facilitate the making of these railways immense gangs of natives were employed, and by permission of their chiefs they were allowed to leave their own localities far away in Kafir land. To make them work only one inducement was effectual —the permission to purchase fire-arms. There was a law in the colony forbidding the acquisition of arms by natives without a special permit, to be given in those cases only in which the magistrate empowered to do so was personally acquainted with the character of the applicant. Unfortunately this salutary provision was not attended to, and permits were given with a laxity quite alarming. Companies of natives marched home, each bearing his musket over his shoulder. Instances occurred in which justices of the peace granted permits to natives in reckless profusion in order to curry favour with traders. The government set the example, and for a while, blinded by a desire to secure cheap labour, the colonists allowed the natives to arm, until at least 400,000 muskets and rifles, some of them breech-loaders, had been acquired.⁴¹

On the Diamond Fields proper (which initially lay beyond the Cape Colony in the contested frontier zone that would eventually become the Griqualand West Colony in October 1871, before being formally annexed to the Cape Colony in October 1880), an effective free-for-all existed as far as the trade in firearms was concerned.⁴² Literate travellers to the Diamond Fields, who were themselves generally laden with firearms, wrote accounts of their visit to the Fields, provided tips and advice to future travellers, and reported on the trade in firearms and ammunition. Indeed, in reading these accounts, it is striking how important firearms were to these travellers.⁴³ More often than not, reference to firearms is presented within the context of hunting and killing for amusement and entertainment, in which “Game” is hunted and killed for “Sport”. Epitome of this must surely be Payton’s extensive description of how to hunt Meerkats:

In numerous parts of the “veldt” may be seen a lot of little holes in the limy, sandy soil, a little larger than rat holes. These are generally found twenty to forty together, and are the entrances to the abodes of the “meerkat,” a small feline animal, something like a weasel, with a nice furry coat —which makes very pretty tobacco-pouches— and fine bushy tails. The meerkat may often be seen scampering over the “ veldt ” at a great pace, and, if followed, will be traced to one of these colonies, and will dart into one of the holes before you can get within range; but if you lie down at about twenty-five yards from the colony, and wait patiently, perfectly still, in a quarter of an hour or so you will see first a knowing little head, then a pretty furry breast, and lastly perhaps the whole animal, emerge from one after another of the holes. At the slightest movement you make, they are in again; and though by waiting some time you may get a shot, your victim, even if killed outright, will probably tumble back into its hole again. Still, by dint of great patience, and only shooting such animals as are seen to have come well away from their holes, a couple of skins may be secured in a morning. It is lazy work, and reminds one of angling, as it may be called “ a contemplative man’s recreation.” So much for meerkat shooting.⁴⁴

Be that as it may, Payton’s advice to prospective travellers to the Fields is instructive as it betrays the easy availability of firearms for sale at the Fields:

With regard to weapons, it is not absolutely necessary to bring out any, as plenty can be bought at fair prices on the Fields. But for anyone who intends to shoot much, I would recommend a Henry Express Rifle, and a good strong 12-bore muzzle loading smooth bore. In the event of wishing to realise money on weapons, I may mention that I have seen a great many sold by auction; and that while a rifle, or double-barrel rifle and smooth--bore will always fetch a fair price, yet a smooth-bore only is not much esteemed, because the sportsmen “ up country ” only go in for large game, and hold “small deer,” either furred or feathered, in contempt. About 5l. or 61. is the price a double barrel smooth-bore will fetch by auction, apparently almost irrespective of quality or maker’s name.⁴⁵

What is interesting here is that the price named between 5 and 6 pounds appears to have been the same amount paid by migrant labourers for the firearms that they were purchasing on the Fields. In addition, as many authors indicate, labourers only stayed on the fields for as long as it took to earn sufficient funds to be able to buy a firearm.⁴⁶ Von Weber summed it up as follows:

… all the wild and barbaric blacks who travel two or three months from the interior of Africa to the diamond fields to hire themselves out as workers have only one goal in mind: to earn enough to buy a gun. As soon as they have worked together to earn the necessary 6 pounds (and at the current wage level of 10 shillings a week, including board, this takes three months), they buy their long-desired treasure, the gun, and return home with it. In this way, hundreds of thousands of guns have been bought here by the Kaffirs over the last two years and taken home.⁴⁷

The Czech traveller Emil Holub wrote:

Of the thousands of black men who at that time acted as servants in the diamond-fields, the majority belonged to the Basuto, Zulu, and Transvaal Bechuana tribes. They earned from 7s. 6d. to 10s. a week, and rarely stayed more than six months at the diggings; for as soon as they had saved enough to buy a gun—which would seldom cost more than 4l.—and about 5 lbs. of powder at 3s. per lb., a few bullets and caps, a woollen garment or two, and perhaps a hat, they considered themselves quite in a position to return to their own homes and buy themselves a wife. A servant had to be bound to his master by a certificate drawn up by a proper official, and this had to be renewed at every change of situation, a penalty being imposed when the document was not forthcoming. Whenever a servant wished to complete his engagement, and to return home, the employer, if the man’s conduct had been satisfactory, would give him a certificate to the local authorities, that he might be permitted to buy a gun. The certificate was practically equivalent, therefore, to a gun licence; and thus it had been brought about that many hundreds of natives, both in the colony and in their own independent states, were in possession of fire-arms, with liberty to use them.⁴⁸

Meerkat hunter Charles Payton, in describing the labourers who came to work on the Diamond Fields, gives us an insight into the thinking and ideas that were prevalent among white diggers and appear to have been substantiated and exacerbated by Eastern Cape and Natal settlers:

The Greatest ambition of every Kafir seems to be to buy a gun. When a Kafir has served long enough on the Fields to enable him to pay 5 [Pounds] or 10 [Pounds] for a gun or rifle, he shoulders his weapon, and turns his face towards the ancestral “kraals,” a happy man. He is then a mighty hunter, is sure of getting a good wife, and is ready to take an important part in any war that may arise between his and the neighbouring tribes—a very frequent occurrence. Some, it is true, are not so careful ; they yield to the “ white ” vices of drinking, gambling, &c., are often to be found in “chokey” (prison), often changing masters, and never saving money.⁴⁹

Selling firearms to Africans

John Angove, a digger and long-term resident from the earliest days in Kimberley, provided a detailed overview of the manner in which firearms were displayed and sold to migrant labourers in Kimberley:

One of the sights of the camp was the huge piles of guns stacked in front of the many Kafir shops on stands sometimes four or five tiers high; besides the guns there were also bayonets, powder flasks, and boxes of percussion-caps laid out in tempting array so as to attract the attention of the boys as they passed along the streets.⁵⁰

…

On these occasions the camp was converted into a regular pandemonium by the yelling of the crowds of excited Kafirs examining guns and firing off caps, the touts of the shop-keepers shouting to them, “Tenga isabam” (Buy a gun).⁵¹

Touts shouting “Buy a Gun” in IsiZulu, Setswana and Sesotho, urged labourers to buy their rifles at specific traders.⁵² It appears that rifles were bought on a form of hire-purchase. Traders would provide percussion caps free of charge to prospective purchasers and allow them to pick and choose from amongst the firearms that they had on offer. Prospective buyers would be permitted to select a weapon, arm it with a percussion cap, and then shoot. Once a choice had been made and a down payment made, the firearm would be labelled and put aside until such time that the payment could be made in full. A commentator described the process as follows:

Work in the claims ceased at about two o’clock on Saturday afternoons, at which time the diggers paid their boys their week’s wages. The Kafir who had not yet earned money enough to purchase his coveted gun and ammunition would, in the company of his friends, spend Saturday afternoons in meandering up and down the streets of the camp, admiring and examining the many guns displayed in the manner described. At such times the shop-keeper would allow the boys to prove the soundness of the weapons by providing free of charge as many caps as the unsophisticated Native desired to use. When at last he had selected the gun he intended buying, the boy gave the shop-keeper as much money as he could of the price, as earnest money. The gun was then labelled and put away in a corner of the shop. Each succeeding Saturday afternoon the boy would repair to the shop and after feasting his eyes on it, the weapon would be replaced. When the time of his departure came from the Fields, the Kafir went to get his gun, and after paying the balance of the purchase-price due on it, with much joy claimed it as his very own, as a child would a glittering toy.⁵³

James Benjamin Taylor, a digger who made his first fortune at Kimberley, and subsequent money on the Witwatersrand described the sale of weapons and betrayed his sentiments in the following manner:

At knock off time our Kaffirs used to pass down streets of tented shops owned by white traders and presided over by yelling black salesmen, whirling guns above their heads. These they discharged in the air, crying: “Reka Reka, Mona Mtsheka” [Buy buy [shop], gun here (Setswana)]. A deafening din. A sight never to be forgotten. The small store-keepers used, in those days, to bring up wagon-loads of antiquated muzzle-loading rifles for sale to the Kaffirs, who frequently were met along the road proceeding to their homes armed to the teeth. An old gun, a canister of powder, a bar of lead, a bullet-mould constituted a glorious equipment for robbing and killing white people.⁵⁴

Frederick Boyle expressed his surprise at seeing the extent of the sale of weapons at “New Rush”:

On the Monday morning I saw a sight which was calculated to startle one. It proved to be common enough, however. This was a sale of rifles at the store of Messrs. Reid. Those who bought were Corannas and Kaffirs. The street appeared to be possessed by a negro army. Round the shops was a crowd of hundreds pressing in. From its open door a stream of armed men struggled out ceaselessly. Each carried a rifle, some with the bayonet screwed on. The purchasers hung round the outskirts of the crowd, comparing the merit of their respective arms, until a body of eighteen or twenty were collected. They then marched away in line. So fast the bargains were concluded, these groups seemed to file past in a grotesque parade. Many of them had no covering whatever, except a tail of jackal hanging in front. Those were the Zulus. But every man carried an excellent rifle, Tower marked, one of the muzzle-loading enfields discarded from the English army. These were sold at 3 [pounds] each, 3 [pounds] 5 [shillings] with bayonet. It was stated that five hundred stand had been disposed of that morning.⁵⁵

The abundant availability and sale of firearms was not without its dangers. Charles Payton, reporting on the Diamond Fields in 1871, described Boer diggers celebrating their finds in the following manner:

The Boers are—or rather used to be—awfully noisy fellows at night. Besides a very regular business of psalm singing, very edifying to them no doubt, but by no means gratifying to an English ear, they would have grand jollifications whenever one of their number found a big diamond—which was pretty often. Them chief delight on these occasions was to let off all the crackers they could buy, and fire an indefinite number of guns and rifles. I say “indefinite,” though I was at one time inclined to think they fired a shot for each carat of the diamond found, but I was always too lazy to count. I should have premised that the noisy part of the business always took place late at night, after a Homeric repast had been eaten, and numberless glasses of Boer brandy been consumed by the men, and “ kommetjes ” of coffee by their fair and fat spouses; and, in their excited state, they would often forget that, in order to make a noise, it was not necessary to put a bullet into the rifle; so, after a horse had been accidentally killed, and several diggers had complained of bullets whistling through their tents in rather unpleasant proximity to their persons, our active Landdrost or police magistrate issued all over the camp notices forbidding the discharging of firearms within the precincts of the camp after sundown.⁵⁶

John Angove described two cases in which the discharge of weapons had unintended consequences:

The continual snapping of caps on the guns in the streets was not unattended by much danger. On one occasion, whilst thus engaged, and unsuspecting boy in placing a cap on the nipple of one of the many muskets pulled the trigger as he dan scores of other guns, when, to the surprise of everyone in the neighbourhood there was a loud report, and a Kafir standing fell backwards, shot through the chest. The gun had been loaded with powder and ball, but by whom, or how long previously, no one knew; for aught anyone knew, it may have been one of the old muskets used during one of the Kafir wars.⁵⁷

In another instance Angove describes the following event:

The writer, whilst sitting reading in the door of his tent at the West-end one Saturday afternoon, was starled by having some sand suddenly dashed in his face; on looking up from his book, he was surprised to see the iron ramrod of a gun sticking in the ground between his feet. From whence the ramrod came he did not know, but it was evident that it had been shot from one of the guns in front of one of the Kafir shops.⁵⁸

The end of the trade

In 1879 the trade in rifles in Griqualand West was curtailed, leading to an increase in diamond smuggling. (Turrell 176). In 1879 the Anglo-Zulu war took place, and the Pedi kingdom (after having repulsed the ZAR in 1873) was defeated by British forces working with Swazi auxiliaries in November 1879.⁵⁹ Two years later British Imperial forces were routed by Boer forces at the battle of Majuba. In 1880 through to 1881, “the Basotho successfully defended their land and their right to bear arms in defence of their nation”.⁶⁰ In his first address to the Cape Parliament Cecil John Rhodes mobilised the Diamond Fields against calls for the disarmament of the Basuto. As his biographer Basil Williams put it:

Rhodes and the Kimberley people disliked the war, because they had many Basutos working for them in the mines, and as one man said, “After all, we sold them the guns; they bought them out of their hard-earned wages, and it is hard lines to make them give them up again.”⁶¹

In 1884 Basutoland was deannexed from the Cape Colony and placed under direct Imperial control. In the same year Cecil John Rhodes engineered the British annexation of southern Bechuanaland.⁶² In all of this, the supply of African labour to Kimberley waxed and waned to an extent that was not beneficial to the profit motives of the shareholders of the increasingly centralised and highly capitalised mining companies. In 1885 the first closed compounds, in which labourers were housed without any contact to the outside world for the period of their contracts, were established.⁶³

Tswana Chiefs hiring hired guns: Boyle, p. 158:

References