The rich, often controversial and sometimes violent modern history of southern African Countries has been a perfect background for the work of a number of brilliant and gifted gunmakers and companies that went on to engineer and manufacture hunting, sport shooting, defensive and military-grade firearms with whatever little means they could find locally.
Most of those firearms remained obscure to the vast majority of gun enthusiasts in Europe and north America, but nonetheless they left a deep mark in the history of gunmaking and gun technology, and under many points of view they set standards for the global industry.

Gun enthusiasts, discerning collectors, historians, and whoever has an interest in the Rhodesian Bush War, in the South African Border War and in a great, unsung chapter of the history of Africa from the 1960s to the late 1980s now have a new reliable source of detailed information, the fruit of years of work by a team of local experts.

Edited by Chas Lotter for the Pretoria Arms and Ammunition Association / Pretoria Wapen en Ammunisie Vereniging (link is external) (PVAA/PWAV) and authored by twelve different local experts of international fame, Firearms Developed And Manufactured In Southern Africa 1949-2000 (link is external) (also known by the authors as the DAMISA book) offers a precise and detailed overview of the firearms engineered and produced for hunting, sport shooting, defensive, Police and military purposes in the Republic of South Africa and in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) ever since the end of World War II and up to the end of the 20th Century.

The authors have engaged in eight and a half years of research: they traced and interviewed some of the key figures involved in the development and manufacture of many of the firearms described in the book; they retrieved and digitalized period pictures and documents; and they found and personally inspected samples of many of those firearms – of whose, more often than not, only a few samples survive nowadays.

In those eight and a half years, the authors collected a library of over thirty thousand documents – some 15.000 of whose being pictures, both professional images and period photographs. Out of those, 1252 were hand-picked, selected carefully among the images of the firearms covered in the treatise to illustrate the 540 A4 pages of this hardback, full-color book.

GUNSweek.com had the chance to purchase a first edition, autographed by some of the authors, and we can safely say without exception or equivocation and without fear of contradiction that what we have here is the ultimate treatise and essay about modern firearms manufacturing in South Africa and Rhodesia. Most of the 180 firearms examined and illustrated in the book are covered under both a technical and historic point of view, with high-definition color pictures and data tables – often in comparison with some of the variants of each design that spawned during the years.

The DAMISA book is a true must-have for gun enthusiasts, researchers, historians and collectors, and shares the ultimate light on an unjustly overlooked and undeservedly unacknowledged chapter of modern firearms history.

The Firearms Developed And Manufactured In Southern Africa 1949-2000 (link is external) book can be purchased through the Tactical Quarter Master (link is external) website, and will ship worldwide. The price of the book itself is 1000 South African Rand – which translates in roughly 74,24 Euro or 80,5 U.S. Dollars. Shipment costs are calculated at checkout depending from the destination.
As we write, about thirty-eight copies of the first edition – autographed by the authors – are still available ready for shipment. Good news for those who may miss them, a second edition is being printed and will soon be available.