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Notes -
Africa is awash with weapons from a wide variety of sources. The continent has had an absurd number of revolutions, civil wars, truck wars, proxy wars, race wars, guerrilla wars, sometimes even literal gorilla wars, all of them involving the importation of modern weapons since, well, the creation of modern weapons. Weird shit turning up in Africa is an occasional source of angst in the gun culture, as photos of various conflicts sometimes include extremely valuable museum pieces like original stg-44s being treated as beater guns by local forces.
Does South Africa have a small arms industry at all, on a different note? Because I'm sure most African states don't.
They used to, and a bunch of fairly iconic weapons were developed there. I heard recently that one of their major manufacturers went belly-up, and most of the older companies died off years ago.
Yeah, Denel suffered some underspecified hollowing-out, according to this article I found through that Twitter thread posted elsewhere. Tony Neophytou, the most recent South African gun designer of note, may need a new job (and perhaps a plane ticket) sooner than later--or at least someone to pick up his most recent weapon design.
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