In Africa, the Adal Empire and the Abyssinian Empire both deployed gunpowder weapons during the Adal-Abyssinian War. Imported from Arabia, and the wider Islamic world, the Adalites, led by Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, were the first African power to introduce cannon warfare to the African continent. Later on as the Portuguese Empire entered the war it would supply and train the Abyssinians with cannon and muskets, while the Ottoman Empire sent soldiers and cannon to back Adal. The conflict proved, through their use on both sides, the value of firearms such as the matchlock musket, cannon, and the arquebus over traditional weapons.
Ernest Gellner in his book Nations and Nationalism argues that the centralizing potential of the gun and the book, enabled both the Somali people and the Amhara people to dominate the political history of a vast area in Africa, despite neither of them being numerically predominant.