Mamba Pistol

• Name — Mamba • Origin — Rhodesia • Type — Semi-automatic pistol • Is Ranged — YES • Designer — Relay Products (Pty) Ltd., Salisbury, Rhodesia • Design Date — 1976 • Manufacturer — Viper Engineering (Pty) Ltd., a division of Sandock Austral; Boksburg, South Africa • Production Date — 1977 • Weight — 1190 g • Length — 218 mm • Part Length — 127 mm (barrel) • Cartridge — 9×19mm Parabellum 7.65×21mm Parabellum • Action — Recoil-operated, locked breech semi-automatic, double-action • Rate — Semi-automatic • Feed — 15-round box magazine

The Mamba was designed in Rhodesia in 1976 and was initially intended to be manufactured there, in anticipation of a domestic military or police contract. The Rhodesian Security Forces were then fighting a long and bitter counter-insurgency campaign against two rival insurgent armies; however, much of their small arms were well-worn and obsolete due to an arms embargo imposed on the country by the United Nations. The embargo had severely limited Rhodesia's ability to acquire new weapons, forcing the country to source most of its materiel from a sympathetic South Africa and from international arms dealers willing to violate the embargo. However, Rhodesian engineers also showed great resourcefulness in utilising the country's limited industrial capacity to manufacture 9×19mm Parabellum ammunition, and a number of small arms chambered for that round. The Mamba was one of several such designs; its Rhodesian developers envisioned it as a combat pistol which combined all the most desirable features of preexisting 9×19mm semi-automatic handguns in widespread military use, with the added feature of being manufactured entirely of stainless steel. Instrumental in the design process was Joe Hale, an American expatriate who was also involved in a number of other independent small arms projects in Rhodesia. Hale claimed he helped design the Mamba in concert with a multi-national team which included Swiss, British, and other American expatriates then living in Rhodesia. In 1977, production of the Mamba's components was outsourced to Viper Engineering, a South African firm, likely because of the sophisticated nature of the manufacturing process. By mid-1977, a few individual pistols had been assembled in Rhodesia from the South African-produced parts; however, by the following year production and assembly seems to have been undertaken entirely in South Africa at Viper's facilities. Hale emigrated to South Africa in 1978 to personally oversee production. That year, the United Nations also imposed an arms embargo on South Africa, and Hale hoped that a locally-manufactured pistol design like the Mamba would be competitive for military or police contracts in that country as well, once the embargo limited its ability to source pistols from abroad. The end of the Rhodesian war and South Africa's ability to continue sourcing semi-automatic pistol designs from various foreign suppliers in spite of the embargo led to these hopes evaporating, and the urgency for the producing the weapon died down. Subsequently, a number of the completed Viper-produced pistols were imported into the United States for commercial sales by the American firearms retailer Navy Arms, which also acquired the rights to manufacture the Mamba under licence. Navy Arms produced the Mamba chambered in 9×19mm and reportedly offered a version chambered for 7.65×21mm Parabellum as well.