Saturday, June 1, 2013

European Settler Colonialism and Genocide in Africa

Taken from the Wikipedia entry on the Herero and Nama genocide in colonial Namibia/German Southwest Africa in the early 20th century, one of the first genocides of the century.

            An undeniable link between settler imperialism and genocide of indigenous peoples in Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas is visible throughout the history of European colonialism in Africa. From Australia to the Cape, Algeria to the Americas, European settler colonialism has resulted in conditions one can safely label genocide, in that it was perfectly understandable to the colonizers that their actions not only would result in the destruction of indigenous societies, but also a demographic catastrophe in which countless lives were lost and survival for the culture as well as the people were very low. In each instance, such as the northern frontier of the Cape Colony and its relations with Cape San, or the indigenous people of the Canary Islands resisting Spanish conquest in the 15th century, settler societies with or without approval of their metropolitan governments, inevitably cause the eradication of indigenes in the process of land acquisitions, ecological damage, introduction of new diseases, and exterminatory violence. European settler colonialism, inherently exterminatory regarding native peoples according to Peter Wolfe, since it seeks to destroy while replacing indigenous societies, becomes a pattern in tales of modern European encounters with non-Europeans.[1] Usually the same conditions predisposed settler colonialism towards genocidal violence: settler populations with agricultural and pastoralist inclinations and connected to global international capitalist markets clash with autochthonous peoples not practicing commercial agriculture or herding and an inevitable conflict for resources, land, and extreme violence develops in tandem with weak colonial authority or strong backing by governments to settlers.[2] However, as Wolfe asserts, since settler colonialism does not always entail genocidal violence, its propensity for inclusion of colonized natives as servile and subordinates in the colonial hierarchy and economic structure created spaces for indigenous survival in significantly reduced numbers.[3] Therefore, the history of European imperialism in African history reveals that colonialism, particularly settler colonialism, predisposes those societies to genocidal violence, as the following cases from the Cape San, Algeria, the Canary Islands, and Australia reveal.
            The earliest European colonial conquest in Africa, the Spanish conquest of the entire Canary Islands by 1490s, exemplifies future European settler colonialism’s genocidal tendencies. Prior to formal Spanish crown-sanctioned missions, Iberians, French, and Italian Renaissance merchants and slave raiders targeted some of the islands, such as Lanzarote, which was conquered by a 1402 expedition from France., though its population declined prior and afterwards through slave raids, or razzias.[4] Though lacking the same global capitalist market system of later centuries when European hegemony in the 18th and 19th centuries was more evident, the allure of sugar and a nascent sugar plantation industry in parts of the Mediterranean, Azores, and Madeira, two Portuguese island possessions in the eastern Atlantic, and the profits of sugar production within Iberia itself produced conditions favorable for Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands to include the establishment of sugar mills and imported slave labor from North and West Africa.[5] In addition to an economic motive against the agricultural indigenes, who, though practicing farming and shepherding, the 15th century Spanish perspectives on their ‘savagery’ and paganism stirred debate and racialization, justifying the exploitation of Canarian labor.[6] Some European observers preferred to look upon the indigenes as innocent, pure, and in need of protection and Christianization, as Boccaccio saw them, whereas others, as see in the work of Petrarch, saw the Canary Islanders as savages justifiably enslaveable, and incapable of self-rule.[7] This type of debate regarding the status and humanity of non-European, non-Muslim peoples the Spanish encountered in the Canary Islands would later on carry over to the Caribbean, which, Columbus and others saw as similar to the Canaries in that the people themselves shared similar skin tones, ‘barbaric’ customs, and forced labor and the establishment of sugar planting also developed with conquest and colonization.[8] The role of religion in stirring and justifying violence, rooted in notions of whether pagans had the right to self-rule and the allegedly bestial quality and sexual looseness of some societies in the Canary Islands, also played a pivotal role in this colonial genocide.[9]
Thus, the case of the Canary Islands reveals the first European modern colonial venture, with racialization and religion to justify the concurrent violence. Economic motives for commercial agriculture production that forced indigenous people to participate in the system or face gradual or immediate destruction through disease, land dispossession and declining access to resources, slave raiding and heinous massacres were the characteristics.[10] The use of religion, or Christianity, also surfaced in European settler genocides in the Cape and Australia, where indigenous peoples’ ‘savagery’ and vermin-like status of being brutes was used as additional evidence of their subhuman societies.[11] Furthermore, racialization of the Canary Islanders established a prototype for future forms of racial thought regarding Africa and the rest of the world, where skin color and phenotype, as well as religion, were utilized as tools of justification for enslavement and slaughter because of the influence of the Aristotelian notion of natural slaves and early modern European thought equating natural slaves with those lacking self-control and seemingly unable to rule themselves, as the ‘rough’ and uncivilized peoples of the Canaries appeared to be in some European eyes.[12] Petrarch’s characterization of the indigenes as resembling beasts exemplifies this perspective on indigenous peoples not only in the Canary Islanders, but future Spanish relations with the indigenous people of the Americas, whose humanity and treatment under Spanish slavery and the encomienda system in the Caribbean would incite protest.[13] Simultaneously, a growing racialization based on lifestyle, physical appearance, and religion was in the process of creation as Spain, Portugal and Renaissance Europe began importing brown and black slaves from North and West Africa, encountering peoples lacking signs of “civilization” as defined by European standards.
Moreover, The allure of wealth from certain farm labor, especially sugar, motivated Iberian expansion into the eastern Atlantic and West Africa, the fabled land of gold for 15th century Portugal and Spain, providing another rationale for Spanish conquest, so as to be closer to the “River of Gold” in West Africa as Europeans were in the process of “discovering” West Africa.[14] Once Tenerife and Gran Canaria, conquered after nearly a century of slave raiding, European encroachment on the coastal lowlands of the islands, war from 1402 to 1496, periodic slave raiding since the 14th century, and Spanish divide and conquer tactics taking advantage of disunity and lack of communication among and between islands, the land was divided by Europeans for Europeans, with Genoese providing capital for establishing sugar plantations.[15] Ultimately, Spanish conquest, propelled by Portuguese rivalry for dominion of the archipelago, turned genocidal as slave raiding, unabated since the 14th century, merged with the introduction of diseases to which the population had no immunity, such as bubonic plague.[16] Conditions were inevitably to sour, since, as the aforementioned Wolfe argues, settler colonialism is inherently exterminatory in that differences in the use of land and conflicts over it will spell the end of one way of life for that of European colonizers.[17] European conquerors, interested in gold trade with West Africa, sugar plantations and rising imperial ambitions within Spain due to the recent conquest of Granada, predisposed the colonization of the Canary Islands to genocidal violence.
Likewise, the case of the Cape San along the northern and northeastern frontier of the Cape colony under Dutch East India Company, or, VOC, rule as well as subsequent British rule, resulted in the genocide of the so-called Bushman during the 18th and 19th centuries. Derived from the Malaya word for orangutan, relations between the Dutch-speaking colonists and the indigenous peoples of the Cape illustrate a similar case of racist dehumanization, virtual enslavement, and clash between trekboer colonists connected to capitalistic markets via Cape Town versus people using stone tools.[18] Intrusive pastoralism of trekboers and their Khoi servants and slaves onto lands of spiritual and physical sustenance for San bands in the Northern Cape led to battles for control of waterholes and the less arid land, with the establishment of Commandos, mostly led by and funded by trekboers themselves, though sometimes with VOC support and sanction, since trekboer relied on imports of gunpowder and ammunition from the Cape coast.[19] Since the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the San and their predatory attacks on settlers’ livestock as well as trekboer servants and slaves in order to prevent further encroachment earned the San peoples, seemingly lacking everything that makes one human for colonists, the hatred of trekboers.[20] Commandos committed several massacres, usually killing all their male adults while keeping the children, exploiting their labor as apprentices through the inboekstelsel system which reduced them to virtual slavery since colonists could control their labor easily in the frontier, far away VOC and British authority.[21] Commando leaders and colonists, both Griqua and white, revealed their racist perceptions of the San by referring to them regularly as creatures, schepselen, or objects of creation, as well as disparaging San communities for their nakedness, lack of agriculture and herds, and for their treacherous acts of self-defense against colonial advances.[22] To make things worse, in 1777, the VOC incentivized the hunting of San communities, turning away from their urging for no unnecessary bloodshed to undoubtedly sanctioning murder and kidnapping of San children.[23]
The accompanying racist, dehumanizing sentiment attached to  Cape San societies in the 18th and 19th centuries by trekboer society and colonial authority justified the destruction of the indigenous people of the northern frontier even after British attempts to ameliorate the frontier violence with a sanctuary, Bushmanland, and misguided, naïve attempts to ‘civilize’ the San with missionaries and livestock.[24] As one can see in the case of the autochthonous population of the Canary Islands, the Cape San, as well as other indigenous Khoikhoi, became equated with vermin and animals, perceived as an obstacle to Christian, civilized commercial penetration of the African interior, especially with the merino wool boom in the Cape that escalated demand for products trekboers could provide. [25] The difference here, however, in terms of racialization, is the San, as hunter-gatherers living in mobile bands of around 10 to 20 people, were viewed as on the bottom of the human hierarchy of Enlightenment thought, which created a social pyramid of evolution where human societies progressed from hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, farmers, and, eventually, to commercial or capitalist market economies.[26] As a product of Enlightenment thought, this method of ranking human societies did not exist during the 15th century Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands, but similarly, religion and the savage heathenism of San, like the people of the Canary Islands, was one of the justifications for the genocidal commando raids.[27] Their mutual lack of Christianity, lack of ties to global commercial markets and trade, and their “primitive” subsistence and social organization led to dehumanizing racialization, enslavement, and dispossession. Nevertheless, as Docker evinces, Enlightenment thought not only condemned the “savage” non-European, but was contradictory in the whole, suggesting racism and anti-racism, cruelty and outrage at the cruelty against indigenous peoples, and calling for exterminatory violence while protesting against the very violence it promotes.[28] Thus, British and other European travelers could describe the San as victims of cruel, violent rapacious trekboer onslaught, and some European perceptions elevated the status of the San to “noble savages.”[29] Despite the protests and opposition of some Europeans and Cape authorities, on the frontier the racist view of the San as vermin, creatures, and treacherous called for their extermination.
Although understudied in comparison, settler colonial genocides in Algeria under French rule after 1830 reveal similar factors that predisposed the colonists to violence of genocidal proportions. Algeria, for instance, according to some estimates, had a population of around 4 million prior to French conquest, but by the end of the 19th century, only numbered approximately half due to the excesses of the Armée d’Afrique, colonial-induced famines and diseases, and fleeing Arab and Berber Algerians.[30] Moreover, similar racist attributes to the Arabs, Berbers, and Jews of Algeria were applied, insinuating they would never adopt agriculture, or sedentary, commercial agriculture under French rule, but remain unchanged primitives, thereby necessitating a militarized capitalistic system imposed with colonialism that brought thousands of settlers from France and Mediterranean Europe.[31] Furthermore, French military forces justified destruction of entire villages and communities in retributive campaigns carried out to exterminate all resistance to colonial authority, so, as in the previous case of the Canary Islands and the Cape San, indigenous resistance movements, acting in self-defense and in order to protect their autonomy, were exterminated.[32] These French razzias, or raids, akin to Iberian razzias waged against the Canary Islands for decades for slaves, led to the elimination of Algerian groups such as the Beni Sala in 1847, for example.[33] These campaigns were also explicitly backed by metropolitan authority, not rogue military colonists acting without the guidance or support of the state.[34] Besides, Social Darwinist thinking in the latter half of the 19th century also contributed to French colonization of Algeria with poor French, Spanish, Italian, and other Europeans, further creating a divide between settler and native, civilized and Muslim savage in colonial administration, too.[35] A settler genocide intent on destroying entire tribes of indigenous peoples in Algeria, with later influences of Social Darwinist thinking, large-scale European immigration, and French-dominated militarized capitalist colonial rule, Algeria in the 19th century provides an indubitable case of European settler genocide with the same motives and rationales as the Cape San and Canary Islands.
Australia in the 19th century provides more apparent parallels with African colonial genocides, too. In Queensland, for instance, the hunter-gatherers, quite naturally and understandably, violently resisted white settlement and land encroachment but faced increasingly racist, extreme violence in the form of the Native Police and private parties.[36] Justifying their violence on the grounds of Social Darwinism, many settlers believed that the Aborigines would simply disappear in the face of a superior invading race, therefore little was done by colonial policy or settlers themselves to end the murder of the Aboriginal population.[37] For colonizers, the Aborigines were beasts, like the Cape San, for their use of the land was not economically productive for international markets, and their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, dark-skin, lack of metallurgy and other aspects of 19th century European civilization symbolized their racial inferiority and the destruction of the Aborigine henceforth was desired.[38] Without regard to their shared humanity and right to land they had been occupying for several thousand years, settlers utilized physical force with modern arms, and possibly in 1789, smallpox as a bio-weapon against Aborigines near Sydney, akin to British practices in North America in the 1760s wherein the British gave smallpox-infected blankets which decimated Ohio River Valley Indians.[39] A combination of massacres carried out by Native Police, a government sanctioned force, as well as private colonists, plus disease, break-up of families, and racist justifications, reducing Aborigines to animal ‘blacks’ moved only by fear, resulted in a settler colonial genocide that parallels events in the Cape, Canary Islands, and French Algeria, with a 90% reduction in the Aboriginal population by the 1890s to only 25,000.[40]
In summation, the experiences of colonialism in the Cape, the Canary Islands, Algeria, and Australia, as well as parallels in the Americas, reveal how settler colonialism predisposed European colonists to violence through racism, economic and spatial considerations, and the inescapably exterminatory nature of settler colonialism, which, though not invariably genocidal, increases the chances of genocide tremendously. Encounters between settlers and African, Australian and indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the United States reveal this seemingly universal pattern of colonialism entwined with genocide. As Wolfe persuasively suggests, settler colonialism, more so than any other form of colonialism, is by its very nature seeking to supplant the previous inhabitants’ mode of life, regardless of metropolitan government’s inaction or support of actions taken by colonists on the ground.[41] In the case of Australia and the Northern Cape frontier, trekboers undeniably took the law into their own hands regarding the excessive violence and exploitation of San women and children. To explain the destruction of indigenous societies, race emerged as a primary marker of difference, imbuing subhuman characteristics and vermin-like tendencies for colonized peoples, even if they practiced agriculture or not, as the case of the Canary Islanders and Algerian Arabs and Berbers under 19th century French rule indicates. This tendency to equate material conditions of these non-European, non-Christian societies, in conjunction with colonial states directing an exterminatory groundwork for a new society on the land of indigenous societies undoubtedly fueled 19th and 20th century racism in non-genocidal colonial conquests elsewhere in Africa and Asia, such as the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa in the early 1900s, as well as paving the way for the 20th century genocides such as the Holocaust, strengthened with racial theories and a history of strong, centralized states supporting genocides directly or growing in strength as a result of subjugation and eradication of conquered peoples.


[1] Patrick Wolfe. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2006), 388.

[2] Ibid, 403.
[3] Ibid, 390.
[4] David Abulafia. The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2008), 74.
[5] Ibid, 83.
[6] Ibid, 101.
[7] Ibid, 89.
[8] Ibid, 30.
[9] Ibid, 64.
[10] Ibid, 49.
[11] Ibid, 86.
[12] Ibid, 89.
[13] Ibid, 101.
[14] Ibid, 80.
[15] Ibid, 101.
[16] Ibid, 75.
[17] Patrick Wolfe. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2006), 403.
[18] Mathias G. Guenther. “From “Brutal Savages” to “Harmless People”: Notes on the Changing Western Image of the Bushmen,” Paideuma, Vol. 26, (1980), 127.
[19] Mohamed Adhikari, “A total extinction confidently hoped for: The destruction of Cape San Society under Dutch Colonial Rule, 1700-1795,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2010), 20.
[20] Ibid, 31.
[21] Ibid, 34.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid, 38.
[24] Nigel Penn,  “Hunter-Gatherers and the Pastoralist Frontier: The Cape and Australia Compared,” UCT Archaeology Departmental Seminars (13 September 2010),  6.
[25] Ibid, 9.
[26] Ibid, 11.
[27] Ibid, 4.
[28] John Docker. “The Enlightenment, Genocide, Postmodernity,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2003), .357.
[29] Mathias G. Guenther. “From “Brutal Savages” to “Harmless People”: Notes on the Changing Western Image of the Bushmen,” Paideuma, Vol. 26, (1980), 130-131.
[30] William Gallois. “Genocide in nineteenth-century Algeria,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2013), 74.
[31] Ibid, 72, 81.
[32] Ibid, 82, 84.
[33] Ibid, 33
[34] Ibid, 82.
[35] Ibid, 81.
[36] Henry Reynolds. An Indelible Stain (New York 2001), 105, 111.
[37] A. Dirk Moses. “An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2000), 96.
[38] Raymond Evans. “Plenty Shoot ‘Em”: The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier,” in D. Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: frontier violence and stolen indigenous children in Australian history (New York, 2004),155.
[39] Norbert Finzsch, “[…] Extirpate or remove that vermine”: Genocide, Biological Warfare and Settler Imperialism in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth century,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June 2008), 223-224.
[40]   Raymond Evans. “Plenty Shoot ‘Em”: The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier,” in D. Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: frontier violence and stolen indigenous children in Australian history (New York, 2004), 164.
[41] Patrick Wolfe. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2006), 387. 

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