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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