"Berber" Ancestry

A feature Ancestry and 23andme must (re)introduce is a chromosome browser that shows the user where exactly their DNA matches another user's. MyHeritage, which is less accurate, already offers this feature for free. However, since their DNA estimates are less accurate, we are forced to use DNA Painter's features to copy the chromosome breakdowns from 23andme or Ancestry to see the assigned "ethnicity" for sections of each chromosome. This convoluted process creates more work, and should be something available for free on Ancestry and 23andme. Doing so would illuminate how exactly one shares DNA with other users. This feature on My Heritage shows us, for instance, where we share DNA with North Africans. In the above example, with someone of Algerian heritage, we share 9.3 cM of DNA on a section of my third chromosome assigned to "North African" by Ancestry. This suggests that we likely harbor small amounts of "Amazigh" ancestry that can still be matched with random people from Morocco and Algeria. In our case, since we do not know of any recent admixture, we assume this is from one (or two) of 2 scenarios: ancient "Guanche" admixture from ancestors who came to the Caribbean via the Canary Islands or via ancient "Berber" admixture in parts of the Iberian Peninsula which contributed to the early peopling of the Spanish Caribbean. Either way, the fact that we have found multiple matches who share segments of DNA on parts of our chromosomes assigned to "North Africa" suggests "Berber" admixture. We need this feature to facilitate understanding of our West and Central African matches from places like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and other countries. It would also be very useful when looking at matches who are a mix of different African nationalities.

Didi

One of the classics by Cheb Khaled. The first 30 seconds are already perfect.

A History of North Africa

Charles-Andre Julien's History of North Africa: From the Arab Conquest to 1830 is one of those good introductory overviews for the history of the Maghrib. Unfortunately leaving out Libya, which is our primary area of interest for North Africa, Julien covers the rest of the region from the Arab conquests to the 19th century. Beginning with the Byzantine period and the lengthy Arab conquests and spread of Islam, the book then shifts to the major Islamic dynasties and states which dominated parts of North Africa, like the Aghlabids, Imams of Tahert, Fatimids, Hafsids, Alawi dynasty, Almohads, Almoravids, and Regencies of Algiers and Tunis. 

We can't lie, sometimes one gets lost in the various names and dynasties over 1000 years. But Julien mostly retains the reader's interest and occasionally delves into other topics, like the spread of Islam, Sufism, the Barbary corsairs, the political economy of Tunis and Algiers, and how the Sharifian dynasties held Morocco together. Since the text was originally published several decades ago, we're sure that archaeologists and historians have shed more light on the Arab conquest and perhaps today's scholars would avoid phrases like "Berber inertia" to characterize what Julien describes as societies trapped in a civilization that hadn't changed much since the 7th or 8th centuries. 

Moreover, it would be interesting to read a history of North Africa that attempts to integrate a Saharan and Mediterranean perspective on the region. Julien, of course, mentioned the Moroccan invasion of Songhay and Hafsid relations with Kanem, but he seems to have bought into the idea that the Islamic civilization of the Sahel was an implanted Maghribi one while also minimizing the importance of the trans-Saharan trade. We have a lot more books to complete on North Africa before we can explore this, but we know Braudel will be on our reading list to help us understand the Mediterranean and, perhaps, how the Saharan "sea" was connected to it.

The Golden Ass

Apuleius's The Golden Ass is a hilarious tale of a man transformed into a donkey. Written in the 100s, perhaps during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the North African author combines comedy and moral education in a tale of magic. Lucius, the protagonist, and central character in novel loaded with inset stories, suffers from an unnatural interest in magic and sex, ultimately leading to his accidental transformation into an ass by Photis, his lover (and slave of Milo and Pamphile, the witch). P.G. Walsh's translation ably renders into the English language much of Apuleius's wicked humor and satire of social relations, the Roman Senate, "catamite" priests, and unfaithful servants. Walsh's translation does not "modernize" the text to make it too informal or contemporary, so it still almost reads like something a Latin-speaker wrote over 1800 years ago. 

Like other ancient "novels" of the Roman Empire, the narrative structure brings to mind Arabian Nights through its several stories of infidelity, disloyal slaves, sorcery, supernatural events, bandits, greedy estate-owners, and, in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, a fable with Platonist or philosophical implications. Cupid and Psyche's tale occupies a significant chunk of the text, suggesting its central importance to the religious and philosophical themes pertinent to the soul and love, humanity and the divine. Psyche's desire for connection, her curiosity, and her eventual reunion with Cupid (and the other gods) suggest a possible route for human connection to the higher powers. Like Lucius, Psyche's curiosity and need for companionship drive her toward peril, but humble service to the gods (even a human-like Venus, overwhelmed with envy for the unsurpassed beauty of Psyche) with acceptance of one's mistakes lead to her salvation. 

Like Heliodorus's Ethiopian Romance, the novel shifts its settings and deals with a variety of trials that Lucius must survive or escape, although there is no Charicleia or female figure he truly loves (Photis was only useful for her sexual services). The intervention of the gods and belief in divine providence abounds in both texts, although the two lovers in Heliodorus's romance are directly linked to two main deities of the Greek pantheon and lack any of the moral flaws of Lucius. Since Lucius is a flawed person with moral shortcomings, his character is more believable and compelling than the star-crossed lovers in the Greek romances. Of course, since Heliodorus and Apuleius were both familiar with the literary heritage of the Greek language, The Golden Ass shares much of the same mythological and literary allusions with the ancient Greek "novels."

 The final book, which tells of Lucius's initiation into the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, presents a shift in tone in the novel as it drops it satirical tone and seems to openly embrace worship of Isis and proper religious behavior. In its embrace of the mysteries and its description of various rituals, this must surely be the world's first occult novel. Like a fable, it calls upon the reader to pursue knowledge in the proper way and practice moderation in sex and curiosity. Lucius, educated though he was, had to endure harrowing experiences as a donkey before he could learn this essential lesson, and find a way out of he morally corrupt world he experienced first-hand as a beast of burden. Much of the details of Lucius's initiation is left unrevealed to the reader, but the novel purports to offer right living and service to the mystery cults as the path to knowledge and success. Instead of the avaricious estate-owners, unchaste wives, effeminate pseudo-priests, violent bandits, abusive centurions, or miserly wealthy who hoard their riches to no purpose, the cult of Isis offers a path away from these ethical dilemmas. 

As an influential text in the history of the Western canon, I could not help but wonder if this novel may have influenced Antoine Innocent's Mimola. The Haitian novel directly links the Vodou loas to the dieux lares of the ancient Mediterranean. Like Lucius, Mimola is afflicted by supernatural means, although in her case it has more to do with the family's rejection of the ancestral spirits. Like Lucius, Mimola and her mother must persevere over the course of a number of trials, culminating in their pilgrimage to Saut d'Eau. Again, like Lucius, Mimola is initiated as a priestess in Vodou and is freed from her affliction. Perhaps any and all similarities between the two novels end here, yet they share a critique of Christianity (the baker's adulterous wife is likely a Christian, while in the Haitian context nationalists of Innocent's era were critical of the Catholic Church's influence). Like Apuleius, Innocent sees the syncretism of "pagan" beliefs and their positive social impact as the basis for community, the city-state. I would like to further explore any possible links between Apuleius and Haitian authors in the future, particularly as it relates to the occult, initiation, and connaissance. Milo Rigaud's Jésus ou Legba? may be the best place to look, especially since Rigaud linked Vodou to ancient Egypt and Nubian religions, of which Isis was a major figure. 

Apuleius

Here is an informative audio format of the Wiki page on Apuleius, the Roman-African author of The Golden Ass. The video covers his origins, his famous trial, the writing of The Golden Ass and Apuleius's larger legacy in the history of Roman literature, philosophy, religion, and the only extant Latin novel.

Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria

Patricia Lorcin's Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria is an interesting study of how colonialism shapes constructs of race in a North African context. Examining French colonial sources from 1830 onwards, Lorcin traces the rise and fall of the "Kabyle Myth" that divided the population of Algeria into two "racial" groups: savage and irredeemable Arabs and Kabyle Berbers who were seen as "white," more civilized because of their sedentary lifestyle, allegedly less devout Islamic practices, fewer restrictions on women, lower incidence of polygamy, and presumed origins among "white" peoples. This binary division of "good Kabyle" versus "bad Arab" collapsed with the rise of settler colonialism in Algeria, which, as Lorcin elucidates, led to a general stereotype and racial discrimination against all "native" Algerians by the end of the 19th century.

Anti-Islamic sentiment among the French, the shift from military to civil administration, and white supremacist pseudoscience of the 19th century all contributed to the "Kabyle Myth." Kabyles, imagined by the French as "noble savages" and compared to Germanic tribes of the distant past, were assumed to be capable of elevation under French law and tutelage, ignored their Islamic devotion, and even applied Saint-Simonianism as the intellectual bedrock, according to Lorcin.

Even physicians contributed to the racialization of Algerians, dividing Algerians into Kabyles and Arabs. Arabs, as pauperization under colonial rule progressed (including disastrous famine), were racialized as thieves, rapists, savages, lazy, stupid and considered unreliable. Racial discourse from the French even linked "beauty" to advanced civilizations, thereby labeling Arabs as physically unattractive while praising the alleged racial "purity" of the Berbers.

Lorcin's analysis also traces a colonial sentiment of France as a "New Rome" in North Africa and the Mediterranean. This form of neoclassical colonial development facilitated the rise of European settlers, who, as Europeans from lands once held by Rome, could be seen in a new light as proper heirs to the Roman Empire in North Africa. Orientalism and Arabophiles among the colonial intellectuals and administrations also shaped discourse on race, albeit always within the pro-colonial framework.

The French association of the Kabyle Berbers with "whites" also played into this, and contributed to the problems and ethnic conflict in contemporary Algeria given the strong forms of Berber nationalism and violence in the Kabylie region. Although one might suppose its obvious, the importance of European colonialism in shaping local constructs of race or even creating and separating identities is quite powerful in the Algerian case, with drastic consequences here and other African nations after decolonisation.

Oran Oran

Roberto Rodriguez's tribute to Jewish-Algerian pianist Maurice El Medioni, "Oran Oran" epitomizes musical cross-fertilization across three continents. Spanish and North African music have a centuries-long history of exchange and mutual influence, but West and Central African influences appear via the Puerto Rican and Cuban influences on Maurice El Medioni's music. According to Hashim Aidi, Maurice El Medioni was exposed to jazz and 'Latin' music through Puerto Rican and African-American soldiers during WWII, and that added another layer of complexity to the musical 'stew' that is his sound. Thus, it is only natural that Latin jazz artist Roberto Rodriguez would pay homage to this legend who was clearly influenced by Latin sounds.

Sounds from Algeria: Rai

Funky and strange rai from 1970s Algeria, featuring Bellemou & Benfissa. I like Bellemou's brassiness and funk or Western influences (check out this one), but this is just amazing. I am no aficionado of rai or other North African genres of music, but it would seem like earlier rai styles are significantly better. Alas, if only the genre was not forced underground and recorded on inferior cassette technology in the late 1960s and 1970s...Regardless, I still think I might prefer some of the pop-rai sounds of Cheb Khaled or a less 'Westernized' sound from Cheikha Rimitti. Some of Rachid Taha's music is good, too, but I guess I just prefer African musical styles from West, Central, and Southern Africa (no offense, East Africa, though Ethiopian music can be quite good as the Ethiopiques series demonstrated).

Maurice El Medioni

A fascinating example of how music transcends religious, cultural, and geographic boundaries. El Medioni, an Algerian Jew living in France, was exposed to jazz and Latin music from meeting African-American and Puerto Rican soldiers in Oran during WWII. Adding those influences to the long history of Andalusian/Maghebri music, we get excellent music.

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 15^th 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 18^th and 19^th 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 15^th 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 15^th 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 14^th 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 14^th 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 18^th and 19^th 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 18^th and 19^th 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 15^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th and 20^th 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 20^th 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. 

Bibliography

Abulafia, David. The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2008).

Adhikari, Mohamed. “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), pp. 19-44.

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Docker, John. “The Enlightenment, Genocide, Postmodernity,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2003), pp. 339-360.

Evans, Raymond. “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).

Finzsch, Norbert. “[…] 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), pp. 215-232.

Gallois, William. “Genocide in nineteenth-century Algeria,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2013), pp. 69-88.

Guenther, Mathias G. “From “Brutal Savages” to “Harmless People”: Notes on the Changing Western Image of the Bushmen,” Paideuma, Vol. 26, (1980), pp. 123-140.

Kicza, John E. “Patterns in Early Spanish Overseas Expansion,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2 (April 1992), pp. 229-253.

Van Krieker, Robert. “Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler-Colonial State Formation,” Oceania, Vol. 75, No. 2 (December 2004), pp. 125-151.

Moses, A. Dirk. “An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2000), pp. 89-106.

Palmer, Alison. “Colonial and modern genocide: explanations and categories,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1998), pp 89-115.

Penn, Nigel. The Forgotten frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).

“Hunter-Gatherers and the Pastoralist Frontier: The Cape and Australia Compared,” UCT Archaeology Departmental Seminars (13 September 2010).

Reynolds, Henry. An Indelible Stain (New York 2001).

Sousa, Ashley R. “’They will be hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed!’: A Comparative Study of Genocide in California and Tasmania,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 2004), pp. 193-209.

Stratton, John. “It Almost Needn’t Have Been the Germans: The State, Colonial Violence, and the Holocaust,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2003), pp. 507-527.

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2006), pp. 387-409.