European Livestock Farmers and Hunter–Gatherer Societies: A Genocidal Collision

Mohamed Adhikari teaches in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. His publications include The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (University of Cape Town Press, 2010).

The indigenous San peoples of the former Cape Colony in what is now South Africa were annihilated largely by Dutch-speaking livestock farmers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While writing on and researching the extermination of Cape San society, and trying to locate this episode in its global historical context, I was struck by how destructive European settler colonialism had been of hunter–gatherer societies generally, be it in the rest of southern Africa, Australia or the Americas.¹ Pursuing this line of thought further, it appeared to me that a particular subset of settler–colonial confrontations—those in which livestock farmers linked to the global capitalist market clashed with hunter–gatherers—seemed particularly catastrophic in their outcomes. The frequency with which encounters of this kind resulted in the near complete destruction of forager societies raises the question why this particular form of settler–colonial violence seems overwhelmingly predisposed to genocidal outcomes.

 

The tendency towards genocide is even more marked if one takes into account that the definition of genocide that I use is more stringent than that of the United Nations Genocide Convention, the one applicable in international law. The definition used in this article is that genocide is “the intentional physical destruction of a social group in its entirety or the intentional annihilation of such a significant part of the group that it is no longer able to reproduce itself biologically or culturally, nor sustain an independent economic existence”.² This definition is more demanding than its equivalent in the UN Genocide Convention in that it requires higher levels of killing and social destruction for an episode of mass violence to be recognised as genocide.

 

It is possible to identify a number of shared features in conflicts between hunter–gatherers and market-oriented livestock farmers in European settler colonies across the globe that served to intensify hostilities and tilt the balance towards exterminatory violence. This analysis explores those factors that I consider fundamental in promoting genocidal outcomes in conflicts of this kind. While there were many other contributors to eradicative violence between hunter–gatherers and commercial livestock farmers, and although each conflict was unique, the primary facilitators identified here were not only common to case-studies globally but also instrumental in escalating the violence to genocidal levels.

Commercial Livestock Farming

In the first instance, the nature of commercial livestock farming itself was a major contributor to the escalation of bloodshed to genocidal levels. One of the crucial dynamics at play in pastoral settler colonies was the rapid occupation of sweeping expanses of land characteristic of capitalist livestock farming, especially when entering virgin territory. The repercussions for hunter–gatherer peoples of invasion by commercial livestock farmers contrasted markedly with those resulting from invasion by other kinds of farmers.

 

Commercial livestock farmers had a significantly different impact on hunter–gatherer communities from that of invading subsistence pastoralists such as the Khoikhoi (Hottentot) or Herero peoples of southern Africa, for example. The absence of sizeable market outlets in traditional societies meant that there were low limits to the economic surplus that could be realised. And because subsistence herders tended to farm in sustainable ways, their need for land and other resources was limited. For such peoples, livestock also had substantive aesthetic and social value, which mitigated the damage of their operations: they did not strive purely for economic benefit. Commercial livestock farmers, on the contrary, were driven primarily by profit, treated livestock as commodities, and sought to maximise economic returns. Because they were linked to world markets they were incentivised to produce as much as possible at whatever environmental and human cost, particularly during economic booms. Thus, when pre-capitalist herders entered the lands of hunter–gatherers, conflict was far less intense as the process was more gradual and the impact less disruptive of foraging activities. Although such interaction tended towards displacement and resulted in bloodshed, it also included incorporation, clientship and even symbiosis. With European commercial livestock farmers, however, the invasions were much more rapid, intent on permanent confiscation of land and resources, and far less compromising in dealing with indigenous resistance.

 

Also, unlike colonising crop farmers, who tended to be sedentary, marking out longer-term occupancy of land with fences and hedges, and to expand incrementally and contiguously, commercial livestock farmers needed extensive pastures and were inclined to be on the move. Livestock-keepers were usually engaged in a constant search for pasture and water, particularly in drier environments. Indeed, dry spells and drought accelerated their dispersal beyond the fringes of colonial settlement. They were generally not bound by the confines of ranches, even where they laid formal claim to such holdings. On pastoral frontiers, registered farms were often used as bases from which flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were moved in transhumant fashion and vast stretches of countryside were treated as communal grazing. Distance from ports and markets was of far less concern for livestock farmers than for their crop-growing counterparts, particularly before the coming of railroads, as in most cases animals were capable of transporting themselves to desired destinations. This was especially true of animals raised for meat.

 

Case-studies across the temperate colonial world confirm that settler advances were relatively slow and conflict with indigenes was localised until colonies turned to large-scale pastoral farming. Few colonies were established as pastoral ventures from the outset, and it was usually growing demand from the metropole or some sector of the global trading network that sparked the shift to commercial livestock farming. Increasing demand for their produce encouraged livestock-keepers to expand their flocks and herds, as well as their official landholdings, and to move into new territory beyond the limit of colonial settlement. Economic booms usually set in motion spectacular frontier advances and the rapid stocking of land, especially with cattle and sheep, but also with pigs, goats, horses and other domesticated animals. For example, leading historian of the destruction of Queensland’s Aboriginal societies, Raymond Evans, comments that with the onset of pastoral farming in that colony around 1840, “the frontier did not merely spread; it galloped.” He estimates that at the height of the economic boom in the early 1860s, the pastoral frontier advanced by as much as three hundred kilometres annually.³ Similarly, in Tasmania, conflict with Aborigines was muted until the colony entered its pastoral phase in 1817. After that, grazing land was very quickly occupied and leading Tasmanian farmers shifted their operations across the Bass Strait to the Port Philip District, later Victoria, from about 1834 onwards.

 

Not only did livestock farmers shift frontiers rapidly and occupy the best land, they also commandeered resources critical to the survival of hunter–gatherer communities. Commercially farmed herds and flocks consumed large amounts of grass and water, and often exceeded the carrying capacity of the land. This damaged the ecosystem, often altering it permanently for the worse. Invasion by commercial livestock farmers had an immediate, and often devastating, impact on the region’s foraging societies, whose seasonal migrations were disrupted, and whose food supplies and other foundations of life were severely compromised. The introduction of large numbers of domesticated animals undermined indigenous hunting, fishing and gathering activities to the extent that communities might soon be suffering malnutrition or even be facing starvation. Conflict was almost unavoidable as both hunter–gatherers and livestock farmers were in direct competition for the same environmental resources, especially land, water and game. Foraging bands suddenly found that they were denied access to sacred locales, traditional hunting grounds, and watering places such as springs, pools and river frontages. Livestock contaminated and exhausted water supplies, trampled edible plants, disrupted foraging activities and displaced herds of game, a primary source of food for hunter–gatherer peoples. Importantly, colonists decimated herbivore populations—whether antelope in Africa, bison in North America, kangaroos in Australia or guanaco in Latin America—and other wild animals with their guns, permanently depleting a key resource. Hungry bands thus often had little option but to target settler livestock for sustenance.

 

The result, almost inevitably, was spiralling levels of violence, as afflicted indigenous peoples resisted encroachment and settlers in turn retaliated, usually with excessive and indiscriminate force. Hunter–gatherer communities typically resisted settler invasion by using the guerrilla tactics of raiding and maiming livestock, slaying herders isolated out in the pastures, and attacking farmsteads, usually at night. Livestock farmers responded with individual acts of slaughter and informal militia activity; on occasion, they teamed up with colonial state forces in retaliatory offensives. Such conflicts often culminated in open warfare and exterminatory onslaughts on the part of colonial society. The weakness of the colonial state and its tenuous control over frontier areas gave settlers, who had access to arms, wide discretion to act against indigenes.

 

There is another significant way in which the nature of livestock farming itself helped amplify violence against indigenous peoples. Given the need for extensive landholdings or a transhumant lifestyle to graze and water animals, livestock-keeping settlers were widely dispersed in small numbers across open landscapes. They were thus vulnerable not only to attack but also to severe economic setbacks from hunter–gatherer retaliation. This set up an anxiety-ridden existence for livestock-farming communities, making them liable to over-react to threats, as well as to undertake pre-emptive violence against perceived enemies. They were usually suspicious of all indigenes, and fearful of raids, revenge attacks, uprisings, or collusion with indigenous servants. Frontier livestock-keepers seldom went about their business unarmed and were constantly alert to the possibility of indigenous aggression. Situations of pervasive anxiety punctuated with sporadic violence are likely to intensify the seeing of enemies as “the other”. And hunter–gatherers were prone to the harshest forms of racial stereotyping because their lifestyle made them the polar opposite of European settler societies’ perception of themselves as “civilised” and part of humanity’s highest incarnation. This undoubtedly weakened settler restraints against violence towards, or the killing of, foragers, especially where their labour was not deemed essential. It is no surprise that in pastoral settler societies, shoot-on-sight vigilantism, informal militia activity, and even state-sponsored eradicative drives were common. [0, 22 APRIL]

International Capitalist Markets

A second dynamic tipping the balance towards exterminatory violence was that access to world markets and a concomitant desire among colonists to accumulate wealth encouraged both intensive exploitation of natural resources for short-term gain as well as a resort to annihilative practices to eliminate obstacles or threats to the colonial project, be they vegetation, animals or indigenous peoples. This impulse, though present from the very start of European colonisation—very evident, for example, in the colonisation of the east Atlantic islands in the two centuries prior to Columbus’s voyages to the Americas⁴—accelerated markedly with European industrialisation and the rapid growth of world markets throughout the nineteenth century. Settler rapacity, excited by opportunities for profit during economic booms, often proved deadly for indigenous communities. Ensuing busts and retreat of pastoral frontiers resulted in little reprieve for hunter–gatherer communities as in many cases the damage had already been done and it was usually only a matter of time before abandoned land was reoccupied.

 

Case-studies across the world confirm that the degree to which settler pastoral economies participated in international trade, together with demand for, and prices of, the commodities they produced, were roughly proportional to the rapidity of indigenous dispossession and the levels of violence perpetrated. Thus, in both Tasmania and Victoria, key suppliers of wool to burgeoning British markets, Aboriginal societies were in effect destroyed within fifteen years of the onset of the pastoral economy, whereas in the (South African) Cape, where the market for pastoral products was limited, the process was more incremental.⁵ In colonial Bechuanaland (modern-day Botswana), where the market was insignificant and colonial institutions were protective of indigenous rights, the characteristic pattern of mass violence towards hunter–gatherers was replaced by a relatively benign form of paternalism.⁶ In neighbouring German South-West Africa (today Namibia), an acute shortage of labour throughout the booming economy together with a ruthlessly oppressive colonial regime resulted in decidedly genocidal policies towards sections of its hunter–gatherer populations.⁷

 

The privatisation and commodification of natural resources (especially land), a defining characteristic of capitalist economies, undermined foraging societies fundamentally. Systems of land tenure based on exclusive usage, fixed boundaries, registration of title deeds, alienability and permanent settlement were completely foreign to the world-views of hunter–gatherers and in effect excluded them from legal ownership of vital resources. Privatisation generally meant the permanent loss of such resources and that settler claims were backed by the legal apparatus, and ultimately the armed might, of the colonial state. Economic and political imperatives invariably resulted in the colonial state’s supporting settler interests and land confiscations, even in cases where both metropolitan and local governments tried to curb frontier violence and restrain settler aggression.

 

Their ability to claim legal title to natural resources in many instances gave settlers cause, and no doubt in their eyes justification, for going on the offensive against indigenous peoples. Although different legal regimes applied in different colonies, broad generalisations are nonetheless possible about the impact of the role of law in the making of mass violence in settler systems. Significantly, the absence of the rule of law on the frontier favoured settlers, who had superior firepower and were able to confiscate land and resources as well as perpetrate violence against indigenes with impunity. Much of this violence was committed with the knowledge and connivance of the colonial state. And when the rule of law eventually did arrive with the closing of the frontier, it was heavily biased in favour of settlers and operated as an instrument for confirming their claims to the land and consolidating their control of it.⁸

 

The access that frontier communities had to world markets, their metropole and settled parts of colonies also meant access to resources, technologies and ideologies that made mass violence towards indigenes all the easier to perpetrate, and extermination all the more comfortable to contemplate. Ships carrying men and supplies with which to settle and conquer; guns and ammunition with which to kill; horses and wagons with which to transport goods inland; centralised political institutions through which to organise dispossession and mass violence; and a wide array of tools, the sophistication of which indigenous societies could not hope to match, were among the more obvious advantages frontier settler society derived from continued contact with its Western wellsprings. Less tangibly, such contact helped reinforce the ideological underpinnings of violence perpetrated against indigenous peoples. Cultural and religious chauvinism, ideas of European racial superiority and entitlement, as well as jingoistic imperialism, were fortified by the continued contact of settlers with their European and colonial bases, and played important parts in promoting violence towards indigenes.

Racial Ideologies

A third common characteristic favouring exterminatory violence was the influence of Western racist thinking that dehumanised the way of life of hunter–gatherers as an utterly debased form of existence, as proof of their racial inferiority, and as comparable in many respects to that of animals. Foragers were cast as the lowest of the low in the racial hierarchy, with particular groups often the object of speculation that they formed the “missing link” between humans and animals. Hunter–gatherers were generally perceived as not owning but merely residing on their territories, much as animals do, because they were allegedly not making productive use of them. Though modulated by local imperatives, the generalised image of unused land inhabited by dangerous, godless savages bereft of morality, reason or any form of refinement, who moreover obstructed the advance of “civilisation” and economic development, usually underlay settler rationales for both land confiscation and accompanying mass violence. Stereotyped as immune to “civilising” influences, and their labour unsuited to settler needs, hunter–gatherer populations were often regarded as expendable.

 

One consequence of racial thinking was that supposed racial traits were regarded as inherent and the entire “race” was judged in terms of them. Blanket racial condemnation of “the savage” helped foster indiscriminate as well as exterminatory violence. Commercially based pastoral settlers across the globe seem to have had little difficulty justifying the killing of indigenous women and children, and did so in remarkably similar fashion, claiming that the women bred bandits and that the children grew up to become enemies. “Nits make lice” reasoning was an inexorable part of racial discourse.

 

Racist theorising, especially from the latter part of the nineteenth century when Social Darwinism became popular, often predicted the dying out of “the savage”. This further encouraged violence against indigenes and fostered an extirpative attitude in frontier society as their demise was seen as inevitable, the outcome of an inexorable law of nature whereby the fit supplanted the unfit. Settler killing of indigenes could thus be interpreted in a positive light of aiding nature and ridding humanity of an encumbrance.⁹ Because forager subsistence needs were irreconcilable with those of the settler economy, colonial society viewed the foraging way of life as one to be eliminated, whether through neutralisation by means of segregating indigenes in reserves, forced acculturation of them into some subordinate status in the colonial order, or outright extermination. In many cases, the forces propelling settler expansion radicalised over time in ways that favoured the most extreme of these options. Where commercial livestock farming was the mainstay of the colonial economy, they nearly always did.

 

Although often cast in racial terms and shot through with racist rhetoric, genocidal struggles between hunter–gatherers and commercial livestock farmers were not primarily racial in nature. They were essentially about incompatible ways of life vying for the same scarce resources and the right to occupy particular areas of land. Racist ideology played an essentially justificatory role in these conflicts. Racism provided a rationale for dispossessing indigenes, and their dehumanisation made it easier to ignore their suffering, and to exploit, kill or exterminate them. That economic competition rather than race was at the heart of these conflicts is demonstrated by Edward Cavanagh’s study of the Griqua, a mainly Khoikhoi-speaking people in the northern Cape. After successfully turning from subsistence to commercial pastoralism in the 1810s and 1820s as a result of market opportunities opened up by British occupation of the Cape Colony, the Griqua became as enthusiastic and deadly slaughterers of the San as European colonists were, and effectively cleared the Transorangia region of hunter–gatherer bands.¹⁰

The Nature of Hunter–Gatherer Society

Fourth, the nature of hunter–gatherer society itself contributed to genocidal outcomes when faced with an aggressive settler pastoral presence. Whereas hunter–gatherer society in some ways was extremely resilient, it in other ways was vulnerable when under sustained attack or when it faced prolonged disruption of economic activity. Hunter–gatherer society was inherently resilient because it consisted of small social groups scattered over large areas, often in inhospitable and remote landscapes. It was, in addition, extremely flexible, mobile, superbly adapted to its environment, and able to live off the land. On the other hand, because hunter–gatherer communities subsisted on the current offerings of nature, were dependent on seasonal cycles of regeneration, and produced virtually no surplus, the severe ecological disruption and despoilment caused by invading commercial livestock farmers represented an immediate and acute threat to their foundations of life.

 

Foraging societies were also vulnerable in other ways when faced with prolonged, systematic violence. Because of their small scale and relative lack of social differentiation, almost any form of organised violence against foraging communities took on the aspect of total war, and bloodshed on any appreciable scale started assuming genocidal proportions at the level of the band and of socio-linguistic groupings. That there was likely to be a blurring of distinctions between warriors and non-combatants in hunter–gatherer society, and that settler violence was often indiscriminate rather than targeted at fighters or livestock raiders, made this doubly so. It was not unusual for entire indigenous communities to be held responsible for the actions of a few or of individuals, and for collective punishments in the form of massacres and random killings to be meted out.

 

That hunter–gatherers were unable to fight in any way other than using guerrilla tactics contributed to the escalation of violence against them. Settlers tended to see their stealth attacks, arson and maiming of livestock as dishonourable forms of warfare, and this in turn fuelled unrestrained responses.¹¹ Settlers had difficulty adapting traditional European means of warfare to dealing with hunter–gatherer adversaries. As Australian historian, Henry Reynolds, notes, “There were no forts to besiege, villages to attack, crops to burn, or wells to poison. Nor did there appear to be any chiefs or leaders with whom to negotiate.”¹² Colonists thus had to find new ways of countering hunter–gatherer resistance. It is not surprising that settlers in the Cape, in North America, Australia, and probably elsewhere in the world, developed the strategy of forming roving paramilitary detachments whose favoured tactic was to surround sleeping hunter–gatherer camps under cover of darkness and attack at dawn. The need for fresh approaches also resulted in such ill-conceived experiments as the “Black Line” offensive governor George Arthur organised against surviving Tasmanian Aborigines in 1830—a vain attempt to drive them out of settled areas into peninsulas where they could be controlled.

 

There is another important way in which the small-scale social structure of foraging societies was an inherent weakness. The dispersed format of their social order meant that hunter–gatherer fighters were routinely outnumbered in hostile engagements, even when attacked by relatively small militia or paramilitary units, because individual hunting bands seldom had more than eight or ten men of fighting age and often no more than four or five. Forager bands, though they did not have hereditary leaders, were on occasion able to combine fighting forces under the command of temporary war chiefs. They were, however, unable to sustain such initiatives for long as the lack of centralised political structures made co-ordination difficult. More to the point, hunter–gatherers did not produce enough of a surplus to maintain anything resembling an army in the field.

 

The small-scale social structure of forager societies also meant that women and children usually found themselves in the frontline of fighting and were thus extremely vulnerable to being slaughtered or captured. The taking of prisoners, who in most cases were made to serve as forced labourers or integrated into colonial society in a servile status, was an integral part of the genocidal process because it was as destructive of indigenous society as killing its members. A clear-cut pattern in settler mass violence towards hunter–gatherer society was to slay the men, take those women not killed as domestic and sexual drudges, and to value children as sufficiently malleable to be trained for a life of servile labour. For hunter–gatherer peoples, their dispersed social structure was an asset for as long as invading settler societies lacked the strength or the will to embark on systematic killing campaigns against them. It appears to have become a decided liability when settler societies went on concerted eradicative drives.

 

Those bands forced onto marginal land beyond the range of colonial settlement or in the interstices of farms lived miserable lives and were vulnerable to extinction in a number of ways. Some managed to live off a combination of foraging and livestock theft for a while. This was a dangerous option as it invited deadly reprisal from settlers. Many were in time forced into the service of farmers, usually on detrimental terms dictated by employers. Where hunter–gatherer bands were displaced into the territories of neighbouring communities, it often resulted in internecine conflict between indigenous groups, weakening them further. In drier areas, bands displaced to remote, marginal land might even succumb some years after their displacement. With the coming of the next drought they might find themselves stranded without food or water, and die forlorn, unacknowledged deaths.

 

The social dislocation caused by incessant conflict and displacement from ancestral land severely undermined the cultural and biological reproduction of hunter–gatherer societies. The intensely spiritual lives of hunter–gatherer communities were usually closely tied to specific sites and aspects of the landscape and, in the words of South African historian, Nigel Penn, “to lose the land was to lose literally everything”.¹³ Also, the necessarily lengthy spacing between children in hunter–gatherer society meant that procreation was more easily disrupted and difficult to maintain in times of severe and prolonged upheaval than it was for farming communities. This wide spacing meant that it also took a long time for bands and socio-linguistic groupings to recover from demographic setbacks.

 

The observation that the nature of hunter–gatherer society itself contributed to genocidal outcomes in conflicts with commercial livestock farmers is not in the least meant to put blame on the victims, nor to diminish either the agency of foraging societies engaged in frontier conflict or the reality that settler society at times had a rather tenuous hold on power. Nor is it to be read as lending any credence to specious claims contained in doctrines such as terra nullius or vacuum domicilium and other justifications for the violence and dispossession inflicted by imperial establishments. It was, after all, resistance by hunter–gatherers that usually precipitated extirpative offensives against them. My comments are intended rather to indicate that, in the final analysis, such struggles were inherently very uneven and that the assault on the land, lives and culture of hunter–gatherer peoples had a decided tendency towards genocide.

Superior Military Technology

A fifth contributor to genocidal outcomes in clashes with hunter–gatherers was the advanced military technologies available to insurgent pastoral settlers, which gave them a huge advantage in situations of conflict. Superior technologies of war both aided processes of dispossession and played a role in escalating violence to exterminatory levels. Not only did the settlers’ enormous military advantage make mass violence easier to perpetrate, it also meant that colonial forces, both formal and informal, could act with relative impunity. This technological gap also helped to confirm the view of settlers that their adversaries were racially inferior.

 

Most obviously, access to firearms gave settlers and their surrogates massive military ascendancy over hunter–gatherer adversaries. Even the relatively primitive front-loading muskets available prior to their replacement by rifles in the latter half of the nineteenth century were far superior to the stone-age weapons used by hunter–gatherers. Muskets had a range far greater than that of forager weapons such as spears, darts, or bows and arrows—at least twice that of the last-mentioned, which had the furthest reach. This allowed colonists to pick off enemies from a safe distance. Guns fired in volleys were particularly effective when the enemy was massed together. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the availability of much more accurate and rapid-firing rifles greatly tilted the balance in favour of colonists. Pistols were used in closer engagements, as were sabres and knives.

 

Horses gave colonial fighters not only the ability to cover long distances rapidly but also manoeuvrability and advantages of height in close skirmishing. Horses were particularly effective in flat open country with low scrub, and were invaluable in situations requiring hot pursuit. The combination of guns and horses amplified the settlers’ military advantage in warfare for, as historian William Keleher Storey explains, the pairing allowed colonial forces to travel like cavalry and attack like infantry.¹⁴ Small contingents of armed, mounted settler militia were thus able to defeat much larger throngs of indigenous fighters on foot who used traditional weapons.

 

Also, frontier stockmen were a hardy breed. They were toughened by long periods spent outdoors in uncomfortable conditions and in the saddle. Hunting both for the pot and for sport, together with the carrying of guns for protection, meant that most were adept at handling firearms. Two ubiquitous settler skills on pastoral frontiers—marksmanship and horsemanship—complemented each other, enhancing the proficiency with which colonists were able to kill off indigenes when their energies were channelled in that direction.

 

For all these advantages, livestock-farming communities in many cases nevertheless had difficulty quelling hunter–gatherer resistance, even when they went on the offensive. The basic reasons for this were that frontier areas were vast, pastoral settlers thin on the ground, environments often hostile, and the target populations sparse, mobile, self-reliant and exceedingly well adapted to their surroundings. In general, the military advantage of settlers counted for little on the frontier unless their fire-power could be concentrated at strategic times and places. This was vital to allowing relatively small groups of colonists to confiscate land and destroy indigenous populations. Also, colonial fighters needed to be disciplined through some form of training and tactical deployment. It is for this reason that settlers and colonial administrations formed militias and paramilitary groups such as the commandos of the Cape Colony; the roving parties of soldiers, policemen and settlers in Tasmania; the Native Police Forces of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland; and the Eel River Rangers of Mendocino County, northern California. Conflict on pastoral frontiers in many instances radicalised to the extent that settler violence became indiscriminate, and virtually every indigene a potential victim irrespective of age or gender. In such cases, it was not unusual for settler paramilitary forces, such as those mentioned above, to operate as mobile death squads, scouring the countryside for natives to kill.

Demographic Imbalances

Lastly, demographic imbalances played a significant role in the genocidal destruction of indigenous societies in various ways. Most obviously, the sheer weight of numbers and resources that settler colonial projects were able to muster would in time and with continued immigration overwhelm hunter–gatherer societies. The communicable diseases interlopers carried, to which indigenes had low immunity, compounded these inequalities. Disease often wreaked a toll greater than outright killing, and sometimes entire communities were decimated even before direct contact was made.

 

A related factor was that on most frontiers severely skewed gender ratios led to widespread sexual violence against indigenous women. The more remote and undeveloped the frontier, as pastoral frontiers tended to be, the greater the gender disparity. On some pastoral frontiers, the ratio between settler men and women was as high as 10:1. What is more, frontier men tended to be a hard, uncompromising and rough lot who behaved in sexually predatory ways towards indigenous women in particular. This, together with racial stereotyping of indigenes as barely human, led to rampant sexual violence against native women and the spreading of venereal disease. Assault, abduction, rape and sexual slavery were common on many frontiers. Sexual violence and venereal disease are of central import in the destruction of indigenous societies. Venereal infection was sometimes so widespread it was a major hindrance to the ability of communities to reproduce themselves biologically. Not only were infected women often unable to conceive or bear foetuses to term, but sexually transmitted diseases alone sometimes killed large proportions of populations, on occasion surpassing in impact other diseases and direct killing.

Conclusion

The cumulative effect of the six fundamental factors identified here goes a long way towards explaining why, in sustained clashes between foragers and commercial livestock-keepers, exterminatory violence was not so much an aberration as customary. The counter-example of San communities in Botswana’s Ghanzi district cautions against making absolute claims in this regard, though. The San communities of the Ghanzi district of western Bechuanaland did not suffer exterminatory violence when colonised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Afrikaans-speaking Boer livestock farmers from the Cape Colony. This is partly because they were able to exploit different ecological niches from those appropriated by these settlers and partly because they received some protection from the colonial state and missionaries. The region was relatively rich in game and the Ghanzi settlers were not eradicative in their hunting practices, leaving the San with a major source of sustenance largely intact, in addition to the plant foods they were able to forage. This meant that initial contact was far less conflictual, allowing for a means of rapport to develop between the two groups, for relations of paternalism to be established, and for many San to be taken on as farm labourers.¹⁵ Very importantly, although they had access to markets, the Ghanzi Boers, because of their isolation and the semi-desert environment in which they lived, were more in the nature of subsistence pastoralists than capitalist ranchers. This contrary case serves to make the wider point that settler colonialism is not inherently genocidal, as is sometimes claimed, but generally so.

 

The Ghanzi example, in addition, indicates that the main driver intensifying conflict between hunter–gatherers and commercial livestock farmers to exterminatory levels was the international market for the commodities that the latter produced. It was ultimately this market’s ability to absorb large quantities of produce and create the prospect of substantial wealth for producers that helped spur immigration to colonies and propelled livestock farmers beyond the margins of colonial settlement. It, to boot, stoked among settlers ruthlessly exploitative attitudes and a sense of entitlement to the land and its resources.

 

It would also appear that the most significant proximate factor providing the impetus to genocidal violence was indigenous resistance, as this is what precipitated exterminatory attitudes, actions and policies within the settler establishment. It is not surprising that settlers reacted with extreme hostility, and in concert, when they perceived their lives and livelihoods to be at risk. It is equally predictable that colonial and metropolitan governments would support the settler cause or allow the violence to take its course when the economy suffered or the colonial project itself was under threat. It was the settler population rather than the colonial state that tended to be the main perpetrator of violence when commercial livestock farmers overran the territories of hunter–gathering peoples. These were in essence what Allison Palmer has described as “societally-led” rather than “state-led” genocides.¹⁶

 

This article attempts to demonstrate that where pastoralists producing for capitalist markets invaded the territories of hunter–gatherers, the global economic system tended to bring together the practices of metropolitan and colonial governments, the interests of providers of capital and consumers of commodities, and the agency of local actors ranging from military commanders to graziers in remote outposts, in ways that almost invariably fostered exterminatory violence.¹⁷ The fate of the Cape San, the Australian Aborigines, and the hunter‑gatherer peoples that once inhabited substantial swathes of the Americas testifies to this.

Endnotes

1. This article is drawn from an early draft of the introduction to an edited collection on genocidal conflict between hunter–gatherers and commercial livestock farmers. References below to unpublished papers in possession of the author refer to draft chapters of this volume that is forthcoming from the University of Cape Town Press in 2014.

 

2. This definition is taken from my book The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2010). See especially pp. 12–13 for elaboration of its meaning and scope.

 

3. Raymond Evans, “ ‘Plenty Shoot ’Em’: The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier”, in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), p. 163.

 

4. See, for example, John Mercer, The Canary Islanders: Their Prehistory, Conquest and Survival (London: Collings, 1980); Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 4; David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), chs. 4 and 5.

 

5. See Lyndall Ryan, “ ‘No Right to the Land’: The Role of the Wool Industry in the Destruction of Aboriginal Societies in Tasmania (1817–32) and Victoria (1835–51) Compared” (unpublished paper in possession of the author); Mohamed Adhikari, “ ‘The Bushman Is a Wild Animal to Be Shot at Sight’: The Annihilation of Cape San Societies by Stock Farming Settlers in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” (unpublished paper in possession of the author).

 

6. See Mathias Guenther, “Why Racial Paternalism and Not Genocide? The Case of the Ghanzi Bushmen of Colonial Bechuanaland” (unpublished paper in possession of the author).

 

7. See Robert Gordon, “Vogelfrei and Besitzlos, with No Concept of Property: Divergent Settler Responses to Bushmen and Damara in German South-West Africa” (unpublished paper in possession of the author).

 

8. I am thankful to Edward Cavanagh for drawing my attention to the significance of the role of law on settler colonial frontiers.

 

9. On the influence of racial ideologies in shaping genocidal attitudes, see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997); Norbert Finzch, “ ‘It Is Scarcely Possible to Conceive That Human Beings Could Be So Hideous and Loathsome’: Discourses of Genocide in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America and Australia”, in Colonialism and Genocide, ed. A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 12–13.

 

10. Edward Cavanagh, “ ‘We Exterminated Them, and Dr. Philip Gave the Country’: The Griqua People and the Elimination of San from South Africa’s Transorangia Region” (unpublished paper in possession of the author); Adhikari, Anatomy of a South African Genocide, p. 73.

 

11. See Benjamin Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia”, Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 2 (2004), p. 173.

 

12. Henry Reynolds, “Genocide in Tasmania”, in Genocide and Settler Society, ed. Moses, p. 147.

 

13. Nigel Penn, “ ‘Fated to Perish’: The Destruction of the Cape San”, in Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, ed. Pippa Skotness (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996), p. 88. Although Penn was referring specifically to the Cape San, his comments apply to hunter–gatherers generally.

 

14. William Keleher Storey, Guns, Race and Power in Colonial South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 36.

 

15. In addition to Guenther, “Why Racial Paternalism and Not Genocide?”, see also by Mathias Guenther, “ ‘Independent, Fearless and Rather Bold’: A Historical Narrative on the Ghanzi Bushmen of Botswana”, Journal of the Namibian Scientific Society 44 (1993), pp. 25–40, and “Independence, Resistance, Accommodation, Persistence: Hunter–Gatherers and Agro-Pastoralists in the Ghanzi Veld, Early 1800s to Late 1900s”, in Ethnicity, Hunter–Gatherers and the ‘Other’: Association or Assimilation in Africa, ed. Susan Kent (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), pp. 87–104.

 

16. Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 2000), p. 3.

 

17. See Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time and the Question of Genocide”, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 104.