Africa Atlantic Slave Trade The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a vast and as yet unknown loss of life for African captives both in and outside the Americas. Estimates have ranged from as low as 2 million to as high as 60 million. Patrick Manning estimates that about 12 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, but about 1.5 million died on board ship. About 10.5 million slaves arrived in the Americas. Besides the slaves who died on the Middle Passage, more Africans likely died during the slave raids and wars in Africa and forced marches to ports. Manning estimates that 4 million died inside Africa after capture, and many more died young. Manning's estimate covers the 12 million who were originally destined for the Atlantic, as well as the 6 million destined for Arabian slave markets and the 8 million destined for African markets. Of the slaves shipped to the Americas, the largest share went to Brazil and the Caribbean.
Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterises the mass death of millions of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade as a genocide. He calls it "one of the worst holocausts in human history" because it resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths (according to one estimate). In contrast to arguments that "it was in slave owners' interest to keep slaves alive, not exterminate them", which he calls "mostly sophistry", he argues:
Cape Colony From circa 1770 until 1880, the Cape San people were subjected to a range of actions that led to "the virtual extinction of the Cape San peoples". These actions included land expropriation, massacres known as "Bushmen hunting", forced labor, and abduction of women and children at the hands of Dutch settlers called and the paramilitary groups that they formed.
The dynamic of violence was characterised by encroachment on the frontier of the Dutch Cape Colony expelling San people, the San retaliating and subsequent spirals of retribution culminating in raids by commandos. The violence also took place in a context of deeply racist perceptions of the San people as barely human, "a wild animal to be shot at sight". From about 1770 until the end of the 1790s, these commandos happened on an annual basis, took a distinct exterminatory character and involved killing men on the spot, while women and children were either killed or taken captive. On 5 June 1777, the Dutch East India Company authorities in Cape Town for the first time endorsed these annihilation practices, giving official sanction to violence which they had previously been unable to restrain.
When Britain took control of the Cape Colony, first in 1795, then again in 1806, they took several steps to shift towards a policy of assimilation, but failed at stopping settler violence against the San. Commando raids continued, although the ratio of San people killed versus taken captive was inverted compared to the late 18th century. Along the Northeastern frontier of the Cape Colony, the Cape San were increasingly integrated as labour into the economy of white farms and along the Northern frontier, the subsistence of those still living according to their foraging lifestyle became increasingly precarious, with starvation a frequent occurrence in times of drought. After a series of massacres in the 1850s and 1860s, and the participation of San in the ǃKora Wars of 1868–1869 and 1878–1879, the independent existence of San society in "Bushmanland" and along the frontier of the colony was essentially extinct.
Congo
From 1885 to 1908, the Congo Free State in central Africa was privately controlled by Leopold II, the second King of the Belgians from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who extracted a fortune from the land by the use of forced labour of natives. Under his regime, there were 2 to 15 million deaths among the Congolese people. Deliberate killings, abusive punishments, and general exploitation were major causes of the deaths. As in the colonisation of the Americas, European diseases, hitherto unknown in the region, also led to a considerable number of deaths. Because the main motive for the killings was financial gain, it has been debated whether the term genocide describes these atrocities well. The journalist Adam Hochschild, writing in King Leopold's Ghost, stated that the level of killing in the Congo was of a "genocidal proportion", but did not consider it a genocide as, according to Hochschild, King Leopold's aim was not the extermination of the Congolese people.
Raphael Lemkin considered the crimes in the Congo to be an unambiguous case of genocide. Robert Weisbord wrote in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2003 that attempting to eliminate a portion of the population is enough to qualify as genocide under the UN convention, this has more recently been supported by historian Dean Pavlakis, who argues that the atrocities in the Congo Free State meet the requisite criteria of the UN Genocide Convention. Reports of the atrocities led to a major international scandal in the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced in 1908 by the Belgian government to relinquish control of the colony to the civil administration.
Ethiopia under Menelik II (1889–1913)
During its military conquests, its centralisation of its power and its incorporation of territories into Ethiopia as decreed by Menelik II, his army committed genocidal atrocities against civilians and combatants which included torture, mass killings and the imposition of mass slavery. Large-scale atrocities were also committed against the Dizi people and the people of the Kaficho kingdom.Alemayehu, Kumsa. Power and Powerlessness in Contemporary Ethiopia Charles University in Prague Some estimates of the number of people who were killed in the atrocities that were committed during the war and the famine which coincided with it go into the millions. According to Alexander Bulatovich, Menelik's Russian military aide, Menelik's armies "dreadfully annihilated more than half" of the Oromo (Galla) population down to 5 million people, which "took away from the Galla all possibility of thinking about any sort of uprising." Eshete Gemeda put the death toll even higher at 6 million.
These deaths may have also been caused by the great famine, which lasted from 1888 to 1892 and was the worst famine in the region's history; a third of Ethiopia's total population of 12 million was killed according to some estimates. The famine was caused by rinderpest, an infectious viral cattle disease which wiped out most of the national livestock, killing over 90% of the cattle. The population of native cattle had no prior exposure to the disease and as a result, it was unable to fight it off. Despite the violence of the conquest, some historians stress the fact that before the centralisation process was completed, Ethiopia was devastated by numerous wars which started in the 16th century. In the intervening period, military tactics had not changed much. In the 16th century, the Portuguese Bermudes documented depopulation and widespread atrocities against civilians and combatants (atrocities which included torture, mass killings and the imposition of large scale slavery) during several successive Aba Gedas' Gadaa conquests of territories which were located north of the Genale river (Bali, Amhara, Gafat, Damot, Adal). Warfare in the region essentially involved acquiring cattle and slaves, winning additional territories, gaining control of trade routes and carrying out ritual requirements or securing trophies to prove masculinity. Wars were fought between people who might be members of the same linguistic group, religion and culture, or between unrelated tribes. Centralisation greatly reduced these continuous wars; minimising the loss of lives, raids, destruction and slavery that had previously been the norm.
French conquest of Algeria
Ben Kiernan wrote in his book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur on the French conquest of Algeria, that within three decades of the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, war, genocidal massacres, and famine had reduced the original population from 3 million by a figure ranging from 500,000 to 1,000,000.
By 1875, the French conquest was complete. The war had killed approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830. A long shadow of genocidal hatred persisted, provoking a French author to protest in 1882 that in Algeria, "we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him." As a French statistical journal urged five years later, "the system of extermination must give way to a policy of penetration."
Historian William Gallois argues that using a variety of frameworks, the conquest of Algeria should be considered a case of genocide.
In response to France's recognition of Armenian genocide, Turkey accused France of committing genocide against 15% of Algeria's population.
German East Africa
The Maji Maji Rebellion (, ), was an armed rebellion of Africans against German colonial rule in German East Africa. The war was triggered by German colonial policies which were designed to force the indigenous population to grow cotton for export. The war lasted from 1905 to 1907, during which 75,000 to 300,000 died, overwhelmingly from famine. The end of the war was followed by a period of famine, known as the Great Hunger (), caused in large part by the scorched-earth policies used by governor von Götzen to suppress the rebellion. These tactics have been described by scholars as genocidal.: "[I]t is doubtlessly appropriate—probably even important—to understand the German suppression of the Maji-Maji Revolt as genocidal.": "If the German command's strategy was to destroy entire settlements (crops, harvests, and food), kill civilians along with combatants, coerce the surrender of entire groups through deliberate starvation, and to intentionally deprive ethnic groups of the leadership that was crucial to their survival — then Germany’s conduct in East Africa deserves the label of genocide."
German South West Africa
Identified as the first genocide of the 20th century, the Herero and Nama peoples of present-day Namibia endured a genocidal persecution between 1904 and 1907 while their homeland was under colonial rule as German South West Africa. Large percentages of their populations perished in a brutal scorched earth campaign led by German General Lothar von Trotha. An estimated 10,000 Nama were killed, with estimates for the Herero ranging from 60,000 and 100,000. Historian Leonor Faber-Jonker highlights how genocidal violence in German South-West Africa was built up to with ever more exterminatory wars during the late 19th century.
Beginning as an insurrection against German colonial rule, the Herero Wars almost immediately developed into a genocide of the indigenous insurrectionists, with Trotha issuing his Extermination Order in October 1904, a copy of which survives in the Botswana National Archives. The order states "every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women or children, I will drive them back to their people [to die in the desert] or let them be shot at." Olusoga and Erichsen write: "It is an almost unique document: an explicit, written declaration of intent to commit genocide." Trotha further explained that the German response to the indigenous insurrection "is and remains the beginning of a racial struggle".
Many of those not killed were moved to concentration camps, such as Shark Island, after the destruction of their villages, where many succumbed to starvation. These concentration camps were also the location of medical experiments by German eugenicists such as Eugen Fischer.
Zulu Kingdom under Shaka Zulu