Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash

Abstract

GENOCIDE ON SETTLER FRONTIERS: WHEN HUNTER-GATHERERS AND COMMERCIAL STOCK FARMERS CLASH Edited by Mohamed Adhikari New York: Berghahn Books, 2015 356 pages, hardcover, $120.00The struggle between indigenous hunter-gatherer populations and commercial stock farmers has popularly been painted along the lines of Cain versus Abel-an inexorable, inevitable conflict from which only one lifeway can emerge victorious. Lost in the older narratives lauding the march of western civilization, or more recent counter-narratives critiquing those myths of progress, has been a cogent analysis of how different modes of settler agriculture affected native populations, how international markets determined the rate of extirpation and extermination of indigenous peoples, and how genocide not only occurred in a variety of settler contexts across the globe but also failed to occur in some places seemingly ripe for mass violence. Mohamed Adhikari's edited volume, Genocide on Settler Frontiers, not only fills in these historiographical gaps quite ably but also lends itself to the further theorization of genocide, addressing, for instance, the question of to what extent genocide and colonization overlap in practice.Adhikari sets the stage with an introductory chapter on the gcnocidal impetus behind commercial stock farming in the colonial context. While sedentary agriculture would prove, in the long run, "more destructive of indigenous societies because it supported denser populations and occupied land more comprehensively and permanently," stock farming made itself felt "much more swiftly over larger areas," especially as distance from ports was of less concern, as the animals were capable of carrying themselves to the desired locales (4). This fact, combined with weak colonial states incapable of exerting power on their margins, fluctuating international markets, racial ideologies that could justify violence against indigenes, superior military technology, and a gender imbalance among settler populations (which were mostly male) all provided the fuel for mass violence against huntergatherer populations, violence that had a particularly large impact given the dispersed population of foraging societies. Adhikari's next chapter examines the fate of the Komani San, in what is now South Africa, under the rule of both the Dutch East India Company ( Verenigde Ooste-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) and the British, with special analysis of the commando system, in which local militias carried out retaliatory raids that often entailed the killing of women and children when they were not captured and enslaved. The two following chapters also relate to the San people of the Cape. In the first, Jared McDonald looks at forced child labor, concluding that the "abduction and assimilation of San children was as injurious to San society as physical destruction" (69); in fact, legislation aimed at regulating more closely the trafficking of San orphans only motivated commando raiders to kill San parents and thus prevent possible disputes. In the second, Edward Cavanaugh examines the role played by the Griqua in the elimination of the San, illustrating that genocide in a colonial context need not be perpetrated exclusively by white settlers.As Jens Meierhenrich noted in his introduction to Genocide: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2014), genocide scholars should also study those forms of violence that do not quite rise to the level of genocide, as well as those cases where genocide might have been the expected outcome but failed to occur. This book does yeoman work in revealing where strategies of elimination and assimilation overlapped and where they diverged. Moving beyond the Cape, Robert Gordon works to reveal how "factors such as ecology, social and demographic structures, economic conditions, conflicts and ideology became aligned in ways that generated mass violence" in German South West Africa, especially how "the imagination and fantasies of settlers were manipulated and tied to the colonial project," producing divergent settler responses to such groups as the Bushmen and Damara, with settler beliefs regarding the ostensible natural servility of the latter, combined with the Damara's reported concept of private property, allowing them better to survive the brutal German colonization of their lands (130-131). …