WEST, NATURAL RESOURCES AND POPULATION CONTROL POLICIES IN AFRICA IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, THE

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2005 by Martin, Guy

Some of these diseases were deliberately spread among the African population. Thus, the first deliberate use of biological weapons for genocidal purposes may be attributed to the British colonial army, which distributed smallpox-infected blankets to the North American Indian tribes, as well as to the Zulus of Natal in South Africa. Thus, Dr. Alim Muhammad, health minister of the Nation of Islam, explains that "(...) in 1761 the British general Geoffrey Amhearst deliberately distributed smallpox infected blankets to some of the Indian tribes during the French-American War, and decimated entire villages and tribes. To my knowledge this was the first deliberate use of biological weapons (...)"26

Beginning with Columbus, the principle of genocide had been established as a way to de-populate and conquer territories so that they could be re-populated with another preferred group. Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, director of the Puerto Rican Cancer Experiment launched in 1931 by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations in San Juan, puts it bluntly:

(...) the Porto Ricans [sic]... are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them (...) What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more.27

An interesting parallel may be drawn between Dr. Rhoad's appalling comments and the thoughts of Leonard Barnes on Africa and the Africans. Writing in the late sixties, Barnes-a former British colonial administrator-puts forward a rather unusual proposal for a rational exploitation of Africa's vast resources:

If it were possible to empty the continent of Africans and to replace them with much smaller numbers of, say, Chinese or Japanese or even Americans, the mise-en-valeur of these desperately ill-used territories would proceed at a pace and in a relatively orderly fashion of which there is no current prospect.28

In other words, as one of Barne's fellow British colonial administrator remarked to him about Uganda in 1964, 'We could make a paradise of this country in five years, if only there were no Africans in it."29 A similar observation is made by an Afrikaner, Hans Sterk, as he surveyed the fertile rolling hills of the Cape's hinterland in South Africa: "This is a beautiful district. It is too good for a black savage to own."30

Indeed, South Africa's oldest indigenous populations, the Khoi [Khoikhoi] and the San [Bushmen], were ruthlessly and systematically driven from their hunting grounds and were virtually exterminated by the British and Afrikaner invaders through epidemics and numerous "hunting" expeditions. Thus, Monica Wilson notes that out of a total Khoikhoi population south of the Orange river of about 200,000 in 1652, only 20,006 remained by 1805 as a result of various smallpox epidemics.31 Once the likes of Hans Sterk had determined that the Cape was, indeed, "too good'" for the indigenous African inhabitants, the latter became the "natural enemies" of the Europeans, and a "war of extermination" was vigorously pursued by commandos organized for the "destruction of this hated race."32 "By 1770," writes Katzen, "the conflict was so intense that trekboer Commandos systematically exterminated the San."33 The story of the 27,927 Boer refugees who perished between June 1901 and May 1902 in the concentration camps that the British set up in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War is well known. Much less known is the fact that during the same period, 115,700 Africans had also been interned in 66 refugee camps, 14,154 of whom died as a result. According to Peter Warwick, who reports this fact, "(...) in December 1901 the annual death rate reached 380 per thousand (436 per thousand in the Orange River Colony camps), a rate of mortality more severe than that in all the white camps in any one month."34