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

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

In German South-West Africa (Namibia), General Lothar Von Trotha issued, on 2 October 1904, his infamous Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order), which stated "Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot." The Germans simply drove the Herero into the desert and sealed off the border for a month, which resulted in the genocide of 65,000 Herero. By the 1911 census, only 9,800 out of 20,000 Nama, and 15,000 out of 80,000 Herero were found to have survived the war in South-West Africa.42 In another German colony, Tanganyika, a peasant revolt against forced cotton cultivation in 1905 (the Maji-Maji rebellion) was brutally suppressed, and the systematic burning of grain crops resulted in a famine that killed between 250,00 and 300,000 people. According to Pakenham, "Perhaps half of the Vidunda, more than half the Matumbi, and three-quarters of the Pangwa died in the rebellion or its aftermath."43 The repression and famine that defeated the Maji-Maji rebellion not only killed up to one-third of the region's population but reduced the average fertility of the surviving women by over 25 per cent, according to a study released years later.44

Drought, Famine, Diseases and Epidemics in Imperial and Colonial Africa

"War, drought, famine, pestilence, locusts, cattle-plague! Why so many calamities in succession? Why?" asked a perplexed François Coillard (a French missionary) in Bulozi in 1896.45 Indeed, one wonders why so many ills plagued Africa and Africans simultaneously, and with such deadly force.

Recent historical studies on the political economy, sociology and ecology of imperialism and colonialism have conclusively demonstrated the inter-connectedness between a series of seemingly unrelated occurrences such as drought, famine, diseases and epidemics in imperial and colonial Africa. Thus, in his seminal work on Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis has convincingly argued that the great drought greatly facilitated the imperial designs of Portugal and Britain in late-19th century southern Africa:

(...) with the emergence of drought and famine-related epidemics of smallpox, malaria, dysentery and sand jiggers [in the decade of the 1870s], colonial troops made unprecedented headway against weakened populations in Kongo and to the east and south of Kwanza [Angola] (...) Thereafter, the extension of the plantation system and the consolidation of colonial power in the Angolan interior were carefully synchronized to the sinister rhythm of drought and disease, as in 1886-87, 1890-91, 1898-99, 1911 and 1916. The drought was an even more important turning point in the highveld and its borderlands [South Africa], where it sounded the death knell of Xhosa, Zulu and even, temporarily, Boer independence (...) The drought crisis, which weakened both African and Afrikaans [sic: Afrikaner] societies as well as increasing the tensions between them, was an undisguised blessing to imperial planners in London.46

In a fascinating chapter on "Demography and Colonization" in her acclaimed book on Africa, French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch argues that the years of late imperialism and early colonization in Africa were marked by demographic regression, less on account on wars than because of the "opening up" of Africa to European penetration "which, through the increased circulation of people, goods, and livestock, encouraged the spread of epidemics." During this period, Coquery-Vidrovitch observes that because of dietary disequilibria caused by the colonizers' excessive and simultaneous demands for food supplies and labor, "the fatal cycle of drought/famine/epizootic disease/epidemics weakened populations unable to withstand this combined ecological and cultural shock."47 This author, like Mike Davis, also notes a coincidence of epidemics (specifically that of the rinderpest between 1820 and 1920) and drought and famine (particularly in southern Angola between 1911 and 1916) with the first wave of European colonial penetration, which thus encountered considerably weakened populations which offered little or no resistance.48