american-holocaust

NOTES 317people killed in the Holocaust, see the discussion in Ian Hancock, "'Uniqueness'of the Victims: Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust," Without Prejudice, 1 (1988),55-56. There were, of course, many other victims of Nazi mass murder-homosexuals,Jehovah's Witnesses, the congenitally malformed, pacifists, communists,and others-who are not mentioned here. For an examination of the fate of theseother groups, see Michael Berenbaum, A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecutedand Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University Press, 1990).9. The number of people forcibly exported from Africa remains a subject ofintense historical controversy, but recent estimates suggest that up to 12,000,000or even 15,000,000 captured Africans survived the ordeal of forced migration tobecome plantation laborers in North or South America or the Caribbean. About50 percent of the original captives appear to have died during the forced march tothe West African coast and in the holding pens there known as barracoons, whileapproximately 10 percent of the survivors died on board the trans-Atlantic slaveships, leaving about 45 percent of the original total to be "seasoned," sold, andset to work. However, the "seasoning" process itself appears to have killed half ofthose who survived the ocean journey, leaving between 20 and 25 percent of theoriginally captured total to actually labor as chattel; thus, for every African whosurvived to become a working slave, between three and four conventionally diedduring the enslavement process. With a total of 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 Africanssurviving to become slaves, this makes for an overall death rate directly attributableto enslavement-and prior to the Africans' beginning to labor as New Worldbondsmen and bondswomen-of anywhere from 36,000,000 to 60,000,000. Aswith most estimates of genocidal mortality, these are very general estimates arrivedat by extrapolation from situations where reasonably good historical data areavailable to situations where they are not. Thus, for example, some estimates calculatea lower death toll than the above during the within-Africa forced march andcoastal imprisonment, while others suggest that death rates aboard ship conventionallywere 15 to 20 and even more than 30 percent-that is, up to three timesas high as is assumed above. On this, see, for example, Philip D. Curtin, TheAtlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969),pp. 275-82; Robert Stein, "Mortality in the Eighteenth Century French Slave Trade,"journal of African History, 21 (1980), 35-41; Raymond L. Cohn, "Discussion:Mortality in the French Slave Trade," journal of African History, 23 (1982), 225-26; and David Northrup, "African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade:The Case of the Bight of Biafra," journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9 (1978),47-64. For discussion of the overall volume of the slave trade, compare Curtin,Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 268, Table 77; J.E. Inikori, "Measuring the Atlantic SlaveTrade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey," Journal of African History, 17 (1976),197-223; J.E. Inikori, "The Origin of the Diaspora: The Slave Trade from Africa,"Tarikh, 5 (1978), 1-19; the same author's comments in J.E. lnikori, ed.,Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Trade on African Societies (NewYork: Africana Publishing Company, 1982), pp. 19-21; and Paul E. Lovejoy, "TheVolume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis," journal of African History, 23(1982), 473-501. Conventional thought regarding the number of deaths causedby the African slave trade posits a number lower than that suggested here becauseit is based solely upon deaths occurring at sea between the points of embarkationfrom West Africa and docking in the Americas-thus ignoring the enormous num-