60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

78 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
several descendants of victim groups have demanded both an offi cial
apology and fi nancial restitution for atrocities committed by European
colonisers in Africa and for the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Barkan 2000).
Furthermore, the representatives of respective lobby organisations want
the fate of their ancestors to be recognised as genocide, which counts
as the worst possible crime (Böhlke-Itzen 2005: 118). Unsurprisingly,
Western politicians and judges are reluctant to acknowledge cases like
the Herero claim for reparations since they are afraid that such precedence
would have the eff ect of opening Pandora’s Box and lead inevitably
to an avalanche of similar lawsuits against former colonial powers.
Mainly due to public perception of the Holocaust, genocide is commonly
seen as the attempt to exterminate a targeted group in whole
or in part. If this conception of genocide is taken as a starting point
it is clear that colonial atrocities in Africa could not be recognised as
genocidal. Even in settler colonies like the Cape Colony or in ‘German
South-West Africa’ the European conquerors were highly dependent
on indigenous labour and thus not really interested in the
wholesale physical annihilation of the Africans. Next to arable land,
manpower was the most contested resource in African settler colonies
(Schaller 2008: 297-298).
Although this exclusionist understanding of genocide is widespread
and regularly used by politicians and judges in order to reject respective
claims by Africans it is the wrong point of departure. The United
Nations Genocide Convention is a much better one because it does
not necessarily require that there be an attempt to exterminate a targeted
group physically or in its entirety. Raphael Lemkin’s original
idea of genocide is even broader: he regarded genocide as the systematic
attempt to destroy indigenous political, socio-economic and cultural
structures (Lemkin 1944: 79).
Surprisingly, neither Lemkin’s concept of genocide nor his unpublished
manuscripts on European colonialism have been taken into consideration
in the discussions of colonial mass violence in Africa. It is therefore
the intention of this article to explore to what extent Lemkin’s idea of
genocide can be applied to the study of violence in colonial Africa. I will
fi rst explain why the defi nition of genocide in the UN Genocide Convention
is not a suffi cient instrument for the analysis of mass violence in
colonial Africa and why it is worth resorting to Lemkin’s original concept,
articulated in 1944. In a next step, I will discuss Lemkin’s historical
studies on German rule in Africa and on the Belgian Congo.