History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Africa II — The Other Lands, Region by Region

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

The campaigns were enormous. The peoples, in case after case, survived them.

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. This class follows the companion class (Africa I) across the rest of the colonised continent: North, South, East, Central and island Africa, land by land, each at the level its record carries — and ends with the small peoples among whom Africa's actual census lines arise.

1. Algeria — the razzia, the enfumades, and a population cut by a third (Documented Fact; toll Debated)

France invaded Algiers in 1830 and spent four decades taking the interior. Under Governor-General Bugeaud the army adopted the razzia as doctrine — columns burned crops, orchards and villages and destroyed food stores to starve resistance — and its extreme instrument, the enfumade: sealing a refuge cave and lighting fires at its mouths. In June 1845, in the Dahra mountains, forces under Col. Pélissier kept fires burning through the night of 18–19 June at the caves where the Ouled Riah had taken refuge; commonly cited death figures run from ~500 to ~1,000, printed here as a range with its disagreement. The native population, estimated at ~3 million in 1830, fell by up to one-third by 1875; estimates of deaths in the first three decades run ~500,000 to ~1 million, from war, massacre, famine and disease combined. Whether the conquest was genocide is Debated: Kiernan and Gallois argue it reached genocidal dimensions; Algeria's state position asserts it as a claim; France has made no official genocide recognition for the conquest. The Ouled Riah name and community continue in the Dahra today — a guard line, not a count.

2. Libya — the deportation of Cyrenaica (Documented Fact; toll Debated)

In Cyrenaica the Senussi resistance under Omar Mukhtar held the Jebel Akhdar against Italy for a decade. From 1930, under Marshal Graziani, Italy deported the Jebel's population wholesale — more than 100,000 people, roughly half of Cyrenaica's population — into coastal concentration camps (Soluch camp alone is recorded with 20,123 people), slaughtered the Bedouin herds, and made contact with the rebels a capital offence. Mukhtar was captured in September 1931, tried at Benghazi, and hanged at Soluch camp on 16 September 1931. The death figures are contested by an order of magnitude: Arab historians estimate a minimum of ~80,000 dead, up to one-third of Cyrenaica's population; the camp figure most often printed is ~40,000 of the ~100,000 internees; the Italian historian Gentile held the high figures excessive, with deaths in the thousands. This class prints the range with its authors and constructs no total. The events are named the "Libyan genocide" by Libyan and some international scholarship — Debated / Claim, no Italian official recognition under that word. The Cyrenaican Bedouin survive: they are the population of eastern Libya today.

3. South Africa — collapse, commandos, wars, and the Land Act (Documented Fact)

The Khoekhoe–Dutch wars of 1659–60 and 1673–77 broke organised Khoekhoe resistance in the western Cape, and Khoekhoe society there disintegrated under land loss and incorporation as farm labour; in 1713 a smallpox epidemic introduced from a Dutch ship devastated the remaining communities. As trekboers pushed inland, the commando system — settler militias operating with official sanction and at times with bounties — campaigned against San bands across the frontier; the curriculum record's own words are that commandos "hunted 'Bushmen' to near extinction" in the settled districts, and children captured in the raids were bound out as "apprentice" labour. On the eastern frontier the amaXhosa fought nine frontier wars, 1779–1879; the cattle-killing of 1856–57, following Nongqawuse's prophecy, ended in a famine whose deaths are commonly estimated at ~40,000. The Natives Land Act of 1913 then reserved ~7% of the country for African ownership and made purchase or lease outside it unlawful — dispossession by statute, the foundation of the land order apartheid built on. The guard, stated plainly: the Khoekhoe did not end — Griqua, Nama, Korana and other Khoekhoe communities stand today, with a living and reviving language line — and the San did not end: the Khomani San, whose 1999 land claim restored Kalahari land, the Ju/'hoansi, the Khwe and others stand. The amaXhosa stand as one of the country's largest peoples.

4. Kenya — the Pipeline and Hola (Documented Fact; toll Debated)

The Mau Mau rising was met with a State of Emergency (October 1952) and the "Pipeline" — a graded detention-camp system with forced labour and documented systematic abuse — together with the forced villagisation of over a million Kikuyu and the hanging of over 1,000 Kenyans under Emergency regulations. At Hola Camp in March 1959 eleven detainees were beaten to death; the inquest found each death caused by shock and haemorrhage from multiple bruising inflicted by camp officials. In 2013 Britain settled the veterans' claim — £19.9 million to 5,228 claimants and a statement of sincere regret for torture and ill-treatment, without legal liability admitted, printed at that exact weight. The death figures: the official figure is ~11,000 Mau Mau recorded killed by the security forces; Caroline Elkins estimated up to ~300,000 Kikuyu dead or missing by demographic deficit — an estimate the demographer John Blacker, architect of the 1962 census planning, concluded was demographically disproved. Both stand in this class as their kinds, and no total is settled. The Kikuyu, Embu and Meru stand as major peoples of Kenya.

5. Tanzania — Maji Maji and the Great Hunger (Documented Fact; toll as a range)

German East Africa's forced communal cotton scheme provoked the rising of 1905, sanctified by the prophet Kinjekitile Ngwale's maji medicine. At Mahenge thousands of fighters were killed charging machine guns; Governor von Götzen's answer was a war of starvation — villages, crops and food stores burned across the south, in a captain's attested words: "Only hunger and want can bring about a final submission." The famine that followed, the Great Hunger, outlasted the fighting. Death estimates run 75,000 to 300,000, overwhelmingly from famine — a range a factor of four wide, printed with its width on its face. Some scholars describe the scorched-earth strategy as genocidal (Debated; no official finding). In November 2023 Germany's President Steinmeier, at the Maji Maji Museum in Songea, asked Tanzania's forgiveness. The peoples of the south — Matumbi, Ngoni, Yao and their neighbours — stand today.

6. Cameroon — punitive expeditions and the hanging of a king (Documented Fact; file thinner, labelled so)

German Kamerun ran on forced labour and punitive expeditions — village burnings, killings, indemnities exacted in goods and forced labourers, chiefs deposed, exiled or hanged; the Cameroonian curriculum-critique literature names instances where whole villages and populations were decimated (Hickory Town, 1884–85; Buea, 1894). No colony-wide death total at scholarly standard exists in this record, and none is constructed here. From 1910 the Duala faced the "Gross Duala" expropriation of their riverfront land. Their king, Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, resisted by law — petitions and appeals to the Reichstag — and when he began coordinating wider resistance he was tried for high treason on 7 August 1914, in proceedings that did not meet even colonial standards, and hanged with his secretary Ngoso Din on 8 August 1914; mission pleas for clemency were rejected. He stands in Cameroon as a national hero. The Duala stand as a living people of Douala.

7. Ethiopia — invasion, gas, and Yekatit 12 (Documented Fact; toll Debated)

Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 using mustard gas in documented breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol it had signed. After the attempt on Viceroy Graziani's life on 19 February 1937 — Yekatit 12 — Blackshirts and Italian civilians were given, in the Federal Secretary's attested order, carte blanche "to destroy and kill and do what you want to the Ethiopians" for three days, and thousands of houses were burned. The estimates, printed as their kinds: Ethiopian sources ~30,000; Italian-era claims a few hundred; the 2017 scholarly history ~19,200; a lower scholarly band of 1,400–6,000 also stands. No figure is settled here. Ethiopia was occupied, never durably colonised, and liberated in 1941; its peoples stand entire.

8. Madagascar — 1947 (Documented Fact; toll Debated)

On the night of 29–30 March 1947 Malagasy nationalists rose across the east and centre of the island. France's repression ran into late 1948 — mass executions, torture, village burnings, collective punishment, and deaths in flight from hunger and disease. The toll stands in four kinds: the French government's first official estimate, 89,000, later raised past 100,000; the colonial administration's 1950 revision, 11,342 "known dead"; historian Jean Fremigacci's reconstruction, 30,000–40,000, with his conclusion quoted at exact weight — "There were war crimes in Madagascar in 1947 but without intent to exterminate"; and the higher scholarly and Malagasy-memory band of 60,000–100,000. No total is settled in this class. The Malagasy peoples stand entire — Madagascar's population today exceeds 30 million.

9. The small peoples — where Africa's census lines actually arise (Documented Fact, at catalogue-plus-record level)

Africa's extermination-census lines do not come from the great campaigns — their victims' peoples survived them. They come from the small-language record, where a people's polity ended by absorption and its language ended with it, while its descendants continue inside other populations (Class B in the census — ended in the record, descendants continue, never merged with exterminated peoples): the Guanche of the Canary Islands, conquered 1402–1496, their languages ended by the 17th century, their descendants standing inside today's Canary Islanders, as genome-wide study confirms; the ǀXam of South Africa's Northern Cape, documented by Bleek and Lloyd in the 1870s–80s, whose last fluent speakers died in the 1910s and whose descendants Dorothea Bleek found in 1910–11 no longer living in the traditional way or knowing the language; the ǁXegwi of Lake Chrissie, whose last known speaker was murdered in 1988; the Kwadi of Angola, whose language no speaker could be found for by 1981 — though two rememberers surfaced in 2014, a dormant line that by itself bars any stronger filing; the Gafat of Ethiopia, last documented from four speakers in 1947 and shifted wholly to Amharic; and Tanzania's Aasax and Kw'adza, small Cushitic peoples absorbed among their neighbours. Against them stand the Class C guards — peoples whose languages ended while the peoples live: the El Molo and the Yaaku of Kenya, both with revivals in their own people's hands, the Weyto of Lake Tana, the Berti and Birgid of Sudan — and Nǀuu, long filed extinct and found spoken by Khomani elders, the standing proof that a catalogue's "extinct" can be a sleeping language.

10. The census finding for Africa

Put through the Collection's worldwide test — a people counts exterminated only when people, language and culture are all missing, with the descendant check run on every line — this base pass verifies zero exterminated peoples for Africa, files seven peoples in Class B (Guanche, ǀXam, ǁXegwi, Kwadi, Gafat, Aasax, Kw'adza), carries three further grouped records outside the count, and prints the catalogue of 75 extinct African languages only as catalogue arithmetic with its seams — ancient languages, liturgical languages, pidgins and dormant lines among them — never added to any count of peoples. The zero is a finding, not an omission: the pattern of loss in most of Africa ran through conquest, land seizure, forced labour, famine and absorption, and the peoples in most named cases did not end. Filing the living among the dead would repeat, in this Collection's own register, the oldest colonial error in the record.

Sources for this class

Kiernan, Ben, Blood and Soil (2007), Algeria passages; Gallois, William, "An Algerian Genocide?" (2013); Britannica, Algeria — Colonial rule (the one-third population fall, 1830–1875); Kateb demographic reconstruction and the 1866–68 famine figures; the Dahra / Ouled Riah enfumade study (the 1845 Frachich caves) • Simons, Geoff, Libya and the West (2003); Ebner & Simons, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy (2011) (Soluch camp, 20,123); the Gentile and Pappé positions as carried in the standard pacification summaries • US Library of Congress Country Studies, South Africa (Khoekhoe wars; 1713 smallpox); Beck, Southern Africa 1700–1950, and the southern-Africa curriculum record (commandos; child apprenticeship); Plaatje, Sol, Native Life in South Africa (1916) (the 1913 Act and its 7% scheduled areas) • Anderson, David, Histories of the Hanged (2005); Elkins, Caroline, Imperial Reckoning (2005), with John Blacker's demographic critique; the Hola inquest finding; the 2013 settlement terms • The Maji Maji literature (Iliffe; Pakenham for the Wangenheim quotation) as carried in the standard summaries; reporting of President Steinmeier's Songea apology, November 2023 • Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, "Shaping Remembrance through History Education" (Cameroon punitive expeditions; Hickory Town; Buea); the Manga Bell record (trial 7 August 1914; execution 8 August 1914) • Campbell, Ian, The Addis Ababa Massacre (2017) and the Yekatit 12 literature (Ethiopian ~30,000; Campbell ~19,200; lower band 1,400–6,000; the Cortese order via Mockler) • Fremigacci (2007); Tronchon (1986); Rabearimanana (1997); the official figures of 89,000 and 11,342, as carried in the Malagasy Uprising literature • List of extinct languages of Africa (75 entries, Ethnologue/Glottolog-based) and the language records for ǀXam (Bleek & Lloyd; Dorothea Bleek 1910–11; Boehmer & Staphorst 2025), ǁXegwi (1988), Kwadi (Winter 1981; Fehn 2014 rememberers via Sands 2015), Gafat (Leslau 1947), Aasax (after 1999), Kw'adza (1980s), El Molo, Yaaku, Weyto, Berti, Birgid and Nǀuu; the Guanche record (conquest 1402–1496; the 2017 genome-wide study). Full research file: Africa — Colonial Exterminations, Genocide Record, Region 3 file, §§3–11; census section: Worldwide Census — Africa.

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