Bantu Genocide

Bantu peoples is used as a general label for the 300–600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages. They inhabit a geographical area stretching east and southward from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes region down to Southern Africa.[1] Bantu is a major branch of the Niger-Congo language family spoken by most populations in Africa. There are about 650 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages.

Around 3000 years ago, speakers of the Proto-Bantu language group began a millennia-long series of migrations eastward from their homeland between West Africa and Central Africa, at the border of eastern Nigeria and Cameroon.[4] This Bantu expansion first introduced Bantu peoples to central, southern, and southeastern Africa, regions they had previously been absent from. The proto-Bantu migrants in the process assimilated and/or displaced a number of earlier inhabitants that they came across, including Pygmy and Khoisan populations in the center and south, respectively. They also encountered some Afro-Asiatic outlier groups in the southeast, who had been there for centuries migrating from Northeast Africa.

Individual Bantu groups today often include millions of people. Among these are the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with over 13.5 million people; the Zulu of South Africa, with over 10 million people; the Sukuma of Tanzania which are about eight million people, Kikuyu of Kenya, with over six million people. Although only around five million individuals speak the Arabic-influenced Swahili language as their mother tongue, it is used as a lingua franca by over 140 million people throughout Southeast Africa. Swahili also serves as one of the official languages of the African Union.

What would happen if the Bantu was subjected to a mass genocide in Southern Africa, similar to the Native Americans and the New Zealand Māori?

Colonialism and the Genocide
Traders of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), under the command of Jan van Riebeeck, were the first people to establish a European colony in South Africa. The Cape settlement was built by them in 1652 as a re-supply point and way-station for Dutch East India Company vessels on their way back and forth between the Netherlands and Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies. The support station gradually became a settler community, the forebears of the Afrikaners, a European ethnic group in South Africa.

At the time of first European settlement in the Cape, the southwest of Africa was inhabited by San people and Khoikhoi who were pastoral people with a population estimated between 13,000 and 15,000.[3] Conflicts with the settlers and the effects of smallpox decimated their numbers in 1713 and 1755, until gradually the breakdown of their tribal society led them to work for the colonists, mostly as shepherds and herdsmen.[3]

The local Khoikhoi had neither a strong political organisation nor an economic base beyond their herds. They bartered livestock freely to Dutch ships. As Company employees established farms to supply the Cape station, they began to displace the Khoikhoi. Conflicts led to the consolidation of European landholdings and a breakdown of Khoikhoi society. Military success led to even greater Dutch East India Company control of the Khoikhoi by the 1670s. The Khoikhoi became the chief source of colonial wage labour.

After the first settlers spread out around the Company station, nomadic European livestock farmers, or Trekboeren, moved more widely afield, leaving the richer, but limited, farming lands of the coast for the drier interior tableland. There they contested still wider groups of Khoikhoi cattle herders for the best grazing lands. By 1700, the traditional Khoikhoi lifestyle of pastoralism had disappeared.

The Cape society in this period was thus a diverse one. The emergence of Afrikaans, a new vernacular language of the colonials that is however intelligible with Dutch, shows that the Dutch East India Company immigrants themselves were also subject to acculturation processes. By the time of British rule after 1795, the sociopolitical foundations were firmly laid.

In 1703, some of the Khoi and San tribes rose in revolt and about 60 Dutch settlers were killed. Troops were sent from the Dutch Republic to re-establish order, but only succeeded in dispersing the rebels.

In October 1704, the Dutch military issued orders to kill every male Khoi and San and drive the women and children into the desert. As soon as the news of this order reached Holland it was repealed, but by this time the rest of the native population was in full-scale revolt. When the order was lifted at the end of 1704, prisoners were herded into concentration camps and given as slave labor to Dutch and German businesses, where many died of overwork and malnutrition.

It took until 1708 to re-establish Dutch authority over the territory. By that time tens of thousands of Africans (estimates range from 34,000 to 110,000) had been either killed or died of thirst while fleeing. At the height the campaign some 19,000 Dutch troops were involved.