In this era of heightened racial and ethnic tension, few academic concepts have enjoyed as much success as “settler colonialism.” Notably articulated by the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in his article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” this approach has been used to explain conflicts taking place in Israel-Palestine, Australia, Russia-Ukraine, Latin America, and the African continent, as well as within the Western world.
Settler colonialism is seen as an ongoing process with enduring impacts on indigenous communities and serves as a framework for explaining the complex dynamics of power, domination, and resistance supposedly inherent in settler-colonial societies. Any perceived settler eruption is said to be governed by what Wolfe labels “the logic of elimination,” meaning that settler colonialism seeks to permanently occupy and transform indigenous lands through violent dispossession, forced assimilation, and cultural erasure. As such, narratives of settler colonialism offer no hope of redemption or reconciliation.
Widely taught and embraced on today’s college campuses, and increasingly featured in the media, the settler-colonial concept has vague connections to the original Marxist-Leninist gospel, but is more directly connected to postcolonial movements headed by figures such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Mao, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Kwame Nkrumah, as well as intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe, Herbert Marcuse, Efraín Morote Best, and Michel Foucault. Less attention is paid, however, to this ideology’s empirical effects and actual history: the most fervent “anticolonial” regimes have generally done little to improve the lives of the oppressed, and often cause their own societies a great deal of harm.
It’s Not All about Racism
The latest version of the settler-colonialist narrative ties imperialism and slavery to the triumph of “white privilege.” In reality, however, colonialism has a long, and diverse, history. Today’s primary promoters of anti‑Western imperialism—China and Russia—are themselves “settler” states, built over centuries through the displacement of indigenous cultural minorities. Even in North America and Africa, well before the conquest of the New World, there were constant wars and incidents of mass enslavement. The early settlers of southern Africa, the Khoisan, for example, have been reduced to just over 1 percent of South Africa’s population, having been displaced through a series of racially diverse migrations and gold rushes before and after the arrival of Europeans. They have faced notable levels of discrimination in South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana, by both the European and Bantu settlers.
We seem to forget that Africans were quite capable of building their own exploitative empires, such as Great Zimbabwe and the Kingdom of Mapungubwe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, which conquered and exploited other people, much like their European settler counterparts. Later, South Africa saw the conquests of the Natal by Shaka Zulu—who notably launched the genocidal Mfecane against the Swazi and Sotho tribes.
Genocides and ethnic cleansings are not unique to any tribe or continent. They have occurred throughout precolonial Africa, in primitive Scandinavia, and pre-Columbian America. As Steven Pinker has noted, in his treatise on the history of violence, several ancient gravesites contain bodies that had their skulls cracked open before they died.
The settler school also often chooses to racialize oppression, forgetting that imperial expansion transcends race and faith. Not all settlers, for example, were demonic tools of capitalism; many came as refugees, such as the persecuted Huguenots following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in Catholic France, or Jewish refugees fleeing Europe during the Nazi era. Others, like the Afrikaner, also were oppressed; they were herded into concentration camps and their language banned during the height of the British Empire.
Read the rest of this piece at American Affairs.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Hügo Krüger is a South African born Structural/Nuclear Engineer, writer and YouTube podcaster, commentating on topics relating to Energy and Geopolitical Matters, Hügo is married to an Iranian born Mathematician and Artist; the couple resides in Paris.
Photo: Landing of Van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, painting by Charles Bell, Wikimedia in Public Domain.
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