The Biases of Genocide Studies (Part III)

In this third instalment of a series on the nature and incidence of genocides, alleged genocides and massacres carried out by the colonial powers and rulers against the indigenous populations in their colonies will be examined. This subject is, of course, of particular interest to Australians, since the alleged genocide of Australia’s Aborigines by its white settlers has been a matter of great interest and controversy.

In considering this question, we quickly run up against a central ambiguity contained in the notion of “genocide”, especially as alleged in the colonial world. Is a sharp, indeed catastrophic reduction in a local population, occurring just after foreign settlement and seemingly resultant from it, automatically an example of “genocide”? Or must the central element of intent and actual killing and murder be present for this to be considered “genocide”?

In Australia, there was unquestionably a sharp decline in the Aboriginal population of Australia between 1788 and 1900, although the dimensions of this decline are disputed by historians. But only a small fraction of this decline was due to deliberate killings and massacres, with the figure of 20,000 Aboriginal dead at the hands of whites between 1788 and c.1939 being generally accepted (but without any compelling evidence) by recent historians. If the commonly accepted figure of 250,000 Aborigines alive in Australia in 1788 is accepted, with the nadir figure around 1901 being 67,000, then around 11 per cent of the total decline was due to deliberate killing. If, however, the Aboriginal population was actually one million in 1788, as some recent historians (implausibly in my view) have argued, then only 2 per cent of the decline was due to deliberate killings.

It seems perfectly clear that the decline in Aboriginal numbers—however tragic and whatever else might be said about it—was not an example of genocide by any reasonable definition of genocide. It totally lacked any element of deliberate, centrally-directed intentionality —indeed, the British authorities invariably worked to protect Aborigines from harm—while the great majority of the population decline was due, plainly, to other causes, especially the spread of virulent diseases.

In addition to the general charge of genocide by whites against Aborigines after 1788, much recent discussion of alleged genocide in the context of modern Australian history has centred on the so-called “stolen generations”, about which so much has been written. To this observer, who has followed the debate on this topic as an outsider in Britain after emigrating from Australia in 1995, many of the claims made by proponents responsible for the widespread acceptance of the “stolen generations” seem curious, at the very least.

Let me preface this by making it clear that, today, no one in their right mind would advocate or accept much of what apparently occurred in the circumstances of the “stolen generations”, especially the double standards invidiously applied, it would seem, exclusively to half-caste Aborigines, the lack of any realistic appeals mechanism or participation at the executive level by those affected, and the bloody-minded way in which the removal of half-caste Aborigines was apparently carried out.

Nevertheless, there appear to be so many difficulties with the concept of the “stolen generations” that one hardly knows where to begin. First, although these forcible removals are invariably portrayed as directed against Aboriginal children, what has simply been lost sight of in any discussion I have seen is that those removed were not Aborigines, but children with white fathers and Aboriginal mothers. One-half of the gene pool of those children removed invariably came from white Europeans; full-blooded Aborigines were, apparently, always left alone. Since these children were one-half European, why is it any less accurate to describe them as being “restored” to their white European culture than being “stolen” from their Aboriginal relatives and culture? The only apparent reason is that their mothers were Aboriginal, and priority has to be given to the maternal bond rather than to paternal descent—or so it would be argued. Yet it is simply wrong and misleading to view these children as Aborigines who have been stolen to be raised as whites, since they were precisely as Caucasian and European as they were Aboriginal. It is, after all, their European ancestry which has been expunged and forgotten in the entire debate over the “stolen generations”.

This consideration leads to another highly pertinent question, which also seems to have been entirely overlooked in the discussion: who, precisely, were the fathers of the children of the “stolen generations”? They appear to be wholly absent, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, from any discussion of these events. Indeed, I have almost never read an account of any forcible removal in which the father was present in the household, or, indeed, was even mentioned.* In narratives of forcible removal, we are simply never told who the fathers of these children were. In the absence of direct evidence, some reasonable inferences may perhaps be drawn. According to the (excellent) Wikipedia entry on the “stolen generations”, it was the anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer who first drew attention to the “many mixed-descent children born during the construction of the Ghan railway [and who] were abandoned at an early age with no one to provide for them”. This reality “spurred the need for state action”.

Anna Haebich’s comprehensive Broken Circles (2000) occasionally hints at the identities of the fathers of the half-caste children. “Girls were the major target group for removals … reflecting the departmental determination to protect them from sexual abuse by employers …” (page 177). In Western Australia “casual sexual contact remained outside the scope of the [Aborigines] Act [1905], leaving Aboriginal women and girls vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse” (page 187). In Queensland in 1913 Archbishop Donaldson claimed, after a visit to the Barambah settlement, that “over 90%” of girls “came back pregnant to white men” (page 179). In the Northern Territory, “there was a serious shortage of white women and stable domestic family life … and, in consequence, largely unchecked sexual exploitation and abuse of Aboriginal women and girls … covert casual sexual contact continued to be tolerated as ‘a necessary evil’ for the outlet of the white—but not Asian—men’s sexual urges” (page 191). Many other similar claims have been recorded.

It would thus seem that most half-caste Aboriginal children were the by-products of exploitative but presumably voluntary sexual encounters between white men and Aboriginal women, or of voluntary prostitution. Whether in outback Australia or in Victorian London, prostitution was almost always the result of female poverty and lack of career opportunities, which low-life white men shamefully exploited.

Nevertheless, this does shed a different light on the families of the half-caste children. In how many cases were the real fathers of these children instrumental in their being forcibly taken from their mothers? One would also like to know how many half-caste children were fathered by multiple sexual partners with the same Aboriginal woman. In other words, it seems likely that many, perhaps most, of the families of the “stolen generations” could be described as classically dysfunctional and in a state of familial social collapse: probably illiterate, unemployable mothers who in some cases had engaged in prostitution; little or no family income, or any prospect of any; almost always an absent father or multiple absent fathers. Had an identical situation existed not among outback Aborigines, but among Anglo-Celtic women and their children in the slums of Melbourne and Sydney, the children of these mothers would, in very many cases, have been forcibly removed from their mothers and placed in institutions or foster homes—as indeed thousands were and still are—with the unanimous approval of enlightened opinion.

Of course there were and are differences between the two situations, since the removal of half-caste Aborigines was, it seems, largely racially-based and without proper safeguards or checks on the process. Nevertheless, the motive for the forcible removal of the children in both cases was largely similar: the welfare of the child. Indeed, that the fate of white children removed from dysfunctional Anglo-Celtic homes is largely ignored, while the “stolen generations” of half-caste Aborigines have been at the forefront of public debate and the subject of an official apology by the Prime Minister, can be seen as a rather perverse example of Left-liberal double standards, however well-intentioned.

There is another crucial consideration about the “stolen generations” which has also been entirely ignored but which is of some importance. The aim of the removals was to raise any part-Aboriginal child with white ancestry as a white European. This is invariably viewed by the Left as racist if not genocidal. What has been ignored, however, is that this policy is the exact opposite of “Jim Crow” in the United States, the legalised system of racial segregation which existed in all Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Under “Jim Crow”, anyone with a perceptible “drop of Negro blood”—not merely a dark skin colour, but “negroid” facial features or crinkly hair—was regarded as a Negro, and legally required to use invariably inferior segregated Negro public facilities, schools, housing and public transport. In Australia, it is crucial to note, any Aboriginal person with an identifiable drop of white blood was regarded as (potentially) white, and deliberately brought into the white community rather than segregated out. Pure-blooded Aborigines were always left alone and their culture respected. If “Jim Crow” in the American South was immoral and racist because it segregated blacks out of mainstream white society, even those with a component of white ancestors, how is it that the policies which produced the “stolen generations”, however misguided they might now seem, were immoral and racist for doing the opposite? And how racist could white Australian society be if it wanted, not to exclude black people from full participation in mainstream society, but to bring them in, and went to extraordinary, if unacceptable, lengths to do so?

The final point which might be made here concerns the definition of “genocide”, and how this might apply to the “stolen generations”. Some commentators regard the removal of half-castes as an example of genocide under Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in December 1948, which defines as genocide “any of the following acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group” the act of “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.

Parenthetically, it might be noted that the UN Convention on Genocide is deeply flawed. Because of Soviet objections, mass murders committed for political or ideological ends were excluded from the UN’s definition of genocide: the mass murders committed by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot are not included under any of the UN’s definitions of genocide.

However, and in view of what was noted above about the fact that the “stolen generations” children were always half-European, it is very doubtful whether the UN’s definition can be seen as including the “stolen generations” removals. Had full-blooded Aborigines been forcibly removed en masse as a matter of policy, there would be a much clearer case to label such removals as “genocide” under the UN’s definition. That those removed were half-European muddies the waters very considerably: these children were removed only because they were half-European. As well, the intent in removing them was not to commit “genocide”—the policy, to reiterate, did not affect pure-blooded Aborigines—but to offer these children an improvement in their life chances and standards of living.

Other alleged examples of genocide by the European powers against colonial peoples may also be, on closer examination, very dubious. For instance, in the wake of Adam Hochschild’s best-selling book King Leopold’s Ghost (1999) considerable publicity has been generated by the great loss of life in the Congo Free State when it was the personal possession of Belgium’s King Leopold II between 1885 and 1908. Building on the exposes of conditions at the time made by E.D. Morel and Sir Roger Casement, Hochschild argued that between 1880 and 1910 the population of the Congo declined by half, from 20 million to 10 million, the result of the brutalities carried out by the Belgians in pursuit of rubber against natives exploited as virtual slaves. Hochschild concedes that “outright murder was not the major cause of death”, rather than “starvation, exhaustion, and exposure”, and a sleeping sickness epidemic, all of which were the direct result of Belgian rule there.

The activities of the Belgian administration of the Congo were indeed arguably appalling—and not remotely duplicated in any British colony—but Hochschild’s claims seem very arguable. The population of the Congo at these dates was simply unknown. The Congo, as large as Western Europe, was virtually unexplored, and no census was taken there until 1921. For many years before 1908 most standard reference works stated that its population was 8 million. The first Congolese census, taken in 1921, revealed a population of 6.5 million, which increased to 8.8 million by 1930. There is simply no credible evidence of any kind that the population of the Congo was 20 million in 1880, or that it declined by 10 million: these figures have simply been invented.

Second, the European population of the Congo at that time was infinitesimal, consisting of an administrative apparatus numbering only 1428 men in 1908, plus another 2500 or so missionaries, nuns, doctors, teachers and the like. It is obviously impossible for a group of that size to have murdered 10 million people, even if they had been the Nazi SS operating on the Russian steppes, rather than administrators and missionaries working in a virtually unexplored and inaccessible jungle of immense size. In fact, most of the violence against native blacks was perpetrated by a Belgian-led army of 19,000 local blacks, who often carried out acts of tribal vengeance.

Even this army, however, did not account for more than a fraction of any Congolese population decline which might have occurred at that time. Local missionaries and other Belgians invariably attributed any population decline to a catastrophic sleeping sickness epidemic which broke out in the Congo between 1895 and 1906, and which is well documented in medical sources. Spread by the tsetse fly (and not yet medically understood), the epidemic spread along rivers and local ports as Belgian trading stations multiplied: the epidemic apparently had little or nothing to do with the brutalities carried out against natives gathering rubber.

The situation in the Congo Free State, in other words, was similar to that in Australia and in North and South America, where great loss of indigenous life was the result of virulent disease. However brutal was the exploitation of native labour in pursuit of Congolese rubber, this was apparently a non sequitur to the real cause of the Congo’s population decline, which in any case appears to have been much lower than has been suggested by recent historians.

One ought to ask whether, in modern times, there are any bona-fide examples of deliberate and unarguable genocide committed by a Western colonial power against an indigenous people. Some aspects of white America’s treatment of the American Indians might be so described, although, as was discussed in a previous article, only a minute fraction of the American Indian population decline can be attributed to deliberate killings by whites.

Perhaps the most clear-cut example of deliberate mass killings by a colonial power were those carried out by the Germans against Hereros and Nama (“Hottentots”) in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) between 1904 and 1907. It is reliably estimated that over 80 per cent of the Hereros and 50 per cent of the Nama were killed by German soldiers in this three-year period, in a brutal attempt by German General Lothar von Trotha to suppress a native uprising there. The likes of this massacre probably occurred nowhere else in the colonial world, and in particular did not occur in the British empire. As in other spheres, Germany pursued a “special path” in its colonial policies which differed from the other colonial powers.

* There are very few references to the fathers of the “stolen” children in, for instance, Anna Haebich’s comprehensive 726-page examination of the “stolen generations”, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000. One of the few occurs on page 176: a 1903 Queensland Report noted of “two half-caste children” that “their reputed father [is] in gaol, and mother dead”. Virtually no other information about the fathers of these children is reported in this lengthy work.

William D. Rubinstein is professor of history at the University of Wales—Aberystwyth. Until 1995 he was professor of social and economic history at Deakin University. He is the author of Genocide: A History (Longmans, 2004) and many other works. The previous two articles in this series appeared in the March and April issues.