This article is about the demographic history which is related to the enslavement of Black Africans. For the characterisation of US policies, seeBlack genocide in the United States.
Maulana Karenga puts slavery in the broader context of theMaafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples".[11]
The Canadian scholarAdam Jones characterized the mass death of millions of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade as agenocide due to it being "one of the worst holocausts in human history" because it resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths according to one estimate, and he claims that arguments to the contrary such as "it was in slave owners' interest to keep slaves alive, not exterminate them" are "mostly sophistry" by stating: "the killing and destruction were intentional, whatever the incentives to preserve survivors of the Atlantic passage for labor exploitation. To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?"[12]
The usage of theSwahili term:Maafa,lit. 'Great Disaster' in English was introduced byMarimba Ani's 1988 bookLet the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in theDiaspora.[13][14] It is derived from aSwahili term for "disaster, terrible occurrence or greattragedy".[15][16] The term was popularized in the 1990s.[17] The Maafa represents a way to discuss the historic atrocities and impact of the African Slave Trade.[18]
The termAfrican Holocaust is preferred by some academics, such asMaulana Karenga, because it implies intention.[19] One problem noted by Karenga is that the wordMaafa can also translate to "accident" and in the view of some scholars the holocaust of enslavement was not accidental.Ali Mazrui notes that the word "holocaust" is a "dual plagiarism" since the term is derived fromAncient Greek and thus despite being associated with thegenocide of the Jews, no one can have a monopoly over the term. Mazrui states: "This borrowing from borrowers without attribution is what I call 'the dual plagiarism.' But this plagiarism is defensible because the vocabulary of horrors like genocide and enslavement should not be subject to copyright-restrictions".[20]
SomeAfrocentric scholars prefer the termMaafa instead ofAfrican Holocaust[21] because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly conveys the events.[14] The termMaafa may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of theHolocaust serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism".[22] Other arguments in favor ofMaafa rather thanAfrican Holocaust emphasize that the denial of the validity of the African people's humanity is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification"-[7]
The historianSylviane Diouf posits that terms like "Atlantic slave trade" are deeply problematic because they serve aseuphemisms for intenseviolence andmass murder. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period ofpersecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than a moral atrocity.[23] With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point as mere "collateral damage" of a commercial venture. However, others feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is an apologetic act on behalf ofcapitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.[24]Roger Garaudy accused America of genocide up to an estimated two hundred million Africans.[25]
^William Wright points to the differences betweenblack history, andAfrican history, and argues that the African Holocaust is a major reason why these two histories are not synonymous: William D. Wright, Black History and Black Identity: A Call for a New Historiography, p. 117
^Ryan Michael Spitzer, "The African Holocaust: Should Europe pay reparations to Africa for Colonialism and Slavery?", Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, vol. 35, 2002, p. 1319.
^abBarndt, Joseph.Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century. 2007, page 269.
^The Global African: A Portrait ofAli A. Mazrui. Omari H. Kokole.
^abcJones, Lee andWest, Cornel.Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education. 2002, p. 178.
^The Global African: A Portrait of Ali A. Mazrui. Omari H. Kokole.
^Ryan Michael Spitzer, "The African Holocaust: Should Europe pay reparations to Africa for Colonialism and Slavery?",Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, vol. 35, 2002, p. 1319.
