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CHILDREN ARE THE FIRST TO DIE  
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Judith Van Allen
May 20, 2024
Africa is a Country
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_ There is a particular historical pattern of colonial settler
genocide that links Africa to Palestine. _

Children breaking a Guinness World Record for kite flying in Northern
Gaza, 2011., Shareef Sarhan for UN Photo via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Deed.

 

In December 2023 doctors in Gaza were already warning that Israel was
destroying the necessary conditions for life and that even if the
bombing stopped, the dying would continue. If you block access
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food, clean water, shelter, sanitation, fuel, medicine, and medical
care,_ disease will do the rest_, and _children are the first to
die_. The previous fifteen years of blockade by Israel had already
seriously weakened Gaza. Now after six months of all-out war we can
see the effects of _fast genocide_ by bombing along with the _slow
genocide_ created by destroying the system of social reproduction. 

Under world pressure, Israel may implement a ceasefire, but that will
not end the dying
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There have, of course, historically been many massacres and genocides
in Africa, but there is a particular historical pattern of
settler-colonial genocide that links Africa to Palestine. What is
under attack by Israel is the whole _system_ _of_ _social
reproduction_, from denial of access to basic needs to attacks on all
the work that mostly women do—feeding, caring for, and reproducing
the labor force. We don’t see that work in the daily images from
Gaza, which tend to focus on men taking risks to get food aid packages
and on starving children. But this system is being attacked, just as
it has been throughout settler colonialism, with lasting effects.
There is the bombing and the shooting that kills more quickly, and
then the slow genocide of starvation and disease. _And the killing
of children is a basic part of that slow genocide._

From the British massacre at Drogheda, Ireland, in 1649 comes the
essential settler-colonial line about killing children, “Nits become
lice”—a justification made throughout the history of settler
colonialism, including notoriously against Native Americans in North
America
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Africa, from Algeria to South Africa, colonial powers have acted
directly to control and destroy social reproduction and block the
crucial support it provided for liberation movements—from destroying
existing villages and then confining surviving women and children and
the elderly to “guarded settlements” or barren “homelands,” to
enclosing, bombing and controlling “native” areas. All these
strategies led to a wholly predictable pattern of disease and death,
starting with children. All are now being used in Palestine.

In the 1899–1902 Boer War, the British burned Boer farms and
imprisoned Boer women and children and the Africans working for them
in guarded camps, to destroy the social reproduction system that
supported Boer forces. Thousands, especially children, died. In Kenya
in the 1950s, the British attempted to block food provision to the Mau
Mau fighters in the forests of Mount Kenya, who were under bombardment
by British planes. Kikuyu women and children living in native reserves
on the slopes of the mountain were forced into “strategic
villages” surrounded by barbed wire, with towers with armed guards.
Malnutrition and disease claimed tens of thousands of lives,
especially those of children.

In Cameroon in the late 1950s the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon
(UPC) went into forest villages as opposition parties were suppressed.
The French responded by setting up guarded settlements along roads for
easier surveillance, with the expected weakening of social
reproduction, and if that didn’t work, they sent bombs. 

Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film _The Battle of Algiers_ and Franz
Fanon’s work have made the urban guerrilla struggle in Algeria
famous. But a long counterinsurgency attack in the countryside—the
first locus of the anticolonial struggle—preceded that battle. The
French destroyed rural villages with aerial gunfire and napalm,
rounded up thousands of peasants at gunpoint, and “relocated” them
into guarded settlements, called _camps de regroupement._ The
mountain areas were then declared forbidden zones and the French army
shot or bombed anything that moved inside them. By the end of the
Algerian War in 1962, some 2.3 million people, mostly women, children,
and the elderly, were in _camps de regroupement_, where malnutrition
and disease took a great toll. In Algiers, the Casbah became a
guarded settlement within which Algerians were bombed, assassinated,
rounded up, and taken away to be tortured and guillotined.

In Madagascar, responding to the 1948 anticolonial uprising, the
French just cut to genocide: burning villages and fields with napalm,
killing domestic animals, using mass arrests, torture, and executions.
Madagascar estimates put the Malagasy dead at more than
100,000—nearly 2 percent of the population, including much of a
generation of educated women and men.

In Namibia full-out genocide was committed between 1904 and 1907,
targeting the Herero and Nama people, who refused to give up their
land. About 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama were shot or driven into the
desert, the few thousand who survived were imprisoned in concentration
camps to die, their skulls sent to Germany for eugenics research. 

Finally, South Africa, so well equipped to recognize both apartheid
and genocide and make the case against Israel at the International
Court of Justice, had its own experience of camps for dying. From
1948, the apartheid project intensified racial separation.
“Removals” forced millions of Africans who were not considered
useful in the South African economy, which meant particularly women
and children and the aged, into the barren “reserves,” where
Africans knew you were sent to die—a strategy inspired by the
reservations where white American settlers sent Native Americans to
die. 

In all these cases, a colonial demand for land leads to the starvation
and outright killing or removal of the colonized (or, at least, the
“surplus”), and this pattern is repeated in Israeli actions, from
the Nakba—the Catastrophe—of 1948 to today’s onslaught in Gaza
and the increasing takeover of the West Bank.
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Algerian and South African liberation movements won despite facing
overwhelming colonial military force not by winning armed struggles
but _through internationalist support._ French support for
Algeria’s settler colonizers was weakened by leaked reports to _Le
Figaro_ about the deaths of children in the _camps de regroupement_,
and seriously shifted as left opposition revealed the brutality of the
French army in urban as well as rural Algeria. In 1961 metropolitan
France voted overwhelmingly for Algerian independence. As the
Algerians put it, “We lost the war, but we won our independence!”
(Pontecorvo, _The Battle of Algiers_)—a strong lesson about
strategy: you may not win the military fight, but by getting enough of
the world on your side you may still win the political war.

The African National Congress faced the same problem and finally ended
apartheid by joining its long internal struggle—above- and
underground—to a strong international campaign. The illegally shot
1974 film _The Last Grave at Dimbaza_ revealed the dehumanizing
violence of apartheid, and the later televising of township violence
helped boost the international movement that eventually brought down
the South African regime. Now we have _daily videos_ of the
destruction of life in Gaza, undeniable in real time to the many
international critics of Israeli actions—and clearly undeniable to
the majority of US voters who now oppose Israel’s actions. What
those daily reports show is that Israel is continuing its destruction
of the system of social reproduction—-and that _the dying won’t
stop when the bombing stops._ Neither will the suffering of the
children. So this time we need a militant international campaign not
only to end Israel’s war on Palestine but also to end the continuing
dying and heal the children.

_JUDITH VAN ALLEN, a long-time activist scholar, currently a Senior
Fellow at the Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell
University._

_AFRICA IS A COUNTRY is a site of opinion, analysis, and new writing
on and from the African left. It was founded by Sean Jacobs
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the content on Africa Is a Country is published under a Creative
Commons BY 4.0
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Africa Is a Country. [[link removed]]_

* Genocide
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* Palestine
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* Africa
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* settler colonialism
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