Europe’s First Settler Colonial Incursion into Africa: The Genocide of Aboriginal Canary Islanders

The annihilation of the aboriginal societies of the Canary archipelago, which consists of seven islands off the coast of southern Morocco and was populated by indigenes derived from Berber-speaking communities of north-west Africa, represents modern Europe’s first overseas settler colonial genocide. The process of social destruction, initiated by European slave raiders in the first half of the fourteenth century, was propelled to completion by mainly Iberian conquistadors and settlers towards the end of the fifteenth century. In addition to unrestrained mass violence against Canarians, European conquerors practised near-total confiscation of land and near-total enslavement and deportation of island populations. Enslavement and deportation, which went hand in hand, accounted for the largest number of victims and were central to the genocidal process. They were in effect as destructive as killing because the victims, generally the most productive members of their communities, were permanently lost to their societies. Child confiscation, sexual violence and the use of scorched earth tactics also contributed to the devastation suffered by Canarian peoples. After conquest, the remnants of indigenous Canarian societies were subjected to ongoing violence and cultural suppression, which ensured the extinction of their way of life. That the enslavement and deportation of entire island communities was the consciously articulated aim of conquerors establishes their “intent to destroy in whole,” which is the central criterion for meeting the United Nations Convention on Genocide’s definition of genocide. This article argues that individually and collectively all seven cases of social obliteration in the Canaries represent clear examples of genocide, and it is the first article to contend that the destruction of aboriginal Canarian societies constitutes genocide.     

Tanzanians in the Land of Oz: diaspora and transnationality in Wichita,Kansas

Studies of recent African immigration to the USA are part of increased scholarly concern for new diasporas and transnationality. Geographers' interests in how particular US settings impact upon African immigrants' experiences and how immigrants transform those settings can be enriched through studies of smaller communities, and their impacts on and experiences in the US outside of the main host cities. This case study of Tanzanians in Wichita, Kansas, concentrates on themes within this community's migration stories that emerged in our research. These include the pull of educational opportunity, the ambivalence of displacement, the simultaneous transnationality and translocality (or local fluidity) of Tanzanians in Wichita, and the diversity of experiences even within a small number of migrants. These themes appear commonly in many US African immigrant communities. We seek to address the possibly distinctive aspects of this case, due to its Tanzanian-ness and its relation to a presumably less likely migration destination, a mid-sized and not very diverse city in Kansas.     

Site Management: An Application to Wadilmeluk (the Valley of the Kings)

‘Value has always been the reason underlying heritage conservation. It is self‐evident that no society makes an effort to conserve what it does not value.’ ¹ 1. de la Torre and Mason, Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage, 3–4. However, assessing the value of a cultural heritage asset as a representative sample of our tangible and intangible heritage for present and future generations is a difficult concept to deal with. It is, therefore, the aim of the researchers to help the conservation decision process by attempting to make an assessment of the values attributed to the cultural heritage assets of one of the most notable heritage sites in Egypt: the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.     

Agent-based simulation of the spatial evolution of the historical population in China

This paper presents an agent-based simulation (ABS) and cellular automata (CA) coupled model to simulate the spatial evolution of the population of China over the past 2000 years. In the model, agents are used to simulate individuals who live in a geographic environment represented by the CA. The choice to migrate is influenced by climate change, potential agricultural productivity change, and waves of mass migrations. Using the simulation, we can observe the spatial evolution of the population, as well as the shift of the population center of gravity, and we can analyze the driving forces of these changing spatial patterns.     

The Role of Digital Libraries in Egyptian Higher Education

Exploring the students' information, communication technology (ICT) profile and how it may affect their attitudes towards the Egyptian university digital library (EUDL) and the role of the digital library in the educational and research activities in faculties of nursing and education in Egypt is the main concern of this study. A questionnaire was distributed to students in the faculties of Nursing and Education at five Egyptian universities. A total of 4008 responses have been received and analyzed. The results showed that nursing students are more active in implementing ICT and they have positive attitudes towards the digital library. The results also revealed that the digital library played a more positive role in the Nursing faculties than faculties of Education. The study also revealed five barriers for not using the digital library by the students: the restriction of accessing EDUL as a source of information for research and education, insufficient Internet access, lack of search skills, insufficient computer labs and the cost of using the available labs. The direct implementation of this study could be in the administration level of the quality assurance programs in the studied faculties. The results of the study could also be generalized to other similar programs in the Egyptian universities.     

Palaeolithic and Neolithic Occupations in the Témara Region (Rabat, Morocco): Recent Data on Hominin Contexts and Behavior

In the 1970s, the discoveries of Palaeolithic human remains in the caves of Dar es Soltane 2, El Harhoura 1 and Les Contrebandiers reinforced interest in the sites of the Témara region. These sites, often cited, have been the object of numerous investigations which have produced a major contribution to the prehistory of Morocco. Over the past 15 years, research at two key sites, El Mnasra and El Harhoura 2, have considerably enhanced the available data for this region. Preliminary results obtained from excavations since 2001, allow us to present the palaeoenvironmental framework and describe the technological behaviour of prehistoric groups within a re-evaluated stratigraphic context. The microfaunal and macrofaunal assemblages are analysed according to systematics, taphonomy and palaeoecology. The lithic and bone industries document patterns of raw material acquisition and transformation. Within the context of the history of more than 60 years of research in the region of Témara, this contribution allows us to approach the question of Palaeolithic population on the basis of recent, and for the most part new, data and evidence.     

The Economic Role of the State in the Classical Islamic Literature: The Views of Ibn Taimiyah

This paper explores the economic writings of Ibn Taimiyah, particularly his views on the economic role of the state. In so doing, it offers some explanations to the “great gap” puzzle posed by Schumpeter, and introduces the reader to a model of the medieval Arab and Islamic economic thoughts.     

A total extinction confidently hoped for: the destruction of Cape San society under Dutch colonial rule, 1700-1795

San (Bushman) society in the Cape Colony was almost completely annihilated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of land confiscation, massacre, forced labour and cultural suppression that accompanied colonial rule. Whereas similar obliterations of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world have resulted in major public controversies and heated debate amongst academics about the genocidal nature of these episodes, in South Africa the issue has effectively been ignored aside from passing, often polemical, references to it as genocide. Even recent studies that have approached the mass killing of the Cape San with sensitivity and insight do not address it as a case of genocide. This article sets out to redress this imbalance in part by analysing the dynamic of frontier conflict between San and settler under Dutch colonial rule as genocide. It demonstrates both the exterminatory intent underlying settler violence as well as the complicity of a weak colonial state in these depredations, including its sanctioning of the root-and-branch eradication of the San.