When is it genocide? Perhaps this is as obvious discussion, considering the attention that I and others have given to the history of the American South and to the political culture of Bavaria (Johno, I am planning to get back to you on the issue of memorialization). Last night, the public radio program Marketplace reported that American descendants of African slaves are suing Lloyds of London for insuring the voyage that brought those descendants to America. My first impression was that this case was flawed because the insurer in this case, not acting as an investor in the enterprise, did not plan or finance the trip. Apparently Fleet might also be named, but that would make more sense: banks take part in planning, especially at this time, and the differences between banks and entrepreneurs are usually slight (banks were often set up to pool resources and to maximize financial advantages for specific projects, and the boards of banks and the groups of investors often overlapped). The man bringing this to prosecution was the same lawyer who took on Swiss banks. Perhaps he knows something about Lloyd’s involvement that I do not.

I was not concerned about the charge of genocide at first. The international act that defines genocide is careful to include all acts that would destroy or attack a people, including those things that would destroy culture. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who invented the word ‘genocide’, carefully articulated the law so that non-lethal acts were included. His original concern for this problem came from his interest in the Armenian Genocide: after the international attention turned to the mass murders, the Ottomans forced Armenians to migrate. This act, beyond causing hardship and death on its own, was designed to dissemble Armenia. The genocide conventions also note those things that would lead to the death of a culture: many of the acts committed against Kurds in Iraq are understood in such terms–forced Arabization (yes, there were gassing, but the continuing atrocities concern assimilation and acculturation).

On the surface, I thought that the slave trade should fit the terms of the convention. Even though mass killings were not involved, forced migration and cultural destruction are acts that the convention can bear. What matters is the intent: destruction of a people, destruction of a culture. Indeed, it is difficult to understand the gassing of rural Kurdistan as genocide without reference to the assimilation.

But how do these acts apply to enslavement of Africans and transport to the Americas? By definition, these acts can be prosecuted as genocide. But how can they be interpreted as destruction of a people (either physically or as some sort of cultural nation)? Enslavement was a cultural and legal phenomenon of West Africa. Wolof kingdoms expanded through enslavement of enemy populations. In fact, those enslavements could be beneficial: new slaves were often incorporated into the apparatus of the state, most often as warriors, but also as administrators. These slaves were used to squeeze the free native population: to extract as much value as possible from them. And the slaves benefitted from exercise and association with high political power. In the interior, what the French would call the greater Sudan, where politics were less organized, slaves were labor. However, they had privileges that allowed them limited freedom of movement, freedom to marry, and ownership of some land–these were limited privileges, but they existed nonetheless. In both these cases, the people enslaved need not be absorbed by that community–they could be sold off to another.

The conditions that they experience as they came into the hands of Muslim traders and European-American merchants were drastically different. Hell, these were even different terms of slavery than were in application in Europe beforehand. The ability to see would seem to leave open the question of whether slaves should be treated under the terms of their old communities. If there were a drastic act that changed conditions from African to European-American slavery, would it not have occurred at the point of sale? Is that not the point at which a genocide had been committed?

But was the intention of the slave traders to destroy the culture? In the audio piece, one plaintiff argues that she is culture-less because of slavery. I find this to be a stretch. Do these communities still exist? Was there an effort to eradicate them? European penetration into Africa was limited. Even the Muslims did not get far inland. They were interested in the commodity. There is no evidence that they were attempting any grander social, cultural, or genetic re-engineering of Africa. While slavery was a tragedy–and it should be memorialized in American culture and social programs–it can only be called genocide with great difficulty.