Europe’s millennium of inner warfare, absent in Africa, prepared Europeans for genocidal violence

Evidence

More frequently than not, the logic of racial domination that had already endured for centuries invoked no alternatives. On this score it had always to be an unequal contest, not because of the superiority of weapons or the preponderance of numbers but because such violence did not come naturally to African peoples. The civilizations of Europe and Africa in those terms had also been very different. For far longer than a millennium, the history of Europe had amounted to an almost uninterrupted chronology of fratricidal warfare and its celebration. The museums of the civilization are the current testament to that preoccupation, its histories chilling accounts. In Africa, where the incident of state and imperial formations and total warfare were rarer, conflict could and was more frequently resolved by migration and resettlement. Eventually the penetration of Islam into Africa and the organization of the Red Sea and Mediterranean slave systems had made some real difference but it was the scale of the Atlantic slave trade and the racial cacophony of European colonialism that would dictate the more profound adjustment to violence. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1430

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to arguments about European state formation through ongoing warfare (e.g., Charles Tilly’s ‘war made the state’) and to comparative civilizational analyses.
• QUESTION: Worth checking: is the claim that pre-Islamic Africa had rarer total warfare historically accurate, or an idealization?