Chapter 4 recounts the most intense phase of the violence of the 1937 Genocide and it focuses on the lived experiences of the victims and the survivors. The chapter is largely based on refugee testimonies collected in 1937 as well as a range of oral histories collected since. By closely examining the survivors’ testimonies, the chapter prioritizes their own understanding of the event. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the magnitude, brutality, and premeditated nature of the state-directed violence that took place in 1937. The chapter focuses on several key features of the 1937 Haitian Massacre in considering its relationship to other genocides in the twentieth century. Elements of secrecy, local complicity, extermination, and land appropriation were key features of this genocide. The chapter argues that victims of the 1937 Genocide interpreted the massacre as a major land grab. They also explained local civilian participation in the massacre in terms of pillage. In addition to focusing on their interpretation of the genocide as a form of land grab, the chapter argues that local complicity was more important than previously acknowledged. It also carefully considers patterns of killings that survivors described that occurred months and years after October 1937.

China has a long history of evolving engagements in Africa’s agricultural sector, from establishment of large-scale state farms to technical cooperation and commercial investments. Since 2006, more than twenty agricultural technology demonstration centers have been built in various African countries, aiming to ameliorate knowledge transfer and skill training through sustainable business practices. Although Chinese have constantly modified the operational manners to address problems encountered in the practice, most of the agricultural projects still fail to achieve their expected results. As subsistence farming dominates Africa’s rural area, multiple factors, including immature market mechanism, low productivity, outdated farming behaviors, and politicization of land-related issues, influence each other in an intertwined fashion and hamper effective modernization of the sector. Scattered foreign aid projects and investments can hardly generate substantial and sustainable impacts. The rumors of land grabs proved to be ungrounded and ignorant of the reality. Pilot Chinese enterprises focuses on connecting agricultural production with the development of an industrial value chain in Africa rather than acquiring large pieces of land.

This chapter provides some economic, social, legal and technical context to development projects and their interfaces with indigenous peoples’ rights to land and the focus of this book. Situating development projects within historical precedents from colonial times, it identifies some important new features of the modern development project landscape. These include the increasing proximity of international economic arrangements and transnational financial transactions such as project finance and its underlying documentary network with issues of indigenous land connection, survival and precarity. Against this background, the book’s objective is to consider how, under the conditions of a development project and its contractual framework and safeguarding policy architecture, private entities and judicial and non-judicial mechanisms frame, conflict with and informally delegate out the recognition and implementation of rights to land for indigenous people. In responding to this objective, I lay out the core themes that repeat throughout: fragmentation, invisibility, power(lessness), priority, delegation, (un)predictability and the integration of public and private remedies.