COLLABORATION AND ACCOMMODATION

Indigenous collaborators often played essential roles in maintaining the colonial system. Especially valuable to Europeans were traditional rulers willing to hold office under indirect rule arrangements even though prevented from exercising the full range of powers held by their predecessors.

The number of active collaborators in any given situation was typically small. The number of accommodators was considerably larger. Accommodation did not imply approval of colonial rule in general or of specific features such as the legal code, employment in mines and plantations, or mission schooling. Neither did it imply disapproval. Rather it was an intensely pragmatic response to circumstances consid­ered unlikely to change whatever one did and thought. Accommodation was an attractive coping mechanism for those who were not politically inclined. It also appealed to the vast numbers who had no time or energy for political activity because the struggle to survive from one day to the next took everything they had. These people adapted with enterprise and resilience—and a minimum of moralizing—to realities confronting them, figuring that the alternative was even more untenable.

The accommodationist attitude was eloquently expressed in Ambiguous Ad­venture, by the Senegalese writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane. In this novel the Royal Lady of the Diallobe urges her brother the chief to send his young cousin, Samba Diallo, to a school just established by the French:

A hundred years ago our grandfather, along with all the inhabitants of this countryside, was awakened one morning by an uproar arising from the river. He took his gun and, followed by all the elite of the region, he flung himself upon the newcomer. His heart was intrepid, and to him the value of liberty was greater than the value of life. Our grandfather, and the elite of the country with him, was defeated. Why? How? Only the newcomers know. We must ask them: we must go learn from them the art of conquering without being in the right. Furthermore, the conflict has not ceased. The foreign school is the new form of the war which those who have come here are waging, and we must send our elite there, expect­ing that all the country will follow them.²

Accommodation entailed active engagement with the new rulers in hopes that it would empower the disempowered. Samba Diallo was sent to school to learn how his conquerors managed to win despite being in the wrong. Knowing France’s secret, he might some day be able to end French domination. Harboring expectations of increased power, wealth, and status, many people went to work for European em­ployers in all sectors, took up cash-crop farming, purchased imported consumer goods, converted to Christianity, and enrolled their children in school.

Did accommodation strengthen or undermine European rule? The most gen­eral answer is that it did both. In the short to medium run it helped the three sectors function effectively. Had there been no accommodators, colonialism’s startup costs could not have been paid. In the medium to longer run, however, active engagement with sectoral institutions had the empowering, enriching, and enlightening conse­quences people hoped for when they decided to participate in the new order.

As sectoral institutions penetrated colonial society, non-Europeans identified and seized opportunities to use them for their own ends. The legal system was one arena in which each side tried to manipulate the other. Paradoxically, the more effective the colonized were in using externally imposed laws, the less likely they were to challenge colonialism’s basic institutions and values. Noting that during the first century of Spanish rule Peru’s Indians tried with increasing frequency to advance their interests through legal appeals, Steve Stern makes a broader point: “A strategy of defense which depended upon colonial institutions to resist exploitation tied the natives more firmly than ever to Hispanic power.... To the extent that reliance on a juridical system becomes a dominant strategy of protection for an oppressed class or social group, it may undermine the possibility of organizing a more ambitious assault aimed at toppling the exploitative structure itself. When this happens, a functioning system of justice contributes to the hegemony of a ruling class.”³