EXIT, AVOIDANCE, SABOTAGE

Because collaboration and accommodation accepted some aspects of the colonial situation, it is not surprising that these strategies helped consolidate European con­trol. Less plausible is the notion that strategies premised on negative responses also had system-maintaining effects.

Some colonized people exercised the exit option literally: they physically es­caped. Indigenous groups in frontier zones relocated deep in forests, swamps, moun­tains, and deserts, where the environment was so harsh that invaders dared not follow. Amerindians in northern South America have retreated into the rain forest from their earliest contacts with Europeans to the present day.⁴ Along the forested eastern flank of the Andes Inca elites fleeing the conquistadors established a kingdom whose centers in Machu Picchu and Espiritu Pampa were so well insulated they were not identified by outsiders until the twentieth century.⁵

Exit is a recurring theme in the history of African slaves in the New World. Escapees formed self-governing communities in the mountainous hinterlands of Caribbean islands and in South America’s interior. They were called maroons, and their communities were known as quilombos, palenques, mocambos, and mambises. The best-known maroon polity was Palmares, in Brazil’s Pernambuco region. Formed in the early 1600s and composed of several thousand people, it retained independence for almost a century despite repeated assaults by Portuguese expeditionary forces. In Jamaica, maroons led by Cudjoe launched guerrilla attacks on plantation owners and colonial troops between 1729 and 1739. The English government had to sign a peace treaty in 1739 acknowledging the autonomy of several maroon settlements.⁶

Physical escape was less frequent in the Old World than in the New.

The ultimate—and ultimately tragic—escape was suicide. An unknown num­ber of Amerindians in Hispaniola, confronted with the dual disaster of slaughter by Spanish settlers and decimation of entire communities by disease, killed themselves by jumping off cliffs or eating poisonous plants. Some Africans committed suicide shortly after arriving in the New World rather than submit to enslavement in a strange land.

Other people resorted to psychological rather than physical forms of exit. Some believed that if they acted in a certain way Europeans would disappear, and they could return to an idealized precontact existence. Expectations of this sort led many South African Xhosa-speakers in 1856-57 to kill their own cattle. Similar hopes of restoring a bygone era were evoked in the Ghost Dance movement, which arose in the late nineteenth century among North American Plains Indians. Some prophets spoke of a millennium in which Europeans would all be killed or driven away. This was the appeal of Kitawala, a version of the Jehovah’s Witnesses Watch Tower mes­sage that spread rapidly throughout southern Africa in the early twentieth century.⁸ Alcohol and drugs offered individuals other kinds of escape from the demoralizing circumstances of their lives.

Those who took the exit option challenged European control in several ways. The existence of an Inca govemment-in-exile and of independent maroon commu­nities showed that it was possible to construct alternatives to subjugation.

In other respects, however, the exit option may have had the unintended effect of maintaining European control. Its appeal as an alternative to the presumably hopeless route of mass rebellion affirmed the coercive edge rulers held over their subjects. However appropriate exit may have appeared as the only thing left under the circumstances, still it was a tactic of evading rather than confronting the enemy. The enemy may in fact have been strengthened when some of its ablest and bravest foes left. The most maroons could expect in relations with a slaveholding regime was coexistence: acknowledgment of their autonomy on condition that they cease raid­ing areas Europeans controlled and return newly escaped slaves. These were the terms of the treaty between Cudjoe and the English in Jamaica.

Exit held high potential for self-inflicted harm, most obviously with suicide. Alcoholism hurt not only the individual addict but also the family and community that had to cope with the addict’s behavior. When Xhosas killed their cattle they only increased dependence on whites, the very people their sacrifice was intended to expel.

For those wanting to resist exploitation yet unable or unwilling to exit the system, avoidance and sabotage were attractive options. They were what James Scott aptly terms “weapons of the weak.”¹⁰ Individuals, even entire communities, might mysteriously disappear when the tax collector or labor recruiter showed up. On occasion religious leaders urged followers not to contaminate themselves by using European consumer goods.¹¹ A person might agree to carry out a command, then do so as slowly as possible or deliberately disobey. A classic avoidance technique was pretending to be too stupid or insufficiently fluent in the colonizer’s language to understand orders. People learned the enormously useful skill of lying with a straight face when asked if they knew about a crime or an alleged plot. As for sabotage, miners withheld some of the precious metals and stones they were expected to turn over to supervisors. Plantation slaves burned cane fields, tossed objects into intricate machinery, and laced owners’ food with poison and ground glass. Domestic servants took home small amounts of flour and cooking oil when the day’s work in their employers’ kitchens was done. Accountants altered financial records. The possibili­ties for disruptive initiatives were legion.

Avoidance and sabotage undermined the colonial enterprise by denying colo­nizers resources they might have obtained had their exploitation methods been more efficient. Such actions also helped the colonized. They reduced burdens and re­distributed resources from rich to poor. They gave otherwise powerless people the quiet satisfaction of having once in a while turned the tables on their oppressors.

At the same time, avoidance and sabotage may have had unintended system­stabilizing effects. Though marginally hurting the colonial economy, they did vir­tually nothing to challenge the political status quo.

Avoidance and sabotage were typically the work of individuals acting quietly and furtively in one small place. They were typically ad hoc responses to specific opportunities for subversion rather than components of a long-term strategy for societal change. As such they were the antithesis of the sustained, coordinated, overt, collective action needed to liberate an entire territory. These options did not produce institutions. Hence they were unable effectively to challenge institutions command­ing colonialism’s sectoral heights. For these reasons rulers generally perceived avoid­ance and sabotage as tolerable inconveniences, not calamities calling for drastic countermeasures.