The Great Colonial Alibi: How the Colonized Became Willing Partners in Their Own Subjugation
An
unflinching indictment of the post-colonial myth that blames empires for
divisions that were always already there
The
most durable lie of the post-colonial era is that European empires manufactured
the ethnic, religious, and caste fractures that continue to tear Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East apart. This narrative is comforting. It allows the
descendants of the colonized to cast themselves as innocent victims, their
hands clean of the blood that has been spilled for generations. It is also,
with very few exceptions, historically illiterate. Colonialism was not a
creator; it was an opportunist. The divisions were deep, endemic, and
indigenous long before a single European ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
The colonials walked into houses already ablaze and simply poured gasoline on
the flames that best served their extractive interests. The post-colonial
elites who cry "colonialism made us divided" are not telling a
historical truth; they are telling a political convenience, one that absolves
them of accountability for their own governance failures, electoral
manipulations, and economic looting. The colonials are dead. The empires have
crumbled. The divisions remain because we choose to keep them alive.
Consider the transatlantic slave trade, that great moral
horror of the modern age. It is conventionally presented as a European crime
against a passive African continent. The historical record tells a far more
uncomfortable story. African kingdoms were the primary suppliers of human
cargo, and they grew spectacularly wealthy from the commerce. The Kingdom of
Dahomey waged annual wars specifically to capture prisoners for European slave
forts. Its economy was entirely dependent on selling humans for muskets and
brass. The Ashanti Empire traded gold and slaves with the British, Dutch, and
Danes, using European firearms to dominate neighboring Akan states, who in turn
raided further inland. The Oyo Empire captured Yoruba and Nupe peoples and sold
them to Portuguese traders at the coast. When Oyo collapsed in the 1830s, its
own vassal states simply continued the trade independently.
The scale of African agency is staggering. Between 1525 and
1866, over 12.5 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. Every single
one was captured, marched to the coast, and sold by fellow Africans. The
Europeans did not go into the interior; they waited on the coast, as the
historian Hugh Thomas reminds us. The slaves were brought to them by African
merchants who had established extensive commercial networks. The historian John
Thornton puts it bluntly: African political and economic elites were not
passive victims but active participants who shaped the slave trade to their own
advantage. Walter Rodney, whose work is often cited by anti-colonial theorists,
admitted as much: the slave trade was not initiated by Europeans; it was an
African institution that Europeans expanded. The East African slave trade was a
partnership of convenience between Arab merchants and African chiefs who
supplied the human cargo. The warriors, caravan guides, and porters were
overwhelmingly African. The Arabs simply bought the captives at the coast. To
pretend otherwise is to infantilize an entire continent and deny its people the
dignity of agency.
India tells the same story. The British East India Company
did not conquer the subcontinent with British soldiers. It conquered India with
Indian soldiers—sepoys—who joined because the British offered better terms than
their own rulers. By 1850, the Bengal Army alone had over 300,000 sepoys, 80
percent of whom were high-caste Hindus from Awadh and Bihar. They joined
because the British paid twice what local Nawabs paid, offered pensions,
respected caste privileges, and provided predictable, reliable wages. The sepoy
was not a traitor; he was a rational economic actor making a choice between two
employers. The British were simply the better option.
The recruitment patterns shifted over time, revealing the
British as opportunists following existing social fractures. In the early
period, they recruited heavily from low-caste and marginalised groups who had
no better employment options under their own caste-Hindu landlords. Later, they
shifted to high-caste Rajputs and Brahmins, believing them to be more
"martial." After the 1857 Rebellion, they pivoted again, favouring
Sikhs, Gurkhas, Pathans, and Dalit Mahars—groups that had no loyalty to the
high-caste rebellion. The 1857 Rebellion itself was not a nationalist uprising.
It was a contract dispute triggered by greased cartridges that high-caste
sepoys believed threatened their caste purity. The historian Kim Wagner
observes that the rebels were not fighting for India; they were fighting for
their caste, their pay, and their privileges. Nationalism was a post-hoc
invention.
The Indian princes and zamindars were equally complicit. In
1757, Mir Jafar, the Nawab of Bengal's own commander-in-chief, betrayed his
master at Plassey for the promise of the throne. In the Second Anglo-Maratha
War, the British allied with the Sindhia and Gaekwad factions against the
Bhonsle and Holkar—Maratha against Maratha. The British did not create these
rivalries; they merely exploited them. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 made
Bengali zamindars the de facto tax collectors for the British. These landlords
evicted peasants, seized lands, and called in the British army to crush their
own tenants' rebellions—all while maintaining their ancestral estates. The
British did not create the zamindari system; they inherited it and reinforced
it, using existing elites as intermediaries.
The Girmitiya system, which operated from 1834 to 1920,
shipped over 1.2 million Indians to Fiji, the Caribbean, Mauritius, and South
Africa after the abolition of slavery. The dominant narrative presents this as
forced abduction by British planters. The historical record reveals a different
story. The recruitment was entirely in the hands of Indian middlemen. The
recruiters, the arkatis, were local agents, often from the same villages or
castes as the labourers, paid a commission per head they delivered to the
depots. The landlords encouraged or coerced deeply indebted peasants to sign
up, collecting a bonus while simultaneously ridding themselves of tenants who
could not pay rent. The headmen on the ships and plantations were fellow
Indians who acted as foremen, enforcing discipline and taking a cut of the
workers' wages. They were ethnically and culturally Indian.
The Girmitiyas were not passive victims. In
nineteenth-century India, famines killed over 20 million between 1850 and 1900.
Indian moneylenders charged interest rates as high as fifty to one hundred
percent per year, trapping peasants in generational debt. The British offered a
written contract: five years of labour, followed by either a free passage home
or a parcel of land. For a landless Dalit or a starving peasant from the United
Provinces, the plantation in Fiji offered predictable food, shelter, and a
legal wage—things their own caste-Hindu landlords had never guaranteed. The
post-Girmit reality was equally indigenous. Indian moneylenders in Fiji and
South Africa enslaved the Girmitiyas in debt all over again, long after the
British contract expired. The British provided the legal framework; the Indians
provided the supply chain, the supervision, and the subsequent debt bondage.
The Middle East offers yet another chapter in this sordid
tale of indigenous complicity. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 is routinely
blamed for the region's sectarian divisions. But the Ottomans had already
divided the region along religious and tribal lines for centuries. The Ottoman
Millet System codified religious communities into autonomous legal entities.
Orthodox Patriarchs, Armenian Bishops, and Jewish Chief Rabbis all collected
taxes and enforced justice within their flocks. These local religious elites
actively collaborated with the Ottomans because it gave them exclusive power
over their own communities. The Ottomans did not create sectarian divisions;
they institutionalized them, using religious elites as intermediaries for
taxation and governance.
The Arab Revolt of 1916 was not a nationalist uprising.
Sharif Hussein of Mecca was a Hashemite tribal chief looking to expand his own
dynasty. His sons were given thrones in Iraq and Transjordan, not because the
British loved them, but because they were the most effective local
collaborators. Meanwhile, the Saud tribe, in alliance with the Wahhabi
religious movement, was actively conquering the Arabian Peninsula with British
gold and arms, fighting against the Hashemites—Arab against Arab. The British did
not impose tribes on the Middle East; they found tribes and worked through
them. The divisions were real, historical, and deeply entrenched.
Post-colonial leaders continued the same tactics. Saddam
Hussein in Iraq was a Sunni who used his own Tikriti tribe to dominate a
Shia-majority country. He did not learn this from the British; he inherited it
from centuries of Sunni Mamluk and Ottoman rule. Bashar al-Assad in Syria is an
Alawite ruling over a Sunni majority. His father built the regime by stacking
the military with Alawite and Christian officers—a classic tribal-military
alliance. The Gulf monarchies are tribal feudal states that have maintained
power by distributing oil wealth to their own tribes and systematically
excluding others. The modern Middle Eastern states are not artificial creations
of colonialism; they are the products of local dynasties, tribal alliances, and
sectarian calculations that predate European intervention by centuries.
Southeast Asia and Latin America follow the same pattern.
The Sultan of Johor invited the British to Singapore in 1819, hoping to use
them against the Dutch and the Siamese. He signed treaties that gave the
British land in exchange for pensions, protection, and recognition of his own
dynastic claims. Southeast Asian rulers were not victims of European expansion;
they were its initiators, using Europeans as mercenaries against their own
rivals. The Chinese Kapitan System in Dutch-controlled Batavia and British-controlled
Malaya appointed local Chinese headmen to manage Chinese immigrant populations.
These Kapitan collected taxes, adjudicated disputes, and controlled the opium,
gambling, and tin mining monopolies. They were the enforcers of colonial policy
and enriched themselves immensely.
In Latin America, Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs not
with five hundred Spaniards, but with tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan, Totonac,
and Cempoalan warriors—native enemies of the Aztec Empire who saw the Spanish
as useful allies against their Mexica oppressors. The conquest was not a
European achievement; it was a coalition of indigenous peoples who used the
Spanish to settle their own scores. Similarly, Francisco Pizarro defeated the
Incas with the help of the Huancas and Cañaris—tribes subjugated by the Incas.
After independence, the Criollos, the Spanish-descended elites, simply replaced
the Spanish Crown. They continued to extract indigenous labour through existing
hacienda systems and systematically disenfranchised indigenous populations. The
colonial era ended, but the hierarchies it reinforced continued.
The post-colonial elites who cry "colonialism made us
divided" are lying by omission. They are saying, "They started
it," when what they really mean is, "We have continued it, but we
want you to blame them for our choices today." The Indian politician who
uses caste arithmetic for electoral politics is not a victim of British policy;
he is a rational actor perpetuating an indigenous hierarchy for personal gain.
Caste violence in India continues unabated, with Dalits still being attacked by
upper-caste vigilantes. The British did not invent the khap panchayats that
order honour killings; they found them and used them.
The African dictator who purges rival tribes is not a victim
of colonial identity cards; he is a tribal strongman using the same logic that
African kings used to raid their neighbours for slaves. Idi Amin expelled
Asians and favoured his own Kakwa tribe, purging Acholi and Langi officers.
Robert Mugabe used the Ndebele-Shona divide to massacre twenty thousand Ndebele
in the 1980s. His methods were homegrown; he learned them from his own
liberation war, not from the British. The Middle Eastern monarch who uses
sectarianism to deflect from economic mismanagement is not a victim of
Sykes-Picot; he is a dynastic ruler who inherited the same tribal and religious
divisions that the Ottomans used to maintain power for centuries.
The historian Niall Ferguson has provocatively observed that
the post-colonial world is not a world freed from colonial oppression; it is a
world where local elites have taken over the colonial structures and filled
them with their own varieties of oppression. The colonials were evil, yes. They
were extractive, violent, and racist. But they were not the source of evil.
They were the amplifier. The poison was already in the blood. The colonials
merely found the right syringe.
Every colonial power—British, French, Dutch, Portuguese,
Spanish, Belgian—was an opportunist, not a creator. They walked into houses
that were already on fire and simply poured gasoline on the flames that
benefited them most. But the gasoline was not their invention. It was the envy
of one African king against another; the greed of an Indian zamindar; the
sectarian fury of an Ottoman pasha; the tribal ambition of a Saharan caravan
leader. The colonials did not introduce exploitation, hierarchy, or cruelty. They
simply industrialized and globalized it.
The post-colonial narrative requires a passive, innocent
victim—a noble savage who was corrupted by the West. But history shows us that
the sepoy was not a passive victim; he was a rational actor choosing a better
employer. The Girmitiya was not kidnapped; he was escaping debt and famine,
often recruited by his own countrymen. The African king was not innocent; he
was a slaver who grew wealthy on human cargo. The Arab sheikh was not a
nationalist; he was a tribal dynast using British gold to crush his rivals. The
Indian zamindar was not a freedom fighter; he was a collaborator who maintained
his estates at the expense of his tenants. To deny them agency is to deny them
their humanity. They were not puppets; they were players. They made
choices—often brutal, always self-interested—within the constraints of their
time.
History is not a morality play; it is a record of rational
actors making brutal choices within the constraints of their time. The
colonials, the African kings, the Indian sepoys, the Girmitiyas, the Arab
sheikhs, the Latin American caudillos—they all played the same game. The only
difference is that today, we have the luxury of looking back and pretending we
would have acted differently. We would not have. The African king who sold his
prisoners for muskets was not evil; he was building a state. The sepoy who
joined the British for twice the pay was not a traitor; he was feeding his
family. The Girmitiya who signed the contract was not a dupe; he was escaping a
famine. The post-colonial politician who uses caste arithmetic is not a
colonial puppet; he is a rational actor perpetuating a system that benefits
him.
The colonials are dead. The empires are gone. The divisions
remain—because we choose to keep them alive. To deny agency to the colonized is
to deny their humanity. They were not passive clay molded by foreign hands;
they were active agents shaping their own oppression and liberation. The poison
was already in the blood. The colonials merely found the right syringe. The
post-colonial myth of colonial origination is a convenient lie—one that
absolves local elites of accountability, enriches the corrupt, and perpetuates
the very divisions it claims to lament. The truth is uncomfortable, but it is
the only path to genuine reckoning. We are not victims of history. We are the
authors of our own divisions. And until we accept that, we will remain
enslaved—not to colonialism, but to our own refusal to grow up.
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