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would be considered criminal for many allies: Redistributing resources, betraying institu
tions, weaponizing one’s privilege and access . . . ’ (Grundy, Jiang, and Niiya 2019). Indeed,
it is suggested, terms such as ‘solidarity’ or ‘allyship’ should be replaced by ‘accomplice’
(Indigenous Action 2014).
Fanon insisted that ‘Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it
cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact
measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content’
(Fanon 2001 [1961], 36). Evans (1997) oral history project, documenting French resis
tance to the Algerian war traces the motivations and inspiration of those French citizens,
living in France who joined in solidarity with the Algerian struggle against the French
army. Taking advantage of being white French they provided ‘safe houses, passing FLN
members across frontiers, printing the FLN press, the transporting of arms and explo
sives’ (Evans 1997, 176). He describes how they struggled between national and ideolo
gical identities. The tacit understanding by FLN members of the lines of difference is
indicated in the insistence of Rabah Bouaziz, when interviewed by Evans, that ‘the FLN
never asked French people to participate in armed attacks. [. . .] the FLN was on the front
line, whilst the role of the French underground was to provide infrastructures of support’
(ibid., 177).
We can, following Gordimer’s critique of Memmi in the introduction to his book, look
at the South African anti-Apartheid struggle, where there were a minority of colonisers who
understood that ‘colonialism had misshapen them, too; its privileges were distortions, and
the loss of these in post-colonial society would be and is normalcy they had never had
a chance to experience’. (Gordimer 2003, 39). However, despite staying a minority:
to suggest that the coloniser’s rebellion could serve no purpose in liberation of the colonized is
to deny the possibility [. . .] of a range of actions taken by rebels among them: from Steward
Gore-Brown accompanying UNIP’s Kenneth Kaunda to negotiate return of a territory, named
for the arch-imperialist Rhodes, back from the British for rebirth as Zambia, to Ronnie Kasrils
becoming Head of Military Intelligence and Joe Slovo the chief strategist in South Africa’s
liberation army, Umkhonto we Sizwe during the guerrilla war against Apartheid. Men and
women Leftist colonizers in South Africa were imprisoned, as Nelson Mandela and thousands
of his fellow black South Africans were, or tortured, as Steve Biko was, for activities with the
liberation movements [. . .] (ibid., 37)
Both examples highlight settlers/colonisers’ support for armed forms of resistance,
whether through actual participation or by providing enabling infrastructure. While
highlighting colonisers’ participation in anticolonial struggle, both these cases underline
the prime role of the colonised as agents of change and transformation, while carving
space for the inclusion of members of the colonising societies, in the struggle for
liberation, equality and justice.
The lesson I draw from comparative struggles, is that the lines of difference must
always be openly acknowledged in any attempt to address the question of resistance from
within, its contribution to the larger struggle and potential to contribute to genuine
indigenous-led decolonisation. The important distinction between leaders and alliessupporters has also guided indigenous-led struggles in North America. The activist and
scholar Shiri Pasternak, who self identifies as a ‘twice settler’ (her mother from Israel,
herself Canadian born), describes a decolonial approach to participating in indigenous
self-determination struggles. This requires: