The colony clarified everything. No pretense. The superior races have all rights over the inferior races. Just appetite with a flag. The Native Code (French: Code de l’indigénat) listed the methods: collective punishment, arbitrary seizure, forced labor. A manual for extraction. It moved through paper, officers, courts. Slow machinery.

In the cracks, a counter-machinery assembled. Not ideology. Sentences. Passed grandmother to child.

A miserable year is better than a condemned fate: The body bends. The line continues.
Sacrifice your beard to save your head: Release before they grip. The trap closes on nothing.
Only the rocks remain in the river: You are water. We are geology. You will leave. We will stay.
The gallows, shared, is a picnic: Betray and survive alone. Alone is worse than dead. The offer is worthless.

The colonizer had decrees. The colonized had sentences. One moved through institutions. The other through air. The decrees are in archives. The proverbs are still in use.