All is movement and change—political and otherwise—in the contemporary Pacific islands. It seems so especially to the generation who knew the island scene before the Second World War when economies were miniscule and dependent and when paternalists held government reins—when, for example, if “Native Regulations” were enforced, the men of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony could not take their canoes to sea between November and March. The change must also seem dramatic to island leaders who were once colonial pupils and are now ministers and heads of state.
Fiji is another striking illustration of the Pacific-wide tendency toward change and progress. Ratu Sir George Cakobau, as governor general of Fiji, occupies a gubernatorial dwelling at Suva which is the successor of the one at Levuka to which his great-grandfather came a century ago to pay courtesy calls on the colonial governor. Fiji became a dominion on October 10, 1970, but the transition to independence was difficult. Of all the major Pacific dependencies, Fiji was the one most inclined to retain its metropolitan ties—for the reason that the Fijians feared that the preponderant numbers of Indians would dominate the political life of the islands as they already dominated their economic life. With the adoption of the Independence Constitution, the protection of Fijian rights has been assured, and the Indians have recognized that their physical safety depends on their accepting a second-class political position. Consequently, race relations in Fiji have been far more placid than they have been in such places as Mauritius and Malaysia. Even so, extremes of Fijian nationalism have sometimes been manifest at times of elections. In contrast, the Indiandominated National Federation party is internally divided, and when in 1977 it won a surprise victory in the general elections,
the indecisiveness of its leaders caused foreign observers to wonder whether it had the will to govern. As in other island groups, race relations in Fiji will probably be determined not only by constitutional compromise but also by the general state of the island economy, which in turn may be shaped by such imponderables as emigration and the vicissitudes of great-power politics.
Four days after independence, Fiji joined the United Nations, an appropriate step since it owed its changed status not only to its own nascent nationalism but also to Britain’s anxiety from the early 1960s to be free of a potential source of embarrassment at the UN. And, in other parts of the Pacific too where Britain or its dominions have ruled, the United Nations 1960 Declaration on Colonialism had an effect. In New Guinea the pace of change perceptibly quickened after 1962, when a UN Visiting Mission advised Australia that, among other things, it should establish a House of Assembly with a large majority of elected members. The Assembly was first convened in June 1964. Elected members began to serve as quasi ministers; parties formed; and after a visit by the then Labour opposition leader in 1969–1970 the pace accelerated to the point where independence was declared in September 1975.
The emergence of “Niugini” as one of the largest island nations commanded the world’s attention because of its size and also because it seemed so unlikely a prospect for independence. But it was only the most recent instance of a series of transfers of power that had been in progress in the Pacific for over a decade. In each case the circumstances of the transfer were unique. In January 1962 Western Samoa led the way by securing independence from New Zealand. Samoa was the pacesetter because, in the words of the late J. W. Davidson, “physical and social conditions made political organization on a national scale easy, and Samoan distaste for alien rule made it inevitable.”
1 The Cook Islanders in 1965 chose an entirely different course—not independence but self-government in a special relationship of “free association” with New Zealand. Another type of autonomy can be illustrated in the case of Nauru, which became a republic in January 1968. Nauru is an independent state all of eight and a quarter square miles in extent, isolated in the central Pacific with a population of only 3,500. Until recently it was rich in phosphate and (unlike its companion phosphate island and nearest neighbor, Ocean) the phosphate royalties were secured to the islanders themselves.
New, articulate, and highly self-aware island nations have come
into being. Until recently island leaders were often patronized at meetings of the metropolitan-dominated South Pacific Commission. They now also meet in the South Pacific Forum, where their voices have particular resonance and dominance even though Australia and New Zealand too are members. At these meetings, the heads of government of the island groups can make effective decisions that are at least binding on their own nations. And at the South Pacific Forum political discussion cannot be cut short by political or economic threat by the metropolitan governments—not even by France, the government which is most averse to political advancement in the area.
All these developments have come about since the Second World War, partly as a result of forces released locally by the war itself, but still more as part of the general worldwide movement toward decolonization.
In 1939 the Pacific islands’ condition and status were much the same as they had been in 1900. The islands were footnotes to imperial pages on which the text had been mainly printed in Africa and the Orient. Except perhaps in the case of fruit shipped to Australia and New Zealand, and some Fijian gold, their produce competed in European markets already well supplied by tropical colonies closer at hand and possessed of greater productive efficiency.
When the Second World War broke out, the Pacific islands were divided politically into nineteen colonial units of varying status. These territories were governed by six metropolitan powers whose rule in many cases had been established in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In many instances the assumption of imperial responsibility had been unplanned and reluctant. For instance, the southern Solomon Islands had been made into a British protectorate in 1893 to keep the French out. The same thing had happened to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1892, when the prospect of a German presence there had similarly prompted Whitehall into action which it would gladly have avoided. Both these territories were acquired with a minimum of imperial concern and outlay. The British Solomon Islands were helped to meet their administrative costs by the copra exports of Levers Pacific Plantations Ltd., which had been encouraged to come into the protectorate by the first resident commissioner. The Gilbert and Ellice Islands were sustained by the royalty they took from Ocean Island’s phosphate. It was to secure extraction rights to the phosphate that Ocean was annexed in 1900, before which time the
protecting power had not considered it part of the Gilbert group.
2In both territories the overall administrative structure was rudimentary: a resident commissioner with a small headquarters staff and a scattering of district officers. In the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, it was true, local government flourished, following traditional patterns in the island councils and—perhaps especially in the Ellice—able to evade the paternalistic hand of the resident commissioners by virtue of remoteness from the administrative center. In the Solomons there was no such clear traditional basis. There district officers and government-appointed headmen held uneasy, superficial sway over extensive populations on large, mountainous islands; and it was not until 1940 that attempts were first made to establish court systems and informal councils giving statutory sanction to existing indigenous practice.
3These two territories owed immediate allegiance to the high commissioner for the western Pacific, who until 1952 was additionally—and preeminently—the governor of Fiji. The high commissioner could also claim some allegiance from two curiosities of the Pacific political world, the Kingdom of Tonga and the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides.
As Hartley Grattan has written, “in an era in the Pacific when native progress toward self-government, let alone political independence, was commonly regarded as a fantasy of disordered idealists,” Tonga still retained the sovereignty which had been established in the mid-nineteenth century by Siaosi Tupou I, whose dynasty rules Tonga today.
4 The kingdom’s foreign relations were long conducted by Britain under a treaty of 1900, the signing of which had caused Tongans considerable anguish since it carried overtones of a protectorate; and a resident British agent and consul had some voice in internal financial affairs. The sovereignty of the islands, however, was no longer endangered once some turbulent passages in the early 1900s had been negotiated, and Tonga stands out as the only one among the several kingdoms of the nineteenth-century Pacific (Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa) which has never lost its independence.
The New Hebrides are a very different case. Joint French and British administrations have worked there along divergent lines under a Convention of 1906, drawn up as a kind of afterthought to the Entente Cordiale. The principal issue between the two sets of nationals residing in the island group—as also between Europeans and the New Hebrideans—was the fate of land allegedly purchased from the latter. Many thousands of hectares were claimed
with the greater number of the deeds in the hands of a company (the
Société Française des Nouvelles-Hébrides) which was under French government subsidy. Here as elsewhere, the future of land claims depended on the criteria laid down for testing their validity. In Fiji in the nineteenth century, Britain applied the following tests of validity among others: right of vendor to sell, adequacy of price paid, and effective European occupation. In Samoa the same tests were also applied by Britain, together with Germany and the United States. In the negotiations over the New Hebrides convention, the British representatives accepted the provisions of French law that prescriptive right was accorded by a documentary title alone even when the land had not been occupied. The result was that some 600,000 hectares of land, in French hands as far as formal title was concerned but mostly unoccupied, were put beyond effective challenge. Moreover, the common administration set up by the convention, the teeth of which was the Joint Court, was quite incapable in the early years of combating the French residency’s determination to allow its nationals a free hand in pressing their trading and above all their plantation interests. No effort was spared by French officials in the protection of disputed land or in the removal by naval force of any New Hebridean who was more effective than others in local opposition to that
mission civilisatrice of France. In this group of islands that meant the establishment of a white plantation economy.
5In the wholly French territories of French Polynesia and New Caledonia, the
mission civilisatrice had free rein. The effect was to keep both colonies in a degree of political as well as cultural subjection to the metropolitan power that was unusual even for the politically lethargic Pacific. “‘Nous sommes ici la France’ remained and remains the doctrine,” as Harold Brookfield has written.
6 And this dogma was none the less pervasive in its effect despite the fact that each colony enjoyed an active Territorial Assembly.
For French Polynesia, the policy of assimilation with the metro-pole was laid down by the Organic Decree of 1887, which provided for a governor, five heads of departments, a General Council of eighteen elected members with limited powers, and district councils overshadowed by direct local administration through French officers. This policy of assimilation continued substantially until the end of the Second World War, when it was reinforced by the colony’s being granted seats in the National Assembly, the Council of the Republic, and the Assembly of the French Union.
In the wake of the Indochina war and decolonization in Africa, substantial authority was transferred from Paris to Papeete by the
loi-cadre of 1957. Nevertheless, the structure of government remained centralized, substantially on the metropolitan model. There was not much room for Tahitian as against assimilationist sentiment, and little sympathy was extended to nationalist leaders—so it proved when Pouvanaa a Oopa was jailed in 1958.
Leader of the
Rassemblement Démocratique des Populations-Tahitiennes, and deputy for French Polynesia in the National Assembly, Pouvanaa had initially sought autonomy for French Polynesia within the French Union and subsequently demanded complete independence. His cry of “Tahiti for the Tahitians” was silenced when he was imprisoned, ostensibly for having plotted to fire Papeete but more likely because in Charles de Gaulle’s recent referendum he had campaigned for independence. Pouvanaa has had active successors who have sought autonomy within the French Union. While their cause has been made popular among some voters by French nuclear testing from Tahiti, so equally has France’s determination to continue the tests made it the more reluctant to consider increased devolution of power. This determination has been reflected in heavy local expenditure, and the resultant boom in the Tahitian economy (inflationary and socially disastrous though it is) may have something to do with the defeat of the autonomist party at the Territorial Assembly elections of 1972.
7 However, the autonomists have recovered: in 1976 the Territorial Assembly refused to meet; and in 1977 the autonomist deputy in the National Assembly in Paris called for independence, rejecting new statutes with the claim that they tended to neutralize all political opposition in French Polynesia and give control of its natural resources to outside interests approved by Paris. Even so, internal autonomy rather than independence still appears to be the real object.
The issues raised by nuclear testing in French Polynesia were raised in similar fashion by “nickel” in New Caledonia. The history of New Caledonia under French rule, even more than that of French Polynesia, has been dominated by French concern for metropolitan problems—first to get rid of relapsed criminals, then to supply French metallurgical industries. The New Caledonian people have been relegated to the background even more than have the French Polynesians. In French Polynesia, indeed, politics has been in great part the playground of the people of mixed blood, in whose hands lies most of the economic wealth of the colony;
consequently, there is tension between them and the Polynesians, which is a potential source of conflict. Once granted, autonomy may well leave two potentially hostile groups face to face.
No such complication exists in the politics of New Caledonia, except insofar as there is tension between locally born French and metropolitans. The Melanesian population is only slightly more numerous than the European, while the other components of the population (Polynesian and Asian migrants) are transients attracted by the mines. The local assembly has wide budgetary powers and sends representatives to Paris, but nickel dominates and is so indissolubly tied to the metropole that the colony would appear to be indefinitely tied also. But, even in New Caledonia, there have appeared black nationalist youth movements whose aspirations are becoming politically important. They are Melanesian movements, and they take the hitherto despised name “kanaka” with pride. At the very least, internal autonomy is sought—though, according to Professor Jean Guiart, autonomy followed by independence would only serve to put the means of repression into the hands of the Europeans, for whose benefit the economy is currently geared. “Il n’est de l’intérêt de personne de voir se créer une mini-Rhodésie dans le Pacifique Sud.”
8Curiously enough, the political frustrations of autonomist French Polynesians and New Caledonians find a counterpart in the islands where the compatriots of President Woodrow Wilson have ruled—and where the system of mandates forever associated with his name has long obtained. The Caroline, Marshall, and Mariana islands came into German possession in the 1880s and 1890s and were exploited by Germany for copra. At the 1919 Peace Conference, they went to Japan, which in turn lost them in 1945 to the United States. Under United Nations supervision, they are now governed by America as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Washington has proved no less tenacious of its role in these islands than Paris has proved elsewhere, with similar metropolitan considerations in view. At Bikini atoll the Americans preceded France in nuclear testing in the Pacific, and the Pentagon’s continued interest in the territory for its defense value means that it is averse to Micronesia’s secession from American overlordship.
Only since the late 1960s have nationalist movements become important in Micronesia, and that development can be largely attributed to Washington’s establishment in 1965 of a central legislature, the Congress of Micronesia. J. W. Davidson, consultant to
the Future Political Status Commission set up by Congress in 1967, wrote before his death in April 1973:
It is not clear that this consciousness has been altogether welcome to the administering authority. Congress proposed a form of “free association” as the basis of Micronesia’s future relationship with the U.S., a form which would in some important respects restrict the latter’s powers in the Trust Territory. In particular, America would be able to use land for military purposes only in agreement with the government of Micronesia, whereas hitherto it has possessed wide latitude under the UN Agreement which recognizes Micronesia as a strategic territory. One alternative to free association has been seen by some Micronesians as independence. “Though they recognised their special dependence on American aid,” wrote Davidson, “many of them now envisage other—and less destructive—means of supporting their country as a separate political entity.”
10 American policy, on the contrary, has been to move Micronesia “into a permanent political relationship with the U.S. within our political framework”—as a National Security Council memorandum approved by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 reportedly expressed it. The blueprint outlining the means to achieve this end was confessedly one that would see the U.S. “moving counter to the anti-colonial movement…and…breaching its own policy…of not acquiring new territorial possessions.”
11 Once more, as in the case of French Polynesia, it seems likely that the material inducements offered by the metro-pole may prevail in some islands over fear of cultural dissolution; nevertheless, “Micronesian consciousness” is not proof against the sense of being preeminently a Marianan or a Marshallese.
In June 1975, a majority of the twelve thousand Marianans voted to sever their political ties with the rest of the Trust Territory and accept a relationship with the U.S. giving them their own constitution along with American citizenship and access to $150,000,000 in economic aid. The other five districts agreed on a constitution for themselves in November of that year, but secession is still
a possibility in the Marshalls and Palau. Though American officials speak of possible independence for the territories, the island economy remains cripplingly unbalanced, the government sector is inflated, and there are scant indigenous resources. As one observer puts it, “one wonders whether the islands might better be called a colony in the making rather than a developing country.”
12In the Pacific island world, the anticolonial movement had been led by Western Samoa. There internal division in the political system—so marked in the nineteenth century—became less visible in the twentieth, in part because of the experience of colonial rule: fourteen years under the Germans, then rule by New Zealand under a League of Nations mandate. Moreover, Samoa had a traditional sense of nationality. During the 1920s and 1930s an opposition movement called the “Mau” drew wide support; people of traditional and modern bent alike, Samoans, part-Samoans, and local Europeans—all worked together against the New Zealand administration. The League had scarcely been replaced by the United Nations when Western Samoa petitioned for self-government, and during the ensuing thirteen years progress toward independence was smoother than in most colonial territories. Independence in January 1962 was thus based on stability and essential harmony in Samoan political life, qualities that have in fact characterized it since then, perhaps in part because the government has taken care to respect the strongly autonomous aspirations of the villages.
Samoan stability has been largely due, then, to a firmly traditional society and a well-entrenched sense of nationality. It has been assisted by the attitude of New Zealand, whose long-continued nineteenth-century chauvinism gave way at last after the Second World War to a pragmatism and generosity which gave the country a more enviable record than some other decolonizing powers. This has also been true of New Zealand’s handling of its other major Pacific responsibility, the Cook Islands, which, having been given the choice, opted to follow the Samoan example in a modified form. In August 1965 the Cook Islands achieved internal self-government; however, since a significant percentage of the islanders are actually resident in New Zealand, since the islands are dependent on the New Zealand market, the new state exists on terms which provide it with access to New Zealand citizenship, consumers, and subventions.
Until recently New Zealand’s attitude toward the islanders on
the whole has been amiable and complacent and thus in some contrast with that of Australia. A change became visible, however, with the outbreak of troubles in Auckland in 1977 over the number of illegal island immigrants, who called attention to the country’s very real racial problem. Australia, on the other hand, had long kept its major Pacific responsibility, Papua-New Guinea, under a quaintly old-fashioned rule to which that much overworked term “paternal” may be accurately applied. As recently as 1961, the Australian Department of Territories seemed to have believed it would continue its highly centralized rule until the end of the century. The emergence of an educated elite was discouraged, and indigenous participation in government was thought practicable only at the most elementary level.
Australia’s other responsibility, the tiny Trust Territory of Nauru, was a classic case of economic imperialism. From 1907 the phosphate rock which covers four-fifths of the island was mined, first for the profit of Pacific Phosphate Company shareholders and then from 1919—when the company, in part German-owned, was replaced by the British Phosphate Commission—for the benefit of Australian and New Zealand farmers. The farmers were supplied with high-grade phosphate at a rate which, given the world prices normally obtaining, represented a subsidy paid by the Nauruan people.
13 From the Second World War onward, Nauruan phosphate was sold at between one-third and one-half of the open market price, while the royalty paid to Nauruans—two shillings a ton—was a mockery. It took hard bargaining with the help of outside economic experts, and directly against Australian interests, before the Nauruans’ determination to secure control of their sole, and diminishing, resource prevailed. In June 1967 an agreement was reached with the partner governments (Britain, Australia, and New Zealand) by which control of the industry passed to Nauruans. Supply was guaranteed, a price acceptable to both sides was decided, and arrangements were made for the BPC’s plant to be purchased by the new Republic of Nauru. This repossession of rights to the phosphate made independence a meaningful goal for the Nauruans. The alternative offered by Australia as the administering power, resettlement within the Commonwealth, had been unattractive to them. Nauruans wished to remain Nauruans.
The emergence of Nauru as an independent republic brought something like a Monaco to the Pacific. Nowhere was the Nauruan example more closely studied, nowhere more meaningful, than on
Rabe Island in the Fiji group where the Banabans—the people of phosphate-rich Ocean Island—live in discontented resettlement. Nor does anything so well illustrate the contrast between old and new in the Pacific world as the differences between Ocean Island and Nauru. While the Republic of Nauru conducts heavily subsidized air and shipping lines under its own flag, Ocean lies firmly in the colonial hands of the British phosphate commissioners. Most of the phosphate profits have gone to the revenue of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, of which distant Ocean was found to be an integral part only when phosphate had been identified there. Ocean’s people, moved to Rabe after the Second World War, live in some insecurity on the proceeds of their investments and the agricultural produce of their new island which, as fishermen-born and not natural farmers, they have not been enthusiastic about developing.
They have lived in hope that the British government would provide a more just settlement of the royalties question. They are also in ever present fear of the day—likely to fall in 1979—when all the phosphate will have been worked out. Perhaps, above all, they have sought vindication of their stand in order to reoccupy their original island homeland with a token community under a flag of their own. At the time of this writing, however, their claim for a greater share and their argument that the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony is not properly their financial responsibility have been before the courts, which have found for them morally but in one instance at least have awarded only derisory damages. The fact that economic imperialism so blatant—and, on the detailed evidence of the original transactions, so indefensible in its historical basis—should have persisted for so long is one small indication that the changing climate of world opinion since 1945 has not entirely erased the values and practices of the pre-1939 Pacific.
14Similar indications of the lasting effects of imperialism can be found in the New Hebrides. There the spirit of metropolitan domination which on the French side animated the Convention of 1906 has long remained very much alive. The French seem to have subscribed to a domino theory: if significant political advancement were permitted in the wild New Hebrides, considerably more would have to be allowed in the more sophisticated New Caledonia. In New Hebrides the French resident commissioner has been accustomed to stress the continuance of France’s “mission,” the length of time that must elapse before that mission can be
regarded as fulfilled, and the necessary preeminence of the metro-pole in policy making. This was reflected until recently in the rudimentary nature of political institutions in the territory, the key feature of which was the Advisory Council established in 1957 with only very limited functions. A perceptive observer has noted about more recent developments, “In late 1971 it was proposed to make it obligatory for the Resident Commissioners to consult the Advisory Council about the Condominium budget, taxes and duties and town-planning, and this alone is ample demonstration of the slowness in any distribution of formal political powers.”
15 The New Hebrides have lately received a great inflow of capital, attracted by the tax structure. The territory has been made an international tax haven, but not to the noticeable advantage of the islanders. On Espíritu Santo, the largest island in the group, there have been attempts at settlements by Americans and Europeans seeking an escape and a new start in the South Pacific.
The islanders have protested. On Santo the most active group has been one called Nagriamel, a traditionalist movement with some messianic overtones. Its immediate political object was originally to prevent European expansion into the interior. That expansion had its motivation in the transformation of the island European economy. Turning from cutting copra to running cattle, the Europeans have been moving inland to areas which, though recognized as alienated by the Joint Court, had hitherto remained unworked. The Santo people regarded these lands as their own. With their lands expropriated, the New Hebrideans see themselves increasingly as strangers in their own islands; small wonder that they are attracted to a movement like Nagriamel—all the more since it has now acquired a political sophistication infused by the educated native elite in government and church service.
16 As a result, as one analyst wrote in the early 1970s, “the tone of Advisory Council debates has undergone a sea change, and it seems even possible that in this one Melanesian territory the laggardly hand of metropolitan governments will be forced…by the vocal emergence of a xenophobic nationalism.”
17 The irony of the New Hebridean situation is that the intensely nationalistic Nagriamel seems to have been captured by a group of French investors in league with American land speculators. They have encouraged Nagriamel to declare Santo independent, their object being to secure an international refuge for the rule of unfettered capitalism.
There is also a nationalist movement among British-educated youth, who formed the New Hebridean National party in 1971.
In 1976 they renamed it the Vanuaaka party as a protest against the colonialist name “New Hebrides.” At present, the Vanuaaka party is pressing for immediate independence, flying in the teeth of French-oriented parties like Union des Communautés des Nouvelles-Hébrides and Mouvement de L’Action des Nouvelles-Hébrides, which prefer to contemplate taking that plunge in the 1980s, if it must be taken at all.
A fairly clear, and historically very understandable, gulf seems to exist between the British-educated—some would claim, British-inspired—Vanuaaka party and the older traditionalist elements like Nagriamel, now allied not only with the indigenous elites but also with the established French planters, an alliance facilitated by France’s policy of handing back the alienated land.
There is no doubt about the ambition of the Vanuaaka party. Its members paraded placards demanding independence for their islands and for New Caledonia in 1978, for Tahiti in 1979. Having won almost 60 percent of the votes in the first elections to the new Representative Assembly in November 1975, Vanuaaka closed the Assembly by boycott in 1977, when it was robbed of its majority by the creation of special seats for the chamber of commerce. At a conference on Tana in June 1977, the party declined to attend a meeting scheduled in Paris to resolve the impasse, saying that the meeting should be held on the spot. The party demanded immediate independence without fresh elections and promised that under its aegis education would be in English alone, not French. This led Nabanga, the French residency’s news sheet, to comment that the Vanuaaka party was formed by apprentice sorcerers with strong support from Protestant churches, which, as far as the party’s origins go, seems to be accurate enough. And, if the apprentice sorcerers had intended primarily to press Paris to accept at least the principle of independence for the New Hebrides, they seem to have won.
In the case of the Solomon Islands, by contrast, London’s instinct to decolonize has had fewer fetters. Metropolitan thinking has been more in step with indigenous aspirations, perhaps even ahead of them. The Solomon Islands are still of doubtful economic viability, even in prospect. Politically they are less fragmented than the New Hebrides, though local differences remain strong. Britain’s main anxiety clearly has been to get them off its hands. Until 1969 that desire had been demonstrated conventionally enough; an Advisory Council was established shortly after the war,
building upon the earlier District Councils, and Legislative and Executive councils were created in the early 1960s. The indigenous response, however, was disappointing, and a fairly radical—though not novel—solution was now attempted. In 1969 a single Governing Council was established, with seventeen elected and nine official members divided into four overlapping committees, the chairmen of which were virtually ministers. In principle this experiment was directed toward achieving consensus in the Melanesian style. The attempt was no doubt admirable, but it failed. The British then introduced a more conventional ministerial system, reportedly in response to local opinion. Internal self-government was achieved in January 1977, and the islands became independent in July 1978. The expectation is that the Solomon Islands will become a republic on the first anniversary of independence.
As in the Solomon Islands, political development in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands was pressed by London during the 1960s. There, as in other island groups, constitution making has a complexity that seems remote from the people’s understanding. Nevertheless, a series of councils was created, leading in 1974 to a Legislative Assembly and a Council of Ministers. With internal self-government achieved in January 1977 and independence just over the horizon, finance is a pressing problem. It is hardly surprising, though perhaps unjust, that on the phosphate question local feeling is decidedly that the displaced Banabans are Gilbertese and that the resources of Ocean Island can fairly be used to finance the entire Gilbert and Ellice group. The problems of the colony—political and financial as well—have been vastly complicated by the decision of the culturally distinct Ellice Islanders, who provide a high proportion of the civil servants, to secede. Rather against London’s wishes, they formed their own state, Tuvalu, in order to escape Gilbertese resentment at their ubiquity in government service and to insure their cultural identity. And so the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, two island groups associated together for more than three generations under British rule, will soon come separately to independence. In each case the constitution will be a modified version of the Westminster model. But Westminster itself seems determined to insist that the secessionist principle applied to the Ellice Islanders cannot be extended to the Banabans, who so eagerly want to apply it to Ocean Island, because the Gilbertese do not agree. Here is a curious illustration of the paradox of colonial self-determination. The Ellice Islanders have applied the principle and apparently have won, but where should the line
be drawn? Are the claims of the Banabans not equally valid? Apparently the British and the Gilbertese do not think so, because the economic resources of Ocean Island (though not those of the Ellice Islands) are necessary to support the Gilberts. In any case the Ellice Islands have seceded, and the new mini-state of Tuvalu with its seven thousand people and its highly dubious economy is an accomplished fact. It has been called “secession in the defence of identity”
18—an impulse that manifests itself in many other parts of the Pacific as well.
The same impulse is observable also in Niugini, the largest of the Pacific island territories. There is a burgeoning sense of nationalism among some Papuans which may lead to a demand for an independent state. A nationalist sentiment, more serious in its dimensions, can also be found in copper-rich Bougainville. As one of the Bougainville separatist leaders says plainly: “Our fear is that we will always be a fixed, unchallengeable, hopeless minority in the midst of an overwhelming majority.”
19 The black Bougainvillians’ sense of ethnicity owes much to the feeling that they are simply exchanging white colonialism for the “red-skinned” Niugini counterpart. Their sense of ethnic identity is heightened by outrage at the changes in landscape and lifestyle caused by copper mining. Doubtless it has also been increased by a recognition that, in good times for copper, royalties would support an independent Bougainville—perhaps in federation with the northern Solomon Islands—whereas now Bougainville copper underpins the dominance of Port Moresby. This is a viewpoint which Banabans might understand, but it is not attractive to the national leaders who are committed to a united Niugini. Nonetheless, those leaders talk of conciliation and consensus rather than of force. The model of provincial government recently established for the northern Solomons may afford a useful compromise, since each side in its own fashion views it as a satisfactory “Melanesian way.”
For that matter islanders throughout the Pacific, from Niugini to Tahiti, plead for the Melanesian, or Fijian, or Samoan, or Tahitian way. For instance, an observer, seeing the official cars leaving Government House in Fiji with turtles to distribute to adherents of the Vunivalu of Bau, knows that “change” is often superficial; by no means is it clear that the great chief’s outlook has been changed by his metamorphosis into a governor general. The same observer—watching foreign capital pour into the mines of New
Caledonia and Bougainville, seeing the growth of hotels and resorts throughout the whole Pacific area, and noticing the level of Japanese interest in Niugini—may doubt whether constitutional advance has really produced political progress. Regardless of the transfer of formal political power, capital, profits, and actual power seem more than ever in expatriate hands. The Pacific islands have always been economic satellites since the advent of Europeans. Paradoxically they are becoming more, and not less, economically dependent as they achieve nominal political independence.
Island governments seem bent on the course of self-determination. With rising populations and limited resources, however, their leaders may have no alternative to seeking economic help from neighboring capitals like Canberra. The Australian government now recognizes the needs of its island neighbors and is lending assistance to the extent of $6,000,000 in aid over three years. Yet that very assistance means an increasing Australian influence over the island nations whose independence is being so proudly hailed.
There are still further paradoxes. In Fiji for many years, Europeans and even Indians have assured the islanders that their society is “fossilized” or “irrelevant,” yet the Fijians have amply and persistently demonstrated a strong political vitality. Nevertheless, they are becoming victims of a creeping urbanization without the corresponding advantages of industrialization. And what holds true for Fiji also holds true for many island groups: villages are becoming deserted, agriculture languishes, and the economy stagnates. This grim condition is the product not only of an uncertain economy but of an educational system that has been inculcating westernized wants and aspirations which may be irrelevant to the true needs of the islanders. At the same time, as the resources of multinational corporations are brought to bear on the Pacific islands world, the islanders’ response is both apprehensive and resentful. In a lament that no doubt summarizes the sentiment of many islanders, the deputy leader of the opposition in Niugini complained that his people are strangers in their own country. Since the islanders own only 3 percent of company property and earn only about the same percent of business income, he is clearly not far wrong. In Niugini as elsewhere in the Pacific, the islanders may increasingly question whether they would not do better to remain poor in their own way.
| 1 |
J. W. Davidson, “The Decolonization of Oceania,” The Journal of Pacific History, vi(1971), 135. |
| 2 |
Deryck Scarr, Fragments of Empire: A History of the Western Pacific High Commission, 1877–1914 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1967), 252–297. |
| 3 |
See Barrie Macdonald, “Local Government in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Part I,” Journal of Administration Overseas, x, 4 (October 1971), 280–293, and “Local Government in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Part II,” Journal of Administration Overseas, xi, I (January 1972], 11–27. Also A. M. Healy, “Administration in the British Solomon Islands,” Journal of Administration Overseas, v, 3 (July 1966), 194–204. |
| 4 |
C. Hartley Grattan, The Southwest Pacific since 1900: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963], 490. |
| 5 |
See, generally, Scarr, Fragments of Empire, 219–251. |
| 6 |
H. C. Brookfield, Colonialism, Development and Independence: The Case of the Melanesian Islands in the South Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 122. |
| 7 |
William E. Tagupa, “Some Aspects of Modern Politics and Personality in French Polynesia,” The Journal of Pacific History, ix (1974), 134–145. |
| 8 |
Jean Guiart, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, xxxi, 49 (December 1975], 475. |
| 9 |
Davidson, op. cit., 145. |
| 10 |
Ibid., 146. |
| 11 |
Quoted in ibid., 148, 149. |
| 12 |
Francis X. Hezel, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, xxxii 50 (March 1976], 112. |
| 13 |
See, generally, Nancy Viviani, Nauru: Phosphate and Political Progress (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970]. |
| 14 |
The Banaban community is studied in Martin G. Silverman, Disconcerting Issue: Meaning and Struggle in a Resettled Pacific Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). |
| 15 |
A. L. Jackson, “Towards Political Awareness in the New Hebrides,” The Journal of Pacific History, vii (1972), 156. |
| 16 |
Ibid., 155–162. |
| 17 |
Brookfield, op. cit., 121–122. |
| 18 |
Barrie Macdonald, “Secession in the Defence of Identity: The Making of Tuvalu,” Pacific Viewpoint, xvi, I (May 1975), 26–44. |
| 19 |
Leo Hannett, “The Case for Bougainville Secession,” Meanjin Quarterly, xxxiv, 3 (September 1975), 292. |