By Leonard Fong Roka
Pangkirangku was a hill that was situated at the very location of the present day idle Panguna Mine pit in Bougainville. It was the hunting ground for the Guava and the Moroni people who mostly intermarried to each other.
Oral history stands that the area was colonized by people not in one wave band but, in single persons through marriage, especially. That is, a family can be a first settler of a territory example, Moroni village, and then later goes back to their place of origin and seeks a wife for a male son and bring her with them to Moroni. She does not return but settles with her in laws and expands her clan. In due course, her children inherit land through the many land ownership related rites of passage.
Site of Pangkirangku (Panguna pit)
But with the dawn of the Bougainville secessionist and anti-mining conflict in 1988, the militant leader late Francis Ona had taken high publicity as the major landowner of Pangkirangku. This is too negative a taint on the identity of the true owners of Pangkirangku.
The late Francis Ona belongs to the Kurabang clan and his group of immigrants into the Guava village is second in line (measuring migration waves in oral history is fluid. It might be decades apart or a generation) to the first group of Kurabangs.
Thus, the first group owned much of the Pangkirangku (turned Panguna later) ridge that hosted the ore bodies that attracted CRA to mine it for Papua New Guinea and sparking the Bougainville crisis that killed thousands of innocent Bougainvilleans.
In the first wave of Kurabangs, were born two brothers, Dumenu and Anthony Ampe during the WW2 period. These brothers, the rightful and undebatable owners of the majority proportion of customary land in the ridge and braes of Pangkirangku.
As children the brothers and their other siblings enjoyed their jungle, wild rivers and gardening with parents. Later in 1950s, the eldest Dumenu began a retard. That’s what many referred to him as, but he was a prophet.
In this state of mind, he left Guava and erected himself a makeshift shelter a safe distance away to the west of the main village on the Guava-Kokore ridge. There, close to his abode, he selected a high point on the trail and began digging the earth with his bare hands. Days he dug and nights he dug. When travellers caught up with him he cried calling, ‘I am destroying your beautiful land and your future is not good’.
A few years before the CRA geologist who officially discovered the copper mineralisation on Pangkirangku, Ken Phillips arrive, Dumenu was death.
His young brother, Anthony Ampe, now took over the actual fight against the CRA and BCL operations from the 1960s and into the 1970s.
Anthony Ampe at Arawa market (Photo: Rodney Banas)
He was noted as the only land owner who faced the money-tyranny with verbal attacks, tears and the use of his body to block equipment from moving on; in every work location, he was felt.
He protested solo in the work places and in the offices. His one act so famous in the mining gossips of Bougainville was in the early 1980s. To the north-east of the pit, was the sacred site belonging to Ampe’s family line, this was the boulder called locally as the Kontemoi. The company was blasting the boulder to pieces from the southern cliffs when Ampe confronted.
He stoned the machinery and the operators and engaged some police in a fight which Ampe a muscular built prevailed.
After minutes he got himself on a rock the size of a 200 litre drum that being pushed by a dozer and halted the progress. There he stood weeping and verbally attacking the workmen who were lost for words from the weight of guilt and shame.
From morning to the sunset he kept tapping the rock with his full bodily mass til the rocked was gobbled by the soft earth. Disturbing the operations, he left for home.
To this very date, the mention of Pangkirangku in Anthony Ampe’s presence, hurts and he cries freely (the mining like his brother had psychologically affected him for life). His name for Papua New Guinea is katua niugini (in Nasioi meaning, incapable New Guinea).
No comments:
Post a Comment