Nigel Matte Lalai & the Bougainville Crisis

Leonard Fong Roka

The said Bougainville conflict affected us in different ways and at different times as we grew up in the midst of the violence and bloodshed. And here I had a short gossip with first year Business Studies Divine Word University student Nigel Matte Lalai from Buka and Kieta.

Nigel Matte Lalai was born during the peak of the first phase of the Bougainville crisis at Arawa in May 1989 whilst homes were being torched and Bougainvilleans from a few villages and New Guinean laborers from plantations and squatter settlements were being rounded by the North Solomons Provincial Government into care centers around Central Bougainville.

Nigel Matte Lalai

 

Four months after his birth, his dad was killed by the Papua New Guinea Defense Force and dumped at the beaches of Kivirai near the Aropa International Airport. Without the love of his blood father, Nigel Matte Lalai yet, made it through the crisis and this far into the Divine Word University.

According to Nigel, his father, Kevin Lalai was from the Torauan village of Vito in Kieta and was aged 24 when he was killed. His father courted his mother, Delphin Matte from Gogohe on the east coast of Buka Island and a 1988 graduate from Kaindi Teachers College in East Sepik in a short period of time and they got married.

Then, the new couple’s long life of love was cut short in late 1989.

Nigel re-collects his mother’s stories, ‘My father and his siblings of Vito were often so involved in many village conflicts over land issues and other social problems. This led to some of their family’s foes into reporting his father falsely as a Panguna militant’s informant whilst he was working with a catering company so he was picked up by the PNGDF and killed’.

The late Kevin Lalai was an employee to the Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) contracted catering company, SHRM Limited. And by then, he had no interest what-so-ever about the militant activities in Panguna but was occupied with the welfare of his wife and the new born son, Nigel Lalai.

Whilst on duty at the BCL’s lime stone mine at Manetai, Nigel’s father was picked by a PNGDF’s BCL vehicle that drove purposefully in, from the direction of Arawa. There, they forcefully dragged him out of his work place and loaded him onto the pick-up with a few punches then drove him away as he shed a stream of tears of innocence and lost.

As his wife, Delphin and his extended family members were in shock at their Vito village, that same night of 1989, Nigel’s father was undergoing torture on the trailer of a PNGDF truck from Arawa towards Aropa in the middle of the night.

And it was at the Kivirai village, near Aropa, that Kevin Lalai’s wailing of agony was noted by the sleeping villagers sprouting off from a slowly passing convoy of PNGDF vehicles.

The curious villagers carefully watched the vehicles as they passed and went out of sight. But they were captivated when the moving headlights died indicating the convoy had come to a halt. Later the next morning, they went to investigate, and there a body of a Bougainvillean was washed up on the beach with deep knife wounds to its chest. They called the Arawa General Hospital and an ambulance took him to Arawa.

On the day of retrieving the body from the morgue, his old agonized mother scooped blood off her son’s body and rubbed it all over her face as she hysterically wailed and was beginning to sip that blood as she was held back by other sympathetic relatives (a story also shared by late Kevin Lalai’s elder sister Marceline Tunim in Liz Thompson film documentary, Breaking Bows & Arrows).

This tragedy of an innocent sibling, took the elder brother of Kevin Lalai, an auto-mechanic and naturally an aggressive character, Justin Kokiai into the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) rank & file.

Justin Kokiai married his late brother’s widow, Delphin Matte and took responsibility of Nigel Lalai up-bringing.

In the BRA profile of the Kieta area of Bougainville, Nigel Lalai’s step father and biological father to his 4 siblings, Justin Kokiai is noted as one of the only BRA leader that did maintained a cordial relationship with the pro-PNGDF Bougainville Resistant Forces (BRF) of the Torau area in Kieta.

From the BRF, Justin Kokiai took a constant supply of ammunition and a number of PNGDF issued high-powered weapons to wage war on the PNGDF until the Bougainville Peace Process came in. To the peace process, he played a significant role in the initial stages of peace negotiations as a BRA commander and also in the weapons containment efforts.

But leadership outside the family and leadership within the family are two different skills and so often do fail to come parallel or unite for Justin Kokiai.

And to Nigel Lalai his step-father was a hard-to-tame person in managing ethics in the family circle. As it is a norm to many BRA big men, he had gone reckless. He was always engaged to a wild rage of extra-marital affair life, boozing and domestic violence, thus Nigel and his siblings were there growing in an abusive environment.

But Nigel’s mother Delphin was designed by all these nightmares to be a woman that nothing can ever let her down to manage a family with pride. As a classroom teacher in many schools in Bougainville she remained steadfast and at ease, her mind. She managed her family alone when the father was out running after beer and women whom Delphin has so many times physically confronted with rage.

Nigel grew up watching all the social dirt and slowly, along with his second born brother, began to grow hatred for their father. They even planned to kill him silently for all the bad treatment he was doing to his wife—their mother—daily.

Slowly, their father also saw how his step-son was growing with his blood sons, and so began to conceal his store of guns from their reach and gradually also change is social position at home. He knew he had created a risk for his life because all his children had grew up in the gun-culture and so knew how to squeeze the trigger.

So, slowly he was moving towards the finer shores, when in 2004 he was killed near the Manetai Primary School where his wife was teaching after a drinking brawl.

Nigel Lalai was again in the midst of a traumatic shock. But a mother, so endowed with courage after a long history of nightmares, was always behind him and now he has just completed his first year of studies at Divine Word University.

His dream is to go back after graduating to help Bougainville gain peace and work towards independence that many of his loved ones had died for across the island.