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Friday 19 April 2013

Geography, migration, weakness of Oral records and conflict in Nagovis


By Leonard Fong Roka

On the 14 September 2012, the blog New Dawn on Bougainville reported a story titled ‘Situation Tense in Bana’ where a person was killed in the Jaba area of Panguna as a result of a conflict that started off some 3 months earlier.

The conflict was a land related issue at the former Bougainville Copper Limited’s farm site of Mananau purchased and settled by the Nagovis’s mountain people of Damane in the hinterland of the Bana district.
The crisis and death of late Kakaleu (pictured) was over a piece of land that had passed through a number of hands over time. Thus, as we know it, oral histories’ negative aspect is that, it is subjected to ‘addition and subtraction’ over time unlike a written piece of history.

In my distant observation, both the killers and the killed were all victims of a land history that went wrong somewhere down the history lane and affected a generation that adopted wrong stories and land boundaries.

After a long period of confrontations, Kakaleu knifed Poarima, his rival over the piece of land, and some of his family members seriously wounding them. Then he fled into the Tumpusiong Valley where he was occupied with alluvial gold mining. His victims were hospitalized at Buka and survived to come back for him.

After a brief search, he was identified by a spy and Poarima, armed with guns and knives raided Kakaleu’s hideout and caught him off guard in the morning hours occupied with his gold panning tasks where he was shot and then slashed with bush knives as pay back just below my hamlet.

But to get deeper into the conflict, I with little insight into the nature of the Nagovis area, of course where my roots are, turn to give some underlying factors to many issues of conflict related to land that is causing death through killing and sorcery accusations.

Wikipedia claims that the Solomon Island of Bougainville was settled some 33 000 years ago. If so, these recorded dates should be in the South Bougainville where most oral history says the majority of us in Central and south Bougainville originated from.

When oral history of all central Bougainville traces back time, the Nagovis area of the Bana District of south Bougainville naturally turns out as the stage of distribution of peoples, from here people have went into the mountainous areas of Damane and beyond into the Kongara area of Kieta; people had gone into the Banoni and beyond into the Torokina area; people had crossed into the Panguna area and more. All these prehistoric movements began from the Nagovis area.

This history makes the Nagovis area are volatile region to changes of people movements; there is an imprint, if I could ignore modernization in advance. Yes, and that scar carried the Nagovis area into the era of colonization. With the German established copra and cocoa plantations on Kekereka, what is now Arawa,  the Nagovis and Siwai people had what remains in the memory of the dying old, the Kaupara trail that laborers employed through the Panguna area; through the Crown Prince Range and into Kupe and onto Arawa in the coast.

But modernization had interrupted that movement. People are now settled in stable village lifestyles. But the Nagovis area, under modernization had other natural factors that keep people on the move and prehistory, as I see it, faced this same phenomena.

Analyzing the Nagovis area landform, the catalyst of migration can be pinpointed in its geographical make-up. Around 60-70 percent of the Nagovis land is a plain starting from the coast. In this plain area, a large portion is made up of marshland with patches of fertile land; this belt occupies most of South Bougainville but for the Nagovis area, it begins from the Koiare Island (referred to as an island because it is in between the sea and a impenetrable swamplands) and Katauri and fades into the Baitsi section that borders Siwai to Nagovis and Banoni.

This plain belt of marshland is thinly populated but is the largest land area of the Nagovis with the coast being the Banoni area.

Linked to this belt is a thin in width, line of fertile and over populated belt that stretches parallel to the marshlands of Nagovis starting from the Panguna area and ending in the hinterland of the Baitsi area near Siwai. Most of the Panguna to Siwai highway is located with this belt or else, majority of the marshland of Nagovis is between the highway and the coast.

This overpopulated and fertile line of land is the immediate product of ages of erosion of the steep Damane mountains of which is the built up of ranges and peaks that create one of Bougainville’s highest peak, the Mount Takuang.

The land in the Damane area produces less when assessing it to cash crop production like cocoa and so on. But the human population here is larger like the mid-Nagovis belt. So here, in the Damane, I see conflict between the man and his environment in the modernized Bougainville where cash economy is a need for the people and it is a conflict that is causing death to my people.

The main villages that make up the Damane area are Sipi, Okaru, Sikoto and Siandaro.

The Damane people, since being in economically hostile environments, have invested in the marshlands of Nagovis where the population is thin. They buy land and settle here in their cocoa blocks and operated retail outlets and even transport businesses. They even operate retail outlets in Arawa, Panguna and all corners of Bougainville. They also make up the majority of the alluvial gold miners in my home, the Tumpusiong Valley.

But as I observe the Nagovis transmigration, from the Damane to the marshlands of Nagovis, there is a lack of permanency. People move to and fro, thus creating avenues of problems. I did asked some of these Damane people, whom were my clansmen, their stories of the land purchasing down in the plains and got the fact that buying land in the plains had existed into the prehistory.

But our awareness is solely fresh with our recent history. Land purchasing existed in the 1960s, as I noted, but skyrocketed in the 1970s, 80s and up. And to most, an arranged marriage for the sole purpose of securing land was a norm today as it was, some years back.

However, I have mentioned it, that permanent settlement to one place for a Damane man was not a norm; they still considered, Damane and their new place, as home. This, as I have observed, creates a room for liars to impinge boundaries and create new boundaries; con men to fool the original landowner that he is a relative of the man who bought land from him years ago; or a rascal who come and sells off land to another buyer looking for land.

So conflict is now centered on these shortfalls of land occupation and changes and in Bougainville, where there are guns, man has to suffer and die.

 

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