Bougainville Manifesto: (1) People and Culture

Leonard Fong Roka

This is a ‘Bougainville Manifesto’ series of writings that I am creating from my own initiative to explore the Bougainville conflict from the pre-colonial era; through colonialism and into the boots of Papua New Guinea. Then I look into the peace process and the autonomy era.

I consider my island and people were badly treated by colonialism and the state of PNG since its independence in 1975 thus resulting in the loss of 10-15 000 innocent people.

Irredentism is our right. Beside we have being subjected to relegation, exploitation, some forms of genocide, institutional indoctrination especially under PNG rule with its unrooted humanistic lies.

The Bougainville Peace Process and the Autonomous Bougainville Government had also failed my people. Most of their demands on my people do not really uphold the will of the people who are not at all strangers to the PNG treatment of Bougainville.

I will attack what I see wrong; create what I see needed and direct where I see Bougainville must be moving towards.

In the Anthony J. Reagan and Helga M. Griffin edited 2005 book, Bougainville before the conflict, Douglas Oliver is cited as having referred to Bougainvilleans and Western Solomon islanders as ‘the black spot in an island world of brown skins’.

The book goes on to discuss the Kilu Cave archaeological findings on Buka that shows that Bougainvilleans had existed on their island for almost 30 000 years. This discovery drove Solomon Island history back 29 000 years away from the previous claim of 6 000 years. These findings on Kilu Cave also solved a puzzle amongst biological anthropologist debate over the 6000 years history of Solomon Islands versus the genetic diversity of Bougainvilleans, symbolized by their extremely dark skin color.

Some 29 000 years ago the first Bougainvilleans arrived. The latest immigrants arrived some 3 000 years ago.

According to Mathew Spriggs writing for Bougainville before the conflict, Bougainville was not an island but a northern tip of a larger land mass that stretches from the northern tip of Buka down along Choiseul Province to Nggele, just insight of Honiara. This big island, or The Great Bougainville, as literature is referring to it now, was made up of what are now the Buka Island, Bougainville, Shortland Island, Choiseul, Santa Isabel and Nggele in the Florida Group.

Hugh L. Davies (ibid) also further said that the creation of Bougainville and its sister islands began some 45 million years ago from volcanic eruptions on the sea floor of the present Solomon Islands ridge. These were facts forwarded by the airborne geophysical surveys by the Federal Republic of Germany in late 1980s.

Darrell Tryon (ibid) again stated that Bougainville has some 16 Austronesian languages and 9 Papuan languages (late arrivals). Bougainville, Buka and Nissan Austronesian languages are inter-related with those of Shortland, Choiseul, New Georgia and Santa Isabel. Classical evidence today can be seen on the Torau languages of central Bougainville and Mono-Alu in the Shortland Islands. So the Bougainville language family of islands is Buka, Bougainville, Choiseul, New Geogia and Santa Isabel. 

Thus, as noted by Ulukalala Lavaka Ata 1988 paper, The Bougainville Crisis and PNG-Australia Relations, the late Joseph Kabui’s words of 17 May 1991, ‘It is a feeling deep down in our hearts that Bougainville is totally different than PNG, geographically, culturally. It's been a separate place from time immemorial. Ever since God created the Universe, Bougainville has been separate, has been different’ is justifiable.  

 

In my 2013 PNG Attitude poem, The Ulungasi’s Border of Injustice on Solomon I wrote the line ‘Of the distant places our myths never knew they existed’ referring to Papua New Guinea and Bougainville politically so promoted oneness by PNGeans and their institutions that absolutely lack substance.

Standing on my people’s epistemologies and the oral histories, my people lived in harmony with the environment around them. From the Nissan Island and our Polynesian atolls, down Buka Island and to the Buin area of South Bougainville, land was our life. We live on it and it feeds us as his dear children and when we die, it accommodated us to feed the next generation.

Our islands’ world was made up three parts that are the flesh that is me the human being; the nature that surrounds me, such as the trees, caves and so on and the marriage between the flesh and the nature; this is the spiritual world that governed and is governing my people since time immemorial.

The human being depended on the nature and the nature depended on the spiritual world that united the man and the nature. The bond between the three was respect and respect! The upset of one is the disadvantage of the world.

In Bougainville the clan and sub-clans were the government; they spread across great distances but in different names despite the same totem and this is reflective of the languages on the island. They were sovereign and had territorial integrity over land. They created laws that governed their land, rivers, fruit trees, dispute settlements, war, marriage and everything done in the good of the clan.

In decision making, the clan decentralization process made its sub-clan an autonomous entity with own jurisdiction over trivial matters. However, when it came to serious matters like killing and war, the clan was now the heart of decision making.

From the clan, power of decision making then came on the sub-clan; from the sub-clan, power landed on the village governing system or osi as it is known in the Kieta area. With the osi network, there were extended families or piongkang as it we call it in Kieta; from the piongkang power went down to the nono or nuclear family.

Such break up of power was more active that it brought the whole population together in the decision making process.

Bougainvilleans were universe referent people and that is, they were the living symbols of the environment they came from. They were not consumerist but conservationist when it came to exploiting the resources to meet their needs. They took what was needed from the mother earth and then let the nature for a period to replenish itself in harmony.

In interactions between people, respect was paramount, people have to treat people with respect; people have to treat the environment with caution as not to upset the ecology of life.

It was a source of power for an individual to grow and know the traditions and cultures of his clan. One has to know his place and responsibilities in the world to be a successful person in life.

Apart from the Buin people, the majority of Bougainville was and is of matrilineal societies. Women own the land and decide what changes that goes on with the land. But the man is vital in the cultures of Bougainville for they were the defenders and workers on the land.

To this regard, in the sexes, a woman was a holiest sex that needed more than a man to uphold traditional taboos or norms of the clan. She was the future of the clan; she was the land and the pride of the clan and the peace of conflicting clans.

The man stood as the support base of the woman. The man was the harvester, the traveler, trader, negotiator of trade, warrior where the power of the woman was centered on. The man was prevented from marrying so far away from home. He was also prevented to marry into a clan that can make him powerless in the kinship systems (this is where arranged marriages were important).

Arranged marriages were the power-base of society. Through such systems, communities took support when in need. Such practices were part of the rights to land and heritage or otherwise such were the nourishment of alliances for trade, war, and land ownership and so on.

Life in Bougainville thus depended on alliances or the sustenance of relationship amongst people or amongst the people the spiritual world that governed their lives.

In the couple of language districts areas, there was harmonious co-existence. Trade existed; marriage occurred; travel occurred; migration continuously happened but, still all had sovereignty. The Nasioi man respected the Nagovis man and his essence of activities. When a Nasioi man entered into Wakunai he lived in accordance to the dictates of the Wakunai people and their ways. Scaling this down, within Nasioi, a Panguna man kneels to the Kongara people when in Kongara as will the Kongara man do when in Panguna.

In the pre-colonial days, Bougainville trade route extended right across the Solomon archipelago. Shell money so employed in most of Bougainville was processed on the island of Malaita and crossed hands up to Bougainville.

So the Solomon Islands was not a scattered and desolated sea of islands but a functional nation state of autonomous individual islands, like Bougainville, that co-existed by trading, marriage, migration, war and so on for ages to remain a people with dignity till the dawn of hell that is colonialism.