Bougainville Manifesto: (2) Discovery & Impact Sources

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.

The functional nation state of Bougainville (within the Solomon Islands) was, according to Douglas Oliver’s 1973 book, Bougainville: A Personal History, was sighted by the Europeans on August 1867 by sailors on the British ship Swallow , commanded by Philip Carteret, but they did not approach the shores.

The mainland of Bougainville (ibid) was sighted on 4 July 1768 when the French ships La Boudeuse and L’Etoile sailed along the eastern coast of both islands and rested off Buka Island. The next recorded visit was in 1792 where d’Entrecasteaux’s ships traded with Buka Islanders. Then between 1820 and 1860 British, French and American vessels hunted sperm whales and it is with these groups that Bougainvilleans got more acquitted with westernization.

Colonialism, for Bougainvilleans, did not arrive with humanistic goals in the context of integral human development. But rather, it came with self-centered handshake of capitalism that is trade. That is, the introduction of the culture of exploitation of natural resources for betterment.

The colonizer was not interested in a peaceful transition of the people from the Stone Age to modernization but rather entertained them with the beauty of their goods for the Bougainvilleans copra; they began to deprive them of their livelihood and harmonious existence on their land. The process of trading had pacification effects on the locals towards the Europeans. It paved the foundation of Bougainvilleans’ relegation, belittlement, genocide and exploitation.

Douglas Oliver (ibid) noted again that with such trade coercion and pacification, by 1870 Bougainvilleans were now being recruited in large numbers as laborers on plantations in Queensland, Fiji, Samoa and New Britain. Some of the indigenous people went voluntarily, evidently eager for Europeans goods to be earned, or to escape from dangerous situations at home.

Whilst on the trade arena, Bougainvilleans were pushed here there by the Europeans; there was rivalry over the grab of colonies between Germany and Britain in the 1880s that were always pacified by dialogues. As Peter Sack, writing for the 2005 book, Bougainville before the conflict, noted:

‘On 10 April 1886 Germany and Great Britain signed a ‘Declaration relating to the demarcation of the German and British spheres of influence in the Western Pacific’. It defined a ‘conventional line’ which cut the Solomon Islands roughly in half. Great Britain agreed not to interfere with the extension of German influence west and north of the line and Germany did the same in favor of Great Britain for the area south and east of it. This declaration gave the two powers a free hand in relation to each other to make territorial acquisitions in their respective spheres.

The German government acted promptly. It did so at the urging of the Neu Guinea Kompagnie—which was governing Kaiser Wilhelmsland, the north-eastern quarter of the main island of New Guinea, and the Bismarck Archipelago under an imperial charter—because the company was concerned that other interested parties had began to make strategic land acquisitions in the northern Solomons. On 28 October 1886 the commander of SMS Adler declared all islands in the Solomons north of the line of demarcation—namely Buka, Bougainville, the Shortlands, Choiseul and Ysabel, as well as the smaller islands to the east—to be a German ‘Schutzgebiet’. He also prohibited, for the time being, the acquisition of land from ‘the natives’ and the supply of arms, ammunition and liquor to them.

On 13 December the emperor granted the Neu Guinea Kompagnie a charter to govern the Northern Solomons in accordance with the arrangements made in its earlier charter for Kaiser Wilhelmsland and the Bismarck Archipelago.

A major change in the borders of the German part of the Solomons took place as a result of an agreement between Germany and Great Britain 14 November 1899. In this agreement Germany ceded all the islands south and south-east of Bougainville—namely Choiseul, Ysabel, the Shortlands and the Lord Howe Islands—to Great Britain as a part of a compensation package for renouncing her claims to the western section of the Samoan Islands, which became German’.

This was too brutal a treatment worthy for the animals. Colonialism was having on Bougainvilleans and the rest of the Solomons, a fool-and-kill strategy to destruct a people of the land. Firstly, Bougainvilleans befriended the colonialist for the goods he traded in a barter system of trade; then came, labor and purchase goods where thousands of Bougainvilleans were lured into the then plantation industry. And at the end of it, the colonizer had Bougainvilleans submerged into the bliss of commerce to trade their land for its own prestige and power.

Bougainvilleans as the rightful owners of their land knew not that their land was subjected to German-Britain meets in the 1880s so engaged to the sweetness of the new concepts of trade that accompanied some adventure abroad and the brainwashing by missionaries that instilled fear in the people to the gods of the Europeans. Thus, colonialism was a kind of a vehicle for imperialism!

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, writing in her 1999 book, Decolonizing Methodologies, said that: ‘Imperialism tends turns to be used in at least four different ways when describing the form of European imperialism which ‘started’ in the fifteenth century: (1) imperialism as economic expansion; (2) imperialism as the subjugation of ‘others’; (3) imperialism as an idea or spirit with many forms of realization; and (4) imperialism as a discursive field of knowledge’.

Based on Smith’s explanations on these four ways of understanding imperialism, it could be said that Bougainvilleans were not really seen as human beings that had owned Bougainville for thousands of years. It treated Bougainvilleans, in a manner my 2012 PNG Attitude article, Past times: How the Bougainville psyche was subverted, as: ‘For a period of time, the Bougainville people were thrown here and there; screened and scaled as cheap commodities to the liking of colonial greed and interests. The divine psyche of the people was given a negative whipping and suffered a gradual disintegration’.

Explaining approach (1) of imperialism, Smith says that ‘Imperialism was a system of control which secured the markets and capital investment. Colonialism facilitated this expansion—’. Bougainville was just caught in the imperialist search for raw resources for their industrialization in Europe. From a simple barter of copra to European goods, the trade moved to labour exports; to the development of plantations on Bougainville then, the labour imports into Bougainville.

This processes secured Bougainville and Bougainvilleans for exploitation and subjugation on their land to be become nobodies.

In the second use of the concept of imperialism, Smith wrote that this was more focused on the exploitation and subjugation of the indigenous peoples excluding economic explanations. The moment the colonizers landed on Bougainville, they came with long experiences in other parts of the world thus their rule was sophisticated and tough. In Bougainville, kiaps and tultuls operated on the basis of do-as-the-government-say that resisted people’s consent.  

So often equal treatment for all Bougainville was not a norm; it is well evident in Bougainville colonial literature that discrimination was practiced by both the government and churches in differentiating Bougainvilleans. Such practices were done to serve the interest of the colonizers. This had made Bougainvilleans to be more susceptible to foreign changes that attacks their island ways that had strengthen them to survive on Bougainville for thousands of years.

In the third way of looking at imperialism, Smith noted that ‘This view of imperialism locates it within the Enlightenment spirit which signaled the transformation of economic, political and cultural life in Europe. In this wider Enlightenment context, imperialism becomes an integral part of the development of the modern state, of science, of ideas and of the ‘modern’ human person’.

Bougainvillean ways, example world views, epistemologies and so on were not worthy within their land but the distant European values were what the strange Bougainvillean world needed in order to function on Earth.

Suppression and genocide are two practices so evident in this outlook. Bougainvilleans have to get European education, government, music, dressing and so on to be seen as human beings in the surface of the Earth.

It so promoted Eurocentric cultures, development and so on that is unrealistic to the traditional Bougainvillean imprints thus becoming detrimental for Bougainvilleans as off the 1960s.

Under this interpretation, integration that respects another peoples, cultures, ideas and so on as they are, was not pragmatic to the betterment of the world as it can be for European technology, language, culture, ideology, food and so on were the only way the world and the man can survive on.

The forth way of imperialism, according to Smith was created by colonized world through its thinkers and writers to understanding colonialism from the colonized peoples’ perspective. The main point here is that despite colonized peoples’ gain of independence, the impacts of colonialism are still active. This is a situation Audre Lorde’s 1981 quote sums up as ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’.  

Bougainville despite being under the parasitic rule of an independent Papua New Guinea still was a host of foreigners (PNG included) that exploited its resources and suppressed its citizens.

Discovery of Bougainville led to colonization and colonization was the path of imperialism and this equals the destruction of Bougainville and Bougainvilleans.