Leonard Fong Roka
This is ‘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.
NOTE: This is an emphasis of Bougainville Manifesto
2
To the imperialist Europe of the exploration and
colonization era, the discovery of a people or an island in the savage world
was good news for boosting one’s power and prestige. But it’s all detrimental
for us if we analyze the world’s problems today.
The explorer, for example Louis De Bougainville for
Bougainvilleans, was a hero in Europe but they are a problem for the colonized
people that still value their homeland’s past, present and the future. Linda
Tuhiwai Smith, in her 1999 book, Decolonizing
Methodologies, sums this outlook as: ‘In the imperial literature these are
the ‘heroes’, the discoverers and adventurers, the ‘fathers’ of colonialism. In
the indigenous literature these figures are not so admired; their deeds are
definitely not the deeds of wonderful discoverers and conquering heroes’.
To answer the question
‘why’ we look up the 1980 book by the late Bernard Narakobi, The Melanesian Way that stated that: ‘Melanesians managed to live on
these islands for thousands of years before Europeans came into contact with
them. It is assumed therefore that Melanesians have had a civilization with its
cultures, values, knowledge and wisdoms which have guided them through the
ages. These are their revealed truths. Our history did not begin with contact
with the Western explorers. Our civilization did not start with the coming of
the Christian missionaries. Because
we have an ancient civilization, it is important for us to give proper dignity
and place to our history. We can only be ourselves if we accept who we are
rather than denying our autonomy’.
So the landing of
colonization on the Solomon archipelago was the pollution and interruption of
the peoples’ harmony and freedom in a land that was theirs through unrealistic
value enforcement, indoctrination, deprivation, suppression and so on.
Westernization, after
arriving in 1868, systematically enforced a breakdown in the ecology of life
that sustained Bougainville and Bougainvilleans for nearly thirty thousand
years. This has made Bougainvilleans lacked the capacity to function within
their own island as a people who know and respect themselves. But this had made
Bougainvilleans, a people full to the brim and thus made weak with alien ideas
and concepts and trying to practice them in an environment that repels foreign
intervention naturally.
Bougainvilleans, today,
deny that they were a nation-state for over thirty thousand years. This is
because modernization had made them erode their ethnic embodiment thus also
losing their sense of direction. One of Africa’s writers, Francis M. Deng, in
his 1997 article, Ethnicity: An African
Predicament, summed this crisis as: ‘Ethnicity is more than the skin color
or physical characteristics, more than language, song, and dance. It is the
embodiment of values, institutions and patterns of behavior, a composite whole
representing a people’s historical experience, aspirations, and world view.
Deprive a people of their ethnicity, their culture, and you deprive them of
their sense of direction and purpose’.
Colonization came systematically
harsh on Bougainville having had a long history of experience in other parts of
the world like Africa. Its sole role was to bring the savage, uncivilized,
evil, stagnant Bougainvilleans to the light or path of civilization and
human-hood that was nothing but the adoption European ways.
The 2010 PNG Attitude poem
by Papua New Guinean poet, Lapieh Landu, This
New Way says it all for Bougainvilleans:
This
new way is
Whiteman’s way
Throw
away your digging stick
Here, take my shiny shovel
This
new way is
Whiteman’s way
Do
away with your tiny shells
Here, take my silver coin
This
new way is
Whiteman’s way
Forget
your wantok
Here, take my fellow dim dim
This
new way is
Whiteman’s way
Dispose
of your slimy sago
Here, take my sweet white grains
This
new way is
Whiteman’s way
Be
naked no more
Here, take my loin cloth
This
new way is
Whiteman’s way
Tear
down your sago huts
Here take my steel posts and sheets
This
new way is
Whiteman’s way
Utter
not your chants and spells
Here, take my bible
This
new way is
Whiteman’s way
Be
little no more
Here take my white hand
It’s
this new way
The Whiteman’s way
The Bougainvillean ways
that served the people of the land for some thirty thousand years were nothing
but the path of death. There was really, since 1868 a period of ‘clash of civilizations’
on Bougainville whereby the indigenous peoples were uprooted.
An amalgamation of European
and Bougainvillean civilizations was not possible because, according to the
whites, Bougainvillean ways were savage and barbaric and not suitable for the
betterment of the land that it served and sustained for thousands of years; and
where modernization could have had forge adaptation processes on.
The Solomon world, in
due process, was divided. Bougainvilleans saw Choiseul islanders as strangers.
Colonialism made Bougainvilleans saw each other differently. Labels brought on
the people and they had to measure each other with, included: lazy people, pagans
or cargo cults, show-offs, unproductive land, educated, baptized, rascal, godly
people, obedient people, corrupt and so on.
This was the sources of
discrimination that sprouted weakness of standing as united peoples for a
common good for Bougainville.
A classical work, out of
the hundreds, of dividing Bougainvilleans through institutional nurturing is
the well promoted but unfounded belief that the 19 to 30 languages of
Bougainville were not at all related at a particular zone.
This is what, a 1992
thesis by Raspal S. Khosa at the University of Adelaide, The Bougainville Secession Crisis, 1964-1992: Melanesians,
Missionaries, and Mining, said: ‘Before World War II some 19 languages
belonging to the categories of Austronesian and non-Austronesian were
identified in Bougainville and Buka. This alone is difficult to reconcile with
the claims of a unique Bougainvillean identity’.
Careful study of the
Nasioi and all other languages in Bougainville will get Khosa coming short with
his statement. The Nasioi language has a boundary of people and villages
(excluding the late arrivals, the Torau people) around it. This is called the karatapo or mixture. This is where
cultures meet or fade into each other.
Before modernization,
any trader from the heartland of Nasioi, intending to do business with a person
from the heartland of Nagovis had to get a third party in the karatapo zone to
pave his way into the heartland.
This was a natural
system that connected all peoples of Bougainville but denied by western
literature.
Another example of the
colonization created problem on Bougainville in those early was noted in the
education or the religions by oral history. Whenever, a Panguna child did well
in education at Tunuru Catholic mission, resentment a condemnation by the
coastal people was high for he was a Bushman denying their children’s rights.
Or if a Siwai kid did well at Chabai Technical, he was the pride of Siwai and
not Bougainville.
In the churches, there
was war; Catholics had their own gods and Protestants had their own set of
gods. Often, they put territories where others were denied access to. Clans
were divided; families hostile to each other’s new gods thus Bougainville was
modernizing on lose sand that could not face the more devastating conflicts in
the future.
Francis M. Deng pinned
the chaos well by saying that you can just: ‘Deprive a people of their
ethnicity, their culture, and you deprive them of their sense of direction and
purpose’. Bougainvilleans were the windsock at the end of the runway of an
airport blown here and there by Eurocentric forces.
Bougainville thus laid a
foundation of modernization on sand of a thousand foreign values, cultures,
people, technologies, laws and so on injected by colonization.
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