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Saturday 8 June 2013

Bougainville Manifesto: (3) Negation of Colonization


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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