Leonard Fong Roka
It is a post Bougainville Crisis scene across south
Bougainville that the male population seem to be welded to a bush knife or a
grass knife where ever he seem to be.
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| An assembly at Kanauro Primary School |
From the ordinary village settings, the educational classrooms,
the traditional feasting nights, other social gatherings and so on the Nagovisi
man, the Siwai man or the Buin man is always armed with an offensive weapon—a
dangerously sharpened worn out or brand new knife.
With such a culture south Bougainville has the record high
of death and injury caused by the application of a knife. Alongside their
knives of all categories—imported or home re-designed—guns step in where knives
fail.
Such a culture is worst in south Bougainville and a week at
Kanauro Primary School, in the Baubake Constituency of Buin District, spells
out the residues of what should be an irritating anti-social behaviour in this
part of Bougainville.
The question Bougainville needs to ask is: who are we arming
ourselves with such offensive weapons against? The New Guineans and Papuans
that troubled us from the slums around our pre-Bougainville Crisis urban
centres are no longer prevalent; the Papua New Guinea Defence Force is not
around shelling us; the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) or the
Bougainville Resistant Force (BRF) should be myths by now with civility
conquering our world, but why a knife in my hand or gun in my car and home?
I travel home regularly to Buin from Buka or vice versa and
aboard there would be a rifle or two. Often I wonder why we had a Bougainville
Peace Agreement in 2001 but still from leaders down to villagers we still have
these weapons around.
Every morning at Kanauro Primary School I watch our future
leaders, the students coming to school with knives, and feel insane; I often
ask myself ‘what is my new home Buin up to by enculturating its future with a
knife culture?’
The 10-year Bougainville Crisis taught me that a person with
any form of weapon is a secured one and with authoritative strength gained from
the confidence of having a weapon. It is such characters that caused havoc
during the Bougainville Crisis and thousands of our people had to be sacrificed.
At Kanauro Village and Kanauro Primary School the
highlighted concerns are deeply rooted and observable.
About a hundred meters away from the staff houses 8 in every
10 persons that march up or down the main Buin-Siwai highway at Kanauro has a
knife; and the ratio is also the same for the students that come to school.
Exploring the classrooms, at least, all has knife wounds and
high degree of vandalism. Students and community hardly respect teachers and
school property over time.
There is random stealing of lunch and property by the senior
students from the lower graders and villagers stealing from staff members and this
hurts the whole harmonious coexistence for better learning or peer education or
public relations.
All round the year, according to the teaching staff here,
they have preached change oriented positive information to the kids at
assemblies and classrooms. They have allocated for religious figures to talk to
the school every morning on Fridays.
But as the leaders talks students grumble behind at the
elders as some of the corrupted personalities and worth not listening to.
Such irresponsible behaviour to the few old folks was
unknown for this school since its creation in 1981 till 1990 but this is a post
Bougainville Crisis development.
But Bougainville should know that the crisis had no physical
existence but it is us the people that need to ask ourselves what our
responsibility and contribution is and should be to building a new and free
Bougainville.
At Kanauro, there is a lesson worth learning, and that is
Bougainvilleans are yet to learn that our island is changing and must change.
Society is stubborn to see and accept change happening in our midst. From the
public offices in Buka right down to villages like Kanauro Bougainvilleans are
locked in a past that is not productive in this age of openness and adaptation.
In Buka Bougainville has public servants that still see and
treat ABG as a provincial government and thus evoke no sweeping changes and
progress for Bougainville; and in Kanauro, we have people that are reluctant to
bring about change and development upon themselves through their available
resources like cocoa i.e. simple things like building permanent houses for
families, solar electrification for their homes.
At Buka ABG spends on consultants, advisors and so on to
induce change onto a public service body that sees the ABG as not an independent government when it is; and
down at Kanauro, people spend their hard earned cash from cocoa on alcohol and
howl their days boozing whilst spending their nights in bamboo walled and sago
leaf thatched homes and kids roam around in worn out or odd-looking stitched
clothing.
Thus who will bring change when the elderly with experience
of time are the ones leading the boozing gangs or the public servant is a
reluctant one to change?
The answer lies on Bougainvilleans learning why our island
and people have struggled against political and economic colonization and PNG
since the 1960s; this is a personal and leadership challenge for all ordinary Bougainvilleans
and the government.
I feel such a search back in time can have the Bougainville
society and the Kanauro villager and the ABG officer in Buka see light on where
to go on from the autonomous stage of government to a progressive and free
Bougainville that thousands have suffered and died for.
