Create a TRUE Bougainvillean, Mr Education

Leonard Fong Roka

Bougainvilleans today face challenge that is worth a life time of sacrifice to address.

In a Pacific where we are subjected to ever exploitative bilateral and multilateral relationships with external political and economic forces, we are told to behave in an established and proven path of development that is nothing but western liberalism and capitalism.

Leonard Fong Roka

Foreign power structures, are classical example is the World Bank and many United Nations bodies, claim our Pacific as a poor and backward in terms of developmental capabilities yet we did inherit the Pacific and survived as a civilisation before it—World Bank—was created.

The question, Europeans and their still-colonialist mentality, should ask is: ‘How the Pacific Islanders did came to be in their corner of the vast ocean? How did they organize their lives and societies? Is our version of thought applicable to their Pacific ways?’

Here lie the problems of economic and social underdevelopment and political instability.

I often feel bad that even those highly educated Bougainvilleans have being streamlined by the pro-western education system our ruling government of Papua New Guinea promotes and sustains as its sole means of survival in our competitive world.

Recently, in our course of lectures in the Divine Word University, we came to talk about the issue of Global Warming and our tiny Pacific countries and societies. The discourse, gave me a painful wall of no hope: ‘You either learn to swim or drown’.

This is a problem for me as a Bougainvillean. I came to school to learn in becoming a PATHFINDER for myself and my people.

In our world of problems, an education system must be a system that gives light and hope to the people. It should be a system that will make a Bougainville to know and love his homeland; and be the light to the people by using every resource his land provides for the good of all.

It must not be a system that brings confusion and hopelessness. It must not be the education system that tells Bougainvilleans that their island is small and soon to be engulfed by the raising sea level and that nationhood must not be the preference.

Every human being has the right to enjoy life even at the last hours of his fate.

And Bougainvilleans has every right to be a nation of their own and feel what it is like to be a Bougainvillean or a Solomon Islander.

This is the RIGHT that all Bougainvillean ought to have by learning their own past, present and the future through a responsible EDUCATION SYSTEM. However, our education system loves and promotes comparative analysis of us against the other countries and cultures.

Thus, our students KNOW nothing of BOUGAINVILLE colonial history, geography, languages, politics and so on even in the tertiary institutions. We are creating Bougainvilleans in the skin down and not Bougainvilleans from the HEART out.

I call this system, an IMPEDIMENT to progress and forever, as long as we don’t change it, it will remain our source of SUPPRESSION and EXPLOITATION.