By Leonard Fong Roka
On the 14 September 2012, the blog New Dawn on Bougainville reported a story titled ‘Situation Tense
in Bana’ where a person was killed in the Jaba area of Panguna as a result of a
conflict that started off some 3 months earlier.
The conflict was a land related issue at the former
Bougainville Copper Limited’s farm site of Mananau purchased and settled by the
Nagovis’s mountain people of Damane in the hinterland of the Bana district.
The crisis and death of late Kakaleu (pictured) was over a
piece of land that had passed through a number of hands over time. Thus, as we
know it, oral histories’ negative aspect is that, it is subjected to ‘addition
and subtraction’ over time unlike a written piece of history.
In my distant observation, both the killers and the killed
were all victims of a land history that went wrong somewhere down the history
lane and affected a generation that adopted wrong stories and land boundaries.
After a long period of confrontations, Kakaleu knifed
Poarima, his rival over the piece of land, and some of his family members
seriously wounding them. Then he fled into the Tumpusiong Valley where he was
occupied with alluvial gold mining. His victims were hospitalized at Buka and
survived to come back for him.
After a brief search, he was identified by a spy and Poarima,
armed with guns and knives raided Kakaleu’s hideout and caught him off guard in
the morning hours occupied with his gold panning tasks where he was shot and
then slashed with bush knives as pay back just below my hamlet.
But to get deeper into the conflict, I with little insight
into the nature of the Nagovis area, of course where my roots are, turn to give
some underlying factors to many issues of conflict related to land that is
causing death through killing and sorcery accusations.
Wikipedia claims that the Solomon Island of Bougainville was
settled some 33 000 years ago. If so, these recorded dates should be in the
South Bougainville where most oral history says the majority of us in Central
and south Bougainville originated from.
When oral history of all central Bougainville traces back
time, the Nagovis area of the Bana District of south Bougainville naturally
turns out as the stage of distribution of peoples, from here people have went
into the mountainous areas of Damane and beyond into the Kongara area of Kieta;
people had gone into the Banoni and beyond into the Torokina area; people had
crossed into the Panguna area and more. All these prehistoric movements began
from the Nagovis area.
This history makes the Nagovis area are volatile region to
changes of people movements; there is an imprint, if I could ignore
modernization in advance. Yes, and that scar carried the Nagovis area into the
era of colonization. With the German established copra and cocoa plantations on
Kekereka, what is now Arawa, the Nagovis
and Siwai people had what remains in the memory of the dying old, the Kaupara
trail that laborers employed through the Panguna area; through the Crown Prince
Range and into Kupe and onto Arawa in the coast.
But modernization had interrupted that movement. People are
now settled in stable village lifestyles. But the Nagovis area, under
modernization had other natural factors that keep people on the move and
prehistory, as I see it, faced this same phenomena.
Analyzing the Nagovis area landform, the catalyst of
migration can be pinpointed in its geographical make-up. Around 60-70 percent
of the Nagovis land is a plain starting from the coast. In this plain area, a
large portion is made up of marshland with patches of fertile land; this belt
occupies most of South Bougainville but for the Nagovis area, it begins from the
Koiare Island (referred to as an island because it is in between the sea and a
impenetrable swamplands) and Katauri and fades into the Baitsi section that
borders Siwai to Nagovis and Banoni.
This plain belt of marshland is thinly populated but is the
largest land area of the Nagovis with the coast being the Banoni area.
Linked to this belt is a thin in width, line of fertile and over
populated belt that stretches parallel to the marshlands of Nagovis starting
from the Panguna area and ending in the hinterland of the Baitsi area near
Siwai. Most of the Panguna to Siwai highway is located with this belt or else,
majority of the marshland of Nagovis is between the highway and the coast.
This overpopulated and fertile line of land is the immediate
product of ages of erosion of the steep Damane mountains of which is the built
up of ranges and peaks that create one of Bougainville’s highest peak, the
Mount Takuang.
The land in the Damane area produces less when assessing it to
cash crop production like cocoa and so on. But the human population here is
larger like the mid-Nagovis belt. So here, in the Damane, I see conflict
between the man and his environment in the modernized Bougainville where cash economy
is a need for the people and it is a conflict that is causing death to my
people.
The main villages that make up the Damane area are Sipi,
Okaru, Sikoto and Siandaro.
The Damane people, since being in economically hostile
environments, have invested in the marshlands of Nagovis where the population
is thin. They buy land and settle here in their cocoa blocks and operated
retail outlets and even transport businesses. They even operate retail outlets
in Arawa, Panguna and all corners of Bougainville. They also make up the
majority of the alluvial gold miners in my home, the Tumpusiong Valley.
But as I observe the Nagovis transmigration, from the Damane
to the marshlands of Nagovis, there is a lack of permanency. People move to and
fro, thus creating avenues of problems. I did asked some of these Damane people,
whom were my clansmen, their stories of the land purchasing down in the plains
and got the fact that buying land in the plains had existed into the
prehistory.
But our awareness is solely fresh with our recent history. Land
purchasing existed in the 1960s, as I noted, but skyrocketed in the 1970s, 80s
and up. And to most, an arranged marriage for the sole purpose of securing land
was a norm today as it was, some years back.
However, I have mentioned it, that permanent settlement to
one place for a Damane man was not a norm; they still considered, Damane and
their new place, as home. This, as I have observed, creates a room for liars to
impinge boundaries and create new boundaries; con men to fool the original
landowner that he is a relative of the man who bought land from him years ago;
or a rascal who come and sells off land to another buyer looking for land.
So conflict is now centered on these shortfalls of land occupation
and changes and in Bougainville, where there are guns, man has to suffer and
die.
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