Leonard Fong Roka
This is a ‘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.
The functional nation state of Bougainville (within the
Solomon Islands) was, according to Douglas Oliver’s 1973 book, Bougainville: A Personal History, was
sighted by the Europeans on August 1867 by sailors on the British ship Swallow , commanded by Philip Carteret,
but they did not approach the shores.
The mainland of Bougainville (ibid) was sighted on 4 July
1768 when the French ships La Boudeuse
and L’Etoile sailed along the eastern
coast of both islands and rested off Buka Island. The next recorded visit was
in 1792 where d’Entrecasteaux’s ships
traded with Buka Islanders. Then between 1820 and 1860 British, French and
American vessels hunted sperm whales and it is with these groups that
Bougainvilleans got more acquitted with westernization.
Colonialism, for Bougainvilleans, did not arrive with
humanistic goals in the context of integral human development. But rather, it
came with self-centered handshake of capitalism that is trade. That is, the
introduction of the culture of exploitation of natural resources for
betterment.
The colonizer was not interested in a peaceful transition of
the people from the Stone Age to modernization but rather entertained them with
the beauty of their goods for the Bougainvilleans copra; they began to deprive
them of their livelihood and harmonious existence on their land. The process of
trading had pacification effects on the locals towards the Europeans. It paved
the foundation of Bougainvilleans’ relegation, belittlement, genocide and
exploitation.
Douglas Oliver (ibid) noted again that with such trade
coercion and pacification, by 1870 Bougainvilleans were now being recruited in
large numbers as laborers on plantations in Queensland, Fiji, Samoa and New
Britain. Some of the indigenous people went voluntarily, evidently eager for
Europeans goods to be earned, or to escape from dangerous situations at home.
Whilst on the trade arena, Bougainvilleans were pushed here
there by the Europeans; there was rivalry over the grab of colonies between
Germany and Britain in the 1880s that were always pacified by dialogues. As
Peter Sack, writing for the 2005 book, Bougainville
before the conflict, noted:
‘On 10 April 1886 Germany and Great Britain signed a
‘Declaration relating to the demarcation of the German and British spheres of
influence in the Western Pacific’. It defined a ‘conventional line’ which cut
the Solomon Islands roughly in half. Great Britain agreed not to interfere with
the extension of German influence west and north of the line and Germany did
the same in favor of Great Britain for the area south and east of it. This
declaration gave the two powers a free hand in relation to each other to make
territorial acquisitions in their respective spheres.
The German government acted promptly. It did so at the
urging of the Neu Guinea Kompagnie—which was governing Kaiser Wilhelmsland, the
north-eastern quarter of the main island of New Guinea, and the Bismarck
Archipelago under an imperial charter—because the company was concerned that
other interested parties had began to make strategic land acquisitions in the
northern Solomons. On 28 October 1886 the commander of SMS Adler declared all islands in the Solomons north of the line of
demarcation—namely Buka, Bougainville, the Shortlands, Choiseul and Ysabel, as
well as the smaller islands to the east—to be a German ‘Schutzgebiet’. He also prohibited, for the time being, the
acquisition of land from ‘the natives’ and the supply of arms, ammunition and
liquor to them.
On 13 December the emperor granted the Neu Guinea Kompagnie
a charter to govern the Northern Solomons in accordance with the arrangements
made in its earlier charter for Kaiser Wilhelmsland and the Bismarck
Archipelago.
A major change in the borders of the German part of the
Solomons took place as a result of an agreement between Germany and Great
Britain 14 November 1899. In this agreement Germany ceded all the islands south
and south-east of Bougainville—namely Choiseul, Ysabel, the Shortlands and the
Lord Howe Islands—to Great Britain as a part of a compensation package for
renouncing her claims to the western section of the Samoan Islands, which
became German’.
This was too brutal a treatment worthy for the animals.
Colonialism was having on Bougainvilleans and the rest of the Solomons, a fool-and-kill
strategy to destruct a people of the land. Firstly, Bougainvilleans befriended
the colonialist for the goods he traded in a barter system of trade; then came,
labor and purchase goods where thousands of Bougainvilleans were lured into the
then plantation industry. And at the end of it, the colonizer had
Bougainvilleans submerged into the bliss of commerce to trade their land for
its own prestige and power.
Bougainvilleans as the rightful owners of their land knew
not that their land was subjected to German-Britain meets in the 1880s so
engaged to the sweetness of the new concepts of trade that accompanied some
adventure abroad and the brainwashing by missionaries that instilled fear in
the people to the gods of the Europeans. Thus, colonialism was a kind of a
vehicle for imperialism!
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, writing in her 1999 book, Decolonizing Methodologies, said that:
‘Imperialism tends turns to be used in at least four different ways when
describing the form of European imperialism which ‘started’ in the fifteenth
century: (1) imperialism as economic expansion; (2) imperialism as the
subjugation of ‘others’; (3) imperialism as an idea or spirit with many forms
of realization; and (4) imperialism as a discursive field of knowledge’.
Based on Smith’s explanations on these four ways of
understanding imperialism, it could be said that Bougainvilleans were not
really seen as human beings that had owned Bougainville for thousands of years.
It treated Bougainvilleans, in a manner my 2012 PNG Attitude article, Past times: How the Bougainville psyche was
subverted, as: ‘For a period of time, the Bougainville people were thrown
here and there; screened and scaled as cheap commodities to the liking of
colonial greed and interests. The divine psyche of the people was given a
negative whipping and suffered a gradual disintegration’.
Explaining approach (1) of imperialism, Smith says that
‘Imperialism was a system of control which secured the markets and capital
investment. Colonialism facilitated this expansion—’. Bougainville was just
caught in the imperialist search for raw resources for their industrialization
in Europe. From a simple barter of copra to European goods, the trade moved to
labour exports; to the development of plantations on Bougainville then, the
labour imports into Bougainville.
This processes secured Bougainville and Bougainvilleans for
exploitation and subjugation on their land to be become nobodies.
In the second use of the concept of imperialism, Smith wrote
that this was more focused on the exploitation and subjugation of the
indigenous peoples excluding economic explanations. The moment the colonizers
landed on Bougainville, they came with long experiences in other parts of the
world thus their rule was sophisticated and tough. In Bougainville, kiaps and
tultuls operated on the basis of do-as-the-government-say that resisted
people’s consent.
So often equal treatment for all Bougainville was not a
norm; it is well evident in Bougainville colonial literature that
discrimination was practiced by both the government and churches in
differentiating Bougainvilleans. Such practices were done to serve the interest
of the colonizers. This had made Bougainvilleans to be more susceptible to
foreign changes that attacks their island ways that had strengthen them to
survive on Bougainville for thousands of years.
In the third way of looking at imperialism, Smith noted that
‘This view of imperialism locates it within the Enlightenment spirit which
signaled the transformation of economic, political and cultural life in Europe.
In this wider Enlightenment context, imperialism becomes an integral part of
the development of the modern state, of science, of ideas and of the ‘modern’
human person’.
Bougainvillean ways, example world views, epistemologies and
so on were not worthy within their land but the distant European values were
what the strange Bougainvillean world needed in order to function on Earth.
Suppression and genocide are two practices so evident in
this outlook. Bougainvilleans have to get European education, government,
music, dressing and so on to be seen as human beings in the surface of the
Earth.
It so promoted Eurocentric cultures, development and so on
that is unrealistic to the traditional Bougainvillean imprints thus becoming
detrimental for Bougainvilleans as off the 1960s.
Under this interpretation, integration that respects another
peoples, cultures, ideas and so on as they are, was not pragmatic to the
betterment of the world as it can be for European technology, language,
culture, ideology, food and so on were the only way the world and the man can
survive on.
The forth way of imperialism, according to Smith was created
by colonized world through its thinkers and writers to understanding
colonialism from the colonized peoples’ perspective. The main point here is
that despite colonized peoples’ gain of independence, the impacts of colonialism
are still active. This is a situation Audre Lorde’s 1981 quote sums up as ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the
master’s house’.
Bougainville despite being under the parasitic rule of an
independent Papua New Guinea still was a host of foreigners (PNG included) that
exploited its resources and suppressed its citizens.
Discovery of Bougainville led to colonization and
colonization was the path of imperialism and this equals the destruction of
Bougainville and Bougainvilleans.
No comments:
Post a Comment