The Last Colonies
From PETER MICHAELS
OCEANIA
ONLY in one part of the world—excluding the Communist countries — is the end of im- perialism not immediately in sight : the Pacific.
There, six powers — Australia, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the US—remain responsible for a variety of islands. Some of them are large and rich—New Guinea and New Caledonia; some famous — Tahiti, Bikini and Pitcairn; but most are tiny, isolated and vulnerable, incapable of facing up to the exigencies of the modern world on their own. Nobody knows exactly how many people there are in Oceania because of the mystery surround- ing the interior of New Guinea, by far the most populous island; estimates range between three and a half and four million, of whom about three-quarters would be Melanesians and the rest Polynesians and Micronesians. Amongst all the island groups, only two seem already to have found apparently satisfactory solutions to the question of status: Tonga, a monarchy under British protection, ruled over by the impressive Queen Salote of Coronation popularity, and Hawaii, the fiftieth star on the US flag. Two others are being groomed for self-government : New Zealand Samoa, and the Dutch part of New Guinea, that same 'West Irian' which, with monotonous irrelevance, is claimed by the In- donesians as an addition to the ramshackle republic they control so imperfectly and yet clamour querulously to extend. In some of the others (notably in the Society Islands) there has been a certain amount of agitation for inde- pendence without much result so far.
The story of two centuries of European penetration into the South Seas is by now a pretty familiar one, certain aspects of which, of course, have come in for a great deal of romanticising. In fact, the Pacific islands, like other overseas countries, have had both the best and the worst of Europe's human exports inflicted upon them.
'Yes? Yes what?' There have been buccaneers and pirates, out for fortune, women and adventure, who traded rum for virgins and weren't above a spot of black- birding, for sport or profit. There were artists and writers on the run from Western corruption, seeking the sources of primitive nobility, like Stevenson and Gauguin, Rupert Brooke and Pierre Loti. There were grasping traders, sleazy missionaries with fanatical Puritan fixations, stiff German administrators determined to curb Oceanic indolence, Maughamesque characters with booze and fornication on the brain, sea captains, mining engineers, convicts, con- scientious officials in love with their charges and anthropologists like Malinowski and Margaret Mead come to crack the secrets of fascinating miniature societies long deprived of contact with the outside world. Each island, as it fell under the control of some colonising power, was made over into a version of the metropolitan pattern. The results are still there for all to see. Thus Papeete (Tahiti) is a kind of little Polynesian Marseilles, while Suva (Fiji) is unmistakably Clacton-on- South-Sea and Noumea (New Caledonia) is a graceless industrial township which, but for its exquisite climate and situation, might be mistaken for a displaced Clermont-Ferrand. Honolulu, a big city of about a quarter of a million, has now become in part a dismally commercialised junior Miami with piped-in exoticism, but also doubles up as a rather successful American-style racial melting-pot where people of Polynesian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Anglo-Saxon and several other origins not only manage to live together peacefully but have, through inter- marriage, produced some remarkably attractive offspring.
Until the outbreak of the Second World War, each of the Pacific territories looked towards the metropolitan powers in matters of policy. There was no common approach to similar local issues, if 'local' is quite the word to describe what might be going on several thousand difficult miles apart. The campaign against the Japanese (apart from a few minor skirmishes around the former Ger- man colonies in 1914-18) was the first experience of modern war in the region. It resulted not only in certain islands being overrun by foreign troops, sometimes merely stationed there and sometimes actually fighting, but was also a revelation to the islanders in many other ways. For the first time they saw the supply machinery of modern in- dustrialism in full swing. Trucks, refrigerators, tinned food, prefabricated housing, aeroplanes and household hardware descended on them in bewildering quantities. Airstrips, roads, port installations and radio transmitters were built. The slow-moving colonial administrations, the modest trading and mining companies and even the occasional luxury liners which used to call paled into insignificance by comparison. The results were sometimes curious, as in the growth of the 'cargo cults' (religious movements based on the notion that the proper rites can cause supplies to drop from heaven, preferably by parachute), but in any case the effect was to acquaint many Pacific islanders with an aspect of modern life they had never dreamt of before.
When the firing stopped and everybody went home, leaving behind, incidentally, a sizeable crop of half-caste children now in their late teens, the clock could hardly be turned back all the way. One of the first peacetime novelties was the establishment in 1947 of the South Pacific Com- mission, a body on which all the colonial powers are represented, which tries to co-ordinate policies and programmes in the interests of the region. It has been quite successful in a number of ways, though development and modernisation is still very unequal. Another novelty is the growth of air transport which has made an immense difference to those places linked to Australia, America and each other by regular commercial flights, now often only a few hours from some large city and therefore no longer cut off in the vastness of the ocean. The planes bring tourists, the tourists demand facilities and thus a few of the islands are being gradually drawn into the mainstream of international life.
As elsewhere, it is too late to cry over the destruction of indigenous cultures and wring one's hands in despair about the undermining of native innocence. The damage, such as it is, has been done and there is now no longer a question of protecting Oceania from foreign rot but merely one of helping the islanders to find their feet under contemporary conditions. Popula- tions are everywhere on the increase. With the notable exception of New Caledonia, which supplies much of the nickel to the Common Market countries and has immense untapped mineral resources besides, most of the islands must rely economically on one or two crops or products of which they produce too small an amount ever to have any perceptible effect on world prices. They are thus at the mercy of markets well beyond their control at the same time as they become increasingly dependent on expensive industrial imports. Diversification, under the given conditions, is mostly out of the question. Again, several islands face a potentially explosive racial situation. Asians, brought over as indentured labourers during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first decade of the pre- sent centuries are settled all over the Pacific and increasing rapidly in numbers. In Fiji, the Indians already form a majority; in the Society Islands, there is an important minority of Hakka Chinese origin which controls local trade and commerce; in New Caledonia there are Indo- Chinese, Indonesians and Chinese. Mostly, the Asians are prevented from buying land, which they naturally resent, particularly since many of the islanders are indifferent farmers. The ad- ministrations tend to side with the natives against the Asians, though when it comes to employment there is less enthusiasm for giving a job to some undoubtedly charming but lackadaisical and unreliable Polynesian than to a hard-headed and hard-working Chinese. Thus Oceania, the fabled paradise, is by no means immune to familiar perplexities, and its current mood is a good deal less idyllic than one might suppose.
Just because the scale of things on the Pacific islands tends to be rather small and one is accustomed to seeing them mentioned in travel folders and glossy magazines rather than in the daily headlines is, of course, no reason for neglect. On the contrary, in an age which has become used to grappling with immensities on all sides, the 'very modesty of Oceanic needs and problems offers an attractive opportunity of doing something worthwhile which implies neither the rape of the taxpayer nor the recruitment of a large body of technicians and other scarce, qualified people. In the Pacific, there is a good chance of avoiding those major calamities which either threaten or overwhelm so many countries as they become independent. Also, there isn't the usual excuse for leaving colonies in the lurch at some point because they have become too expensive to keep. Such subsidies as the islands may absorb are tiny compared to the expenditure of modern States for other purposes.
What is chiefly required is a' little attention, a little study, a little imagination and the courage of one's convictions. An Oceanic Federation, or even a Melanesian Republic with its delegate to the UN is not around the corner, but there is a danger that lack of direction and co-ordination may result in a repetition of African balkanisa- tion. This would probably be disastrous for the Pacific islanders and set them back by at least • several decades. If, on the other hand, some care and goodwill are shown by all the six metro- politan governments, then what might be the world's last colonies could become models of their kind, tangible evidence that imperialism need not be everywhere and always the grasping grinding, purblind obscenity of popular folklore and opportunistic mythology.
Previous page
