The Totem and the Tricolour: A Short History of New Caledonia Since 1774 0868401226, 9780868401225

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iQIHIs

TilciUS — A /HORT HI/TORY OF — NEW CALEDONIA /INCE 1774

DU 7 CO . L96 11986

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/totemtricolourshOOOOIyon

THE TOTEM AND THE TRICOLOUR

Order From: Koala Books of Canada Ltd. 14327 - 95 A Ave. Edmonton T5N 0B6 Canada

THE TOTEM AND THE TRICOLOUR A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW CALEDONIA SINCE 1774 'fU

Martyn Lyons

(rent Univ«r»»*V egyae&oeoo©*

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Published in Australia by NEW SOUTH WALES UNIVERSITY PRESS PO Box 1 Kensington NSW Australia Telephone (02) 697 5452

©

Martyn Lyons 1986

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the copyright act, no part may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Lyons, Martyn, 1946 — The totem and the tricolour. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 86840 122 6. 1. National liberation movements—New Caledonia— History.

2. New Caledonia—Politics and government.

New Caledonia—History. Administration. I. Title. 993'.2

4. France—Colonies—

3.

CONTENTS

Maps and graphs Introduction

vii ix

Part one: Contact and Confrontation, 1774—1878

1

Chapter 1

First European contacts

Chapter 2

Kanak society on the eve of European discovery

Chapter 3

The invasion of the Christians

Chapter 4

The expropriation of the Kanaks, 1853 — 78

Chapter 5

The Kanak insurrection of 1878

2 13

26 41

56

Part two: The Triumph of French Colonialism, 1878—1945 Chapter 6

A colony without colonists?

Chapter 7

Economic stagnation and the yellow peril

Chapter 8

The Kanaks, 1898—1945: a dominated culture

68

Part three: Melanesian Renaissance, 1945 — 85 Chapter 9

The Melanesian revival, 1945 — 58

Chapter 10

The Sociele Le Nickel

Chapter 11

1964—84: Into the Kanak cauldron

Chapter 12

Past imperfect and future conditional

Bibliography Index

141 145

67

109

78

99 100

^ 121 134

86

To Holly and Claudine

LIST OF MAPS AND GRAPHS

Maps NEW CALEDONIA in the south-west Pacific viii NEW CALEDONIA: early European contacts 5 NEW CALEDONIA: missions 31 NEW CALEDONIA in the nineteenth century 44 NEW CALEDONIA: area of the 1878 insurrection 60 Settlement of Melanesians in New Caledonia in 1983 128 Settlement of Europeans in New Caledonia in 1983 128 Settlement of Polynesians in New Caledonia in 1983 128

Graphs The native population of New Caledonia, 1853—1969 83 Exports of nickel, 1951—75 111 Evolution of the population of New Caledonia, 1875—1976 Evolution of tourism, 1971 — 77 1 18

115

V 11

KO°E

150°E

160°E

170°E

INTRODUCTION

For Captain Cook and his crew, the hills of New Caledonia recalled the mountains of Scotland. For the French missionary, Father Rougeyron, they were a reminder of another patrie: the hills of the Auvergne. For the Kanak, his long, narrow native land was a handful of earth, which a God had rolled up in a taro leaf and flung into the ocean. But whose home was it? This was the urgent question posed by the FLNKS (Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front), in the Kanak insurrection of 1984—a strong term, perhaps, but the occupation of the town of Thio, and the formation of the provisional government of a new Kanak state seem to qualify as insurrectionary acts. The New Caledonian crisis of 1984 occurred at a bad moment for President Mitterand, and the socialist government in Paris. The euphoria of the left-wing victory of 1981 had long since evaporated, and the initial impetus for reform had given way to a new regime of austerity. The communist party had left the government, and the rise of right-wing extremism, in the form of Le Pen’s anti-immigrant party, the Front National, showed how racism and nationalist extremism could profit from the strains of economic recession. The right-wing parties sought every opportunity to create a political climate favourable to their cause in the forthcoming legislative elections, and New Caledonia gave them another weapon with which to beat an unpopular government. The right wing, shaken and deeply frightened by the victory of the left in 1981, looked forward to regaining power in 1986, in a spirit of merciless revenge. The parliamentary elections of 1986, and the likely prospect of a right-wing victory already cast their shadow over the debates on the future of New Caledonia. When the crisis of 1984 broke, however, the average Frenchman was profoundly ignorant of even its most essential components. Few could have placed New Caledonia accurately on the map. For most, it was just another of those overseas territories, unflatteringly known as the ‘DOMTOM’ (Departements Outre-Mer, Territoires Outre-Mer) still under French rule, like Guadeloupe, and Martinique in the West Indies, Reunion in

INTRODUCTION

the Indian Ocean, and French Polynesia in the Pacific. Some might have recalled that the island was one of the world’s leading sources of nickel, but it is safe to assume general ignorance of the island’s history. This state of affairs provides one of the reasons for this book, which attempts to describe the historical dimension to New Caledonia’s present conflicts. The Australian public has been intermittently bombarded with alarm¬ ing reports of events in New Caledonia. The newspapers of Sydney and Melbourne launched their attack on French colonialism in the Pacific at the time of the prise de possession in 1853, and they have hardly let up since. But their perception of the territory and its problems have some¬ times been tinged with what one French consul-general in Sydney de¬ scribed as ‘a bitter and puerile chauvinism’. This book tries to avoid such a reproach by presenting a view based on French historical sources, normally inaccessible in Australia. My views have thus been formulated from a reading of French doctors, soldiers, settlers, missionaries and anthropologists, whose works are to be found in the Bibliotheque Nationale (National Library) in Paris; and from a reading of the correspondence of governors and administrators in the overseas section of the French National Archives. These documentary sources are essential for a proper understanding of the history of New Caledonia under French rule. That history is first of all a history of Kanak resistance to French rule, for the rising of 1984 had many antecedents, notably the Kanak insur¬ rection of 1878, and the more localised rebellion of 1917. It is a history, too, of the disintegration of native culture, the demographic holocaust of the Kanak population, and the progressive marginalisation of the Kanaks in New Caledonian society. Excluded from industry, from the educational system, and from opportunities for professional promotion, the Kanaks were confined to subsistence agriculture and casual labour. The birth of political aspirations, and the prise de conscience which pro¬ duced claims to Kanak nationhood, are recent phenomena. These de¬ mands came very late in the history of colonialism and of decolonisation, globally speaking. They nevertheless represent the genuine frustration of a people which has discovered itself to be an exile in its native land. I do not intend either to put French colonialism on trial, or for that matter to defend it against its many Australian critics. I am not tempted to play the game of comparing French and British colonialisms, counting up the atrocities committed by each player, and giving the best scorer a certificate of good conscience. That would no doubt produce a highscoring game, but one bound to end in a dishonourable draw. Such an exercise appears sterile. French colonial history has its share of liberal humanitarians, as well as of petty tyrants, and of patient bureaucrats lacking vision and imagination—the good, the bad and the ugly of any colonial history. It is important to transcend national squabbles, for the historical process of colonialism dictates its own demands and its own logic to every colonial power; it is a relentless logic, which eventually defeats the most obdurate native rebel, and the most progressive and

INTRODUCTION

humane of colonists. It is the logic of economic domination, of the de¬ struction of traditional society and culture, and of a triumphant, but ambiguous renaissance. The precise ambiguity of the Kanak renaissance lies in its combined appeal to native cultural traditions, and to western political ideals of self-determination. The independence movement com¬ bines the ancient symbolic power of the totem and the democratic values of the French tricolour.

PART ONE:

CONTACT AND CONFRONTATION,

1774-1878

CHAPTER 1

FIRST EUROPEAN CONTACTS

The first recorded European landings on New Caledonia were made, almost by accident, by two of the most celebrated navigators of the late eighteenth century. In September 1774, Captain Cook’s expedition was heading northwards along the north coast, when Midshipman Colnett sighted the point of land which still bears his name. The second landing was made by the French explorer, D’Entrecasteaux, who arrived in 1793, the year when the French king who had sent him was executed by revolutionaries in Paris. These two expeditions, one English, the other French, both landed in the same spot, near Balade, on the extreme north coast of the mainland. Yet they produced quite different reports of the life and inhabitants of New Caledonia. The English found the natives friendly, the French utterly distrusted them. The contrast between these two opposing judgements is an intriguing historical enigma which is not easy to unravel. Cook’s second voyage had already taken him to New Zealand, Tahiti, Tonga and the New Hebrides, and having in effect made futile any further speculation about the existence of a great southern continent, he was about to turn back to New Zealand, when New Caledonia was sighted. Native canoes, or pirogues, put out to greet Cook, who readily invited the natives on board, and the first recorded exchanges between Kanak and European took place. Cook offered them gifts, and politely received their offerings of fish in exchange. He found the natives very interested in red cloth, nails and metal tools (in many respects, as we shall see, the technology of the Kanaks at this time was that of the Stone Age). Cook was impressed by his warm welcome. The Kanaks had been kind enough to show the Resolution a clear passage through the reefs, and the natives who met Cook on shore were unarmed. From this he inferred that ‘they had little else than good nature to bestow’. Cook liked the appearance of the Caledonians, reporting that ‘they are a strong, robust, active, well-made people, courteous and friendly and not in the least addicted to pilfering.... In their disposition, they are like the natives of the Friendly Isles; but in affability and honesty they excel them’. As for 2

FIRST EUROPEAN CONTACTS

3

the women, the botanist George Forster found their feature* coarse, but good-natured. Rarely in the future were the Kanaks to evoke such a positive response from Europeans; subsequent visitors to the island found Cook’s compliments wildly misplaced. The visit was brief—it lasted just over a week—but from Cook’s point of view, it was a success. Good relations were assured above all by Cook’s own openness, and his readiness to reciprocate in the customary rituals of hospitality, the exchange of gifts, and honouring the local chief, Tea Pouma. Cook’s response was appreciated by the Caledonians, who treated him as a chief, giving him the title of Tea Cook. Only one incident seems to have marred the excellent rapport between Cook’s crew and their hosts. On one occasion, Cook and Forster were served with a fish, which was poisonous, and made them both acutely ill. Perhaps this was a deliberate test engineered by the natives: were the white men divinities, whose great sailing ships seemed to descend from the skies like the vessels of Gods; or were they human? For the Kanak, who had no conception of clothing, the British naval uniforms they wore were perhaps the skins of deities. Perhaps Cook’s reaction to the poisonous fish was a convincing demonstration of his mortality. Cook was full of compliments about his brief visit. He admired the natives’ irrigation works, and he found the women flirtatious but chaste (a judgement which later severely damaged Cook’s credibility in French eyes). ‘I never heard,’ he said, ‘that one of our people obtained the least favour from any one of them.’ Some women apparently enjoyed enticing sailors into the bushes, and then running away, but according to Forster, this sex-play was quite innocent. When they turned up their noses at salt beef, their horror of meat could only mean that they were not cannibals. Cook was determined to do something lasting for the natives, to increase the resources and material prosperity of the island. The natives appeared totally to lack quadrupeds. Cook therefore presented Tea Pouma with a dog and a bitch. The chief, realising that he was being done a great honour, expressed his gratitude, but was unsure how to treat the strange race of beings which Cook had introduced. Tea Pouma’s perplexity soon turned to even more acute embarrassment. Cook, believing that his gift of dogs had been well-received, wanted to go further, and proceeded to offer the chief a pig and a sow, which he thought would enormously increase the food resources of the island. Tea Pouma could not refuse the gift of a respected friend, without violating the norms of native hospi¬ tality. But he tried to discourage Cook, by avoiding him. Cook tactlessly insisted on leaving the pigs, although the natives had no intention of raising them for food. After Cook’s departure, his unwanted gifts were apparently removed to the uninhabited island of Balabio, where, in 1861, Lieutenant Mathieu discovered a herd of 500 pigs running wild. On this occasion, and not for the last time, European benevolence and progressive intentions had been insensitive to Kanak cultural traditions and fears. The introduction of quadrupeds was an unwanted, but irre-

4

CHAPTER

1

vocable step; not only would it have been an unthinkable insult to have destroyed Cook’s friendly gift, even after he had left, but the animals themselves, strange and wonderful as they must have seemed, were regarded as spirits to be handled with the utmost respect. Pigs and dogs therefore bred without restriction, with important effects on ancient traditions. The Kanak practice, for instance, of exhibiting corpses in the trees was once considered by anthropologists to have been an ancient native custom. It was probably, however, a comparatively recent im¬ provisation, devised to rescue the remains of the dead from scavenging pigs and wild dogs. For twenty years after Cook’s visit, no other European landing on New Caledonia, as it was now known, was recorded. It is possible that the great navigator Laperouse landed there, in the course of his tragic and final voyage from Botany Bay in 1788. If Laperouse did land before being fatally shipwrecked off Vanikoro in the New Hebrides, he left no trace of his fleeting presence in New Caledonia. He did, however, leave a prestigious reputation, and a deep mystery surrounding his fate, which was not verified by Europeans for decades. In 1791, Louis XVI, soon to be dethroned, sent Admiral D’Entre¬ casteaux in search of Laperouse’s lost expedition.- After a long voyage chasing rumours and false trails, a weary D’Entrecasteaux approached New Caledonia in the autumn of 1793. On 30 Germinal of the Year 2, by the new revolutionary calendar, it was now his turn to be greeted by pirogues off Balade. D’Entrecasteaux’s expedition stayed much longer than Cook’s: almost a month in all, but the Frenchmen’s impressions of the natives did not improve with greater familiarity. Their reactions were in stark contrast to those of their English predecessors on the Grande-Terre. Suspicion and hostility marked Franco—Kanak relations from the outset. The natives who were invited on board were far from the robust and well-made individuals described by Cook: in fact they were starving, and refused to sell the French sailors their coconuts. They were armed with clubs, assegais and slings, they were completely naked, and their pierced ear-lobes hung down to their shoulders. They were afraid of the pigs on board. Cook seemed to have been mistaken about the women, for the French found them immodest, and ready to sell themselves to the sailors. Once a Kanak offered Piron, a member of the crew, a grilled bone to eat. It was soon identified as part of the hip of a human adolescent: a clear and horrifying indication that the French were not being entertained by the affable natives of Cook’s description, but had fallen among cannibals. There was an exception to this growing distrust between the natives and the members of D’Entrecasteaux’s expedition. Many natives happily assisted the botanical forays made into the interior by the naturalist LaBillardiere, who was grateful for their help, and left us the best written account of the French visit. Even he branded the natives as

Balabio Is.

6

CHAPTER

1

inveterate thieves. They stole a sabre and a hat, and they had to be forcibly dissuaded from seizing other valuables from the crew. This was not what the French expected, after reading Forster’s assertion that ‘they did not attempt to take the least trifle by stealth, behaving with the strictest honesty and propriety in board’. The French took to drawing a circle in the sand, within which they stocked their goods, forbidding the natives to cross the perimeter. But these precautions were insufficient. When a group of natives tried to make off with some axes, shots were fired, and at least one of them was killed. Later on, Kanaks stoned sailors from the Espe'rance, and more shots were fired. Skirmishes broke out a third time, according to LaBillardiere, when natives tried to steal a catch of fish. Cook seemed to have been mistaken about so many things. He had unaccountably missed the practice of cannibalism, ap¬ peared to have a very naive view of native sexual morality, and his remarks about their honesty and friendliness seemed badly in error. The French were therefore puzzled, and also relieved, when they set sail again, without any news of Laperouse, on 10 May 1794 (21 Floreal Year 2, by the new revolutionary calendar). There was such a huge discrepancy between the verdicts on the Kanaks reported to Europe by Cook’s expedition on one hand, and by D’Entrecasteaux’s on the other, that it was hard to accept that they were talking about the same island. In fact, one explanation offered for the differences was exactly that Cook and D’Entrecasteaux had encountered different natives, from different tribes. Forster had visited Balabio, to the north, where he found the natives no different from those at Balade, but both expeditions landed at the same point, so that this interpretation relies heavily on the assumption that considerable tribal migration took place in the twenty years which elapsed between the two European visits. Unfortunately, this assumption cannot be verified, and even if a different tribe occupied the region in 1793, some further evidence is needed to explain why its attitudes should have been diametrically opposed to those of its predecessors in the area. A second interpretation, sometimes offered by French commentators, is that Cook’s response to the natives was superficial and naive. Cook had only stayed IV2 days, and for three of those he was immobilised by illness. Not only did he not stay long enough to establish an accurate picture of the natives, but his idealisation of their behaviour was pre¬ judiced by eighteenth-century philosophical preconceptions. Cook, in other words, was predisposed to admiration of native simplicity, honesty and virtue, encountered amongst beings in an uncorrupted state of nature. Cook, according to this interpretation, saw the Melanesian as a ‘noble savage’, not hostile but friendly, not perfidious but trustworthy, living in a pleasant Virgilian setting. George Forster was far guiltier than Cook of this kind of distortion, when he described the Caledonian as ‘an ambulant figure of the Roman Garden-Cod’. The trouble with this explanation of the two conflicting versions of the Caledonian is that it

FIRST EUROPEAN CONTACTS

7

does not explain why French attitudes, less than twenty years later, should not have been conditioned by the same intellectual influences. Furthermore, if Cook was lacking in realism when he landed in New Caledonia, he ought to have approached the other peoples of the South Pacific with the same naivete. But this was far from the case. Cook was very far from idealistic about the other Pacific peoples he encountered. He had found parts of the New Hebrides inhabited by ‘the most ugly, illproportioned people I ever saw’, and called them ‘this ape-like nation’. Four natives had been shot dead during his visit to Eremonga, and he was well aware of the existence of cannibalism on Tanna Island. Cook, on the whole, gives an impression of remarkable objectivity in his judge¬ ments. The explorer who had given the Friendly Isles their name had also named Savage Island. Two other factors must be invoked to explain the problem: the first lies on the mainland itself, the second is to be found on board the French ships, and in the attitudes of the French expedition. Changes certainly had occurred on the Caledonian side to explain a certain hostility and aggression towards the intruders. The tribes of the north were suffering from wars and famine when D’Entrecasteaux arrived. The natives were reluctant to part with foodstuffs, and eager to lay their hands on what¬ ever the French had to eat, because they were starving, just as they wanted their axes as weapons of war. The strains resulting from tribal conflicts and deprivation made relations difficult. Secondly, D’Entrecasteaux’s expedition itself was in an unhappy state when it arrived, and remained so until it left. D’Entrecasteaux landed very reluctantly at Balade; he had heard that natives had been seen clothed in French uniforms in the Admiralty Islands, and wanted to set off again in search of Laperouse’s ill-fated expedition. The crew, how¬ ever, was tired and hungry. Perhaps it was also divided by the political arguments which were troubling their home country, now in the midst of revolution. Morale, in other words, was very low in D’Entrecasteaux’s expedition when it arrived, and it was not raised by the death of Captain Huon, who was buried as secretly as possible, to prevent the natives from desecrating his corpse. D’Entrecasteaux made several mistakes. He did not welcome the native with the generosity which had proved so rewarding for Cook. He did not establish the same amicable contact with the local chief, nor did he invite him to dinner on board, as Cook had done. He therefore infringed a ritual code of greeting, by which the natives judged strangers and interlocutors. An additional factor was perhaps the poor discipline which prevailed amongst the French crew, in comparison with the cohesion of the English expedition. D’Entrecasteaux did not enjoy the same authority as Cook, and he failed to prevent his crew from occasionally panicking, and opening fire on the natives. Cook had been able to guarantee that, during his stay, no such incidents occurred. Perhaps, then, we do not need to call on the eighteenth-century

8

CHAPTER 1

philosophes, or on non-existent evidence of tribal migrations to explain the apparent contrast between English naivete and French cynicism. The answer may lie in the particular circumstances, circumstances of war and famine, which prevailed on shore at the time of D’Entrecasteaux’s landing, as well as the tense frame of mind in which the French crews approached New Caledonia. It was unfortunate that the French myth of New Caledonia, which superseded Cook’s myth, had a long life ahead of it: the native was untrustworthy, cannibalistic, and a natural thief. After D’Entrecasteaux, foreign visitors were few and far between. Captain Kent and the Buffalo, returning from Norfolk Island, stayed six weeks at Port St Vincent in 1803, but other sailors kept their distance, deterred perhaps by the island’s newly acquired reputation for canni¬ balism, as well as by the reefs surrounding it. The explorer Dumont d’Urville approached the Eoyalty Islands in 1827, but he never made a landing. In the half-century before the French officially claimed possession of New Caledonia in 1853, the island’s chief contacts with Europeans were transient encounters, sometimes friendly, sometimes brutal, with a motley series of entrepreneurs. Amongst them were British and American whalers, who frequented these waters especially in the early years of the century. Between 1804 and 1817, they are estimated to have slaughtered about 15 000 whales annually in the region, and in the decade of the 1830s they took 160 000 tonnes of whale oil. For the south Pacific whalers, New Caledonia was an ideal winter station. Two important events, however, were beginning to transform the development of the south Pacific. The first was the establishment of Sydney in 1788, which created a new centre of influence, wealth and commerce in the region, and had powerful repercussions on the history of New Caledonia. The second was the arrival of the first Christian missionaries on Tahiti in 1797. The missionaries will make their entry into New Caledonia in chapter 3; the expanding influence of Sydney rapidly accelerated white contacts with the territory long before they arrived. A few escaped convicts, for instance, made their way to the Loyalty Islands. Seven who originated from Norfolk Island were massacred there in 1844. But the sandalwood merchant was by far the most frequent and representative visitor from Australian shores in this period. They came in a trickle from Sydney, and then in a great rush in the early 1840s, bringing iron and metal utensils, hoops, scissors, fishhooks, nails, tobacco, red cloth and axes, to trade for sandalwood, which they took to China, where it was used as incense-wood. In China, the merchants loaded tea for the third leg of their triangular voyage, back to Sydney. They searched for sandalwood first on the Isle of Pines, then on the Loyalty Islands, finally moving to the east coast of the mainland for supplies. There they were later to meet the missionaries, to whom they sometimes entrusted stocks of supplies to guard for them.

FIRST EUROPEAN CONTACTS

9

Sandalwood, however, grows slowly and is quickly exhausted. First Fiji had been plundered, and then the Marquesas. By 1830, Hawaii’s supplies had also run out. New supplies were continually sought, and once they had been found, it was important not to reveal their where¬ abouts to competitors. Sydney traders were therefore extremely reluctant to reveal their exact destination. Many who declared their aim to be Kamchatka or Guam (where there was no sandalwood) were in fact bound for the Isle of Pines, or the east coast of New Caledonia. Even there, stocks ran out by 1842, and traders moved to Mare and the Loyalty Islands. The sandaleers cut too much, too fast; in 1844, a glut brought a fall in prices on the Chinese market. Trade briefly revived, and the New Caledonian mainland became the focus of the sandaltraders’ attention. Prices collapsed again in 1849. Small ships continued to reach Caledonian shores regularly in the 1850s, but from then on, the island’s sandalwood stock seems to have no longer been worth the voyage, and Australia’s influence on the island’s destiny waned. The sandal-seekers’ relations with the Kanaks were unpredictable. There were those unscrupulous seekers after profit who sold the natives short. Captain Erskine remarked that the sandaleers were only distin¬ guished from savages by their knowledge of gunpowder. Crews some¬ times became involved in tribal quarrels. Doing business with one Kanak clan might involve the crew in a war against another, jealous of the benefits of trade with the whites. From time to time, a crew was massacred. Sailors got drunk, and abused native women. John Geddie, a Presbyterian minister on the New Hebrides, described the sandalwood vessels as ‘floating brothels’. Occasionally, however, relations were sur¬ prisingly good. One young sailor, Charles Bridget, was adopted by a tribe on Lifou (Loyalty Islands), and lived there for some time, affectionately remembered by his comrades as ‘Cannibal Charley’. Trepang, or beche-de-mer (sea slug), was also sought by white mer¬ chants, who fished it in New Caledonian waters, and sold it in Canton, where it was served as a great delicacy on gourmet Chinese dining tables. These visits were frequent in the 1830s and 1840s, and exchanges between natives and English fishing merchants were profitable for both. They had an important side effect, for it was largely from the trepangfishers that the Kanaks on the east coast began to learn the language of the Europeans. For them, English, and not French, was the first white tongue they heard, and the pidgin which they spoke was suitably known as bichlamar. Robert Towns, after whom the Queensland settlement of Townsville was named, was one who made a personal fortune from the trade in sandalwood and beche-de-mer. Towns, born in Northumberland in 1794, married a sister of William Charles Wentworth. After earning his living shipping British emigrants to Sydney, he became one himself, and es¬ tablished a trading post on the Isle of Pines in 1848. He was subsequently well placed to ship native labour to his Queensland cotton plantation.

Chief Bourrate became very friendly with the Anglo-Australian traders, and he was taken to Sydney in 1848, as a curiosity, introduced under the meaningless title of ‘New Caledonia’s King’. He learned to speak English, to use a knife and fork, and to play the accordion. He received more, however, than an introduction to the social and musical arts of the Europeans: they also gave him guns, and therefore a source of power and authority in his own territory. The arming of the natives by the Australian merchants was to be a serious grievance of the French, after they took control. Ships arrived, too, to ‘recruit’, or to press-gang, Kanaks for work in the Queensland sugar plantations, although the main hunting grounds for Melanesian labour were the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. Sometimes the natives were forced aboard, occasionally they were given money, or at least promised wages. A few were even shipped back at the expiry of their ‘contract’. In the late 1860s, the number of natives ‘engaged’ in this fashion by Australian vessels in the Loyalty Islands averaged about sixty a year, including many children. Governor Guillain strongly suspected the Protestant missionaries of encouraging this human traffic to and from the Protestant, anglophone bastion of Australia. After 1853, they risked a chase with the French naval authorities, and they always risked a hostile reception from the native inhabitants. In 1849, for instance, the crew of the Cutter, an American trepang fisher, was massacred by the Pouma tribe. Among the many entrepreneurs who did business in New Caledonia during this Australian period of the island’s history, one individual stands out for the scope of his commercial undertakings, and his impact on the territory. James Paddon is remembered as one of the most influential and sympathetic of New Caledonia’s early pioneers. Paddon was born in Portsmouth in 1812, and like many sons of ‘Pompey’, he gravitated towards a career in the Royal Navy. He left the navy, how¬ ever, while still a young man, seeking to establish a fortune in trade in the far East. He first traded opium in China, before turning to sandal¬ wood. It was a risky business: in 1843, he lost seventeen men in a fight with natives on Mare, in the Loyalty Islands. But he survived the dangers to become a substantial merchant. In 1845, he was based at Annatom (New Hebrides), where he built his own ships, but in 1851, he moved his activities to the lie Nou (the future site of Noumea). Climatic reasons probably dictated this change, for as Europeans were gradually discovering, there was no malaria on New Caledonia. Paddon’s commercial interests were varied; he traded sandalwood and trepang with Canton, and his shipbuilding base attracted workers and a small white settlement, which needed imported goods from Australia. Thus Paddon has the dubious distinction of introducing New Caledonia to horses, and also to alcohol, hitherto unknown to the natives. His main claim to fame, however, is his reputation for openness and honesty. He was apparently respected as a paternalistic employer, and it was fre-

FIRST EUROPEAN CONTACTS

I 1

quently said of him that he always gave the natives a fair price for the goods he bought in New Caledonia. Paddon died on lie Nou in 1861. He had been on good relations with the French, supplying the colonists with goods imported from Australia, and receiving in return 4000 hectares of land near Paita. Paddon’s three surviving daughters all married French¬ men, and one of them was educated at a convent in Noumea. The French recognised his contribution to good relations between the races on New Caledonia, and deplored the fact that so few traders followed Paddon’s example. Through men like Paddon, Australia exerted a considerable influence over the development of New Caledonia, in the first years of European contact. In 1860, trade with New Caledonia amounted to only 1 percent of Sydney’s foreign trade, but exchanges with Sydney accounted for no less than 84 percent of New Caledonia’s trade. Sydney’s main role was as a supplier of alcohol, but whites on the island also relied on Sydney for supplies of basic foodstuffs, like flour, rice, sugar and tinned meat, as well as for manufactured tools. What, then, had early European contact given to New Caledonia, and how had it changed the life of the native inhabitants? Europeans brought a superior technology, metal tools, like the nails and other small items they traded for trepang and sandalwood. They also brought metal weapons. Their axes and guns threatened to make traditional tribal wars suddenly far more lethal than before. They also brought a new language, out of which sprang the pidgin known as bichlamar. Bichlamar, however, which grew out of the necessity of commerce, had only a short life before French became the dominant European language of the territory. It is nonetheless curious to discover Kanaks using their version of English to curse the French. Gondou, a rebel of the 1860s, spoke in bichlamar against the French: ‘Frenchmen,’ he said, ‘he all same pouacas. Suppose me look one I vomit.’ Whatever the European brought, he met resistance, as the tales of native attacks and massacres of unwary crews testify. But the merchants of this period, Paddon apart, had only very ephemeral contact with the Kanaks. They came, fished or plundered, and soon were gone. Their visits thus tended to have only a fleeting and superficial impact on Kanak society and civilisation. Real changes were to come only with the arrival of the missionaries and the more permanent imposition of a French administration. The merchants did, however, bring one invisible cargo, which was to have a dire effect on the life of the island. They brought diseases, like measles and influenza, syphilis, tuberculosis and even leprosy, unknown before white contact, which were to ravage and enfeeble the Kanak population for almost a century after their fateful introduction.

12

CHAPTER 1

Main sources for chapter 1 The main sources on early European contacts are the first-hand accounts of COOK, FORSTER and LABILLARDIERE. This is also the period for which English and Australian sources have most to offer. I have made use, for instance, of Dorothy SHINEBERG’s They Came for Sandal¬ wood: a study of the sandalwood trade in the south-west Pacific, 1830—1865 (Melbourne 1965), and Georgette CORDIER—ROUSSIAUD’s Relations economiques entre Sydney el la Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1844— 60 (Paris 1957). More general works which touch on this period are Yves PERSON, ‘La Nouvelle-Caledonie et PEurope: de la decouverte a la fondation de Noumea (1774—1854)’ Revue d’histoire des colonies vol.XL 1953, together with Roselene DOUSSET-LEENHARDT Colonialisme et contradictions: Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1878—1978 (Paris 1978), and Bernard BROU Memento d’histoire de la Nouvelle-Caledonie: les temps modernes (Noumea 1973). Details of all these works will be found in the bibliography.

CHAPTER 2

KANAK SOCIETY ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

The Melanesian way of life was to be gradually eroded, dominated and transformed through contact and conflict with European civilisation. But how did the Kanaks live, before the whites arrived? How can Kanak society be characterised, on the eve of European settlement? This is a hard question to answer adequately; naturally, there are no conventional written sources to illuminate a way of life which might have been in existence for centuries before the age of Cook and D’Entrecasteaux. A description of Kanak social relationships and cultural practices must be approached indirectly, that is to say by way of European sources. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French missionaries, doctors, administrators and professional anthropologists wrote plentifully on the Kanak customs they observed. Through their writings, the beliefs and social structure of an earlier period can be glimpsed. Nothing, however, authorises us to project the picture which emerges very far back into the Melanesian past. We can outline some features of Kanak life when the whites began to take an interest in them, but whether these customs had prevailed for millennia, for centuries, or merely for a few generations, we cannot tell. The Kanak population extracted a precarious living from agriculture and fishing. The Kanaks had limited natural resources at their disposal. Their society had a narrow and inelastic food base, which could only support sparse tribal settlement. The size of their population was kept within bounds by material constraints, such as malnutrition and physical exhaustion, which produced a low level of fertility. Fertility was also limited by customs and sexual taboos. In France, the low domestic birth rate was regarded as a source of national weakness, and the French in New Caledonia projected this domestic anxiety onto the native popu¬ lation. They deplored the low level of Kanak fertility. But agricultural resources in the territory were so uncertain that an untramelled popu¬ lation expansion might have been catastrophic. In effect, the physical and cultural obstacles to a higher birth rate helped to balance the size of the population against its available means of subsistence, and enabled the Kanaks to survive.

Two hanaks from Canala (east coast) pose with characteristic weapons and bagayous Mitchell Library

KANAK SOCIETY ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

15

The total native population of the island in the age of Cook and D’Entrecasteaux is impossible to estimate accurately. The decline of the Kanak population later on in the nineteenth century may have led some writers to exaggerate its extent in retrospect. The historian Yves Person makes a cautious estimate of about 40—50000 for the mainland, not including the population of the Loyalty Islands (Lifou, Mare and Uvea). The bulk of these inhabitants were to be found on the coast, or in the foothills, rather than in the central mountains, or on the barren rocky outcrop at the southern end of the Grande-Terre. In spite of this relative concentration, a total of something in excess of 50000 inhabitants does not suggest a very high level of population density. Given available resources, and the native mode of agricultural exploi¬ tation, this is not surprising. Unlike the Australian Aborigine, the Kanaks were not principally nomads or predators when the Europeans arrived. They had developed a sedentary form of agriculture, or at least, a semisedentary form of agriculture, since their taro fields were probably abandoned every four or five years after the soil had been exhausted. They had therefore acquired at least some of the benefits of the so-called Neolithic revolution: they had invented a settled form of cultivation. They were ignorant, however, of the other half of the Neolithic revol¬ ution, namely the domestication of animals, because until Cook arrived, quadrupeds were unknown on New Caledonia. Without cannibalism, the Kanaks had no meat resources. Kanak agriculture centred on the cultivation of two principal crops: the yam and the taro, both vital resources which not only made up the staple diet of the natives, but profoundly influenced cultural beliefs and practices. The taro, grown in shallow water, demanded the terracing and sophisticated irrigation works which Cook had admired on the Caledonian hillsides, but the Kanaks achieved this with only wooden implements. The yam, too, was a precious resource, which required careful training. For one Australian in 1871, the Kanak yam plantations were a vivid reminder of the hopfields of Kent. The anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt has drawn our attention to the cultural symbolism of the yam and the taro. The yam, for instance, was held sacred, for it grew in the ancestral soil, and its cultivation and harvesting were surrounded by various rituals designed to placate the spirits, and ensure a plentiful crop. The yam was invested with a pre¬ dominantly male symbolism. It was held to give the male his virility, and to contain the ancestral spirit which enabled the male to continue the line of the tribe or family. While the gestures and codes which accompanied the yam harvest were exclusively male, the taro, by con¬ trast, was a ‘female’ crop, grown not in dry ground but in water. Accord¬ ing to Leenhardt, this series of dichotomies, between yam/taro, male/ female, dry/wet, was central in Kanak life and culture. The word ‘Kanak’ itself is a Polynesian term, denoting not just ‘man’, as it is sometimes crudely translated, but rather ‘man of the country’ or homme du pays. In

other words, man is considered inseparable from the land, the soil, his natural surroundings. The name ‘Ranald implied and embodied a very intimate spiritual relationship between the New Caledonian and the earth he trod, cultivated, and acted propitiously towards to make fertile. Apart from the yam and the taro, the Kanak also ate fish, which he sometimes caught with a spear, or bow and arrow in the shallows. There were other supplements to his monotonous diet, but they were all ac¬ cessories to the yam and the taro. There were coconuts and banana trees, but certain foods, like turtles, were reserved for the chiefs alone. In the nineteenth century, the poultry and pigs introduced by the whites were kept only for purposes of commercial exchange with European sailors. The cagou, a species of bird native to the island, was occasionally hunted, but the only game consistently hunted by the natives was the flying fox, or roussette, prized for its red hair used to make necklaces. LaBillardiere also discovered children feasting on grilled spiders. From time to time, human flesh supplemented the Kanak diet: a fact which, more than any other single influence, evoked horror and mis¬ trust of the Kanaks amongst Europeans. As recently as 1966, a New Caledonian novel still characterised the Kanak as a cannibal (Paul Bloc, Les Confidences d’un Cannibale). In December 1984, Gerard Deuil, president of the French SNPMI, a right-wing union of small businessmen, de¬ nounced the leaders of the Kanak independence movement as cannibals. Cannibalism was especially associated with war and its accompanying rituals. To eat the heart and organs of one’s enemy gave the warrior a foretaste, as it were, of victory. The roasted flesh of the defeated was often shared with allies and neutral clans. It was offered to enhance the prestige of the conqueror, and to seal an alliance with a friend. The French frequently noted, however, that cannibalism also occurred in peacetime, and that the Kanaks consumed not only the flesh of their enemies, but sometimes even the flesh of their own kin. Occasionally, no doubt, the practice was abused and it became a destructive vice, when a tyrannical chief like Bourrate of Hienghene took to settling grievances by killing and consuming an offender. Chiefs who began to eliminate their own tribe in this barbaric way were, as Maurice Feenhardt put it, liquidating their own capital. The best interpretation of the practice of cannibalism is still perhaps a physiological one. Human flesh was some¬ times eaten in hatred, sometimes in peace and friendship; now in time of famine, now in time of abundance. Repulsive though it seems in western eyes, it was a response to the instinct for survival, in an environment which provided an exclusively vegetable diet. The real cause of canni¬ balism was a shortage of meat. The Kanaks’ supply of food was therefore irregular, insecure, and unbalanced from a nutritional point of view. Cultivation relied on a primitive technology, for metal tools were unknown before the whites arrived. It generally took two workers to turn the hard soil: one to hold the spade’s handle, and the other to push its blade into the stubborn

KANAK SOCIETY ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

1 7

earth. Like any traditional society, theirs was at the mercy of the climate. Drought, storms or cyclones could destroy their harvest, and they were also vulnerable to attack from the locusts which periodically descended on the mainland. The locusts also ruined the hopes of many settlers, nipping their plantations in the bud, and the French imported frogs in order to eliminate them. War, too, devastated plantations and always entailed the felling of a certain number of coconut trees. The Kanak ate when he could, and he ate heartily in case a long period of dearth was just around the corner. The yam harvest was often celebrated with extravagant feasting, and the French were sometimes shocked by this lack of moderation, and carefree attitude towards the future. The starchy diet of the Kanaks left obvious traces of nutritional deficiency. Elephantiasis affected up to one-tenth of the population, and conjunctivitis, impetigo, eczema and herpes were other evidence of the inadequacy of the diet. Paradoxically, the Europeans found New Caledonia surprisingly healthy: in spite of the marshland where the taros grew, the territory was malaria-free. The natives lived in huts built of wood, bark, coconut leaves and straw, bound with creeper. The huts were circular and conical, like a hive, the central pillar which supported the structure had a symbolic value, representing the male head of the household. The huts were warm at night, a very important consideration for people who wore little or no clothing, but were airless. In the native villages, fires would be lit at night, inside the huts, to repel mosquitoes. At the summit of this struc¬ ture, an inverted arrow was plunged into the roof, and on it hung various shells. One of them contained the totem, essential guardian and protector of the household. The flag of the newly proclaimed provisional government of the Socialist Republic of Kanaky adopted a stylised version of this decorative arrow as its emblem. The Kanak ‘tricolour’ thus carries a direct reference to a very ancient totemic tradition. The individual huts clustered around the Great Hut, with its very high pointed roof, used for communal and ceremonial events. Here, the central pole, or rhea, was a symbol of the unity of the whole clan, supported by its strongest pillar, the chief. The clan groupings of the Kanaks varied in size, from about 200 up to about 5 000. The clans, or tribes, had very little commercial contact with each other. They spoke different dialects, for about thirty-six different languages were spoken on the Grande-Terre, some of them intelligible to Polynesians, since there had been some recent immigration to the north and to the Loyalty Islands, from the Polynesian island of Wallis. There was therefore no consciousness of Kanak unity, and no word or concept seems to have existed for the island as a whole. Social and political organisation was very fragmented, along tribal lines. The clans did occasionally quarrel with each other, and endemic war¬ fare was at least one form of intertribal contact. War, rather than sexual potency, was the chief index of masculinity in Kanak society. On cere-

The hut of Great Chief Philippe of Hienghene, with a superb central arrow (fleche fattiere) Mitchell Library

KANAK SOCIETY ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

19

monial occasions, warriors might wear the bagayou, a covering for the penis, of exaggerated length, which sometimes trailed along the ground. Before going into combat, fighters would touch a specially designated virility stone, shaped like a penis, to give them strength. Fighting was above all a mentality, a question of temperament and confidence. It required careful psychological preparation, by means of rituals and dances, to bring the native’s anger and hostility to a highly aggressive pitch. The priest, or lakala, might ask for the heart or liver of an adversary in order to conduct a propitiation ceremony before battle. At the beginning of the rebellion of 1917, Leenhardt recalled, the colon Vouta was assassinated, and his heart cut up on a native ‘altar’ in just such a ceremony. War, said one Kanak, is the ‘result of a fury which you swell up inside yourself’ (L’effet d’une col'ere que Von gonfle en soi). Actual hand-to-hand combat, with assegais, clubs, spears and slings, did not normally cause many fatal casualties, until the introduction of European axes made fighting much more dangerous. Widespread destruction of property, however, almost always resulted from tribal war. The clans intermarried, or one might say that they exchanged women, sealing marriages and agreement by the reciprocal exchange of gifts, or of pearl-money. Marriage was patrilocal, or in other words the bride went to live with her husband’s clan, but, as we shall see, the maternal clan always commanded enormous respect. The child of the marriage, for instance, was held to belong to the mother’s clan, so that the family line passed always through the mother. This makes it hard to say whether the men or the women were supreme in the organisation of marriage and the family. The clan was a collective organisation, and was controlled by groups of kinsmen. Marriage needed the consent of the chief and a whole group of male relatives, so that marriages were often supervised by fraternal groupings. Brothers would give their sisters in marriage, and follow their own bloodline through the sons of their sisters. It was customary for a man to marry his brother’s widow. The chief himself was regarded as the eldest member of a group of fraternal kin. For these reasons, Kanak social relationships may be best viewed as determined by groups of brothers. Such marriages, sealed by the ceremonial exchange of pearl-money, were based on Melanesian traditions which French law could never encompass. There was a further aspect of marriage relationships which was even further removed from western practices. This was the vital role assigned to the maternal uncle, or the wife’s brother. The maternal uncle was an object of veneration, not only for the child, but also for the child’s natural father. After the mother, the maternal uncle was the child’s closest relative. Such was the authority of the maternal clan, that the role of the husband himself in the reproductive process seems to have been regarded as of minor significance. The totem of the family was held to reside in the back of the maternal uncle’s neck. He was entitled to gifts and a show of respect at every stage

20

CHAPTER 2

of his nephew’s passage to adulthood. He was owed presents from the husband, or the paternal clan, when his sister was married. When the family had a son, the maternal uncle, rather than the father, was con¬ gratulated and again received ceremonial gifts. Circumcision, too, was an important rite of passage and a family occasion. It usually occurred when the boy was about fifteen years old. Incision was made with a bamboo knife, after the subject had anaesthetised his genitals by sitting for a few hours in cold water. At such occasions, the wife's brother stood as a powerful representative of the maternal clan, and played a pivotal role in the network of reciprocal obligations, which tied one clan to another. In childbirth, reported the French doctor Rochas in 1862, the mother assumed a crouching position, supported by other women on each side. If labour proved difficult, or unusually prolonged, delivery was hastened by punching the mother’s abdomen. This sounds a very dangerous procedure, but there were other ways, too, in which natives effectively limited their own birth rate. Some, like infanticide, were quite voluntary; others took the form of longstanding cultural traditions and practices. It was inevitable in the first place that a life of hard labour, sustained by a mediocre diet, reduced fertility. Rochas noted that Kanak girls seemed to reach puberty early, and he claimed they married relatively young—in their late teens—but physical hardship severely shortened their child-bearing years. A long (by modern western standards) period of lactation might also have limited fertility, although this idea may be just a myth of nineteenth-century medicine. Children were frequently breastfed up to the age of three. The polygamy practised by some chiefs was to be denounced not only as unChristian but as demographically unsound, since it was bound to limit the sexual activity of several fertile women, especially when the chief was an old man. The customary tabus which also restrained fertility and population growth also included the periodic isolation of women. Special huts were set aside in the village for women, where segregation and sexual ab¬ stinence were compulsory at the onset of the menstrual cycle. Sometimes a period of sexual abstinence was considered imperative to ensure a good harvest. A sexual taboo also operated during pregnancy. Abortion was practised: cooked green bananas were considered an effective abortifacient, and women might be taunted with a joking innuendo, ‘she’s been eating green bananas’. Infanticide, and especially the infanticide of young girls, was suspected to have been widespread by the whites. They could never, however, substantiate such claims. If girl infanticide did take place, it does not seem to have prevented the existence of a slight surplus of known female births. Infanticide is always an intimate and secretive affair, and its frequency is therefore impossible to estimate. It only came to light in the very rare cases when the father was a white. Consider, for instance, the harrowing case of Maria Batiani, a 20-year-old native girl, who had already had

KANAK SOCIETY ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

2 1

one child, and had, in 1882, been living for three years with a white colon. She had strangled her newborn baby by this man, and hid the foetus under a banana tree. Her white lover denounced her for infanticide, which she admitted, telling the court that ‘since she had one child to feed and care for, the baby would be an overwhelming burden for her’. Batiani was illiterate, and her parents were unknown. She was sentenced to five years’ hard labour. It is impossible to judge how far her crime was part of generalised practice. By western standards, the lot of Kanak women in general seemed unenviable. Isolated during menstruation, they otherwise contributed fully to agricultural tasks. They accepted a great deal of sexual segre¬ gation: men, for instance, usually ate alone. French missionaries also recorded that they would often be beaten if they disobeyed their husbands. Divorce was possible, in cases of the wife’s adultery, and sterility. After cannibalism, the harsh treatment of women was, for the French, one of the most shocking and deplorable features of Kanak life. The clan lived a communal life, within which there was always a certain degree of sexual segregation. Property was shared on a collective basis, and ceremonies and cultural events took place in a tribal frame¬ work. The spirit of the clan, handed down through generations of an¬ cestors, was embodied in the chief. The chief was the visible presence of dead ancestors, the living medium through which they continued to speak to the clan and influence its destiny. He was the link by which the present spoke to the past, a past which he incarnated. The succession of the chiefs was ensured by primogeniture, but this was not automatic. A chief needed to cement his authority by demon¬ strating one important quality: his eloquence. He represented the ‘word of the clan’, and his power was judged according to his persuasive and oratorical powers. The chief was often portrayed in native art as a speaker, rather than as a great warrior. In wood sculptures, the chief is shown with his tongue protruding, as a symbol of his powers of speech. The chief was readily seen as a tyrant and a despot. He enjoyed certain privileges: certain foods were reserved for him alone, and the first fruits of the yam harvest were ritually presented to him. Fie had the power to declare war on another tribe, and he had the power to place taboos on people, food or plots of land. The chief also had judicial powers which might give him the power of life and death over his subjects. A cruel chief could no doubt abuse these powers, and appear an autocrat. This, however, might be a misleading impression of the chief. His authority was limited by customary law, and by pressure from his kin network. The chief was known humbly as ‘the great son’, a title which placed him firmly within his maternal clan, to which great honour was due. The chief was just one member, generally the eldest member, of a group of brothers, and to some extent they, rather than any single individual, together controlled the destiny of the clan. Their influence

22

CHAPTER 2

was brought to bear formally through a kind of council of elders. The informal constitution of the clan was thus a political mixture, the chief was part-monarch, and part-representative of an oligarchy of brothers. The religion of the Kanaks was a form of ancestor worship. Skulls of the dead were preserved in the ancestral burial ground, as a reminder of the ancestors’ physical presence, and the spirits of the tribal ancestors were present in the sacred stones used in communal ceremonies. For the Kanaks, there was a life after death. In some myths, it took the concrete form of an island paradise. In other stories, paradise was a rich under¬ water yam field. The soul, accompanied there by the souls of the an¬ cestors, found music and dancing, and an abundance of good food and bananas. Until the missionaries arrived, there was apparently no con¬ cept of hell in Kanak theology. The natural world was full of spirits. Man himself was an intimate part of this natural and animal world. Kanak culture did not distinguish humanity from its physical surroundings in the same way as western culture emphasised the peculiarity and superiority of mankind. I he placing of taboos, and the reverence for totems were ways in which man related to the physical universe. Some of the commonest forms of totem have already been mentioned. They frequently took animal form, or had a precise physical location. There were house totems, in the walls or roofs of huts, individuals could carry totems, like the much-honoured maternal uncle. A clan might also have its own totem, symbolising its collective life and force. There were many other forms of totem. They resided in animals like lizards and sharks, in vegetables, in people, in thunder. Their power was generally diffused throughout the natural universe, associating and giving vitality to all organic forms of life. The totem’s force could guarantee health and prosperity; but to violate or humiliate the totem or tabu could bring a terrible punishment on the offender. The lizard, to take one example, was a totem and a symbol of fertility. He had to be honoured if the yam harvest was to be successful. A place was traditionally reserved for him amongst the thatch of the native hut. The lizard was reputedly attracted to the banana tree, and the black spot sometimes found inside the banana fruit was a trace of the lizard s embryo. The lizard protected crops and pregnant women, but he was also capable, if slighted, of causing scrofula and emaciation. The earthworm, too, was a totem with power over the crops. There was a good material reason for this: the earthworm was quite capable of destroying the earthen dykes which framed the terraces of the taro fields. The shark and the sea snake were also respected totems. When black Pacific troops returned to New Caledonia in 1919, the Kanaks of Kanala presented them with yams, and this welcome: ‘Long God, return home into your own house.' This, too, was a reference to the tribal totem, the sea snake, known as the ‘Long God’. Kanak life and agriculture were sustained by the vital force of the

; ;

KANAK SOCIETY ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

2'i

totem. They were also protected by various prohibitions, or taboos. The taboos on sexual relations during menstruation and pregnancy have been noted. An incest taboo forbade intimate relations between brother and sister, who were obliged to avoid each other’s company as far as possible. Sexual taboos were sometimes imposed ad hoc by the chief to win the benevolence of spirits for specific purposes. Taboos protected sacred sites, and surrounded the spirits of the ancestors. The tribal burial grounds were taboo. The head of a chief could not be touched. The chief might place a taboo on the yam harvest, to ensure that it was not gathered in prematurely. This measure recalls the traditional French regulation of the wine harvest, the ban des vendanges, which officially laid down the date when grape-picking began. At the summit of Kanak society, the supreme expression of tribal culture was the pilou, a festive occasion which was the equivalent of the Australian Aborigines’ corroboree. The purpose of the pilou was normally to honour the maternal clan and its ancestors. The precise occasion might be determined by the need to offer the fruits of the harvest, to present young male initiates, or perhaps to present a new chief to the tribe, and to listen to his all-important inaugural speech. The presence of relatives on the female side (but not necessarily of females) was required, and thus other tribes would be invited to the pilou, to feast, dance and exchange gifts. The exchange of gifts assumed enormous significance in Kanak society. The purpose of gift exchange, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss has argued in general terms, is neither purely ceremonial nor entirely dis¬ interested. On the contrary, it was invested with considerable political meaning for witnesses and participants. The presentation of gifts con¬ ferred prestige on the donor, and the granting of a generous present was

; *

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A pilou-pilou: Melanesian warriors celebrate an important collective ritual (date unknown) Mitchell Library

CHAPTER 2

24

a way in which a chief sought to enhance his authority, and build up his reputation. Hence when Robert Towns presented Chief Bourrate with a red coat, the chief cut it up in many pieces, and distributed them to his petits chefs, inviting them to share his prestige. Gift exchange was there¬ fore enormously important to the giver. At the same time, it placed obligations on the recipient, tying him into a network of mutual obli¬ gations and alliances. Gift exchange was essential for political prestige, and it was also a kind of social cement, but it was clearly fraught with problems, since so much could be at stake. It was vital to observe the proper conventions, to match the generosity of one’s partner. Otherwise, one had to deal with a dishonoured chief, whose pride had been slighted, and who had pub¬ licly lost face. Presenting gifts made allies, but they might well be reluctant allies, unwilling to embrace the quarrels of the donor, but simply wanting to avoid the embarrassment and even greater humiliation which an outright refusal would cause. This is why gift exchanges between tribes and families were not always as amicable as one might suppose. The pilou, designed to exalt the spirit of the ancestors, honour the maternal clan, and express a sense of tribal community, could easily provoke quarrels and spark off an inter tribal w.ar. The greatest festival of all was the pilou-pilou, an exceptional feast to mark the death of a chief. It customarily required an enormous invest¬ ment of time and effort. It took years of preparation, requiring the erection of special buildings, and the plantation of special yam fields allocated for the celebrations. Many tribes would gather at such an occasion, and were obliged to give presents. The greatest honours were reserved for the family of the dead chief’s mother, the clan of the 'Great Son’. French missionaries reported that human victims were sometimes presented as gifts at the pilou-pilou, and deduced that these feasts de¬ manded special human sacrifices to be carried out. This was an excuse for a wholesale attack on tribal customs. These traditional practices were in decline anyway, by the late nine¬ teenth century. White contact eroded native culture, and French domi¬ nation demoralised the tribes. The evolution was slow; the pilou sometimes incorporated a dance which presaged the defeat of the European, but this was a transitional development, before traditional Kanak culture disintegrated altogether. Their dances eventually became tnviahsed, objects of patronising tourist curiosity. Many aspects of ancient Kanak life and culture no doubt remained impenetrable to the French anthropologists who studied and recorded them. This brief outline relies on those studies, and presents Kanak culture as observed through their eyes. Unfortunately, their contribution has not always been recognised by their compatriots. In January 1985, the New Caledonian academic and anthropologist Jean Guiart found his home and property destroyed by a gang of angry Caldoches (Caledonians of French origin), who considered Guiart too sympathetic towards Kanak aspirations to sovereignty.

KANAK SOCIETY ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

25

Main sources for chapter 2: The main sources for Chapter 2 were the works of Maurice LEENHARDT, especially his Gens de la Grande-Terre (Paris 1953), and Notes d’ethnologie neocaledonienne (Paris 1930). Supplementary material was mainly pro¬ vided by Dr Victor de ROCHAS, La Nouvelle-Caledonie: ses habitants, productions, moeurs, cannibalisme (Paris 1862), and by Eric RAU, Institutions et coutumes canaques (Paris 1944).

CHAPTER 3

THE INVASION OF THE CHRISTIANS

In 1843, the first Catholic missionaries landed on the north-east coast of the Grande-Terre. Protestant catechists had started their New Caledonian mission three years earlier, but they concentrated not on the mainland, but on the outlying island dependencies. Although the two churches had ultimately similar aims, they were great rivals. 1 he missionaries oi each religious denomination were not fighting merely for the souls of the heathen Kanaks, they were also to some extent fighting each other. The missionaries were patriots, and they promoted the interests of the two great powers they represented. The Catholics were identified with French interests, the Wesleyans with the spread of British mfluc nee. The Catholics had great difficulty in establishing themselves in New Caledonia, whereas the Protestants were, initially, much more successful. Once New Caledonia officially became a French colony in 1853, how¬ ever, Catholic fortunes were secured, while the Anglo-Protestant in¬ fluence correspondingly diminished. I he introduction of both Clnistian religions started to undermine the values and certainties of Kanak culture, and both have had a lasting impact on New Caledonian lih up to this day. The Catholic missions were sponsored by the Societe de la Propagation de la Foi, established in the French city of Fyon in 1824. The society en¬ trusted missionary work in the south Pacific to the Marist fathers, who established a base in the 1830s, on the island of Wallis. The direction of this mission was entrusted to Monseigneur Bataillon, who assumed the grand title of Vicar of Western Oceania. This was the base, too, for the small group of Marist missionaries who landed near Balade in December 1843, escorted by the French navy. Unlike the British missionaries, the French evangelists were always transported and supplied by their own government. They numbered only five! two lay brothers, lathers \ lard and Rougeyron, and their leader. Monseigneur Douarre. Guillaume Douarre was a rather inglorious, but hard-working pioneer of French Christian civilisation. He was a man of humble, rural origins, the son of a baker’s assistant from the Auvergne. He was in his early 26

THE INVASION OF THE CHRISTIANS

27

thirties when, in 1842, he was appointed Bishop of Amata in partibus infidelium. He left most of the work on the spot to his colleagues, for- he spent much of his time travelling backwards and forwards to France and to Rome, organising support and supplies. One of his chief problems was to persuade headquarters in Lyon to allow him more independence and funds. He had been placed under the jurisdiction of the authoritarian Bataillon on Wallis, who tended to absorb most of the available money himself, leaving only a few crumbs at the disposal of the New Caledonian venture. Douarre had some success in 1847, when he persuaded Rome to appoint him as an independent vicar in New Caledonia. Further assistance was forthcoming from the Societe Francaise d’Oceanie, established in the Channel port of Le Havre in 1845. The Oceania Society intended to combine commercial expansion with assistance to the French Pacific missions. It canvassed support in Lyon, which was not only the headquarters of the Societe de la Propagation de la Foi, but also a rich commercial centre. The society issued shares, subscribed by the Pope, the clergy and the respectable bourgeoisie of Lyon. The company looked forward to establishing a trading post on the site of every mission. The word of God and the acquisition of profits would go hand in hand. Unfortunately, the word of God was not always heard, and the profits did not materialise. Support from this source to the missions in the South Pacific dwindled after the 1848 revolution, and the company was eventually dissolved in 1854. By this time, Douarre had at least some¬ thing to show for his efforts: he had managed to buy a ship, the Etoile du Matin, which enabled the New Caledonian mission to obtain supplies in Sydney, without having to rely on naval generosity. It was typical of Douarre’s narrow-minded approach that his chief thought, on arriving at this unknown shore, was the fear that the Pro¬ testants might have got there first. The missionaries soon had more pressing worries—not the natives, who at first appeared friendly, but their own food supplies. The mission ‘bought’ a field of yams from the natives, but a drought had destroyed the crop in the north of the island, and famine threatened. The natives seized the meagre harvest of yams, on which the missionaries had counted. Very soon, the Marist fathers were suffering severely from hunger, unable to predict when another supply ship would appear on the horizon. The Kanaks gave the mission¬ aries fish, but it proved poisonous. This may have been a repetition of the identity test which Cook had to undergo, seventy years previously. The mission had been left with enough supplies for five months. In fact, the group was to be isolated on New Caledonia for a year and a half. In those months of deprivation, their survival was assured only by the hospitality of the Kanaks, and by the intelligence of Father Viard. Viard was an invaluable member of the mission. On Wallis, he had learnt the rudiments of Polynesian dialect, which served him well in the north of the Grande-Terre, where there was some Polynesian influence. Viard’s linguistic skills qualified him as a useful preacher and evange-

28

CHAPTER 3

list, but they were even more useful in bargaining with the natives for food. Father Viard was welcomed by Chief Hienghene, whose household was fascinated by his three-cornered hat. Clerical costume made few concessions to the climate. They were also very curious about the cruci¬ fix hanging from his neck. When Viard explained that it represented the son of his God, who had been crucified to death, the natives expressed their sincere condolences to the Christians on this sad bereavement. Viard was fed with coconuts and bananas, and spent the night in the chief’s hut. He was also offered human flesh, but insisted that the chief should desist from cannibalism. He extracted a promise from him to this effect. Most importantly for the future of the mission, Chief Flienghene promised to put an entire yam field at the disposal of the Christians. When the missionaries, wretched and starving, later recalled this pro¬ mise, they found that Hienghene had kept his word, and their yams, ready for harvesting, had been untouched. In this way, the whites survived, but the Kanaks did not find their hospitality repaid as they expected. In response to the generous gesture of Chief Hienghene, Father Viard had himself made a promise: if Hienghene and his clan accepted Christian baptism, they would receive some ’material reward, when the French supply ships next arrived. The chief accepted. The natives well knew that the great sailing ships which periodically descended from the horizon brought food, and they under¬ stood that if they were to join the French religion, they too would receive a share of the goods they brought. Unfortunately, Viard's promise was not kept. He himself left on the supply ship Le Rhin, before carry¬ ing it out. Relations between whites and Kanaks thereafter began to deteriorate. When Le Rhin came to the rescue of the hungry missionaries in 1845, Father Rougeyron naively found the natives very helpful in disembark¬ ing provisions, and cheerfully singing the canticles they had been taught, as they worked. Dealings between the fathers and the Kanaks had given rise to a sort of cargo cult. For the Kanaks, there seemed to be a direct relationship between professing Christianity and enjoying the same supplies which the priests received when their ship came in. I he missionaries, however, never seem to have perceived this connection in the Kanaks’ minds. The supply ships brought them large stocks of flour, which they did not share with their converts. On the contrary, they tried to per¬ suade the Kanaks to eat dogs, a neat substitute for cannibalism and, at the same time, a solution to canine overpopulation. The missionaries, of course, had constant subsistence problems of their own in the early years of Christian presence. In 1846, La Seine was wrecked on the reefs, and the missionaries were obliged to give hospi¬ tality to its crew. Their 5000 kilograms of flour were used to feed 200 hungry castaways. This, no doubt, only served to confirm the Kanaks worst fears: in spite of promises and baptisms, the whites would only

THE INVASION OF THE CHRISTIANS

29

share their goods with other whites. Conflict and distrust grew even more acute after the arrival of the Spek at Balade in 1847. This time, the natives raided the hangar where unloaded provisions had been stored. The natives seemed friendly when a ship approached, hostile when it left. They waited in anticipation for some relief from hunger. Viard found that: ‘They still have an exalted idea of whites. Power over wind and rain is attributed to us. Heaven, according to them, is our home, and they arrived at this conclusion because they saw our ships on the horizon, touching the sky’. The Kanaks entertained high hopes, which were dashed when it became clear that they were to be excluded from the heavenly cargo. Le Rhin brought an additional cargo when it dropped anchor in September 1845. It carried several dogs, which the missionaries adopted to guard their compound. The natives’ fear of dogs has been noted before; it was evident again in their apprehensive attitude towards one in particular, the fierce bulldog, named Rhin, put in the care of Father Blaise. The dogs stood guard over the mission hut. They deterred pilferers, and kept annoying beggar women at a distance. The natives approached the dogs with trepidation. They regarded them as creatures which had to be appeased, and won over. They talked to the dogs, offered them presents of yams and bananas, and pleaded with them for their kindness and protection. Perhaps the guard dogs made the Marist fathers feel more secure in their tiny, alien outpost, isolated from white contact. At the same time, they made amicable relations between missionaries and Kanaks very difficult. In 1847, the anger and frustration of the natives exploded into violent retaliation. The whites had hoarded their provisions, set ferocious dogs to guard them, and furthermore, seemed to be immune from the plague epidemic which raged in the north-east in that year. Perhaps they were sorcerers. Their presence, at any rate, had become intolerable. On 17 July 1847, Kanaks attacked the Balade mission post. The plantations and gardens, which the fathers had carefully raised and tended, were destroyed. Their food stocks were raided. The missionaries themselves were forced to flee, as their church was set alight. One of them, however, did not get away. The Kanaks vented their wrath on Father Blaise, the priest responsible for the guard dogs. He was clubbed to death, the first Catholic martyr on New Caledonian soil. The missionaries fled south to Pouebo, and thence took refuge in Sydney. In August, the first of many punitive military missions arrived in Balade, to exact ‘reprisals’ for the murder of Father Blaise, and the expulsion of the mission. Soldiers from La Brillante and L’Anonyme burned down native villages, and felled coconut plantations, driving the native inhabitants off into the hills. The first attempt to introduce Catholicism into New Caledonia had met with appalling failure and bloodshed. The mission soon resumed its work, but from a new base on the Isle of

30

CHAPTER 3

Pines. In 1851, Monseigneur Douarre, returning from Europe, led the mission stubbornly back to Balade, but once again, the fathers were expelled. Their enthusiasm had anyway been somewhat dimmed by the news that the crew of the Cutter, an American trepang fisher, had been massacred and eaten by the Pouma tribe. The missionaries grouped their neophytes together, and shipped them safely off to Wallis. Catholic footholds still remained on the north-east coast, at Pouebo and Ouagap, but Balade was definitely abandoned. By this time, the Catholics were learning to communicate in the local Melanesian language. It had taken Father Rougeyron a year and a half to speak to his putative flock in their native tongue, but in 1844, the missionaries had enough followers to celebrate Mass with them. Twenty natives, who had learnt the Paternoster and the Ave Maria, attended. In 1850, on the Isle of Pines, this work continued. Father Goujon started a school, and set to work on a dictionary to use in it. According to one French colonist in 1873, the absence ol any welldefined religion facilitates the propagation of Catholicism . I his ignorant exaggeration completely underestimated the strength ol existing Kanak beliefs. Catholicism had not just to destroy paganism, but to adapt to it as well. It had to find its place in a mental universe already full of magical and spiritual agencies. Sometimes it undermined those ideas; at other times, it compromised with them. By 1861, on the Isle ol Pines, one such compromise had become an established practice. A regular new service had been added to the Catholic calendar: the blessing of the yam harvest. This ceremony tended to erode the traditional ceremonies at¬ tached to the yam harvest, but it was also evidence of the Church’s willingness to adapt to Kanak customs. The Catholic mission eventually became self-sufficient in food supplies, and even became a pioneer of agricultural reform. By 1858, the mission at Ouagap had a herd of eighty goats, and at Pouebo, rice and maize had been introduced. The Isle of Pines proved even more fertile. Here, the missionaries planted maize and European vegetables. They con¬ structed their own irrigation works, and set up a sawmill. They tended to the sick, but their deathbed visits were sometimes interpreted as sorcery. The main concern of the missionaries was to baptise those about to die. When Father \ iard baptised a sick child, who recovered, his reputation among the natives was enhanced. On another occasion, however, he baptised a chief s wife, who died later on the same day, and the priest was suspected of having hastened her demise. It is more than likely that the natives attributed the recovery or death of the patient to the ceremonies of baptism or extreme unction. Kanak anxieties on this score were at their height in time of plague. In 1847, the year the mission was expelled from Balade, a plague epidemic carried off half the local population, according to Father Rougeyron’s rough estimate. He recorded the symptoms: they consisted of a violent headache, deafness and stomach pains. It was later suggested that some

Yenguebane Is.

NEW CALEDONIA: MISSIONS

o" S>

32

CHAPTER 3

of these outbreaks resembled diphtheria. Many of the dying were bap¬ tised. The missionaries appeared to have power over the disease, but they also appeared to be condemning many victims to death. The Catholic mission experienced further outbreaks of ‘plague’, which caused literally hundreds of deaths, on the Isle of Pines, in 1861, and again in 1864. One problem was that the missionaries themselves never seemed to become infected. This suggests that they were confronted with a com¬ mon European disease, against which the Kanaks had no immunity. In 1853, when an epidemic killed one in ten of the Pouebo tribe, the Kanaks began to wonder why the whites were spared. The immunity of the whites encouraged rumours that they could control the spread ol the disease, and were deliberately using magic to kill the Kanaks. These rumours were scotched by the tragic illness of Monseigneur Douarre himself, who died, in the arms of Father Rougeyron, on 27 April 1853. His death had one small consolation; it restored the credibility of the whites, demonstrating their vulnerability to disease. Douarre was a pessimistic plodder, who spared no effort, but worked without vision or imagination. He confessed that he regretted his own cowardice, and avowed himself unfit for such a difficult mission. Posterity may well endorse this cruel verdict of inadequacy, but it is only fair to point out the enormous difficulties the Catholics faced. 1 he missionaries tackled cannibalism, plague, starvation and complete isolation from white society for years at a time. Douarre and his compatriots endured all this, sustained by his obstinate faith, and passionate anti-I rotestantism. He died too soon to see Catholicism solidly established, under the protection of the French military administration. The Kanaks associated France with Catholicism, and their adoption of Christianity was an important step towards their assimilation of European culture. At times, however, the gap between the two cultures seemed unbridgeable. In 1858, Father Poupinel, in a revealing comment, saw the greatest obstacle to the conversion of the Kanaks as lying in what he called the ‘communism’ of the natives. He referred perhaps to the tradition of tribal collectivism, or to the anarchic state of economic exchange, in which pipes and tobacco served as the natives' favourite form of currency. The fundamental problem was that a society based on gift exchange could not easily grasp the notion of buying and selling. A tribal communalism could not be reconciled with modern western capitalist concepts of private property. This was the origin of one very early misunderstanding. Soon after their arrival, the missionaries believed they had ‘bought a field of yams. Such a definitive property contract was not comprehensible to the natives, who later insisted in taking back the fruits of the harvest. Yams, in any case, were sacred. They were the flesh of the ancestors. How could they therefore be ‘sold’ in a western sense? The consequence of these errors was that the French saw the natives as thieves or ‘bandits’, as Rougeyron branded them. They surrounded their compound at Balade with a palis-

THE INVASION OF THE CHRISTIANS

33

sade, to keep out thieves and used dogs to protect their property from light-fingered intruders. It was therefore the missionaries who first introduced the Kanaks to the notion of individual private ownership. It was a painful introduction. The Kanak always expected a division of the spoils. When the whites did not cooperate, they became enemies who would not observe the conven¬ tions of gift exchange. For the whites, on the other hand, the Kanaks were thieving barbarians, who refused to recognise that certain things did not belong to them. Father Poupinel saw it as his task to eradicate ‘The communism of Oceania. . .this scourge of society, with its ugly and depressing consequences, [which] oppresses the tribes of these islands. Here, one must share everything. . .Communism must surely be one of the greatest obstacles standing in the way of the mission’s attempts to improve the physical and moral condition of these tribes’. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Catholic and Protestant missions operated in different geographical areas: the Protestants in the Loyalty Islands, and the Catholics in the hostile north of the GrandeTerre, followed by the Isle of Pines (where the Protestants had in fact briefly preceded them). Although separated by their faith and by the ocean, they both attacked similar aspects of Kanak culture. They dis¬ couraged their customary nakedness, especially of women, who were urged to adopt the ‘missionary robe’. The missionaries also found the men indecent, for they wore only the flimsiest of penis covers. Hence the insulting French joke that with a pair of gloves, one could clothe ten Kanaks.

The discipline of the Church: the Nao mission, in 1876

Mitchell Library

34

CHAPTER 3

Protestants and Catholics both campaigned against polygamy, with mixed success. Chief Touru, on the Isle of Pines, who had fifty wives, responded to Christian reproaches by offering to lend some of his wives to the Samoan teachers. On the Grande- Terre, another Kanak was refused baptism because he was bigamous. He rectified this matrimonial irregularity by killing and devouring one of his wives. The French were particularly anxious to alleviate the brutal treatment of native women. All missionaries tried to eliminate cannibalism, but this was far from easy, as they were frequently reminded. At Yenguebane in 1850, the crew of the Alcmene was attacked. Twelve whites were killed and con¬ sumed; three sailors who swam for it were adopted by a neighbouring tribe. By the 1890s, Christianity had made a little more progress, for the old warrior chief of the Tamboa tribe complained to Governor Pardon that the ban on cannibalism had contributed to Kanak population decline. The meat of an enemy, he argued, constituted the most fortifying of diets, and the new prohibition was reducing the Kanaks to a state of anaemia and enfeeblement. But the governor appreciated the logical absurdity of permitting the practice of cannibalism in order to increase population levels. By this time, the imposition of French rule had vastly weakened native resistance to Christianity. On the other hand, the Kanaks by then no longer monopolised the attention of Catholic mission¬ aries. The arrival of a substantial white military and convict population gave them new, and more receptive clients. Protestant missionaries arrived in New Caledonia before the Catholics, and after a shaky start, had considerable success. In 1840, they landed on the Isle of Pines and, in the following year, on Mare, in the Loyalty Islands. They did not stay long on the Isle of Pines. The unpopularity of the sandalwood traders rubbed off on the English-speaking missionaries, and the islanders rejected them. In 1842, the crew of the sandal-trading vessel Star was massacred on the Isle of Pines, and there were Protestant missionaries among the victims. In the Loyalty Islands, however, Protestant implantation was far more solid. The Isle of Pines was abandoned by the London Missionary Society, but evangelists remained both on Mare and Lifou. Only at the very end of the nineteenth century did Protestantism establish a base on the mainland, with the permission of the controversial Governor Feillet, who quarrelled regularly over such matters with the Catholic elite in Noumea. By 1873, the colonist Balansa found the population of Lifou was 85 percent Protestant, and today, the Loyalty Islands remain a Protestant stronghold. The success of the Protestant missions lay in their use of Polynesian catechists. The first missionaries on Mare were from Samoa and Raratonga. These Polynesian teachers were more persuasive than the agents of an imperialist European power, and they helped to build an organisation much more truly Caledonian than the Catholic Church in the colony.

THE INVASION OF THE CHRISTIANS

35

White Protestant missionaries and their Polynesian assistants spread the Gospel through the medium of the English language. Their success as educators embarrassed the French administration. Captain Treve reported in 1864 that the natives of Lifou were being taught to read, write and count, and that many of the present generation could already write. Most of them could read, he added, and not only bibles. Many of them knew some English already, having spent time working for the whalers or the sandal-traders. A few had even visited Sydney or New Zealand on English or Australian ships. By 1885, Louis, the well-educated brother-in-law of Chief Naisseline on Mare, had completed his studies in Sydney, and acted as interpreter for the French Resident on the island. The French were not particularly happy to see this rapid spread of English cultural influence. In the 1860s, they could not administer the island of Lifou, without employing two interpreters: one for the Kanak dialect, and another to translate English. London sent British priests, too, to Lifou and Mare. Some of them, like MacFarlane and Jones, were strong-willed bigots who were soon engaged in running battles with the French. Like the Catholics on the mainland, they tried with varying degrees of success to ‘civilise’ native culture. The French recognised Protestant success in making almost all the natives wear clothes, and in giving them a good sense of private property. The Protestants introduced other startling innovations. Unlike the Catholics, of course, they were not necessarily celibate, and the mission which arrived on the Isle of Pines included Mrs Murray, the missionary’s wife. This was possibly the first time a white woman had ever been seen in New Caledonia. Murray, like the French, was very shocked by the inferior status of Kanak women, and set out to remedy this source of oppression. He received a ceremonial welcome, but insisted that Kanak women should be admitted into the Grande Case (Great Hut) for such ritual occasions. This was a revolutionary violation of Kanak custom, and for a missionary who wanted to ingratiate himself, a terrible faux pas. If we turn to the activities of the Protestants, the documentary evidence gives the impression of constant friction between them and the colonial administration. The Protestant missionaries barely tolerated French supervision, although after 1853, they were obliged to recognise the legitimacy of French rule in New Caledonia. The French regarded them as seditious, and deliberately provocative, and kept them under military surveillance. Like the Catholic priests, the Protestants introduced the Kanaks to alien ideas and institutions, like private property and mono¬ gamous marriage. The clergy of both denominations worked to under¬ mine indigenous cultural traditions. Christianity, in whatever guise, blazed a trail by confronting ingrained habits, and shattering the social and cultural ties which held Kanak culture together. The fanaticism of the Protestant missions, together with the hostility of a few French officers, caused a crisis on Lifou in 1864. The British

36

CHAPTER 3

priests issued dire warnings against the dangerous attractions of Catholi¬ cism, which the French construed as a kind of political conspiracy against their colonial rule. Pastor Sleight, on Lifou, provoked Captain Treve and Lieutenant Bourgey by telling the natives that anyone who converted to Catholicism would die within the year. In order to counter Anglo-Protestant influence on the island, these officers ordered the sus¬ pension of all Protestant schools. They had taken a great risk, and Treve’s action was later to be disowned, for it sparked off a native rising against the French. The two officers had underestimated native loyalty to their religious leaders and teachers. When Lieutenant Bourgey arrogantly dismissed a peace offering of yams, the natives armed themselves with assegais and clubs, and began to hold preparations for resistance, after dark, by torchlight. At this point, the French added further folly to their original mistake, by ordering the arrest of the Protestant teachers. This produced a military conflict, in which the French saw the hand of Protestant England manipulating the natives against them. One native shot a soldier dead, and a state of siege was declared on Lifou. A punitive ex¬ pedition arrived, which took some hostages, and'destroyed the villages of Chepeneche and Mendoe. Governor Guillain forbade Pastor MacFarlane from practising his religion, and blamed him for the insurrection. The whole issue, however, was taken up by the Australian press, and even by Lord Russell at the Foreign Office in London. The French government had no wish to create a diplomatic incident over a trivial skirmish on a small, distant Pacific island, and the Colonial Ministry ordered that a more conciliatory policy towards the Protestant missions be adopted in future. Pastor MacFarlane, however, was in a triumphant mood. Now aware that a few well-directed letters and morally indignant press reports could arouse the interest of the Foreign Office on his behalf, he proceeded to complain loud and long about French vexations. MacFarlane was a young Scot of twenty-one, when he arrived on Lifou in 1859. He soon established a powerful personal ascendancy over his flock. He behaved like a King, Lieutenant Bourgey complained. He collected copra from the natives, and made a profit out of it. As Governor Guillain told the minister for colonies, ‘The propagation of the faith. . .goes hand in hand with business; and the influence earned in the name of God is made to serve commercial activities, which it soon succeeds in monopolising’. MacFarlane imposed his own rough justice, fining adulterous women yams and pigs, banning smoking, and insisting on strict sabbath obser¬ vance. He protested at every French interference in his activities. They prevented him and his co-religionists from visiting Uvea; they would not allow him to visit Sydney, he claimed, and so on. At Christmas in 1865, MacFarlane, accompanied by his wife and some Protestant Kanaks, entered the (empty) Catholic church at Nassalo. Inside, the Kanaks were fascinated by the paintings of Christ.

THE INVASION OF THE CHRISTIANS

37

Mrs MacFarlane entered the choir and, out of curiosity, had a good look at the altar, fingering some of the ornaments, for which she was later accused of sacrilege. They were eventually challenged by a native at¬ tendant, whom MacFarlane harangued: ‘Do you really believe that you eat the good Lord when you celebrate the Mass?,’ he asked. ‘Why don’t you eat Father Fabre while you are at it?’ Father Fabre was the Catholic priest of Lifou. This was really too much for the governor, but his superiors vetoed any retaliation. On Uvea, where the Catholic presence was much stronger, the Pro¬ testant pastor Samuel Ella was similarly accused of inflaming tribal warfare. One issue involved was the tributes and tithes which the Pro¬ testant Church expected to receive from the natives—a practise bound to antagonise the Kanak chiefs. The true impact of Protestantism on Kanak life was not limited to the use of clothing or attempts to enforce Victorian Sabbatarianism in the South Pacific. In the long term, the coercion exerted by the missionaries went much deeper. It was eroding the institution of chiefdom itself. Not the Great Hut, but the prayer house became the centre of village life. Not the chief, but the Protestant missionary and his teachers commanded the community. The authority of the chief was further supplanted by MacFarlane’s introduction of fines for crimes like adultery, for this threatened the chief’s judicial authority. Then the collection of tithes was added to these sources of chiefly grievance, for such offerings were customarily reserved for native chiefs. What the Kanaks gave to the Church, they refused to their own chiefs. The Kanak community was undergoing a serious crisis, which affected its traditional forms of leadership and of cohesion. The social and politi¬ cal structure of local life was disintegrating under pressure from the missionaries. This was the case on Mare under Pastor Jones in the mid-1880s. In 1885, the situation was well analysed for the French by Louis, the brother-in-law of chief Naisseline. Louis’s family ties made him a natural sympathiser with the traditional authority of the chiefs, when he re¬ ported that All the teachers have a common aim: to destroy the old ways, so that they can take power in the name of religion, and seize the tributes due to the chief. The teachers have arrogated for themselves the right to make the Kanaks work for them, without the chief’s authority, and have as¬ sumed the right, formerly reserved exclusively for the chief, to be served certain kinds of fish. Even in 1875, Naisseline senior had to punish several teachers for encroaching on his prerogatives.’ Chief Naisseline was himself a Protestant, but he was faced with a tribal secession against him, until he discovered in the French administration a natural ally against his own insubordinate Protestant subjects. The French backed Chief Naisseline and Louis, not because they were par-

38

CHAPTER 3

tisans of Kanak tradition, but because they wanted to reduce the in¬ fluence of Protestantism and of perfidious Albion. They were rather more subtle about undermining Pastor Jones than they had been with MacFarlane, twenty years earlier, on Lifou. This time the French realised that the internment of the native teachers was insufficient. Louis told Gallet, head of the Native Affairs Bureau, ‘When you want a tree to die, it is no good attacking the branches. You must go for the roots’. In other words, the authority of Jones himself must be weakened. The French had a brainwave. They introduced a French Protestant priest, by the name of Cru. (4 his was not necessarily what Naisseline wanted, but it showed that the French did not object to Protestantism. They were more interested in reducing the authority of the English.) Unfortunately, Pastor Cru was not up to his task. He was no match for the experienced Jones. Jones persuaded the natives to boycott Cru. Then he solved Cru’s accommodation problems, by giving him a house, rent-free. This, the French realised, placed Cru in a position of inferiority and dependence in native eyes. Jones, however, was forced to respond to military intimidation, and although he was defended by the Australian pjess and by the English government, the international situation was not as sensitive as it had been in 1864. The French, accusing Jones of having inspired antiFrench sedition, expelled him in 1887. Jones was forced to abandon years of hard work at very short notice. The natives, however, proved fickle supporters. After he had gone, they dismantled his house, took away his doors and gates, and slaughtered his livestock, as the French reported, ‘with joy in their hearts’ (de gaite de coeur). The French, who had supported their Protestant puppet, the ineffec¬ tual Cru, clearly had not expelled Jones because they preferred Catholi¬ cism to Calvinism. They rather wanted to restrict English influence, and the spread of the English language and education in the Loyalty Islands. Thus, the departure of Jones was accompanied by the closure of his English schools. As far as the natives were concerned, this Anglo-French quarrel was superimposed on disputes between tribes, some allied to the French, others to the English, and on disputes within tribes. Hence the pro-English petits chefs had rebelled against the pro-French grand chef Naisseline. As for Naisseline and Louis, their loyalty was rewarded with the medaille d’honneur. Naisseline’s descendants are still chiefs on Mare. Niddoish Naisseline is today the leader of New Caledonia’s small, moderate independence party, the LKS (Kanak Socialist Liberation movement). The legacy of these early missionary activities is apparent in New Caledonia today. The geography of Protestant and Catholic religious observance closely follows the earliest patterns of evangelical efforts. The Protestant Church is today closer in touch with Kanak aspirations than the Catholic clergy, which was, from its arrival, viewed as part of the apparatus of colonialism. The pedagogic effort of the churches has also

THE INVASION OF THE CHRISTIANS

39

borne fruit, even if, for some members of the hierarchy, that fruit seems to be inexplicably poisoned. The role of the churches, in New Caledonia’s more recent political life, has been to educate the elite of the modern independence movement, even if some members of that elite have now rejected the churches. JeanMarie Tjibaou, leader of the FLNKS provisional government, is himself an ex-Catholic priest. Elio Machoro, the ‘hard man’ of the November 1984 insurrection, shot in a gunfight in 1985, was an ex-seminarist, and Yann Uregei, the itinerant ambassador of the FLNKS, is a practising Protestant. Both churches inaugurated independent and enduring systems of education. The priests they trained formed a natural Kanak elite. They were prepared for a position of religious leadership in their community, but several of them inevitably accepted responsibilities for political leadership as well. Whereas the Catholic hierarchy has adopted a prudent attitude to¬ wards the Kanak independence movement, the Evangelical Protestant Church in New Caledonia has, since an unequivocal resolution of the General Synod in 1979, supported the movement. There are historical and racial reasons for this attitude. Ever since the Protestant missionary and ethnologist Maurice Leenhardt settled on the mainland at Houailou, his church was sympathetic to Kanak aspirations. While the Catholic Church always appeared closely connected with the colonising power, the Protestant Church is a more genuinely Melanesian body, admin¬ istered by Kanak priests. The Catholic Church has been far more reticent. Its leaders have followed the advice of Pope John Paul II, recommending political non¬ intervention. The Catholic Church embraces a rather different congre¬ gation than does the Protestant Church. A census of 1983 registered 62 percent of New Caledonia’s population as Catholics. They are to be found principally on the mainland, consisting of almost all the Europeans, all the immigrants from Wallis, and perhaps a half of the Kanak popu¬ lation. Twenty-five percent of the population were practising Protes¬ tants. They are to be found especially at the Protestant enclave of Houailou, and on the Loyalty Islands. They are almost all of Melanesian origin. There has been something of a reaction against the Catholic Church. Of the seventeen priests ordained in the diocese of Noumea since 1946, twelve were in fact Melanesian. But of the fifteen ordinands still alive today, seven have left the priesthood. They include some of the most militant campaigners for independence, like Francois Burck, Nepamoindu, Camille Ipere and Jean-Marie Tjibaou himself. Tjibaou recently de¬ clared: ‘We expect nothing from the Church. It can leave us alone! Our people are suffering, but they will get nothing from bending the knee in a cloud of incense’.

40

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Main sources for chapter 3 The early activities of the Marist fathers are best followed through the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, published annually in Lyon since 1829, while the Protestant story on the Loyalty Islands is documented in the Archives Nationales, Section Outre-Mer, Nouvelle-Caledonie, cartons 85 and 86. Information on the role of the Churches today was found in Le Monde aujourd’hui,' 23-24 December 1984, the weekend supplement to the famous daily, which included a special dossier on ‘Nouvelle-Caledonie: le jeu des eglises’. Useful secondary sources were Yves PERSON ‘La Nouvelle-Caledonie et PEurope’, Roselene DOUSSET-LEENHARDT Colonialisme et contra¬ dictions, plus Bernard BROU, Memento etc., all previously cited. All these, however, tend to neglect the Protestant story.

CHAPTER 4

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE KANAKS, 1853-78

On 24 September 1853, the French Empire of Napoleon III took formal possession of New Caledonia. The short ceremony, conducted on the east coast by Rear-Admiral Febvrier-Despointes, was attended by a naval detachment from the Tahiti station. It was marked by a 21-gun salute, and cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ High hopes were placed in the new colony. It was to become the French Sydney, a thriving commercial entrepot, the ‘Emporium of the Pacific’. If the pursuit of la gloire could have been achieved by rhetoric alone, then French rule would have indeed been splendid. Many dreams of commercial wealth, and an abundance of agricultural resources were soon to fade, and in any case, French rule itself was not yet a reality. Some native chiefs were persuaded to sign a document recognising French sovereignty, but at the time this act of submission had little real substance. In 1854, the French colony still consisted virtually of two military bases, one at each end of a remote island, which was neither conquered nor occupied nor understood. Gradually, however, the tiny white outposts on New Caledonia ex¬ panded, took root, and searched inland for new resources and produce. Colonists and their livestock occupied the land, little realising what effect this occupation might have on the native population. This territorial expropriation, this seizure of the Kanaks’ ancestral soil, sometimes justi¬ fied by French law, and sometimes illegal even in white terms, was the most important material consequence of French colonialism. It revol¬ utionised relations between the French and the indigenous population, and it was to lead, in 1878, to a widespread colonial uprising. French annexation of New Caledonia may have been in part a pre¬ emptive measure, taken to prevent the South Pacific becoming an AngloAustralian lake. Fondon accepted the annexation, but the Australian press was irate. The Sydney Morning Herald denounced ‘Downing Street apathy’ towards the prospect of an invasion of Catholics and deportees. It was one thing for Britain to have ‘dumped’ her prison surplus in the Pacific, but quite another to welcome ‘French brigands’ as new

*

A study in racial segregation: Place des Cocotiers in central Noumea, the future arena of many pro-colonialise demonstrations Mitchell Library

Australian neighbours. The Australian press ignored the fact of the Anglo-French alliance in the Crimean War; it even used the French threat as an argument for Australian federation. The French prise de possession came only after protracted discussion in Paris on the future of French penal policy. For some decades, depor¬ tation had been accepted as an alternative to the notorious prison hulks of Toulon and Rochefort. For a long time, however, the destination of deportees was in doubt. In 1819, one government commission had Western Australia in mind as an overseas French prison. In the 1830s, several French pamphlets appeared recommending New Zealand. The favourite remained Guyana (Cayenne), where many proscribed French revolutionaries had spent their last disease-ridden days. These questions required an urgent solution after the French Revol¬ ution of 1848, which humanely abolished the death penalty for political offenders, but then locked up many more new ones who had to be dealt with. After the Parisian workers’ insurrection of June 1848, the fate of hundreds of rebels had to be decided. A choice had to be made between the Comores, which were too unhealthy, Algeria, which was too near, and the Marquesas Islands, where some deportees were in fact sent. In 1851, Louis-Napoleon seized power in Paris in a coup d’etat, which added another category of political criminals, the anti-Bonapartists, to the list of removable prisoners. Napoleon III chose Guyana in preference to New Caledonia, which came into the reckoning, but was rejected as 42

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE KANAKS,

1853 - 78

43

too far away, and therefore too expensive. By 1853, enough favourable reports of New Caledonia had percolated to Paris to persuade the govern¬ ment to adopt it as a destination for deportees. It had two important advantages as a penal colony. Firstly, it was isolated enough to deter escapes. The sharks would prove excellent jailers, as one promoter of the island’s attractions grimly remarked. Secondly, it was recognised as malaria-free, which could hardly be said of Devil’s Island. It was thus as a remote prison that New Caledonia became a part of the French Empire. French interests were now reorientated, away from the north coast, towards the future site of Noumea. Noumea was chosen in 1854 by the colony’s second governor, Tardy de Montravel, because of its harbour, which seemed accessible and easily defended. It was becoming essential, too, to establish a base on the west coast, to facilitate links with Sydney. It was certainly not a fertile spot; it lacked fresh water, and the town was supplied by rainwater, collected in a large cistern. At first, the settlement was known as Port-de-France, but since the French postal services often confused it with Fort-de-France, on the West Indian island of Martinique, it took the name of Noumea in 1866. The capital and white stronghold of New Caledonia owed its name to the incompetence of the French post office. For the best part of a decade, only a fraction of the island was under French control. Communications were quickest and safest by coastal vessel, and the interior was not fully occupied. Anywhere north of La Foa was virtually forbidden territory for whites. In 1859, the navy referred to a ‘quadrilateral of occupation’, linking Kanala, Ourail, Port-de-France and the Isle of Pines. Only this southern bastion was militarily secure. Noumea was a small white outpost, a commercial, administrative and military centre. It was also a refuge, where French exiles tried to re¬ produce for themselves a few of the comforts of life in France. The infant town was dominated by its barracks, and those essential social insti¬ tutions which inevitably accompanied a French garrison: a Masonic lodge, bars and brothels. By 1877, there were many individual wooden houses, along straight, macadam roads, named to celebrate the few military achievements of the Second Empire, like Sebastopol, and Magenta. Even the settlement at Kanala, founded in 1859, was patrioti¬ cally named Napoleonville. Noumea had its traders and its mineral prospectors, its docks and warehouses. Labourers, prostitutes and clerks lived in the Latin Quarter, while members of high society enjoyed the beach at Anse Vata. After 1865, they could go to the races, sit in cafes, and listen to concerts offered by a convict orchestra. In 1859, Noumea had its municipal council and its National Guard, in 1863 its market and cemetery, and eventually, in 1877, Governor Pritzbuer inaugurated the conduit which ensured the town a supply of fresh water. In 1890, the total population of Noumea was only 8 000, and the

NEW CALEDONIA IN THE 19TH CENTURY

BELEP

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE KANAKS, 1853-78

45

enormous proportion of soldiers in this number created a marked sexual imbalance in the population. The governor’s ball of 1864 must have been a very strange affair: it was attended by sixty gentlemen and nine ladies. The government tried to relieve the situation by ordering sixty orphan girls from Paris. But these hired government females were in an in¬ vidious position. A few of them found husbands, but most were rejected, stigmatised as little better than prostitutes. This small white community, in the process of developing its own social and cultural life, had a certain image of the Kanak. It was an image formed by missionaries’ reports, the impressions of soldiers, farmers and prospectors, and also by occasional contact, although there were very few natives in Noumea itself. The early white conception of the Melanesian was to have a long-lasting influence. It helped to con¬ dition and to stereotype white opinion, and it is worth outlining here. Official language was not always uncomplimentary to the Kanak. It described the Melanesian either as a Kanak, a native, or (at least before 1878) as a naturel. He was, of course, un anlhropophage—a cannibal—and knowledge of this fact tended to make the Kanak an object of loathing. The Kanak was usually perceived in negative terms. In appearance and behaviour, he was a savage beast. Charles Brainne’s description of the Kanaks in 1854 emphasised this savage aspect: ‘The New Caledonians,’ he told his readers, ‘belong to a Melanesian race which is the fiercest and most uncouth in all Oceania. They are cannibals. Their height is above the average; they have black skin, rough features, thick beards and crinkled hair. Their barbarous tongue seems to be like the language of the Wallis Islands.’ Another colonist reported that the Kanak even smelt like a wild animal: ‘When the Kanak gets hot from labouring or walking, he exudes a very pronounced odour of wild game.’ Governor Du Bouzet saw himself surrounded by ‘tribes of savages’, who needed to be trained to accept French authority, by exemplary acts either of severity or conciliation. The Kanaks seemed treacherous and cruel. They were friendly one day, and hostile the next. They were vengeful and cunning. They were clever at ruse and dissimulation, and so could not be trusted. This impression was strengthened in the rising of 1878, when previously docile natives tricked their way into white households in order to mas¬ sacre the occupants. Before 1878, white attitudes were much more com¬ placent, and less tinged with fear. The Kanaks, it was thought, were naturally thieves, and this was a supposed feature of their conduct ever since the reports of LaBillardiere in 1793, and the early Catholic missionaries in the 1840s. They were also prone to alcoholism, and the natives were protected by French laws which banned the sale of liquor to the natives. The Kanaks had never en¬ countered fermented liquor until the whites imported it, along with the colonial paternalism which tried to ‘protect’ the native population from white vices. The Kanaks did not necessarily appreciate this concern for

46

CHAPTER 4

their sobriety. They saw that in this, as in so many other matters, there was one standard for the whites, and another for the Kanaks. The natives were thus seen as barbaric, vindictive, deceitful and thieves. In the opinion of one doctor, they were so steeped in ignorance that they would never attain the level of civilised societies. It was commonplace, too, to complain of the Kanak’s laziness. The mission¬ aries found the men lazy because they left so much hard labour to their women, and they found both sexes lazy because they never bothered to cultivate the breadfruit tree. The natives would not work, complained Governor Saisset in 1860. They kept to themselves, and only came to Noumea out of curiosity, not to look seriously for employment. He concluded ‘We cannot hope to keep them on a building site for more than a fortnight. They can hardly tolerate being absent from their homes.’ The Kanak could not be quickly transformed into an obedient and well-disciplined industrial labourer. To begin with, he had very few material needs, and very little use, as yet, for cash. He was a traditional peasant, more intent on subsistence than on accumulation, only dimly aware that the material advantages of western civilisation might be accessible to him. The Kanak worker had none of the capitalist work ethic, no concept of thrift, saving or of wage labour itself. He might work for a few days, or a few hours, and then go'home. He was not well adapted to the demands of the industrial west. In the white discourse on the characteristics of the Kanak, he was thus labelled as ‘lazy’. There were other reasons for his reluctance to work, which some colonists perhaps did not want to recognise. Kanaks might have been more willing to accept a labour contract, if labour contracts had been faithfully observed by their white employers. General Trentinian’s masterly report on the causes of the 1878 rising shows that many white employers had cheated or undervalued their native staff. French ad¬ ministrators in the bush would requisition labour from the local chief. If the designated number of workers was not provided, the chief could be arrested by the gendarmerie. But some French officials neglected to pay their requisitioned labourers, or else made them walk up to 100 kilo¬ metres to Noumea to collect their pay from a government office. The Kanaks who repaired the barracks at Bouloupari, after the gale of February 1876, had not been paid eight months later. The natives from Naina who worked on the gendarmerie there in 1877, were still unpaid a year later. These illuminating incidents suggest very good reasons why the allegedly work-shy Kanaks avoided working for the French officials they knew derisively as the oui-oui. Perhaps the French should have been less surprised to discover, as Henri Riviere discovered in 1878, that the Kanaks ‘see our civilisation without wanting it, readily adopt its vices, always preserving their native dissimulation and ferocity. They watch us, submit to us, do not love us, hate us even. The Kanaks ask only for one thing: that we should leave them in peace, to cultivate their yams and their taros’.

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE KANAKS, 1853-78

i

47

Did the French then find nothing positive to say about their new colonial subjects? They did not normally question their intelligence, and some recognised that they had exceptional powers of memory (an im¬ pressive characteristic of many oral cultures). The French tended to interpret Kanak behaviour in the light of familiar literary images of primitive societies. For educated public servants and army officers of mid-nineteenth-century France, the novels of Fenimore Cooper, fea¬ turing the North American Red Indian, were a regular reference point. Cooper’s novels, especially The Prairie and The Last of the Mohicans were very popular in France in the 1830s and 1840s, and colonists’ memoirs often measured the Kanak against Cooper’s vision of a declining warrior society, caught up in an Anglo-French conflict. These literary associ¬ ations implied that the Kanak did have some admirable qualities. Like the Mohican, he was extraordinarily agile. The French could respect his physical prowess and bushcraft. All the same, for Ulysse de la Hautiere, the Kanak did not quite meet the standards of bravery and fidelity set by the fictional Chingachgook. The Mohican, he thought, would never have approached the white man as the Kanaks sometimes did, by feeling his calf muscle, to see how much meat he had on him. In the sheltered and artificial colonial society of Noumea, an atmos¬ phere of complacency reigned, until 1878. Captain Henri Riviere recalled the shock he experienced when first entrusted with a mission in the interior. He wrote in 1881: Until then, I had taken New Caledonia and the Kanaks for granted. I only began to get to know them from the day you [the governor] gave me the order to make an inspection of the coastline. Up to that moment, I, and perhaps the whole colony with me, had remained unaware of what was happening and being plotted inland, and of the unexpected dangers which might ensue. I may say that, until the day I was forced to look, see and learn for myself, when I started to perceive things clearly because I was per¬ ceiving them at first hand, I had always assumed that the Kanaks did not exist, or else that they no longer existed.

; I

Various policies were open to the colonists. At one point, Riviere recommended that a race of half-castes would assist peaceful race re¬ lations in the colony. Unfortunately, too many white men viewed native women either with disgust, or else merely as means of satisfying immediate physical urges, to make this an attractive proposition. There were always a few hotheads ready to destroy the Kanaks completely. Com¬ mandant Testard was apparently one of them. He found the Caledonian ‘a monster of perversity’, who would always be a threat to white security in the colony. In 1856, he recommended that troop detachments should ‘beat’ the bush, to flush out the natives, and he drew a parallel with wolf hunts in France. Once again, the Kanaks were equated with wild game. This was the ‘Tasmanian solution’, the liquidation of the indigenous

48

CHAPTER 4

population by a concerted military operation, similar to the methods used by the English to eliminate the Aborigines in Tasmania. For many French colonists, it was imperative for patriotic honour that France should not emulate the barbaric British preference for genocide. The native may be lazy and a communist, regretted Fa Hautiere in 1869, but instead of the English method of extermination, the French must attempt to civilise the savages. He did not sound too convincing, perhaps, but many others declared themselves ready to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’, accepting their civilising mission as a duty, how¬ ever distasteful the task appeared. The first coat-of-arms of the colony was proudly inscribed with the determination to ‘Civilise, Rehabilitate, Produce’. The French colonists were to produce, the convicts were to rehabilitate themselves, and the Kanaks of course were being enjoined to become civilised. Other commentators proposed more realistic diagnoses for the future. According to Dr Rochas, the natives, enclosed by the sea, had nowhere to go, no alternative territory to escape to when the french took their land. They were therefore inevitably forced either to perish or to as¬ similate. This was not strictly accurate: many Kanaks were simply pushed into the mountainous interior—in other words, they did have somewhere to go. But they were left with the poorest soil, and many did later perish from one cause or another. I he most clear-sighted, but unpalatable vision of the future of colonialism was offered by Governor Du Bouzet in 1857, when he warned the minister for colonies that ‘I foresaw that we were entering this long struggle, which seems to be the inevitable consequence of the establishment of the white race alongside tribes of savages; a struggle without glory, but not without dangers and above all, not without sweat [fatigues].' The Kanaks, on their side, were not clear either about the best strategy available. They had first attempted to assimilate the whites, as when Captain Cook, or Tea Cook, was welcomed as an honorary native chief. Subsequently, they had tried to assimilate to white culture, for instance by a superficial acceptance of Christianity. For many, this had been as a means to, or a necessary qualification for sharing the material benefits of white civilisation. Yet as the small white population based in Noumea began to expand, and settle elsewhere, neither of these alter¬ natives seemed plausible. The history of Kanak expropriation was to show that for many, the only possible response was resistance and revolt. New Caledonia offered three main attractions to early settlers and entrepreneurs: minerals, the cultivation of new crops, and stockbreeding. Geological samples revealed the presence of coal, copper, gold and silver in the ancestral soil of the Kanaks, and, in 1864, Gamier found nickel. With hindsight, we can say that this was the most significant find of all for New Caledonia’s future. Many early excavations proved uneconomic, but nickel, and to a lesser degree, chrome, were to be valuable resources with a worldwide market.

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE KANAKS,

1853- 78

49

This was not yet apparent, but adventurous entrepreneurs like Higginson were prepared to try copper, gold or nickel extraction in search of a quick profit. Higginson is yet another example of Australian involvement in the colonial development of New Caledonia. He fitted the stereotyped image of the self-made man, in the sense that he was poorly educated, but a shrewd and daring investor. In the north of the GrandeTerre, he became the largest owner of copper and nickel mines. Higginson, Morgan and Montefiore of Noumea exported gold from their Fernhill mine, and together with Gamier, Higginson founded what would later become the Societe Le Nickel. In 1876, Higginson took French nationality, although he never mastered the language. The gold fever, too, infected some New Caledonian colonists. In 1856, a group of French settlers at Kanala heard rumours of a rich gold seam in the north, and six of them set out to prospect. They were never seen again. All were missing, presumed eaten, having paid the penalty for straying beyond the ‘quadrilateral of occupation’. North of the KanalaOurail line, whites went in risk of their lives. The agricultural possibilities of the island were also initially tempting. Coffee and sugar were planted; at Bouloupari, attempts were made to grow cotton, maize and beans. Tobacco and rice were further possibilities. But many of these experiments failed, victims of cyclones, locusts, or just the inexperience of the farmers. Of all the crops attempted, coffee and sugar were probably the soundest commercial propositions. They were cultivated, however, with imported labour. The Kanaks, considered lazy and unreliable, were never regarded as a suitable source of plantation labour: an ironic judgement, considering how many of their race were transported to work the Queensland plantations. The hard work was to be done by others—by New Hebrideans from Tanna Island, for instance. Many of the sugar planters came from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, and they brought their Indian sugar workers (Malabars) with them. The Kanaks regarded these imported workers with as much antagonism as they did their white employers. Stockbreeding seemed to have more of a future, and cattle herds, brought from Australia, were put out to graze on the west coast pastures north of Noumea. In 1859, 1 000 head arrived on the island, but by 1878, there were 80 000 head in New Caledonia, and they did untold damage to native plantations. In 1890, the livestock census registered 102 000 head of cattle, over 11000 sheep, and 3 000 horses. Until the whites arrived, the Kanaks had no animals to pasture, but colonisation had introduced a veritable quadruped revolution. The original cattle herd was imported from Australia, but so too were the methods of pasturing. The French adopted what they knew as the Australian style of pasture, which meant large-scale, unfenced pastures, of an extensive rather than an intensive nature. The animals roamed at will, and the graziers seemed little concerned with the quality of the grass, or the density of the animal population.

50

CHAPTER 4

An Australian vocabulary of stock-rearing entered the French lan¬ guage on New Caledonia. Colonists referred to les stockmen, they put stock out onto les paddocks, and even le bush entered colonial French usage. There was a very significant Australian presence in the industry. In 1866, there were 200 Australians in New Caledonia, out of a population of 1 000 free settlers (excluding troops, convicts, Malabars and Reunion planters). The Franco-Australian Society was a substantial livestock company. In 1860, French settlers were outnumbered by foreigners, mainly Australians, Irish and a few Germans. Extensive, unfenced pasturing was disastrous for Kanak agriculture. First the invasion of the Christians had undermined the basis of their cultural life; now the invasion of the quadrupeds threatened to destroy the material basis of their existence. The accelerating extension of cattle pastures, however, was belatedly condoned and legitimated by govern¬ ment legislation. It constituted the first phase of the expropriation of the Kanaks. The government began by auctioning short leases of properties of twenty to forty hectares. In the 1860s, it offered five-year leases, with options to buy the properties. Military personnel who retired in New Caledonia could take up a free concession. In 1875, the government started to offer land concessions for an annual rent. As we shall see later, none of these measures was really sufficient to entice a large number of settlers to a distant Pacific island, where missionaries were known to have been eaten. The impact of French occupation on the Kanaks, however, should not be measured just by the total number of colonists who settled from overseas. Equally important were the amount of terri¬ tory granted to them, and the damage done to Kanak plantations by grazing livestock. The government was prepared to grant some very large land con¬ cessions. It sometimes did so on the basis of grandiose promises made by the contractors, and it did so against the advice of the colonial governors. In 1858, Joubert was granted 4 000 hectares on the Dumbea, and Paddon was given the same at Paita. This was not at all what Governor Du Bouzet had in mind. He feared that very large concessions were politically dangerous. They would disperse the whites too thinly, leaving them at the mercy of a well-settled and numerous native population. The Colonial Ministry did not listen: it found money in hand, and the pros¬ pect of profitable agricultural development too inviting. One of the biggest concessions of all was made to Brown and Byrne of Sydney, in 1858. Brown and Byrne received 40000 hectares, on which they contracted to settle 1 000 migrants within five years. At least onethird of these settlers had to be white, and the government, with an eye to increasing the colonial population, stipulated that one-third of them be women. Each male white was to receive twenty hectares. Contracts like this made the concessionary into a leasing agent, who assumed responsibility for settlement, together with whatever profit could be

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE KANAKS,

1

i

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5 1

realised. In practice, this vision of a community of small colonial farmers was a mirage. The plans did not materialise, because settlement was too slow. The government’s attitude towards the rights of the native population, in the face of this extension of white settlement, was based on several misunderstandings. In 1855, Governor Du Bouzet granted the Kanaks legal right of ownership of all land they actually occupied, but he claimed, for the French state, all unoccupied or vacant land. The French, however, had a very elastic notion of what constituted this residue of ‘vacant’ land. Unoccupied land might include taro fields, for instance, which were simply lying fallow for a few years. The Kanaks would not have regarded this land as ‘unoccupied’, or abandoned, but all the same, after 1859, concessionaries were authorised to use such land as pasture. In 1867 and 1868, further measures affecting the status and rights of the Kanaks were passed. The ‘tribe’ was given a collective legal status for the first time. It was recognised as the legal owner of the land it occupied. The implications of such rulings were that private and family ownership did not exist among the Kanaks, only tribally owned property being recognised; and that it would be relatively simple to decide exactly which land each tribe occupied. In fact, there was nothing simple about this. The Kanaks had for centuries been going to war with each other to decide exactly such difficult questions. Special surveys were necessary to define the limits of the tribal territory. Another problem was to arise when someone had to speak or make a decision in the collective name of the tribe. The French had only a hazy notion of Kanak political structure and custom, and tended to assume that an all-powerful chief was the natural legal representative of the tribe. They expected him to act alone for the tribe in the sale of land to white settlers. The chief, however, never had this enormous authority in the Kanak clan. The chief could perhaps dispose personally of the fruits of the harvest, but the alienation of the land of the clan had to be a collective decision, in which an important role was taken not by the chief, but by another tribal leader, known as the Land-Master (or Maitre de la Terre). Before very long, the government’s measures were not enough to satisfy the growing appetite for land among whites, especially the graziers, and the penal colony itself, which became a substantial landowner. Concessionaries nibbled away at tribal holdings, clans were induced to sell, and others who rose in revolt were expropriated completely, as punishment for their insubordination. After the rebellion of 1878, this was to be the fate of many more defeated clans. In 1868, tribal reserves were created, consisting in theory of the ‘traditional territory’ of the tribe, taking into account at the same time the size of the tribe, and the quality of the soil it cultivated to subsist. Once a tribe had been allotted its legal reserve, it was left to the chief to divide it into villages, and to distribute individual plots. Once again, this

52

CHAPTER 4

provision rested on a French misconception and exaggeration of the chief’s customary authority. As far as the Kanaks were concerned, this was only one of the problems. What was ‘a tribe’? In practice, it was no more than a fiction of French law. The French administrators grouped different clans to¬ gether in the same reserve with little discrimination, so that clans who were hereditary enemies might find themselves labelled as members of the same ‘tribe’. Such niceties were ignored in the interests of bureau¬ cratic convenience, and speedy white land appropriation. According to the historian Alain Saussol, the tribal reserves gathered together ‘an arbitrary grouping of uprooted people on strange territory’. The French might use the reserved land as a kind of reward for clans who supported them, but they had no compunction about making resistors rub shoulders with collaborators in the same newly constituted ‘tribe’. The Kanaks often found that the ‘traditional territory’ allotted to them was the most infertile in their area. In new reserves, the cultivatable land only pro¬ vided about one or one and a half hectares per person. It was some time before specialist apparatus had been set up to survey the land, and define the ‘traditional territory’ of each tribe. Meanwhile, the settlers continued to encroach on Kanak territory, sometimes offering derisory sums of money to gullible chiefs. This kind of anarchic dis¬ possession continued until Governor Pritzbuer set up a Boundary Commission (Commission de Delimitation) in 1875. 1 his commission, created to rule on the definition of tribal reserves, had, as its guideline, the allocation of three hectares of arable land per head. Needless to say, Melanesians were completely unrepresented on the Boundary Commission. Governor Du Bouzet had recognised Melanesian possession of all occupied land. In 1868, Governor Guillain granted each tribe the terri¬ tory it had traditionally enjoyed. In 1876, Governor Pritzbuer went further towards acknowledging the dispossession of the Kanaks. Each tribe, his decree ordered, was to have its traditional territory ‘as far as possible’, a sinister phrase which seemed to justify the previous but illegal white land seizures, and to permit further seizures in the future. The French state was empowered by this decree to take whatever land was necessary for the penal colony, or for grants of private concessions. The colonial government had at first concentrated the Kanaks into artificial administrative units, and then limited their available territory at its own discretion. The Kanaks were gradually expropriated and pushed into the infertile hills, leaving the coastal strips, and the area closest to Noumea, for white cultivation and cattle pasture, Australianstyle. Only a few whites glimpsed the consequences for the Kanaks: ‘The Kanaks,’ said Governor Guillain, ‘see us as a strange tribe come to take their land.’ In the region of Pouebo, coconut-growers dispossessed the coastal tribes, using coconut to feed the pigs and chickens they sold in Noumea.

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE KANAKS,

;!

'

;

i

, i

!

;

1853-78

53

When the missionaries persuaded the reluctant local chiefs to send a petition of protest to the governor, he reacted by arresting Chief Hippolyte Bonou. Hippolyte later died of influenza during his internment on the Isle of Pines. In 1869, after the murder of colon Cosso, and an ambush of gendarmes near Ponguet, three rebel tribes were declared dissolved, and their territory confiscated. In this way, the military prepared the way for expropriation. At Bourail, in 1868, Captain Mathieu attempted to force the natives to hand over the assassin of the emancipist (libe're') Bridon. He promised them land in return for their co-operation, and added: ‘If you refuse to accept these conditions... I will destroy your taro fields, your plantations, your banana-trees, your paw-paw trees, your coconut groves. I will set fire to your grass and the woods in your valley.’ This was a comprehensive agenda of destruction, and the threat brought thoughts of resistance to an end. Nine years later, however, 200 concessionaries were eating away at the native villages which Mathieu had guaranteed in 1868. Not surprisingly, these communities joined the rebels in the insurrection of 1878, although by so doing, they were signing the order for their own annihilation, and for further land confiscations. These events have important bearings on contemporary politics. In the 1970s, the independence movement was profoundly conscious of historic injustices like this. Some of its members put forward claims for the recovery of ancestral Kanak land taken by the French since the beginnings of colonisation. Conservatives were prepared to consider some kind of land redistribution, but they wanted all races to benefit. Colon politicians looked forward to the creation of a more numerous class of landed proprietors, and individual smallholders, both black and white. They saw the tribal reserves, and collective ownership as an obstacle to economic progress. In the 1970s, however, the independentists saw something positive and worth defending in the tribal reserves. They seemed to offer at least some guarantee of Kanak customary rights. The Kanak militants therefore opposed ‘privatisation’ of native reserves, which they viewed as bastions protecting the continuity of Melanesian culture. Governor Saisset complained of the natives’ uncooperative attitude. Complete mastery of New Caledonia, he judged in 1860, would be a long-term goal, ‘because of the natives’ peculiarly exclusive ideas about possession of the land’. But there was a certain amount of hypocrisy about French laments that the Kanaks would not respect property con¬ tracts, even if there was also some truth in this. The natives could not normally alienate their land in the way the white purchasers demanded. The complicated religious ties which bound man to earth in Kanak mythology could not be severed by the exchange of money and a sig¬ nature along the dotted line. There was a network of customary rites and relationships which tied the Melanesian community to the soil and its crops. There would inevitably be resistance, when French law told the

54

CHAPTER 4

Kanaks that their fallow, or their ancestral burial ground, was ‘vacant’ land which the whites could resume. There were some clans, of course, who chose to collaborate with the French regime. They were given uniforms, stripes and medals. Chief Ouatou received a gold one in 1862, as well as brandy, beef and 1 000 francs, for turning two rebel chiefs over to the authorities. Chief Bourrate of Hienghene was a thorn in the French side for years, before he was captured and sent to Tahiti in 1857. When, however, Governor Guillain repatriated him in 1863, he was a firm french ally, which ensured the passivity of the north during the 1878 insurrection. Such collaborators were not always appreciated by the Melanesians themselves. In 1858, Chief Koindo was assassinated by his own tribe near Noumea, for rallying to the French. Their villages were burned in retaliation, anyone captured was deported to Tahiti, and the children handed over to the missionaries. There was violent and sporadic resistance against expropriation and the depredations caused by colonists livestock. Isolated colonists and mission posts were always vulnerable. In 1857, the wealthy colonist Beraud was murdered near Mont d’Or, together with his daughter, eleven European workers, and fifteen Kanak Christian converts. Kandio, Beraud’s assassin, was captured and shot. According to popular tra¬ dition, the sky turned red, and birds uttered cries of anguish at the moment of his death. His head was preserved as an anthropological specimen, in the Brest Naval Hospital, until destroyed by bombardment in the Second World War. At Hienghene in 1858, the crew of the sandal-trader Styx was mass¬ acred. At Pai'ta, in grazing country, two colonists and three women were eaten in 1860. On the west coast, Gondou led the resistance against the French. Governor Guillain called him the Caledonian Abd-el-Kader, after the North African anti-French leader. (This was not the last time a parallel was drawn between New Caledonia and French Algeria.) At Pouebo, in 1867, colonists’ property was attacked, gendarmes requisition¬ ing native workers were killed, and the colon Antonio was eaten. I his time the guillotine appeared on the beach at Pouebo; a dozen Kanaks were beheaded. Kanak property, food supplies, customary beliefs, and their collective self-respect were under assault. The toll on both sides was mounting. The French occupation was in earnest, while native resistance was becoming correspondingly more desperate.

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE KANAK.S, 1 853 - 78

55

Main sources for chapter 4 Information on the Kanak’s place in the whites’ mentality has been compiled from various official sources and private memoirs, which will be found in the bibliography. I have used the governors’ correspondence in the Archives Nationales (Section Outre-Mer), Nouvelle-Caledonie, carton 42. On the land question before 1878, the most recent, and the most thorough source is Alain SAUSSOL L’Heritage: essai sur le probleme fonder melanesien en Nouvelle-Caledonie (Paris 1979), which I have supplemented with DOUSSET—LEENHARDT Colonialisme et contradictions, etc., already cited.

CHAPTER 5

THE KANAK INSURRECTION OF 1878

The immediate cause of the Kanak Insurrection of 1878 was a quarrel over a woman. An emancipee, Chene, had abducted a Melanesian woman from her tribe near Bouloupari, and moved out of the area. Some years later, in 1878, he returned, accompanied by his popinee (black dolly), as the settlers called their Melanesian concubines, and their children. The woman’s tribe decided on revenge. Chene, his mistress, and one of their children were assassinated. Local gendarmes searching for the murderers arrested several local chiefs in the region of Bouloupari and La Foa, hoping they could be persuaded to reveal the identity of the assassins. Amongst those arrested were some innocent tribesmen, and this was a fatal French mistake. On the morning of 25 June, the gendarmes at La Foa were taking their early bowl of coffee, before escorting one of those arrested, the chief of the Dogny, to Bouloupari. They were assailed and massacred by armed Kanaks. The insurrection had begun. What started as a move to release innocent prisoners of the french soon developed into something more widespread and threatening for the colonial regime. Later in the day, settlers and their workers at La Foa were attacked, and then several hundred Kanaks marched on nearby Teremba, which was successfully defended, however, by a handful of troops and convict supervisors. However much one may sympathise with the Kanak cause, there is little point in minimising the brutality of these attacks, or the terror they inspired in vulnerable white homesteads. Isolated farms were attacked, and colonists axed to death, together with their families and New Hebridean employees. On the following day, the violence continued, and spread to Bouloupari, where other chiefs were held under arrest. They were forcibly released, and the gendarmes mass¬ acred. The Kanaks attacked the convict camp, where overseers and about thirty convicts themselves were killed. Whites everywhere were cut down horribly, with a tomahawk in the back or in the neck. In the Bouloupari telegraph post, the telegraphist Riou was slaughtered at his post, just as a message was relayed to Noumea warning the capital of 56

the outbreak of the rebellion. The bloodletting of these first two days took the whites completely by surprise. The official list of the victims of the events of 25 —26 June in the La Foa—Bouloupari area numbered 124. The rebels seemed to spare no one, killing women and children, free settlers and convicts, French, New Hebrideans and Indians. They would openly approach a settler’s house, ask for a light or some tobacco in order to gain entry, and then murder the occupants, before looting and burning the farm. Before very long, they had seized guns and cartridges, and attacked the sugar mill at Ouameni. The whites rallied, however, at Teremba, and at the convict camp at Fonwhary, which became a refuge for terrified fugitives, each carrying their private tale of horror through swamp and bush. While Kanaks got drunk in the hotel at Bouloupari, Captain Riviere secured the defence of Teremba, and awaited the arrival by boat of reinforcements, under Colonel Galli-Passebosc. The situation looked more hopeful for the French near Kanala, where the tribes did not immediately take sides in the conflict. In what the French considered a remarkable military exploit, one of their officers, Servan, took the initiative by visiting the Kanala tribes personally, and ordering them to attack the rebels. Instead of killing Servan, which then seemed a possibility, the Kanala tribes decided to ally themselves with the French. Loyal natives like Chief Nundo were to be well rewarded, not only with commemorative medals, but also with the land, food and women of the defeated enemy. Servan’s courageous gesture raised the morale of those who habitually imagined the Kanaks as passive creatures, never endowed with initiative, but always responding to a lead from the French. His role in turning the Kanala into pro-French collaborators has probably been exaggerated. The Kanala tribes did not need the French to tell them on which side to fight. They had their own reasons for considering the rebel clans as their enemies. The ‘defection’ of the Kanala tribes to the French was a great comfort to Noumea, and greatly improved French prospects in the long drawn-out struggle. Early in July, French morale collapsed again, when their military commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Galli-Passebosc, was shot in the bush, on an expedition between La Foa and Bouloupari. A leading role was now expected of Captain Henri Riviere, who responded with the kind of counterinsurgency methods at which French colonial troops had to be¬ come increasingly adept. He organised a series of ‘mobile columns’, to penetrate the bush at high speed, and strike at native settlements by surprise. The colonnes mobiles, based in La Foa, managed to reestablish communications between isolated white military posts. In the mangrove swamps near Bouloupari, they would repeatedly surprise Kanak families fishing, kill their men, and make prisoners of the popinees. On September 1, the mobile columns won a highly desirable scalp, that of Chief Atai, generally considered as one of the leading instigators of the insurrection. Atai was surprised in his own camp, where the

58

CHAPTER 5

French had been led by their Kanala allies. The revolt, however, con¬ tinued to spread, to the region of Bourail and Poya. 1 he Brun station was burned and looted. Near Poya, other ranchers were also killed. In the Bourail valley, settlements were attacked, and outlying farm buildings burned down. In return, the French razed native villages and plantations. Many colonists were evacuated to Noumea by sea. But in Houailou and Hienghene, the tribes did not rise against the French. The skirmishing, surprise attacks and burning of villages continued well into 1879. Crops were confiscated, and rebel women handed over to pro-French tribes. Near Ourail, Colonel Wendling encouraged the natives to surrender by blocking off the water sources to the taro fields. An outbreak of typhoid amongst the troops at Bouloupari delayed the military repression in the summer months of 1878—79, and probably saved several tribes from annihilation. 1 he fighting was localised, and the French were obliged to master their enemy almost village by village, tribe by tribe. After reinforcements eventually arrived from Saigon, their task became easier. On Christmas Day, 1878, Chief Mondjiou surrendered at Kanala. Chief Naouno surrendered at Ourail, and by February 1879, the French acknowledged a fairly steady stream of Kanak tribes wishing to surrender. When the dead body of Chief Naina was identified, his tribe had little alternative but to surrender as well. Many of these leaders and their families were deported to the Isle of Pines, or to the Belep Islands in the north. A French military report of 7 March 1879 estimated that 800 had been so deported. This fate was too demoralising for some Kanaks. Chief Gario of Nera, reputedly appalled by the decimation of his tribe, and the destruction of his territory, hanged himself. The land he and the de¬ ported tribesmen left was taken up by white settlers and their Melanesian collaborators. In March 1879, the French declared the process of pacification com¬ plete. This was a little premature: prisoners were still in fact being taken as late as October 1879. The outcome, however, was no longer in doubt. The colonial regime had experienced a very severe shock, and had only reasserted its dominance with very great difficulty. Altogether, nearly 5 000 soldiers had been mobilised against the Kanaks. But the French had overcome the most violent resistance they were ever to face. How heavy were the casualties? The local press, La Nouvelle-Caledonie, estimated 200 whites dead, a large number of whom had been killed in the first few days of the uprising. As for the Melanesian dead, much harder to estimate, perhaps 1 200 were killed in combat, including many chiefs. Eight hundred were deported to Belep or the Isle of Pines, but more were also sent to Tahiti, never to return. There had been largescale material destruction. Hundreds of villages had been destroyed, perhaps 200 farms or concessions devastated in the struggle, as the Kanak bands struck, and the French army retaliated against native agri¬ culture, trying to starve out the rebels. There were huge livestock losses,

THE KANAK INSURRECTION OF 1878

59

and the sugarworks built by the Reunion immigrants had disappeared. These were the crude facts of a brutal and desperate confrontation between a colonial power and subjects it had wrongly assumed to be docile. Many questions remain. The Kanaks had exploded into violence, but the explosion hinted at the existence of longstanding, bottled-up resentments against the French. How did the French themselves explain an uprising they never dreamt could occur? The consequences, too, for future relations between French and Kanak were significant, since the carnage suggested that harmonious relationships between the races might be impossible to achieve. At first, the French could not understand what had hit them. They could arrive at only one possible explanation for the suddenness and violence of the outbreak: it had, in their view, been planned and plotted for a long time in advance. Chief Atai, it was thought, was at the centre of a huge conspiracy, which patiently gathered arms and ammunition, waiting for the signal to rise. There was a rumour that the date set for the rising was 24 September, the 25th anniversary of the French prise de possession of the Grande-Terre, and a day when Noumea society would be amusing itself unconcernedly at the races. The arrest of the chiefs, ac¬ cording to this conspiracy theory, forced the Kanaks to react before the appointed time. General Trentinian, who led a French inquiry into the causes of the rising, promoted the idea of a general conspiracy, taken up by historians later. He unfortunately neglected to provide any evidence for it. It was a convenient notion for the military, who liked to blame Kanak discontent on the stupidity and racism of civilian settlers. The idea of conspiracy neatly disguised the fact that the ill-considered arrest of several chiefs after the Chene affair had sparked off the revolt. The struggle was a localised one, rather than a generally coordinated rebellion, and the idea of a general conspiracy simply served to soothe the French. It confirmed their stereotyped view of the dissimulating and deceitful Kanak, and diverted attention from the tribes’ serious and concrete grievances. The Kanaks had lost partly because the rebellion took the form of a series of local conflicts, concentrated near La Foa and Bouloupari, but including other risings in Poya and Bourail. They were defeated by the arrival of French reinforcements from Indo-China, and weakened by the deaths of many of their chiefs. The ‘scorched earth’ tactics of the French also helped to starve them into submission. The mobile columns had been an effective method of dealing with small and dispersed groups of insurgents. Above all, the Kanaks were defeated because of defections to the French from within their own ranks. The tribes of Kanala, Ouagap, Houailou and Hienghene were either non-combatants or actually proFrench, and the colonial regime could thus rely on solid native support along the east coast. This gave the French a decisive advantage. One of the fundamental reasons for the insurrection was the dis¬ possession of Kanak tribes, discussed in chapter 4. The area where the

Poya

C5

THE KANAK INSURRECTION OF 1878

I

6 1

rising broke out, the area around Fonwhary in the south-west, was an area very recently affected by the arrival of large-scale grazing, and hundreds of French convicts. In 1877, the Boundary Commission had pushed the Kanaks off the fertile floor of the Fonwhary valley to make way for the prison farm. In the north-east, which had been so belligerent until the capture of Chief Bourrate, serious white settlement had not yet begun; hence this area was quiescent during the insurrection. In 1872, near Bouloupari, the Nennegaras tribe had been dispossessed to make way for a profitable concession granted to a French magistrate, in partnership with a liquor dealer. This, according to Captain Mathieu, infuriated the Kanaks and ensured their participation in the massacres of June 1878. In his report, General Trentinian recalled how the ex¬ propriation of the Kanaks had provoked the assassination of individual colons, like Beraud. This was what lay behind the insolence of chiefs like Atai. The administration, Trentinian wrote, ‘has not considered that in their meetings, the natives spoke of their practically depopulated villages, fading away on contact with us, and that they said that anything was preferable to the slow death reserved for them’. The heart of the re¬ bellion lay in the south-west, the area where by 1878, the expropriation of the Kanaks had been most thorough and far reaching. Some tribes had done very well out of French land policies. Divide and rule is an age-old axiom of imperial powers, and the French applied it by using land grants to cement alliances. The Kanala had been well treated, perhaps because they surrounded the island’s second port, or because the cattle-ranchers were more interested in the pastures on the west coast. In the east, pro-French tribes like the Mandiai received twice as much land as that allotted to the Dogny tribe, allies of Chief Atai. The French saw to it, therefore, that not all Kanak tribes were victims of land expropriation, and this helped their cause in 1878, for their dip¬ lomacy had guaranteed them considerable Kanak support in some quarters. Chief Atai and his tribe had particularly suffered from the establish¬ ment of a penal settlement and prison farm, which took much of his best land near La Foa. Trentinian felt that the Boundary Commission had persistently provoked Atai by its policies of, as the commission put it, ‘liberating the land from Kanak occupation, for the benefit of coloni¬ sation’. The French had failed to perceive the dangers of reducing Kanak land so drastically that the natives no longer had enough culti¬ vable land to provide for their own subsistence. They had not read the warning signals. Atai had met Governor Olry at Teremba with two sacks. He emptied one at his feet, full of earth, and then the other, full of pebbles. The symbolic meaning was clear enough: ‘Here is what we used to have,’ Atai explained, ‘and here is what you are leaving us!’ The damage caused by wandering cattle was a further grievance. The livestock herds increased rapidly in the 1870s, as a response to profitable speculation in beef. Graziers were encouraged to fence their pastures,

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CHAPTER 5

but no one wanted to pay the expense of enclosures. In the end the price was paid by Kanak agriculture. The cattle were fond of sugarcane, and they feasted on banana trees. They invaded the yam plantations, and stomped down the dykes which supported the taro fields. The graziers, like Pelletier and Brun, ignored warnings from the administration, and did little to prevent their stock wandering down the hillside onto pro¬ perty allocated as native reserves. Even attempts to impose fines on them were not carried out. Cattle herds were quite capable, once they entered a yam plantation, of destroying a whole village’s subsistence for several months, but the Kanaks’ only remedy was to take a court action for damages. The Kanaks, who knew little of French judicial procedure, concluded that the whites were not content with taking their land: they seemed to want everything else as well. It was no wonder that Mauger discovered rebels near Gomen hunting down cattle and killing as many of them as possible. The livestock problem had been severely aggravated in 1878 by the drought of the previous year. This meant that cattle and other livestock had to search even further afield than usual for adequate fodder, and the native plantations were very tempting targets for hunger-stricken animals. The territory between Noumea and Bouloupari was especially dry, and graziers were allowed to take their herds onto government property near Ourail, for a small fee. The cattle arrived there starving in an area of flourishing native fields, and set about systematically destroy¬ ing them. Colons did all they could to avoid the capital expenditure involved in constructing effective enclosures. Their attitude was that if the Kanaks wanted proper protection, they should build their own. One Kanak replied to a stock-raiser who made such a suggestion: ‘When my taros go and eat up your cattle, then I’ll put up a fence.’ There were other contributory factors to the revolt. Natives objected to labour requisitioning at harvest or yam-planting time, when all avail¬ able hands were needed in the village. Avoiding forced labour was a common form of insubordination, and added to the native’s reputation for ‘laziness’. In April 1878, the governor ended labour requisitioning for road construction. The abduction of native women was another source of friction, although it seems to have angered the Kanak men more than it worried the women themselves. This was not surprising in view of the hard labour the women were expected to do in the tribes. The French sometimes included women, and even pregnant women, in their demands for forced labour, but of course a gendarme s concubine was unlikely to be expected to exert herself to this extent. Chene’s popinee had unwittingly been the immediate cause of the uprising, and when Mauger considered Kanak exasperation with white sexual demands on their women, he had to admit that ‘when the causes are coolly considered, one has to accept that the blame does not lie completely on the side of the natives’. Native cemeteries had been deliberately violated. Sometimes the skulls

THE KANAK INSURRECTION OF 1878

63

of tribal ancestors had been irresponsibly removed. One colonist even sent convicts searching out native burial grounds, to find skulls and sculpted wooden artefacts to send back to Paris. Chief Atai’s ancestors were victims of such sacrilege, which constituted a profound offence to native religious beliefs. There was, therefore, a considerable catalogue of grievances behind the outbreak of the insurrection of 1878. But only after the event did the French become aware of the extent of native frustration. As Riviere told the governor in July 1878, bitterness had accumulated among the Kanaks, dispossessed of their best land, harrassed even on their own reserves by graziers’ cattle, subject to labour requisitioning, to which they submitted with re¬ pugnance, and which usually fell upon the tribes nearest the local gendarmerie. I think I can assure you that the arrest of the Dogny chiefs was the signal for this insurrection, which was long premedi¬ tated, and in which we see the Kanaks acting with all the cleverness of their race, and adapting their tactics in a way which suggests they are receiving the help and advice of Europeans. This judgement was half accurate. Although there is no evidence for a formal conspiracy, Kanak frustrations had for some time been building to a climax. Riviere’s final comment, about European aid to the rebellion, was a French fantasy. Rumours flew around Noumea that the Kanaks were being assisted by escaped convicts, or that they had been en¬ couraged by mistaken ‘do-gooders’ among the missionaries. The Kanaks did not befriend escaped convicts, and even the deportees from the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 joined forces with the French army against them. These rumours of European support were heeded only by those who still could not credit the Kanaks with the capacity for independent action in their own interests. They should have realised that sheer desperation had driven several tribes to overthrow all European tutelage. Drunken soldiers and unruly convicts had often been poor ambassa¬ dors for western culture. The practice of paying Kanaks to hunt down fugitive prisoners seemed particularly demeaning to General Trentinian, as it engendered Melanesian contempt for the whites. The army was even afraid that news of France’s humiliating defeat in the FrancoPrussian War of 1870 would reach the Kanaks, and undermine the colonial power’s aura of invincibility. The rising against the French was never united. The French knew how to exploit the tribal rivalries which set the Kanak clans against each other. One reason why Servan managed to persuade the Kanala people to march against Chief Atai was that the two tribes had been enemies long before the outbreak of the revolt. The French campaign against the Bourail tribes could also rely on the support of those tribes’ traditional enemies, the Ni and Azzareu. In 1878, the Melanesians were periodically

64

CHAPTER 5

fighting each other, as well as the French. This may be an unpalatable truth for some Kanak nationalists, but opposition to colonialism was not quite universal enough to subsume these long standing local quarrels. This is why the geography of the insurrection was so uneven. The northern tribes were divided in their allegiance, perhaps because they had been subdued earlier, or perhaps because white settlement itself was very sparse here. The north remained relatively peaceful until a rising broke out there in 1917. The main area of the insurrection was the centre of the Grande-Terre, between Kone and Bouloupari in the west, and Houailou and I hio in the east. It was no coincidence that the rebel areas were those closest to white influence. The rebels of the La Foa area were amongst those who had most contact with the French. This meant, at the very least, that they easily acquired the axes and rifles with which to kill the colonists. This was also the region where the penal settlement had pushed the Kanaks off their old plantations, and brought peaceful exchanges be¬ tween the French and the Kanaks to an end. The insurgents tended to be those closest to white occupation, the most ‘Europeanised’ of the Kanaks. One anonymous French colonist agreed that ‘it must be recognised that, everywhere, it was the natives who were most civilised and most adaptable to our way of life who were the instigators of massacre and pillage’. This merely accentuated the French sense of outrage and betrayal by those they had trusted and considered most friendly. Chief Atai was a prominent example of a relatively ‘westernised’ Kanak. He had been courting a French widow, Madame Fournier, who had rejected his proposal of marriage, but nevertheless had entertained him for tea on her verandah. Atai bore no grudge against the widow; he made sure that the rebellion spared her. He personified a Melanesian elite, which had frequent contacts with the French. In recent times, Kanak independence militants have looked back on the 1878 insurrection as an event of major historical significance for them, marking an important stage in the development of a national consciousness and the drive for self-determination. Roselene Dousset, daughter of the celebrated Protestant missionary and ethnologist, also saw the rising as an inspiration and mobilising force behind an awaken¬ ing nationalism. For her, it represented a Melanesian prise de conscience. Not all Kanaks, however, were inspired, mobilised or awakened. Many were receptive to French blandishments. Many tribes stayed neutral, and the French made Melanesians do their fighting for them as often as possible. Chief Atai could not have been successfully tracked down without the aid of Kanala tribesmen. It was they, not French soldiers, who actually killed him. The extent of Melanesian collaboration with the French demands a slightly more nuanced interpretation than that usually advanced by committed nationalists. That does not mean that the events of 1878 can be brushed off simply

THE KANAK INSURRECTION OF 1878

65

as a series of uncoordinated intertribal wars, in which the French oc¬ casionally intervened. This was also an anti-French rising, which varied in its intensity according to the impact of white settlement. It was provoked by the territorial expropriation of the Kanaks, and the con¬ tinued harassment they received at the hands of graziers and their live¬ stock. The roots of the revolt lay in the cold logic of imperial conquest and colonial annexation. It occurred, in other words, because the French had claimed possession of a land already occupied by a Melanesian population, which had to be displaced if French possession was to have any meaning. As Captain Riviere put it, ‘the great cause of the insur¬ rection, one might say the only cause, is the antagonism which has always arisen in the past between a conquering people and a conquered people’. There were long-term consequences for the colony’s future. For the French, valuable property had been destroyed, on their side as well as on the Kanak side, and these capital losses had to be made good. The geography of French settlement was permanently altered. The defeat and displacement of tribes in the west and south-west left these areas free for exploitation by French graziers and agriculturalists. So it was that the west coast of the Grande-Terre held the most important concentra¬ tions of white settlers on the island. The east coast, where far less dis¬ placement occurred, became a predominantly Kanak area. The division between the mainly French west coast and mainly Kanak east coast persists today, and has marked the political geography of New Caledonia since the war. The immediate beneficiary from these changes was the penitentiary, which found new land available for it near Poya and Bourail. This was not necessarily in France’s best long-term interests. It was not easy to persuade immigrants to settle in a land of rebellious, scalp-hungry Kanaks, where the government seemed to give such a high priority to its convicts. Eighteen seventy-eight certainly did nothing to enhance the attractions of New Caledonia for French settlers. The Kanaks faced defeat and deportation. Many chiefs lay dead, or were sent into exile, never to be repatriated. The survivors of defeated tribes were displaced, their property confiscated and redistributed. The decline of the Melanesian population was accelerated by the trauma of defeat and the dissolution of many clans. In the reserves, the defeated plunged deeper into suicidal despair and resignation. There was no simple cure for the malaise of a dominated people. The Kanak race was entering a long dark night of subjection, from which it would not emerge for at least another sixty years.

Main sources for chapter 5 I have made considerable use of General Trentinian’s report, con¬ veniently reprinted in R. DOUSSET-LEENHARDT Colonialisme et con¬ tradictions, etc., already cited, as well as the memoirs of Captain Henri RIVIERE. Some extracts from MAUGER’s account are reproduced in R. DOUSSET-LEENHARDT Terre Natale, Terre d’Exil (Paris 1976), which is useful in its own right. I have used the archival sources in the Archives Nationales, Section Outre-Mer, Nouvelle-Caledonie, cartons 42 and 43. Other secondary sources, besides the version by DOUSSETLEENHARDT, include Linda LATHAM’s article in the Journal of Pacific History 1975, which challenges some accepted views, occasionally with success. This should be taken, however, in conjunction with the polemic it inspired with Jean GUIART, to be found in Pacific Islands Monthly April and May 1979. Alain SAUSSOL’s L'Heritage, already cited, is more recent, and in my opinion, better balanced.

PART TWO:

THE TRIUMPH OF FRENCH COLONIALISM,

1878-1945

CHAPTER 6

A COLONY WITHOUT COLONISTS?

New Caledonia became a convict terminus seventy-five years after New South Wales, and the penal settlement determined its colonial role until the final years of the nineteenth century. Hopes that French convicts, like their English predecessors, would provide a stimulus to colonisation and agricultural development were not realised. At the turn of the century, a vigorous debate was initiated in Paris over the burdensome cost of maintaining a penal settlement at all in the south Pacific. Argu¬ ment ensued over whether the convicts had helped or in fact hindered the progress of the colony. Not only were convicts difficult to trans¬ form into colonial pioneers, but free settlers were very rare too in New Caledonia. In the 1890s, so few had been persuaded to migrate there that New Caledonian society still seemed surprisingly dominated by men in uniform: soldiers or criminals. To farmers and traders, the domination of these parasitical elements w'as reinforced by the military’s strangle¬ hold on the office of governor. Not until 1884 was the first civilian governor, Le Boucher, appointed. The scarcity of free settlers made New Caledonia appear ‘a colony without colonists’. New Caledonia’s ‘first fleet’ of 250 convicts arrived on the Iphigenie in 1865. By the outbreak of the 1878 insurrection, there were already 6 000 of them in the colony. The prisoners fell into three main groups, accord¬ ing to the gravity of their crimes, and their place of confinement on the Grande-Terre. First of all, there were the deportees, who included many political prisoners sentenced to detention in a fortified place. Many of them were interned on the Isle of Pines, or the Ducos peninsula. They had not been sentenced to hard labour, and since work for them was optional, many of them refused to do any. After 1871, political deportees included Arabs involved in North African risings against the French; they were joined in 1872 by almost 4000 guilty of sedition or rebellion in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871. These Communards included many professional people and Parisian artisans. They were not farmers, and they had no interest in taking up 68

The Penal Colony: the prison

1 ! ! i I

I

(bagne)

at Nou Island

Mitchell Library

land concessions. They were not people likely to develop the agricultural resources of the island. Some did not intend to stay long enough even to consider a future in New Caledonia. Henri Rochefort, the radical Parisian lawyer and journalist, made a daring and celebrated escape in 1874. The Communards also included Louise Michel, feminist and incendiarist, who compiled one of the first collections of Kanak legends. Louise sympathised with the Melanesians, and recalled impressing one Kanak 69

Convicts’ heads being shaved, Nou Island

Mitchell Library

by offering him her red scarf. But perhaps the symbolic importance of a red bandeau for the ex-communarde was lost on the Kanaks. In any case, the Communards were loyal to the army when the French were attacked in 1878. Both the Arabs and the Communards were incor¬ porated into mobile columns against Kanak insurgents. In 1881, the Republic amnestied the Communards, and they returned to France. A second category of convicts, after the political deportees, consisted 70

A COLONY WITHOUT COLONISTS?

7 1

of the relegues, or recidivists, who arrived after 1885. The relegues were those who had committed a certain number of common law crimes within the space of ten years. They were sent to New Caledonia not because they had been found guilty of a particularly serious crime; most of them were no more than petty thieves. They had sinned repeatedly, however, and that was why they qualified for the trip. They were petty but hardened criminals. By 1897, there were just over 3 000 recidivists in New Caledonia, and their usual place of detention was on the Isle of Pines. They were allowed to find work with individual employers, and to become domestic servants, and eventually they were permitted to acquire land concessions. Only four of them ever did so. They were employed in public works schemes, and in the nickel mines. Finally, there were the transportees, a far more dangerous and numer¬ ous group. These criminals were obliged to do hard labour during their sentence, and once emancipated, they were obliged to stay in the colony for a period equal to the duration of their sentence. If they were sen¬ tenced to eight years’ hard labour or more, then they would never leave New Caledonia, even after they had been ‘emancipated’. Alberti calcu¬ lated that by 1908 over 21 000 convicts had been sent to New Caledonia, the vast proportion of them male. This last category was either confined to the lie Nou, opposite Noumea, or dispersed among various prison farms, like the one at Bourail. Prisoners arrived in New Caledonia in a continuous stream from the mid-1860s onwards, interrupted only in 1878 — 79, the years of insurrec¬ tion. An average of about 500 per year arrived until the mid-1880s. During this time, New Caledonia was the only overseas penal colony that France used for white offenders. In 1886—87, however, deportations to Guyana resumed, and this stopped the flow of very hard cases to New

\New Caledonia's convict population included Arab rebels from French North Africa Mitchell Library

Caledonia. In 1886, the number of convicts present in the colony reached its all-time peak at about 10 500, and the total present levelled off thereafter, until transportation was at last suspended altogether in 1897. The sort of offender shipped to New Caledonia was unlikely to make much impression as an agricultural pioneer in a strange climate. The left-wing journalists and urban craftsmen of the Paris Commune had no experience of cultivation, and there was no serious attempt to transform hardened recidivists into active peasants. In the long run, only free settlers were capable of putting the colony on the road towards selfsufficiency and economic profitability. Was the penal colony a drain on French resources, an impediment in the way of the free progressive development of New Caledonia? Or was it, on the contrary, a spur and a support to the colonial economy? These were the questions which exercised the minds of deputies and adminis¬ trators whenever the colonial budget was formulated in the last years of the century. These questions were not exclusively financial ones, about the cost-effectiveness of transporting criminals to the other side of the world. They were also questions which would decide the destiny of New Caledonia as a French colony. The decision eventually taken—a vote against the economic value of the penal colony—forced the white colonial regime to make a radical change of direction, and to search for a new raison d’etre for a French presence in the islands. The convicts were put to work in a number of enterprises. There was a foundry and a brickworks on the lie Nou. There was a sawmill at Fonwhary, an experimental farm at Bourail, there were coffee plan¬ tations, and the convicts got kaori wood production under way at Prony Bay. For these and other reasons, the penal colony was of great economic utility, argued its defender, Alberti, in 1909. Convict labour had erected various public buildings in Noumea, built water conduits and secured telegraph connections. A defence of the convict system on these grounds, however, did not carry complete conviction. It was generally agreed that the communications infrastructure on the island was still insufficient. In spite of the availability of convict labour, very little road-building had been completed. By 1882, there were only about 57 kilometres of road completed on the Grande-Terre. This was a poor advertisement for the penal colony, and much was made of such inadequacies in the Chamber of Deputies by the radical deputy Chautemps. Convict labour was employed in the mining industry. In 1878, Higginson hired 300 for his mines at Diahot, and he paid the govern¬ ment in land. The Franco-Australian Company employed between 200 and 500 convicts. The colonial administration resorted to using convict labour to purchase land or services. In the Cardozo contract of 1887, the government bought an estate at Ouameni from the Societe Le Nickel, in return for 660000 convict working days, over ten years. In the same year, it agreed to pay Higginson 2!/2 million working days for providing a monthly steamboat service between Noumea and the New Hebrides.

A COLONY WITHOUT COLONISTS?

73

In this way, the convicts were exchanged as human currency, in a series of bargains struck between the government and the island’s biggest capitalists. The two sides worked very closely together: by 1894, the nickel mines employed about 800 convicts in all, as well as 300 emancipees. Perhaps the large employers and mine-owners had good economic reasons to regret the passing of the penal colony, but smaller business¬ men and farmers resented the competition which the convict workshops represented. They felt it was unfair that convicts (the recidivists) should acquire land concessions before they had worked out their full sentence. They objected to the workshops and the printing press run by convict labour, which appeared to them to constitute unfair, subsidised com¬ petition. Their pressure forced the administration to abandon some of these enterprises. There is, however, no disputing the importance of the presence in New Caledonia of up to 10000 mouths to feed. The most substantial econ¬ omic contribution of the penitentiary was not as a producer, or even as a provider of cheap labour, but as a many-headed consumer. Even con¬ victs had to be fed, and so did their jailers. The greatest beneficiaries in this respect were the food importers, the meat suppliers and behind them, the grazing industry. The debate on the economics of the prison population was therefore conducted partly as the defence of vested interests. Those who had gained most from the convict presence were the large graziers and the livestock industry on one hand, and the mining industry, Higginson and the nickel companies on the other. The conservative influence of the nickel and grazing interests was to become a constant and not always constructive feature of New Caledonian politics. Small manufacturers and farmers were far more likely to view the convicts as unwelcome rivals. The very existence of the penal colony was blamed for the colony’s patent shortage of free settlers. If soldiers and administrators are excluded from calculations, there were only 500 free white settlers in 1865, 2 000 by 1874, 5 000 by 1884, and 6 500 in 1891. Half of these were to be found in Noumea and its immediate environs. In other words, free white settlers were still poorly dispersed throughout the bush. The economic development of New Caledonia, argued Augustin Bernard in 1894, was being retarded by the penitentiary, which remained unproductive and parasitic. Perhaps the failure to entice a greater number of migrants to the colony was more complicated than this. Governor Guillain, in the course of his long term of office, attempted to establish an experimental com¬ munity of free colonists at Yate. In 1864, he inaugurated a phalanstery, based on the communalist ideals of Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist philosopher of the early nineteenth century. The members of the Yate commune were recruited in France, chiefly from artisan circles. There

were bricklayers, tinsmiths, a mechanic, a saddler, a mason, a carpenter and a blacksmith, but sadly, only one farmer. The commune was granted 300 hectares, and Guillain gave the leading role to an elected committee of five. Advances of livestock, rations, seed and poultry were provided. As Fourier had recommended, egalitarian principles were combined with some individual incentives. A proportion of the group’s property was to be divided equally, but some of it was to be distributed according to the work done. Lieutenant Bourgey obligingly recruited some Melanesian labour for the commune. Things started badly, and grew worse. In 1864, the community’s main storehouse accidentally burned down, and much capital equipment was lost. Perhaps the communal arrangement was too idealistic, but the evidence does not permit us to decide whether failure was due to bad management rather than bad luck. Within two years, however, it was clear that the experiment had failed. Some members of the phalanstery continued as independent coffee-planters, but as a community, the phalanstery had ceased to exist. Guillain’s dream of a socialist colonis¬ ation of New Caledonia was shattered by this failure. No doubt he and the colonists underestimated the difficulties involved in transposing European agricultural methods into a tropical climate, especially when those cast as pioneers had no expertise in the field. Another attempt at sponsored settlement was made in 1890, but this time without the socialist aims which Guillain had promoted. Several families from the Dordogne, in south-west France, were recruited by the Colonisation Society in Paris. Their colony at Ouameni was prepared by convicts, and the families were given six months’ free rations. This was not enough, however, to ensure success in a strange environment. Within a year, almost all the Dordogne immigrants had packed up and gone to live in Noumea. Once again, they were not peasant farmers by origin, but papermakers. Lack of expertise and perhaps lack of adequate encouragement con¬ tributed to the failure of such projects. The military blamed incompetent convicts; colonists blamed the incompetent soldiery. In 1861, Guys, president of the Chamber of Commerce, told Paris: ‘One does not create commercial and agricultural interests with men of the sword’. It was absurd, he added, that New Caledonia should import so much from Australia, instead of developing her own resources more efficiently. His criticisms of the local government, and of the Ministry for the Colonies in Paris, were pertinent, for the shortage of free colonists is partly explained by the absence of legislation to facilitate migration. Governmental policies neglected colonial development. The conditions under which early land concessions were granted did not encourage free settlers. Only those with large sums of capital could readily afford to take advantage of the government’s offers. In the 1880s, a free concession of three hectares was offered to new settlers, but this was quite insuf¬ ficient. In 1884, a proposal was introduced for the first time to offer

A COLONY WITHOUT COLONISTS?

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colonists a free passage from France. Migrants were also promised twenty-four hectares of land and six months’ rations. This was progress, but the effect was immediately mitigated by the decree of 16 August 1884, which reserved 110 000 hectares of the colony’s best land for the penal colony. Nothing irritated the colonists more than this example of the preferential treatment accorded to the convicts at the expense of free settlers. Concessions became, if anything, more unpopular after 1885, when conditions of settlement were made even more restrictive. The adminis¬ tration now demanded that all concessionaries had to be of French nationality. The government had never acted generously enough to ensure an adequate flow of free colonists to New Caledonia. Such migrants required assistance with the cost of their passage, and they needed enough credit or capital to carry them through their first, loss-making years. The government assisted them for six months; but their efforts on the land might not show any profit for perhaps five years. Many could not survive that long without financial aid, and they gravitated away from the bush, and into Noumea. Thus, at the beginning of the century, the colony still imported essential foodstuffs like sugar, as well as its manufactured goods. One-half of its imports came from France, onethird from Australia. French colonies never became great magnets for trade and investment in this period. In the fifteen years before 1914, the colonies as a whole only accounted for 12 percent of French trade, and the main targets for French capital investment were in Europe itself, especially in Russia, Tsarist railways and Balkan armaments loans were more attractive propositions for small French savers than south Pacific coffee-growing. Settlement policy changed dramatically with the arrival of Paul Feillet as governor in 1894. The new incumbent threw his considerable energies into the promotion of agriculture and free colonisation. Paul Feillet be¬ longed to a dynamic generation of late-nineteenth-century French col¬ onisers, vigorous, young, determined, and imbued with a great sense of mission. Feillet was only thirty-seven when posted to New Caledonia, and he already had a turbulent career behind him. In Guadeloupe, he had been wounded in a duel, and had then become governor of the North Atlantic territories of St Pierre and Miquelon. Feillet’s first aim was to reduce the importance of the penal colony, and eventually, to eliminate it altogether. As he put it, he wanted ‘to turn off the dirty-water tap’ which flowed into Noumea on the convict ships. He managed to persuade the government to suspend deportation. Instead, he made the first serious attempt to encourage free colonisation on a substantial scale—turning on the clean-water tap. He organised publicity in France to attract migrants, and aimed to recruit those with some expertise, and some starting capital. He offered new settlers a free passage from France, and credit on arrival. There was no longer to be any restriction on the nationality of new settlers; French

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and non-French citizens would be welcome. Feillet concentrated on the development of coffee plantations, but the government knew that new plantations were unlikely to show a profit for at least six years after they were established. Feillet therefore insisted that new colonists should have sufficient capital to carry them through this early period. If migrants could show they had at least 5 000 francs, and would promise to devote half of their land to coffee cultivation, they would qualify for a free land concession. This was real encouragement at last, based on sensible and practical considerations. The myth of tropical fertility lost ground, in other words it was no longer assumed that almost anything could be grown in New Caledonia. Feillet deliberately directed efforts into the specialised area of coffee production. Steps were also taken to ensure that the colonists who arrived had some skill, some capital and plenty of official encouragement. An enormous transformation occurred. Feillet succeeded in attracting about 540 new families to New Caledonia, who responded to the new recruiting effort, and the allocation of better land than had been pre¬ viously provided. Coffee production soared. Exports rose from about 33 000 kilograms in 1890 to over 212 000 kilograms by 1896. The European population of the colony started to grow again. In 1887, there were about 16 500 whites in New Caledonia; by the time of Feillet’s departure, there were 23 500. The number was soon to decline again, but Feillet had nevertheless presided over the first and only attempt to establish a population of free settlers. In the long run, the colony’s future lay in mining and minerals, rather than in agriculture, and in this sense, Feillet had made the wrong choice. Nevertheless, he had brought to an end New Caledonia’s role as a penal colony, and had established white colonists as a real presence in the bush for the first time. He had arrived when French politics was passing through the upheaval of the Dreyfus Affair and its aftermath, and the shock waves reached Noumea. The French Catholic Church had aligned itself with reaction¬ ary forces against Dreyfus, and religious policies were becoming a par¬ ticularly sensitive issue. Feillet, however, was an abrasive personality, and did not shun controversy. He allowed the Protestants to establish a mission on the mainland at Houailou, and he showed indulgence to Freemasonry. This angered traditional Catholics. Feillet made many enemies. Commercial interests found his schemes too expensive, and he was opposed by the Noumea municipal council, as well as the wealthy colonists. The missionaries, too, opposed him. In order to make agricultural development a success, good land had to be allocated to new immigrants. Some of it was taken from the penal colony, which was deprived of 43 000 hectares in 1897. Some of it was also taken from the native reserves. As we shall see, the Kanak population was in a state of rapid decline, and so Feillet could argue that the Melanesians did not need as much land as they had originally been granted. Native reserves were

A COLONY WITHOUT COLONISTS?

77

accordingly diminished. By 1902, they amounted to only about one-tenth of the surface of the Grande-Terre. The Marists, however, opposed the spoliation of native reserves, which was the inevitable corollary of Feillet’s colonising efforts. Feillet swept their objections aside with a dogmatic severity which raised local hackles. He was recalled in 1902. Many of his plans did not outlive his term of office, but Feillet had made an impact on French settlement in New Caledonia. His efforts and espousal of radical policies were long remembered and respected by small French farmers in the colony, who owed their position to his administration. Paul Feillet’s tumultuous passage marked a turning point in government policy. Today, New Caledonia has a special status (and therefore special problems) among French overseas possessions. It is France’s only re¬ maining ‘colony of settlement’. It is often forgotten how recent that settlement is, and how difficult it was to achieve.

Main sources for chapter 6 The history of government land policies is discussed by Lucien DELIGNON Les Alienations de Terres, already cited. The polemic on the role of the penitentiary is sustained by Augustin BERNARD L’Archipel de la Nouvelle-Caledonie 1894, (against the penal colony), and by J.-B. ALBERTI Etude sur la colonisation de la Nouvelle-Caledonie 1909, (in defence of the penal colony). Paul Feillet’s governorship is summarised by Patrick O’REILLY in his article ‘Paul Feillet, gouverneur de la NouvelleCaledonie, 1894—1902’, in Revue de I’histoire des colonies franqaises tome XL 1953.

CHAPTER 7

ECONOMIC STAGNATION AND THE YELLOW PERIL

Governor Paul Feillet had made many enemies and several mistakes. He was not responsible, however, for everything that graziers and local administrators blamed him for. The agricultural depression and mining crisis which characterised his term of office, and its immediate aftermath, were outside his control. They nevertheless aggravated the colony’s problems. The white population of New Caledonia, which Feillet had done so much to increase, went into decline at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1926, it stood at less than 17 000, which was little more than its level in 1887. It was not easy to find the right economic justification for the colony which the colonist Le Goupils had dubbed the Emporium of the Pacific, the ‘Eden of the Tropics’. These epithets looked sadly out of place in the interwar years. Be¬ tween 1894, when Feillet had ‘turned off the dirty-water tap’, and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the economic history of New Caledonia gives the impression of stagnation and inertia. The agricultural myth faded, and mining became the colony’s prime exporter and incomeearner. World markets for nickel, chrome and cobalt, however, seemed very volatile, and New Caledonian production was increasingly vulner¬ able to international competition, especially from Canada. Feillet’s legacy included another problem: without convict labour, where would the colonialists find a workforce for the metallurgical industry, and the belated spurt of modernisation which occurred in the 1920s? They recruited it in the Far East, in Japan, Indonesia and Indo-China. This was an early example of the importation of labour of mixed racial origins, which has skewed the racial balance in New Caledonia, and helped to put the Melanesians in a minority. The arrival of these Asian workers also created problems for the French with their Australian neighbours. The agricultural depression had various beginnings, and the dimin¬ ution of the number of convict consumers was only one of them. Crops were devastated by the cyclone of 1906, and again by the cyclone of 78

Indonesian immigration: a Javanese house-girl at Ouaco (date unknown)

Mitchell Library

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1910. In 1899, the colony was affected by an outbreak of bubonic plague. Coffee plantations were destroyed by the arrival in 1910 of the parasite Hemeleia Vastatrix, which especially affected the Arabica variety. This was one reason why many white settlers sold their coffee plantations to the Melanesians, and why the island switched to the cultivation of the Robusta variety of coffee. The coffee blight was a severe blow to Feillet’s hopes for a coffee-led agricultural recovery. The grazing industry slumped, too, although the Franco-Australia Society gave it one temporary outlet. At Ouaco, it produced tinned beef for the French War Ministry, employ¬ ing 150 workers, and slaughtering 100 head of cattle daily. The colony’s future lay in mining, and particularly in nickel extraction. The Societe Le Nickel, founded by Higginson in 1881, produced over 19000 metric tonnes by 1889. It had taken its share of convict labour and of native land. In 1889, it expropriated over 115 hectares from the Ouroue reserve near the nickel centre of Thio. The colonial administra¬ tion obligingly decided to declare this fait accompli an exceptional case. Before Feillet arrived, the Societe le Nickel continued to have a direct influence on official policy; the president of the local administration (the Conseil general) in 1888—90 was Pelatan, Higginson’s son-in-law. The quality of New Caledonian nickel was good, and generally superior to the nickel found elsewhere. The ore was a silicate, which contained between 6 and 10 percent of nickel, whereas other known deposits contained only 2 — 4 percent of the mineral. Nickel was used increasingly in the manufacture of coins and household utensils. It was used in steel production and in the manufacture of cartridges; New Caledonian production therefore profited from every European war scare. In the 1880s, New Caledonia briefly enjoyed a virtual world monopoly of nickel production. Until 1910, only raw nickel had been exported. In that year, indus¬ trialisation in New Caledonia took a long step forward with the in¬ auguration of the nickel fusion plant at Doniambo. From then on, the local economy was capable of processing its own nickel for export. Nickel exports enabled the colony to achieve a much improved balance of trade, although this was normally in deficit. In 1892, for instance, New Caledonia exported more manufactured materials than it imported, thanks ex¬ clusively to nickel and other metals. By this time the export of metals and minerals was over three times as valuable to the colony than the sale of animal products. Nickel exports soared in the early 1890s, reaching 40000 tonnes in 1893, 100000 tonnes in 1900, and 125 000 tonnes in 1905. The world price of nickel, however, was by no means constant, and the mining economy began to experience a series of slumps which re¬ vealed the dangers of over-reliance on one productive sector. In the late 1890s, New Caledonian nickel was rivalled by Canadian producers, and as a result of the exploitation of this new source, there was a glut and the world price fell by a half. In 1895, the nickel mines stopped completely.

ECONOMIC STAGNATION AND THE YELLOW PERIL

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Then came a gradual recovery, and the SLN (Societe Le Nickel) was employing 1 800 workers by 1902. In 1903, however, another slump cut this workforce down to 800. The resulting crisis had nothing to do, as Alberti erroneously argued, with the disappearance of the penitentiary; it was due to the power of Canadian competition and the depressed state of the steel industry in the advanced world. The colony’s stability now lay in the grip of such remote factors. In August 1907, the prospects looked bleak to Captain Buchard, when he reported on the economic depression to the Colonial Ministry. Noumea had just experienced an unprecedented event: 280 people had demons¬ trated in the capital to demand work. Buchard attributed economic col¬ lapse to the end of the penal settlement and the withdrawal of troops from the colony; here, he was probably exaggerating. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking his gloom, and the sense that the colony was running down. The railway Feillet had built to Dumbea was never used, and Feillet was wrong, wrote Buchard, to place his confidence in agriculture. Japanese migration was not beneficial as long as Japanese workers repatriated three-quarters of their wages. New Caledonia, he pessimistii cally concluded, had to be defended against the predators of the Pacific: | Japan and Australia. New Caledonia may have seemed a declining backwater to Buchard, but technological innovations were reducing the colony’s international isolation. After 1893, a submarine cable linked Gomen with Bundaberg in Queensland. From 1882 onwards, a steamer of the Messageries Maritimes linked Noumea with Marseilles. This was a monthly service, which operated via Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and the Suez Canal. The whole trip took thirty-eight days. Twice every month, in addition, the Australian Steam Navigation Company sailed from Sydney to Fiji, via Noumea. The Australian link was still vital. The inhabitant of Noumea was still forced to regard Sydney as the gateway to metropolitan France. But for New Caledonia, as for Australia, distance was relaxing its tyrannical grip. The infrastructure of domestic communications remained in poor repair. Feillet had planned a railway between Noumea and Bourail. It was never completed. Sixteen kilometres ran from the capital as far as Dumbea, but as we have seen, it was rarely used. The road network was extremely deficient. When Governor Pallu arrived in 1882, there was only one road in existence, running to Pa'ita. Pallu built 60 kilometres of road, and 390 kilometres of mule-tracks completed the transport net¬ work. In the early twentieth century, the port installations also required modernisation. The port was a ruin, and in 1918, Noumea was still without electricity and healthy water. Economic depression had halted spending on essential improvements, and the shadows of seedy neglect were creeping over the dilapidated colonial capital. In 1925 a dynamic governor, Joseph Guyon, set about promoting a belated program of modernisation. Guyon obtained a loan of 95 million

i,

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francs from Paris, and another 15 million from Germany. With this he gave the colony electrification, and a better communications system. The port was modernised, 300 kilometres of main roads and 250 kilometres of secondary roads were built. Guyon was probably just in time; he achieved what he did before the colony was again plunged into economic depression. Guyon’s term was a bright, constructive interval between the crises of the First World War period, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Guyon’s public works schemes had relied on an influx of immigrant Asian labour. There were precedents for this, not all of them encourag- I ing. In 1893, at the height of a nickel boom, the SLN had imported 500 Japanese workers for its Thio mine. Feillet had introduced Javanese migrants in 1901—02. By 1918, there were as many as 2 458 Japanese in New Caledonia, counted for us by Governor Repiquet. They had first arrived as miners, but many had stayed and entered a wider range of occupations. They were hardworking and sober, advised the governor, and therefore differed enormously from the local workforce. They be¬ came market-gardeners, fishermen, grocers and small shopkeepers, and they were passionately fond of gambling. A high proportion of their earnings went home to Japan. Their presence was not appreciated by Australia, which found a new cause of anxiety, to add to the older fear of convict escapees landing on the east coast. Australians now complained vociferously about the dangers of the Yellow Peril, unscrupulously promoted by the cynical French. In 1911, the Melbourne Age envisaged a moment, not too far in the future, when ‘hordes of the little brown men may swoop down upon Queensland any fine day’. Australian white supremacist paranoia thus identified New Caledonia as a kind of springboard for a pre-1914 Asian invasion. The only remedy, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, was to organise a British or Australian takeover of the French colony. The Sun kept these fears at a high pitch in March 1911, by suggesting that Japan only had to offer Rothschild the right price, and New Caledonia would become a Japanese possession. This was a reference to Rothschild’s economic interests in the SLN, and it was also a neat conflation of several racial targets: the Jews, the yellow men and the shifty Frenchmen, all combining to undermine Australia, the bastion of white racism in the Pacific. With allies like these, the French needed no enemies in the region. Australian-New Caledonian relations were particularly tense in these prewar years. Noumea was well aware that some Australians were argu¬ ing for a British takeover of the colony. The delivery of an Australian dreadnought warship in 1913 further worried the French, and this helped to explain why New Caledonians tended to regard Australia as a kind of great white shark lurking in the south Pacific, to devour any small European colonies that inadvertently got out of their depth. The Sydney consul-general told the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris that some elements of political opinion in Australia had puerile aspirations to

SOURCE: Bernard BROU Peuplement et Population de la Nouvelle-Caledonie: la societe moderne Noumea 1980 pp 34—35. The dates of population censuses since 1887 are marked but in the period before 1887, the extrapolation of the graph is speculative.

ECONOMIC STAGNATION AND THE YELLOW PERIL 83

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Pacific domination. For some years, he reported in 1913, ‘a bitter chau¬ vinism has been raging in this country’. When Governor Guyon recruited 4000 Indo-Chinese and 1 700 Javanese workers in the 1920s, he faced criticism from other sources. Vietnamese labour, like Japanese labour before it, was necessary for the mines, and especially the hydroelectric plant at Yate, which started to function in 1927. When a delegate of the governor-general of the Dutch East Indies arrived in 1925, to inspect working conditions for Javanese immigrants, he reproached the New Caledonian employers for their excessive familiarity with them. Guyon took this as a great compliment to French colonialism. Attacks from French bureaucrats were much more serious. While the Dutch accused Guyon of too much fraternisation, a local administrator in Indo-China named Montpezat raised a hue and cry, on the grounds that the employment of Vietnamese workers in New Caledonian mines amounted to ‘yellow slavery’. His lengthy and rather hysterical indict¬ ment of Guyon’s regime provoked a response from the beleaguered governor, and some of his accusations of ill-treatment were borne out. Guyon admitted, for example, that in 1924, some ‘troublesome’ Viet¬ namese had been injected with the sedative terebenthine. In his defence against accusations of ill-treatment, Guyon pointed out that many Viet¬ namese wanted to renew their contracts when they expired, which was a sign that their conditions of work were not intolerable. These polemics drew attention to one particular source of official embarrassment. There was, in interwar New Caledonia, one law for the whites and one law for the Melanesians. But into what administrative category did the natives of Indo-China fall? Colonial bureaucrats cer¬ tainly did not consider them on a par with whites, but they were a more respected sort of colonial subject than the cannibalistic Kanaks. The ambiguities of French racist policies demanded a delicate compromise. The Vietnamese, like the Kanaks, were subject to an 8 pm curfew in Noumea. They were treated by the special native medical service, after they had been decontaminated. (On arrival, a ceremony took place known as ‘deparasitation of exotic immigrants’.) One token adminis¬ trative gesture, however, recognised that the Vietnamese were more civilised French subjects than the Kanaks. The Vietnamese were ex¬ empted from the ban on alcohol which applied to the Melanesians. They were at least permitted to drink wine. Guyon had another problem. Vietnamese workers could be carrying a disease more fatal than those normally dealt with by decontamination procedure: they might spread the infection of communism to New Caledonia. Tempers ran high during the Tet New Year period in 1927, when Vietnamese miners discovered that their Vietnamese foreman had embezzled the funds they had saved to send home to their families. A brawl broke out, in which the French intervened. Violence, however, quickly turned against the French, and one Vietnamese was killed. For Guyon, this minor incident demonstrated the existence of anti-French

ECONOMIC STAGNATION AND THE YELLOW PERIL

85

undercurrents among the immigrant workforce. His suspicions were confirmed when several subversive tracts were found in the possession of Vietnamese miners. In recent times, the French have continued to call upon reserves of labour from other colonies—not from Indo-China, but from Wallis and Futuna Islands, Tahiti and the New Hebrides. Immigrants from these sources appear much safer in the eyes of the colonial regime than the Vietnamese workers of the 1920s. Their economic future depends on the white colonial regime, and so far the Wallisiens and Tahitians have given their political allegiance to the whites rather than to the Melanesian independentists. The Kanaks, too, were the victims of colonial neglect in the interwar period, as the next chapter will show. The lack of social and economic reform before the Second World War made native demands after it especially sudden and insistent. The Kanaks were nevertheless called upon to serve under the tricolour in two world wars. White colonists and natives of New Caledonia and Tahiti fought together in a ‘Mixed Pacific Battalion’. Between 1915 and 1917, four troop contingents left New Caledonia for France. Altogether, they numbered 2 170, and more than half of these were Melanesians. Five hundred and forty never returned. The Kanak death rate of almost one-third was twice as high as the rate of losses for white New Caledonian troops. In the Second World War, volunteers, both black and white, left to fight in Europe and North Africa. The Pacific Battalion distinguished itself in Libya alongside the British Eighth Army, in the landings in Italy, and in the liberation of France itself in 1944. These common military efforts have usually been regarded by colonists as unquestion¬ able demonstrations of racial harmony and cooperation, and as shining examples of the success of French colonialism. Only a closer examination of what the war and French colonialism meant to the Melanesian popu¬ lation in this period will suggest whether or not this traditional view has any substance. The myth of multiracial comradeship in the trenches dies hard. But did the Kanak population ever subscribe to it?

Main sources for chapter 7 There are very few secondary sources for this ‘middle period’ of the colony’s history. I have exploited what ALBERTI and BERNARD (already cited) have to offer on the colony’s economic history in the early years of the twentieth century. I have also used Governor GUYON’s own report, published in 1928, on the Vietnamese workforce, addressed to the governor-general of Indo-China. Otherwise, the best sources are in the archives. I have used carton 231 of the New Caledonian section of the Archives Nationales, Section Outre-Mer. Carton 180 contains a file of Australian press cuttings col¬ lected and sometimes translated for the governor in 1911.

CHAPTER 8

THE KANAKS, 1898-1945: A DOMINATED CULTURE

Between 1898, when the Native Affairs Service was inaugurated, and the Second World War, the Melanesian population had a special, legally defined, subordinate status in New Caledonian society. A paternalistic philosophy inspired the attitudes of white administrators towards the Kanaks, and at the same time perpetuated assumptions about the Kanaks’ inferiority. Paternalism was backed up by a hard core of police regulations designed to enforce work discipline and make it easier for the French to recruit unskilled Kanak labourers. Under this regime, tradi¬ tional Melanesian cultural practices were further eroded, and the cultural deprivation produced by white domination was accompanied by a great deal of emotional anguish on the native reserves. The Kanaks faced a difficult dilemma: whether to adopt white manners as fast as possible, in order to share the material benefits of white civilisation, or to cling as long as possible to what remained of indigenous traditions. It was a choice between saving the pieces of an old, but subordinated identity, or looking for a way to build a new one. New generations were emerging from the trauma of defeat and domination at the end of the nineteenth century, and they gradually ‘acculturated’ to white practices. This process was evident, for example, in changing styles of Melanesian dress and housing, which began to incorporate western fashions. Defeat, displacement and cultural alien¬ ation had contributed to the rapid decline in the Melanesian population. In New Caledonia, as in other colonised areas of the Pacific, white domination had devastated native populations. By the 1930s, however, there were some signs that this demographic slaughter was over. The Melanesian population began to increase alongside that of the French inhabitants. There were some medical reasons for this, for common European diseases were not as fatal to Melanesians as they once had been; there were also cultural and psychological factors behind the rising Melanesian population. The Kanaks were overcoming their defeatism and ‘mal de vivre’, and coming to terms with white-dominated society and its cultural influences. The germs of a revived Kanak self-respect were being sown. 86

Gendarmeries like this one at La Foa were responsible for local administration and the requisitioning of Melanesian labour

Mitchell Library

! Acculturation, however, did not mean assimilation. The Kanak popu¬ lation was still very much on the margins—the agricultural margins— of New Caledonian society. The fact that so little was done in this interwar period to integrate them, into the educational system or the workforce, only made subsequent Kanak reassertion seem more sudden and demanding, when it was eventually expressed after 1945. Between the wars, the Kanaks were both subjugated and neglected. This neglect simply delayed the crisis of decolonisation until today, but it could not survive long in the postwar era. On the eve of 1914, however, French colonists had hardly perceived a Kanak problem at all. ‘Unfortunately,’ Alberti wrote quite sincerely in 1909, ‘the Kanaks are in the process of disappearing. . . .One can predict that their race will be extinct within the next thirty years.’ There was therefore no need to develop a policy for a community about to vanish from the face of the globe. The graph, based on the official figures which were first produced in 1887, shows how this assumption could have been made. The decline of the Melanesian population, which had justified Feillet’s reduction in the extent of native reserves, was catastrophic up to the first decade of the twentieth century. It fell from a total of approximately 42 000 in 1887 to only 28000 in 1901. If reliable figures existed before 1887, the collapse 87

CHAPTER 8

would perhaps appear even more dramatic. As it was, the Melanesian population was reduced by as much as one-third in a mere thirteen years. The fall was not geographically uniform. It was more drastic in the areas of insurrection and native displacement. The population fell fastest on the Grande-Terre and the Isle of Pines, both areas of white contact. In the Loyalty Islands, the population remained relatively more stable. Then, for two and almost three decades, Melanesian population levels remained stagnant and almost stationary. Only in the 1920s, and more clearly in the 1930s, was the corner turned. The Melanesian population began to rise steadily, a sign perhaps of material improve¬ ments and a growing self-confidence. The extent to which white presence and domination were responsible for this demographic disaster is disputable, but the fact that they did exacerbate native population decline is incontrovertible. Imported dis¬ eases took a heavy toll, among them being smallpox, evident after 1889. Beri-beri, perhaps introduced by the Indo-Chinese, appeared after 1891, and leprosy, brought to New Caledonia by the Chinese, was already present. Leprosy, however, afflicted both Europeans and Melanesians, and it was very hard to eradicate, especially since the Melanesians did not always grasp the reason for the isolation of victims. In 1890, there were forty-nine lepers on Mare, which was about 1 percent of the population there, and the disease was thought to have originated with a New Guinea catechist on the island. In 1952, leprosy still affected 0.72 percent of New Caledonians of European origin, and 2.84 percent of Kanaks. These diseases no doubt contributed to the debilitation of the native population, but they were not responsible for carrying off one Kanak in three in the space of a decade and a half. Leprosy, after all, only accounted for an average of a hundred deaths per year at the end of the nineteenth century. Far more destructive wras tuberculosis, introduced by white traders early in this history, but caused, according to colonists, by the native insistence on sleeping naked on chilly nights. Armed conflicts, like the insurrection of 1878, also caused thousands of deaths, either in combat or indirectly, amongst the displaced Kanaks and the defeated tribesmen herded into the native reserves. It is not too fanciful to suggest that many died of misery, and the self-disgust of a people which felt deprived of its identity and of its future. White medical neglect played a part, but this was only one symptom of a more general refusal to recognise the existence of a Kanak problem in the interwar period. In 1911, Governor Richard had organised a native medical service, but it was allocated only eleven doctors, and one of them was supposed to cope single-handed with the entire population of the Loyalty Islands. After the First World War, the situation worsened. In the budget for 1920, the native medical service was allocated only 1/116th of all expenses. When Inspector Barthes visited New Caledonia in 1935, he found the native tribes had not received the regular six-

THE KANAKS, 1898-1945: A DOMINATED CULTURE

89

monthly medical checks to which they were entitled, and he regarded the persistence of leprosy as a scandalous reflection on the colonial adminis¬ tration. ‘One must,’ he reported, ‘actually consider as a complete failure the fact that, after 22 years’ existence of this specialised medical service, in a colony of only about 52 000 inhabitants, no-one even knows the exact number of lepers.’ Such diseases, he sensibly advised, would only be counteracted through propaganda disseminated by native doctors. But none had been trained. Western medicine could hardly be counted among the benefits which French imperialism brought to New Caledonia in this period. Some aspects of low Kanak population levels remain mysterious. The incidence of Kanak abortion and infanticide can never be accurately determined. It is possible that the revival of the Melanesian population owed something to the decline of these practices, but that is speculation. The acculturation of younger generations, and their acceptance of colonial status, together with the progress made by white education and Chris¬ tianity, no doubt helped. Campaigns against alcoholism might have had some effect in reducing a common cause of physical weakness. Some medical progress also occurred: Noumea hospital was eventually endowed with a native maternity ward, and there was a native section in the Ducos sanitorium. As a result, the Melanesian population began to increase steadily, especially in the 1930s. By 1963, it had almost regained its 1887 level. The Kanak population was kept under rigid white tutelage. Governor Feillet had created the Native Affairs Service in 1898, and set up a net¬ work of syndics, who were responsible for the administration and super¬ vision of native affairs within their allotted tribal district. The syndics, however, operated from the local post of the gendarmerie, which meant that supervision of native affairs was closely associated with police con¬ trol, and labour requisitioning. In 1907, the special Native Statute, which defined Kanak status, was renewed for another ten years. In principle, policing and tutelage of this kind was only a temporary measure, which would become obsolete as soon as the Melanesian people had ‘come of age’, and reached a suf¬ ficient moral and intellectual level to run their own affairs. Unfortunately, Kanak civilisation in 1907 was thought to be still far short of that of the French, and therefore the special legal status of the natives was prolonged. In 1917, it was prolonged for another five years, and the outbreak of the revolt of 1917 suggested that it was still too dangerous to remove it. The Native Statute was renewed annually after 1922, and Governor Guyon found the natives in 1925 ‘still incapable of restraining their instincts which drive them to debauchery, drunkenness, vagrancy and to violence’. The mechanisms of white social discipline thus remained in place until after the Second World War. In 1924, the newly named Native Affairs Bureau included within its responsibilities the inspection

Insurrection, 1917: the severed head of Chief Noel, one of the instigators. This photograph was distributed to neighbouring tribes as proof of Noel’s death, and as a warning Mitchell Library

of native schools, general police, the recruitment of native labour for public services, the enforcement of health and anti-leprosy regulations, and the supervision of tribal justice. Within the framework of the Native Statute, special police regulations applied to Kanaks, and Kanaks alone. In 1928, natives were forbidden to leave their tribal district without permission, a measure probably intended to prevent them from evading labour requisitioning. After 1934, a ten-franc reward was offered for the capture of any native ‘in an irregular situation’, and the Native Affairs Bureau was empowered to discipline native workers who refused their employers’ orders. These regulations remained in force until 1946. Labour requisitions were amongst the most humiliating aspects of French administration, as the following copy of a requisition of 1944 from Oueholle may suggest: To Maela, the gunner’s wife. . . Your four women and boy are requisitioned to pick coffee on the Metzger property at Konio for two weeks beginning Monday 10 July 1944. After the expiry of these two weeks, they will be replaced by five other women. By order of the governor, the tribe of Oueholle will have no more sugar, rice or oil, and no more clothing coupons if these women do not appear to pick coffee. In addition, the woman Maela, wife of the gunner, will have her ration refused if she does not appear to pick coffee. The chief will be punished if this order is not carried out. The Syndic. Kanaks could not trespass on private property, or disturb the peace of the whites. Kanaks could not enter public bars, or carry native weapons in a place of European residence. They were forbidden to hold a pilou-pilou in unsocial hours, and further native crimes included charlatanism, witch¬ craft, showing a lack of respect for the authorities, and non-observance of the leprosy regulations. Any of these offences might incur between one and fifteen days in prison, and fines of up to 150 francs. Natives could also be fined simply for being naked, and a 9 pm curfew applied to them except on Wednesday and Saturday. In this way, the supply of native labour, and the peace and propriety of European residential districts was i preserved. A double legal standard also applied to the consumption of alcohol. The sale of liquor to Melanesians was officially banned in 1899, but this rule was relaxed in the 1930s. The authorities realised that banning Kanaks from French bars was counterproductive; they simply bought their supplies from Chinese or Japanese liquor-dealers, who were harder t to police. In fact, a slightly more liberal atmosphere prevailed on the eve of the Second World War. Natives had slightly greater freedom of movement, and crimes like the late-night pilous were deleted from the Native Statute. By this time, such pilous were probably rare events.

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The native chiefs were given an important role in this system of policing and disciplining the Melanesians. I hey were a vital administra¬ tive link in the apparatus of colonial domination. They were expected to register births and deaths, and marriages, too, although this was a prob¬ lem since there was no simple Kanak wedding ceremony to record. The tribe itself was given a collective legal identity, and the chief was re¬ sponsible to the French authorities, acting through the local syndics. The governor had the power to appoint chiefs, dissolve and reconstitute tribes, and to order Kanaks to change tribes. Thus the scope for inde¬ pendent action was severely limited by French tutelage. Regular meetings of local chiefs, for instance, were supervised by the syndic. The chief was expected to enforce customary law, to settle internal disputes within the tribe. However, an appeal against the chief’s decision was always possible, to a French court. In other words, Kanak justice was dispensed at the lowest judicial level, and tribal law thus remained inferior to French law. The chief was also responsible for collecting taxes, and he could legally take a cut of 5 percent for his efforts. In this way, the French exploited the traditional authority of the chiefs to exert social control over their Melanesian subjects. Kanaks were even subject to a different tax burden, which was much heavier than the taxes which fell on whites. Inspector Barthes was indignant to discover in 1935 that the whites exempted themselves from paying income tax. Meanwhile, Kanaks over sixteen years old were liable to pay a capitation tax of 40 francs per annum. Like most exploi¬ tative measures, this provoked Kanak resistance, as the case of Chief Amane indicates. In 1908, Chief Amane was arrested for repeated dis¬ obedience, and the insubordination of his tribe, the Poyes, had already made a military expedition necessary, in 1901. Amane’s greatest crime was to have refused to pay French taxation, and to have incited other natives to do the same. ‘You heap of blockheads, why do you pay up? he was solemnly quoted as saying. ‘Whites and you others, leave me in peace, I am in charge here.’ The chiefs, however, were only in command as long as they performed the judicial and fiscal functions the French demanded of them. It did not look well for Amane when the lesser leaders of his tribe, the petits-chefs, turned on him, too, using the French investigation of Amane to resurrect a litany of ancient grievances against the tyrannies of their high chief. He had robbed them of copra, terrorised the tribe, and he was accused, ten years previously, of killing a family by blowing up their hut. Governor Richard sentenced Amane to five years’ exile on Wallis. The colonial minister asked for an investigation, but the governor was vindicated. Amane never returned to his tribe. After he had served his sentence, he settled on Uvea. Litigation between Kanaks subject to the Native Statute was left to the chiefs to settle. In matters of summary justice involving only Melanesians, the French did not interfere, leaving customary law intact. When a

Western influences on this Kanak are apparent in his dress and pipe Mitchell Library

94

CHAPTER 8

colonist was involved in a dispute with a Melanesian, however, the situation was different. The litigants had recourse to French justice, but it is doubtful whether this gave Melanesians adequate guarantees of impartial treatment in practice. The Leconte affair of 1909 suggests otherwise, and serves to illustrate the subordinate status of the Kanak in the judicial arena. Leon Leconte was a violent bully in his late twenties, who came from a domineering family. His violent attacks against Melanesians were protected by the fact that his father, a rich colonist, was a local notable, even though he too had been convicted of assault on natives in 1888 and 1894. In 1909, Leon Leconte himself also had two previous convictions for attacks on natives. These convictions, the governor dubiously claimed, showed that the Kanaks could count on the French to guarantee adequate protection. On New Year’s Eve, Chief Tieou of Paola, near Kone, was bringing in the capitation tax returns he had collected from his tribe. On the way he was hoping to find a popinee, Nini Poya, and entered Leconte’s courtyard to see if she was there. She wasn’t and he left. Leconte followed him, and attacked him on the road without reason. A little later, Leconte came after him again in his car, beat Tieou so savagely that he lost an eye, and threw him into the nearby river. This appalling brutality was not all, for Leconte also seized the money from the capitation tax, and this loss could have had dire consequences for Tieou and his whole tribe. Eventually, the Assize Court awarded Tieou 3 000 francs damages, but acquitted Leconte. It is clear that the jury and Tieou were under immense pressure to dismiss the charges. Leconte had presented Tieou with a document agreeing to withdraw all charges, offered him 30 francs to sign it, and then threatened him with prison if he refused. Such was white justice. Tieou was perhaps exceptional in resisting this intimi¬ dation, for presumably many others did not dare to defy prominent colonists. Tieou, however, having lost the tax returns, was in such serious trouble that he was more or less compelled to go through with the prosecution. It is not clear what decision was taken over the missing money, but by 1917, Tieou had become a nationalist, who refused to cooperate in tax collection or in labour requisitions. He was repeatedly fined or im¬ prisoned in the war years, and was suspected of resisting the recruitment of volunteers. In 1917, he was sentenced to three years’ internment in the New Hebrides. His is not the only case of insubordination which dents the myth of racial harmony so gloriously exemplified, it is sometimes thought, in the Pacific Battalion. Melanesians did not set aside their resentment and grievances just because the French were at war in Europe, and the re¬ cruitment of Kanak volunteers was by no means as smooth and har¬ monious as appearances suggest. In 1917 a revolt broke out in the region of Hienghene, in which sixteen whites were killed. Once again, Kanak resentment against the stockbreeders was partly responsible for this

THE KANAKS, 1898-1945: A DOMINATED CULTURE

95

violence. The graziers had recently expanded their pastures into the nearby northern valleys. Ten natives arrested in December 1917 com¬ plained about wandering cattle, and they were exiled to the New Hebrides. By August 1920, four of them were dead there, and the rest were allowed to return home. In some sense, then, the agitation during the war years was a belated sequel to the revolt of 1878. In Poya, in 1915, Chief Moinba and his brother, suitably named Napoleon, were convicted of inciting natives to violence. They had apparently urged an insurrection to avenge the defeat of 1878. They were both sentenced to five years on Wallis Island. The revolt of 1917 was not, however, merely a rerun in miniature of the great insurrection. There were new tensions at work, superimposed on the old grievances by the pressures of war. Kanaks were recruited for the European war in the same way as their labour was requisitioned for road construction or the repair of public buildings. That is to say, the respon¬ sibility was laid on the chiefs to find the recruits. This meant that in practice, the Melanesian contribution to the French war effort was no more voluntary than any other labour service, performed under threat of collective reprisals against the tribe. Recruitment of ‘volunteers’ sometimes provoked serious conflicts with¬ in the tribes, for many petits-chefs resisted the demands of their high chiefs for manpower. At Kone, especially, the High Chief Doui met resistance in his attempts to fulfil French requests for military recruits. He tried to enforce the request by threatening to burn down Kanak villages, if the natives did not respond. ‘I will cut your throat,’ he promised, ‘if you don’t find me the volunteers.’ At this point the hill tribesmen marched into Kone, looking for weapons and munitions with which to resist Doui. Several were arrested. The incident suggests that multiracial cooperation in the 1914—18 war was not quite as generous as colonists liked to believe. The Kanaks submitted to white cultural domination, with all the losses and gains that that entailed. It brought, on the positive side, fewer intertribal wars, and the end of cannibalism. The triumph of Chris¬ tianity helped to perpetuate these changes. By the end of the Second World War, New Caledonia was 90 percent Christianised, with approxi¬ mately equal Protestant and Catholic populations. The churches also contributed enormously to elementary schooling and the development of literacy; the schools were powerful instruments in the conquest of white culture. After the First World War, according to one French doctor, French was spoken and understood by all the Kanak inhabitants of the Loyalty Islands, and three-quarters of them could write it too. On the Grande-Terre, the proportions were smaller: about a half could speak French, and a quarter could read and write it. The Kanak demand for primary instruction was already outstripping the supply of schools. French was becoming the first common language of the islands, transcending the local Melanesian dialects. In 1923, the teach-

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ing of the French language was made compulsory in all schools. Religious schools taught the vast majority of Melanesian children of school age, until much greater provision for state education was made after the Second World War. In 1936, for instance, about 1 000 Melanesian children attended state primary schools, but 2 700 attended private schools. Kanak medicine came under attack, but often it merely went under¬ ground, operating according to secret networks, as the case of Mezere Ouatou, known as Marcellin, shows. Marcellin was known in New Caledonia as a superwizard (supersorcier). In 1943 he had been interned on Lifou for practising illegal medicine. This did not deter him, for there was considerable public demand for his skills. He was in trouble in 1944 because he had failed to turn up for work at his job at the Etablissements Ballande, and he had also failed to appear for a labour requisition in Noumea. In fact he had gone to a New Year’s fete at Thio, where he was expected to treat rheumatism and tuberculosis. He was sought after to cure stomach illnesses and female sterility, but in June 1945, he was sentenced to two years’ internment for charlatanism. The Church led the campaign against sorcerers; Marcellin was denounced by the apostolic vicar Bresson. The traditional role of the chief in Melanesian culture had also been transformed. The chief was now expected to fit into a new hierarchy of missionaries, doctors, gendarmes and officials. He was no longer the dy¬ namic warrior of the tribe, but a functionary of the French state. There was still scope for his eloquence, however, in his new political responsi¬ bilities, and he still commanded respect as an arbitrator of local dis¬ putes. The chief, even in his new diminished role, guaranteed the con¬ tinuity of the tribe, and perhaps remained its only possible defence against colonialism. Within the Kanak village, there were clear signs of the progress of ‘acculturation’. The ceremonial feast of the yam harvest was now blessed by the local Christian priest, and the customary meal was becoming a family celebration, rather than a tribal event. The Grande Case was a prayer house and meeting hall. The native pilou was in decline. Loyalty Islanders were invited to dance a pilou in the main square in Noumea to celebrate Bastille Day, one of the main national holidays in the French Republican calendar. Native culture was thus becoming emasculated, republicanised, relegated to folklore of tourist interest only. The governor traditionally rewarded the dancers on Bastille Day with gifts of mirrors, umbrellas, cloth and wire. French culture brought many changes in the everyday lives of the Kanaks. The generalised consumption of tobacco was one of them. The use of guns was another. The circular and hive-shaped native hut started to go out of fashion between the wars. Kanaks tended to build more rectangular houses, in imitation of the colonists, with a thatched roof and perhaps a verandah. Instead of creeper, it was held together with

THE KANAKS, 1898-1945: A DOMINATED CULTURE

97

nails. Glass, enamel and aluminium utensils, together with the paraffin lamp, took their place in Kanak households, replacing ancient cultural practices. Men stopped wearing the bagayou, or penis cover, and more women adopted the mission robe. Paul Bloc reflected on such changes in his novel Les Confidences d’un Cannibale. His fictitious Kanak Tiangou was halfway towards assimi¬ lation to white culture. At the beginning of the story, he lived alone in a hut in the forest—neither integrated into the tribe nor yet part of colonial civilisation. But his transition is completed when Tiangou burns down his native hut, and accepts lodging with a white estate-owner. Tiangou remains in awe of white technology, and full of respect for his good white master. Many Kanaks followed a similar path between the wars, a path which led them closer to white culture and its dominating paternal influence. As we have seen, the Kanaks remained very much second class citizens. They were taxed more than whites, and they received lower wages. A whole framework of administration and police regulated and defined their separate and subordinate status. They remained on the margins of New Caledonian society. They were not part of the industrial workforce, for this role was taken by Asian immigrants. In 1941, 85 percent of the workforce in the mines was Javanese or Vietnamese. Those Kanaks who were part of the industrial labour force were generally excluded from social-benefit schemes, reserved for whites. In 1927, a new Labour Code restricted child and female labour, but covered neither Kanaks nor Asian workers. In 1929, legislation on industrial accidents provided compensation and pension schemes, but was not applicable to Javanese or Melanesians. The Kanaks were subsistence farmers, of a very traditional kind, although commercialisation was beginning to offer them new oppor¬ tunities. Many taro fields were being turned into coffee plantations, for instance. Pigs were sometimes raised commercially, and snails and oysters were cultivated for the Noumea market. The Kanak diet was changing, just as native dress and architecture was becoming more westernised. Deer, imported from Manila by Governor Guillain’s wife in 1870, could supplement the native diet, as well as allowing French colonists to indulge in one of their favourite leisure pursuits—hunting. But traditional yam culture survived. There were still two cultures on New Caledonia, for while the Kanaks clung to their yams and manioc, the whites retained domestic French cultural preferences. The statistics on meat consumption after the Second World War suggests how im¬ permeable the two cultures had become. In 1952, New Caledonians of all races consumed on average 39 kilograms of meat per head; but Europeans alone ate no less than 119 kilograms per head. Acculturation was therefore incomplete, and our estimates of how far the Kanaks accepted or learned European cultural habits must be highly nuanced. Many native customs declined, while others were maintained,

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in face of white policing, education and other forms of European cultural domination. The Kanaks remained a marginal people. They were peasants, excluded from the mining labour force, and denied the op¬ portunity to gain the educational qualifications and professional skills necessary for upward social mobility. For secondary education was still monopolised by the French in this period. It is a sad reflection on the spread of the benefits of French civilisation that by 1953, not a single Kanak had obtained the baccalaureat, the principal qualification of French high-school students. Thus, the Kanaks were not absorbed either into the elites of manual labour or the professional classes. Perhaps this failure, on the part of the French, to nurture a native middle class, helps to explain why an independence movement took so long to appear in New Caledonia. The lack of an indigenous elite until after the Second World War made French New Caledonia an anomaly in a largely decolonised world. Without such an educated Melanesian managing class, the cry for selfdetermination arose later and more stridently.

Main sources for chapter 8 For the demographic details, I have consulted the article by Pierre METAIS, on ‘Demographie des Neo-Caledoniens’, in the special number of the Journal de la Societe des Oceanistes 1953, devoted to ‘Un siecle d’acculturation en Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1853—1953’. This subject ob¬ viously has some relevance to topics discussed in the rest of this chapter. On the Native Statute or Indige'nat, and on the troubles of 1917, see Archives Nationales, Section Outre-Mer, Affaires Politiques (AP) 741. The dossier on Leconte is in Nouvelle-Caledonie, carton 231, and a useful account of native agriculture can be found in Jacques BARRAU, L’Agriculture vivriere autochthone de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Noumea 1956.

PART THREE:

MELANESIAN RENAISSANCE,

1945-1985

CHAPTER 9

THE MELANESIAN REVIVAL, 1945-58

After the Second World War, it became essential for the French to develop a genuine Melanesian policy. For one thing, Roosevelt had seemed to view the old European colonial empires with disfavour, and such international pressures meant that the neglect and institutionalised subordination of the Kanaks could not be indefinitely prolonged. The newly formed United Nations Organisation, and the UN Charter, espoused the general goals of racial equality and decolonisation. Within the French Empire itself, steps were soon taken to end French control in Morocco and Tunisia. In 1954, the defeat at Dien Bien Phu heralded the end of French imperialism in Indo-China. This climate favoured impor¬ tant changes in Melanesian status in New Caledonia. So too did a sequence of governing coalitions in Paris, which included the centre and the socialist left. The formation of ruling Gaullist majorities in the late 1950s and 1960s was to prove by contrast quite unsympathetic to Kanak emancipation. The pressures for change, however, did not all come from outside. The Kanaks began to formulate political and social demands of their own. Strictly speaking, the Melanesian revival did not begin out of the blue after the Second World War. In terms of population growth, it had earlier roots in the interwar period. A new generation of Kanaks had therefore experienced the war, had seen something of European and American society, and developed a keen appreciation of their own subordinate position, and of the cultural loss which imperialism had entailed. As a result, the Kanaks acquired a new political status in the decade after demobilisation. During the Second World War itself, New Caledonia rallied to De Gaulle’s Free French forces, in opposition to the Vichy regime. Thus began a long association between the colonial elite and Gaullism, which still survives long after the general’s death. New Caledonia depended on Australia for supplies, and nickel production could not continue, without either submitting to Japanese conquest, or ensuring a regular supply of coal from the Allies. The choice New Caledonia made in 1940 was thus almost inevitable.

THE MELANESIAN REVIVAL,

1945-58

101

New Caledonia became an important naval base in the Pacific war, and in the American attempts to ‘roll back’ the tide of Japanese expan¬ sion. The colony was the base for Admiral Fletcher and Task Force 17, which recaptured the Solomon Islands, and Admiral Halsey used it as a base for the command of all operations in the Southwest Pacific. When defenders of the French presence in the Pacific today emphasise New Caledonia’s strategic importance for the western powers, their view is supported by the colony’s experience in the Battle for the Coral Sea. The enormous American presence in New Caledonia during these years had substantial social consequences. It created many new oppor¬ tunities for making money, and Kanaks could compare the status of negroes alongside whites in the American army very favourably with their own inferiority at home. A younger generation of Melanesians were no longer prepared to accept this inferiority, and the old tribal structure could no longer be relied upon to contain youthful extremists. The Americans also introduced an enormous quantity of consumer and other goods, which impressed the Melanesians. In Poindimie, Nemia Nemia recalled that Kanaks would wait on the shore for boxes of goods and tinned food to drift in from wrecked ships. High Chief Mandaoue had favourable memories of the war years: ‘The Americans,’ he told Myriam Dornoy, ‘had many possessions, paid us well, and gave us clothing, while treating us equally.’ Remarks like this carry an im¬ plicit criticism of the French, and they also suggest how the American presence in the Pacific could give rise to new cargo cults. Near Houailou, other Melanesians recalled that the Americans were ‘good to us, gave us many things and treated us better than the French did’. Kanak soldiers who returned to their homeland soon protested against the situation which confronted them. A small group from Ouegoa wrote to the Colonial Ministry, in September 1946, that they had found their plantations abandoned, since all available labour had been requisitioned by the whites during wartime. Many tribes, they complained, had re¬ ceived no medical treatment for six years. A new language and a new spirit was now heard in their demands for equal pay and status: ‘We would like,’ their petition ran, ‘to be paid according to our work, and not according to the colour of our skin....We demand that our chiefs should be elected by us, so that they can be our representatives and our guides, and not instruments of oppression in the hands of the adminis¬ tration. . . .We have built all the roads in New Caledonia, and none of them come anywhere near our tribes, which explains the absence of doctors.’ The vocabulary of western democracy was now enlisted in the cause of Kanak emancipation. A list of native demands (Cahier des revendications indigenes), drawn up in 1946 under the auspices of Chief Naisseline on Mare, went further in articulating new Kanak aspirations. Since the Kanaks had shed their blood under the French flag in the Second World War, they demanded the rights of French citizens. They appealed for the end of labour

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CHAPTER 9

requisitioning, and the abolition of the Native Affairs Bureau which administered it. The Kanak ex-combatants claimed equal pension rights with those of white soldiers, and they wanted higher pay for native teachers and nurses. The influence of the war is clear in these cases; the equality of sacrifice in battle in a common cause was not matched by equal conditions in peacetime. Soon afterwards, a New Caledonian Communist Party was formed on Mare, and it issued a further list of demands in June 1946, which now included demands for various liberal freedoms, like free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom to petition, and equal voting rights. It was inequitable, argued the Caledonian communists, that illiteracy should be used as an excuse to disqualify Kanaks from voting, and from legitimate representation on the local Conseil General (General Council). After all, many Corsicans and Bretons had civil and political rights, without necessarily being able to read and write French. Proposals were now advanced for the abolition of the capitation tax, for the establishment of training schools for native teachers and doctors, who would be entitled to salaries equal to those of whites. Article 6 demanded a higher salary for the high chiefs, and the influence of Chief Naisseline may perhaps be detected in this request. It may also be evident in the protestations of loyalty to France which accompanied this list of grievances. The Caledonian Communist Party rejected the idea of autonomy or independence. It was faithful to the French Republic— ‘Vive la France!’, concluded Article 3. Jean Guiart hinted that there was something fraudulent about the European promoters of this short-lived Communist Party. It is true that the movement had European leaders, like the mysterious Madame Tunica y Casas, whose subsequent career remains unknown. For Guiart, the Communist Party of New Caledonia took on the characteristics of a cargo cult. Promises of liberty went hand in hand with promises of material wealth; in this case, paradise was to be achieved through the agency of the French Communist Party itself. This kind of political movement, partly western and partly Melanesian in character, was a pale reflection of the similar John Frum movement, which emerged in the 1940s on Tanna Island in the New Hebrides. The agents of John Frum, ‘King of America’, urged their followers to replace the white man’s currency. Some even dumped their cash into the sea, believing that if money were abolished, the white traders would have no alternative but to leave. John Frum would then be free to provide the native inhabitants with all the material riches of the expelled whites. A new era would then be inaugurated. Unfortunately for the credibility of the cult, two men both claimed to be John Frum. One of them was interned in the New Caledonian lunatic asylum, having enlisted an armed guard, intending to build an airstrip to receive the American planes which were confidently expected to arrive, carrying bounty from the West. Such movements, for Jean Guiart, were among the forerunners

of Melanesian nationalism. Perhaps Guiart underestimated the serious intentions of European communists. The French Communist Party in Paris took up Kanak grievances, and its colonial spokesman Citerne asked several awkward questions in the Chamber of Deputies during 1946. He echoed the demands of the agitators on Mare, and asked why the members of the Pacific Battalion were treated differently, according to their race. Whites had received a demobilisation bonus of 17 000 francs, while Kanaks were only given 6000 francs each. The policy of the New Caledonian Communist Party was to dissemi¬ nate propaganda amongst Indo-Chinese workers, nostalgic for home, and to direct their agitation towards Melanesian chiefs, like Naisseline. On Mare, one French official reported, communism was well received, and Chief Naisseline had to be sanctioned for his open espousal of the cause. Chiefs were French public servants, and as such they were sup¬ posed to show political neutrality in public. This pressure, communist and non-communist, was rewarded. In 1946, the Kanaks were officially granted French citizenship, and the oppres¬ sive system of labour requisitioning was at last abolished. The Frenchspeaking territories, or ‘French Commonwealth’, were given their own political debating forum, the Assemblee de 1’Union Frangaise. One half of the members were nominated by French deputies and senators, and the other half were to represent the overseas territories. After the war, there¬ fore, New Caledonia was represented by one deputy, and one senator sitting in Paris, and by one councillor in the Assemble*e de 1’Union Frangaise. The colony itself was still to be administered by a governor, however, together with the Conseil General. Since Melanesians were now permitted to vote for this General Council, its complexion was about to undergo a revolutionary transformation. After 1946, then, a genuine political life began in New Caledonia. It was a political life which involved the Melanesian population, even if the earliest political parties were European-organised. The emergence of a Communist Party in the Foyalty Islands had been a frightening developi ment for the colonists. To allow the communists to monopolise the ex¬ pression of native demands appeared politically dangerous. New parties were therefore formed to counter the communist threat, and they were successful in doing so. The first two political parties had a religious basis, and a denominational framework. The Caledonian Native Union for Freedom in Order (UICAFO) was a Catholic movement; the Associi ation of Natives of French Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands (AICLF) was its Protestant equivalent. As their titles suggest, both were Europeanled, but both supported Melanesian electoral representation. The denominational parties thus initiated Melanesian voters into European-style party politics. By 1953, Kanak aspirations were channel¬ led into a new, and increasingly influential party, the Caledonian Union j (Union Caledonienne). This was not yet an exclusively native organisation,

1 04

CHAM KR

‘l

for it mobilised both Kanaks and small white colonists against largescale grazing and nickel interests. It stood for the maintenance of native reserves, equality of pay, as well as improved housing, education and medical facilities for Melanesians. In 1953 it became the majority party on the General Council, and it succeeded in getting nine native candi¬ dates elected onto the local administration. Some were later to find the Caledonian Union too conservative and restrictive. It was a multi-racial party, but a party dominated by Europeans. Nevertheless, for all its subsequent failures, its success in gaining Melanesian political rep¬ resentation must be regarded as a milestone in the history of Kanak emancipation. In power, the Caledonian Union introduced a progressive land tax, and built the dam at Yate. It indexed taxes on world nickel prices. It incorporated the Protestant and Catholic political parties, and it had trade union support. "Phis coalition of Melanesians, the missions, unionised workers and small white farmers temporarily held at bay the powerful economic interests which were accustomed to dominating public life in New Caledonia. This success was closely associated with the Caledonian Union’s cel¬ ebrated leader, Maurice Eenormand. Eenormand was a chemist from Macon in Burgundy, who had come to New Caledonia during his mili¬ tary service in 1934. He married a Melanesian from the Loyalty Islands, and stayed. He supported the Gaullist resistance to Vichy during the war, but he styled himself a ‘left-wing Gaullist’. With the support of Kanaks and white metal-workers, he presided over three years of successful local government by the Caledonian Union, in the years of prosperity and postwar reconstruction. He was elected New Caledonia’s deputy in 1951, and reelected in 1956, 1959 and 1962. Under his leader¬ ship, the Caledonian Union won a resounding electoral victory in 1953. Lenormand thus presided over the introduction of the Kanaks to real political participation, and he also spearheaded the opposition of his motley political coalition to the power of big business. One electoral manifesto of the Caledonian Union railed against the ‘conservative and colonialist mafia’, and the supremacy of the ‘upper bourgeois racists’. These targets were by no means imaginary. In 1946, an elite of eight percent of all farmers owned almost 80 percent of the New Caledonian land surface. Lenormand, however, stopped short of demands for com¬ plete independence, and he was loyal to De Gaulle. Yet, as he told the general in 1956, ‘We will not confuse the interests of France with the powerful interest groups who hide in the folds of the French flag’. In the twenty years after 1953, the Caledonian Union could boast substantial improvements in the material situation of the Kanaks, in the fields of public housing, equal pay, family allowances, and access to education. In 1956, for instance, the lycee (secondary school) was opened to Melanesians. It was inevitable, however, that the Societe Le Nickel and its supporters should rally against the explicit opposition of Lenormand

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and the Caledonian Union. As we shall later see, this is exactly what occurred in the Gaullist era (1958 — 68). It was inevitable, too, that the Caledonian Union should be outdistanced by Melanesian demands lor self-determination. Its domination of local politics was therefore seminal, in the sense that many Kanak militants began their political careers under its auspices, but that domination was also temporary. The social promotion achieved by the Kanaks in the early 1950s was gained in a period of prosperity and economic re-organisation. The foundations were laid by the currency reform of 1945, which established the French Pacific Franc, issued by the Banque d’Indochine, and valued at 5.50 metropolitan French francs. This remains the common currency of French overseas territories in the Pacific. The nickel boom of the 1950s also enabled New Caledonia to achieve a surplus trade balance for several years. Substantial aid for investment in economic modernisation was provided by France through FIDES (Investment Fund for the Social and Economic Development of Overseas Territories). In 1953, New Caledonia received 622 million French francs in investment grants from this source. France also relieved the local budget of police and defence costs. Plans were laid to develop a tourist industry, focussing on the Isle of Pines. There were only 450 tourists in New Caledonia in 1954; by 1969, 16000 tourists were visiting the island annually. At the same time, the nature of the New Caledonian labour force was changing. The Asian component of the workforce declined after the war. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, all Japanese in New Caledonia were expelled. Vietnamese and Javanese workers, who usually arrived on five-year renewable contracts, were gradually repatriated. In 1941, they had formed 85 percent of the labour force in the mines, but by 1953, they only constituted 30 percent. This left the way open at last for the recruitment of Kanak labour by the mining and metallurgical industries, which had consistently avoided this outcome. As more Kanaks were recruited by the Societe Le Nickel, their demands for equality of pay and working conditions took on greater significance. Although the influx of Kanaks into the ranks of nickel employees never matched the enormous rise in the proportion of European em¬ ployees, their numbers rose substantially. In 1941, the Kanaks rep¬ resented only 2.4 percent of the industrial labour force, but by 1952, they accounted for 20 percent. More Kanaks were thus being integrated into the wage-earning proletariat, but full integration was slow to achieve. Many Kanak employees still retained links with their tribal reserves, and had tribal land waiting for their return. They did not immediately sever their associations with traditional agriculture. Their situation resembled that of thousands of European labourers in the early stages of industrial¬ isation: they were half-peasant, half-worker. At any time, an industrial slump could send them back to the tribal reserves. Economic expansion, and the gradual introduction of Melanesians into the labour elite were* the background to the dcmocratisation of New

1 06

CHAPTER 9

Caledonian politics. Democratisation was not accomplished without a struggle. In 1951, steps were taken to extend the Melanesian franchise, to create an electorate of about 8 700 Kanaks, alongside 10900 voters of European origin. In addition, Lenormand insisted that these two elec¬ torates should not be segregated. There should be one single electoral college, rather than a double college. He was supported in this by the Assembly of the French Union, but opposed by the wealthiest white colonists. Senator Lafleur, the notables of Noumea, and Governor Angamarre all denounced the idea of single college, as communistinspired. Melanesian leaders, however, were delighted. High Chief Vincent Bouquet spoke for all chiefs when he said: ‘I am quite sure that the Fourth Republic, daughter of the great French Revolution, will not go back on its word, and will recognise as her own descendants, her black children of New Caledonia, some of whom have paid the heavy sacrifice of their lives on the field of battle, in order that France should live.’ The government of the much-maligned Fourth Republic, unlike that of the Gaullist Fifth, was prepared to respond to this invocation of its democratic and revolutionary ancestry. Fenormand and the Caledonian Union had their way, and in 1953, the party won an overwhelming majority in the General Council, which now contained nine Kanak members. In the following year, Kanaks were also allowed to vote for municipal councils for the first time. The distribution of seats was still heavily weighted in favour of the white population. The southern constituency, composed principally of Noumea itself, returned no less than nine councillors, and in 1953 they were all whites. The west coast, where European and Melanesian popu¬ lations were more evenly balanced, returned seven representatives. In 1953, five of them were white colonists, but all seven backed the Caledonian Union. The east coast constituency presented a problem for white colonists, for here the Melanesians were in a huge majority. The east coast electorate was therefore divided. One section returned two white representatives, while the so-called ‘eastern districts’ returned four Kanaks. This partition was a compromise with colonialists which pre¬ vented the white electorate from being completely swamped by Kanak voters in the region. The Foyalty Islands, with an overwhelmingly Kanak electorate, had only three representatives out of the total of twenty-five, although they included about one-fifth of New Caledonia’s total electorate. Electoral distribution and the drawing of the constitu¬ ency boundaries therefore guaranteed the return of a white majority. In the following years, this electoral system underwent important amendments, and the electorate was widened further. The Autonomy Statute (Loi-cadre) of 1956 introduced universal suffrage for all New Caledonians over twenty-one. The establishment of proportional rep¬ resentation made sure both white and Kanak communities would be represented in what was now called the Territorial Assembly. Thus the segregation of the east coast constituencies became redundant. The

THE MELANESIAN REVIVAL, 1945-58

107

Territorial Assembly was enlarged to include thirty members in all. The Loyalty Islands obtained two extra representatives, and the southern, eastern and western constituencies one more each. The assembly was also to have a Government Council, or executive cabinet, of eight mem¬ bers, who each took the title of minister. The Autonomy Statute replaced the previous grouping of French territories in the assembly of the French Union, and it was introduced at a time when several black African colonies were demanding greater independence. The real leader of the autonomists was Leopold Senghor of Senegal, who was generally supported by Maurice Lenormand. Lenormand favoured autonomy, but not complete independence from France. The law broadened the powers of local territories, and gave them greater control over their own economic development. New Caledonia’s Territorial Assembly, for instance, became responsible for postal and telegraphic communications, and for primary, secondary and technical education. However, the French state retained overall responsibility for finance, defence, diplomacy, tariff policy and higher education. In 1957, then, Lenormand’s Caledonian Union was in control of local government, but its scope for action was considerably enlarged by the new statute. Lenormand was not merely a local councillor, but minister of the interior, and executive vice-president (the governor, now the high commissioner, presided). The education portfolio was entrusted to Doui Matay Ouetta, a nurse, president of the Protestant Association and member of the Caledonian Union. Roch Pidjot, an east coast Melanesian farmer with a long political career ahead of him, was minister for the rural economy. Lenormand appointed his own brother-in-law as minister for posts, and Henin, a technical meteorological assistant, became minister for mines. These developments disturbed the conservative colonists and oligarchic interests whom Lenormand had challenged. They had permitted the extension of political rights to the Kanak population, and they were perhaps not altogether hostile to the principle of greater colonial auton¬ omy. But they certainly opposed it in practice, if it meant greater auth¬ ority for Lenormand and the Caledonian Union. As we shall see, the conservatives reacted by attempting to undermine Lenormand and the Autonomy Statute itself. The statute passed its second reading in the National Assembly in Paris in February 1957, in the midst of the Algerian crisis. Events in Algeria were soon to bring General de Gaulle to power, end the regime of the Fourth French Republic, and create a political climate which became increasingly unfavourable to Lenormand and his sympathisers.

Main sources for chapter 9: Some archival sources are available for the period up to about 1955. I have used the documents in Archives Nationales, Section Outre-mer, Affaires politiques 389, an invaluable source for Kanak political demands after 1945. Affaires politiques 261 provides useful details on the electoral regime up to 1957. On the Union Cale'donienne, see Lenormand’s own article on ‘L'Evolution politique des autochtones de la Nouvelle-Caledonie’, in the New Caledonian centenary number (1953) of the Journal de la Societe des Oceanisles. The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris also contains one political manifesto from 1972, entitled Pourquoi Oui a VUnion Cale'donienne, Oui a VAutonomies The debates on the Loi-cadre can be followed in Le Monde, during January 1957.

CHAPTER 10

THE SOCIETE LE NICKEL

The chief importance of New Caledonia for the rest of the world can be summarised in one word: nickel. The colony’s role as the third major nickel producer in the world makes it a vital resource for the steel and armaments industries of the industrialised western countries. The nickel industry has exerted an enormous influence over the social and political life of New Caledonia itself, not to mention its obviously crucial financial role. Through nickel production, New Caledonia was integrated into the world capitalist economy, but reliance on the commercial production of a single world commodity has carried a high risk for the stability of New Caledonian society. The dangers of mono-production, which include economic overspecialisation, and extreme vulnerability to world price fluctuations, have been only too apparent in the crisis of the mid-1980s. Within the New Caledonian nickel industry, one company stands supreme: the Societe Le Nickel (SLN). The SLN monopolises all pro¬ cessing, or fusion of nickel, at its Doniambo plant, and in 1965, the company produced more than 70 percent of all nickel extracted in New Caledonia. Its social and economic impact is enormous. The SLN is the island’s largest single employer, with a workforce fluctuating between 2000 and 3 000. It therefore regularly injects considerable sums into the local economy in the form of salaries and wages distributed. Its labour policies are potentially vital for the social promotion of the Melanesian community. The SLN is also a great consumer of energy and payer of taxes. In 1970, the SLN used 29 million litres of fuel oil—over half the total consumption of New Caledonia. Its nickel exports, principally exports of its own processed or ‘fused’ nickel, determine the colony’s trade balance. In 1953, mining products as a whole represented 88 percent of New Caledonian exports in terms of value, and 94 percent of exports in terms of volume. The export duty collected by the colonial government on fused nickel constitutes a major source of government revenue. When fused nickel exports rose to over 43 million tonnes in 1970 the govern¬ ment’s revenue from the export duty (droits de sortie) increased by over a 109

third in absolute terms. In recent years, stagnant world prices have reduced the contribution of nickel exports to New Caledonia’s income, but in 1969, the colonial government still drew 20 percent of its revenue from these exports. Thus when High Commissioner Rene Hoffherr urged the executive council of New Caledonia to get its priorities right in October 1954, he reminded its members of a few simple statistical truths: • the mining industry covered 40 percent of the island’s land surface; • mining was responsible for 88 percent of New Caledonia’s exports; • mining was responsible for the employment and livelihood of 3 000 workers; • mining paid out 420 million French Pacific francs per year in wages; • the SLN alone was responsible for 35 percent of New Caledonia’s income; • New Caledonia supplied 10 percent of the world’s nickel needs. This was a powerful exposition of the importance of the mining industry in New Caledonia. At the same time, it suggested the colony’s dangerous dependence on the decisions of a single company. Hoffherr added rather weakly, almost as an afterthought, that there was a need for improved agricultural production in order to balance the economy. Such reminders were regularly offered, and just as regularly ignored, in the prosperous years of the 1950s and 1960s. Having established the importance of the nickel industry to New Caledonia, and the importance of one company, the SLN, within that industry, we should also outline the importance of New Caledonian pro¬ duction in worldwide consumption. New Caledonia is the third world producer of nickel, a long way behind Canada and the Soviet Union. In 1965, for instance, Canada produced about 60 percent of the world’s output, and New Caledonia supplied about 11 percent. Nickel is used widely in the manufacture of steel products and electronic goods. It has a market, therefore, in household equipment and consumer goods, and in the manufacture of cars. It is an important component of armaments and munitions manufacture. In the early days of nickel production, almost all New Caledonia’s output went to France. Now, its customers are different. Between 1935 and 1941, for instance, raw nickel was exported to Germany and Japan for their war effort, and Japan remained an important customer for New Caledonian raw nickel in the postwar period. New Caledonia continues to export to Europe, but France itself is no longer as dependent on New Caledonian nickel as it once was. In 1970, the SLN provided 70 percent of France’s nickel needs; in 1980 only 33 percent. Thus the economic link which ties New Caledonia to France has been considerably weakened in the last decade, perhaps hastening the coming of independence. On the other hand, the SLN is owned by a multinational group of

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SOURCE: Annuaire Stalistique 1977 p 115 The nickel boom profited from the demands of the Vietnam War. Its collapse at the end of the 1960s (which has not been reversed) had disastrous effects on the colonial economy.

companies, based in France. Ownership is currently shared between three large combines: IMETAL, Elf-Aquitaine and ERAP. Elf-Acquitaine is a petroleum company, and in the past ERAP was involved in mineral extraction in North Africa. IMETAL controls various enterprises in the steel and metallurgical industries. In 1975, it took over the Copperweld Corporation, an American producer of specialised steel products, like small tubes. It had an American workforce of 4600 in 1981, and other interests in Brazil. The SLN is therefore controlled by a mixture of impersonal multinational corporations, generally involved in steel manu¬ facture and mineral extraction, and with investments in several con¬ tinents. In these distant and amorphous hands—as much as in the hands of the government in Paris—lies the future of New Caledonian society. So much depends on the rise and fall of the world price for nickel, that it is worth considering how its value has fluctuated since the war, and what factors have determined those fluctuations. Between 1952 and 1957, there was a boom in nickel prices. The nickel industry in New Caledonia was boosted by modernisation, financed by investment funds from FIDES, and by the resumption ofjapanese purchases. Nevertheless, the industry still found it difficult to compete with Canadian nickel, which was considerably cheaper for most of this period. In 1954 a new investment effort was launched, in the form of a four-year development plan for French overseas departments and territories. One of the main problems was the search for cheaper and more efficient sources of energy. After the war, the SLN relied on expensive coal, from Australia, or from the USA. In 1949, for instance, production at Doniambo had been halted by a coal strike in New South Wales. Not until the hydroelectric dam at Yate was operational in the mid-1950s, was the energy problem solved. In 1955, the SLN announced an excel¬ lent profit of over 300 million francs, and issued a dividend of 550 francs per share. This brilliant result had been achieved by considerable investment of funds. Although the SLN paid for its own electric fusion plant, other essential modernisation was financed either by FIDES, the local govern¬ ment, or the French government (supported by Marshall Aid). The SLN’s profits, therefore, were to some extent dependent on political decisions to invest, taken in Noumea, Paris or elsewhere in the west. It was therefore important for the SLN to ensure a favourable political climate. This investment made the New Caledonian nickel industry better prepared to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the for¬ mation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1954. Neverthe¬ less, there was a short recession in 1957-60, when Japanese demand declined. I he effect of such sudden rises and falls could prove disastrous, and is illustrated by the fate of the New Caledonian chrome industry in these years. New Caledonia had been the sixth world producer of

1

THE SOCIETY LA NICKEL

1 1 3

chrome, but, in the 1960s, the chrome industry in the north of the island collapsed. In 1962, as a result of a slump in the world price of chrome, the Tiebaghi mine ceased activity, and in 1964 it was definitively closed. In 1960, after a brief hiatus, the nickel boom resumed, and the industry enjoyed a decade of profitable exports, both of raw and of processed nickel. Export records were broken by the SLN in 1961, and again in 1965. Boosted by the demands of the Vietnam War, the company planned new expansion at Doniambo. The Japanese economy entered a new phase of growth, while demand from France itself remained steady. The world price for nickel rose, and went on rising, at least until 1971. In the 1970s, however, the nickel boom collapsed. The world petrol crisis caused a worldwide recession, and the loss of the Japanese market added to the problems of the SLN in New Caledonia. In 1977 — 78, exports of fused nickel fell by 22 percent, and in the early 1980s the slump continued. Reliance on one company, specialising in one world commodity, had put the economic and social stability in the hands of forces lying quite beyond the control of New Caledonians. The declining size of the SLN’s labour force is an eloquent indicator of the impact of falling world nickel prices on New Caledonian society. The workforce expanded annually in the boom decade of the 1960s, reaching a peak in 1970. In that year, the SLN employed 1 200 in its mines, and almost 3 500 at the Doniambo electric fusion plants. In 1971, new re¬ cruitment stopped, but lay-offs affected other miners much more than the SLN itself. In the 1970s, the labour force shrank further, falling to only 2 274 at Doniambo in 1981. There were several reasons for this, one of them being the introduction of more mechanised equipment. For instance, the installation of a conveyor belt system enabled the SLN to dispense with a certain number of truck drivers and transport workers. The chief reason, however, was the west’s economic crisis, and falling sales, which brought a halt to labour recruitment, and more frequent early retirement. In 1981, Doniambo was working at only half-capacity. What did this mean for the Kanaks’ prospects? In order to answer this question, the statistics of a shrinking workforce will not suffice. The racial composition of the workforce must also be analysed. The bulk of the labour employed both in mining and metallurgical processing was European in origin. Europeans always made up at least half of the work¬ force at the Doniambo plant, for instance. The racial composition of the labour force, however, differed widely in the mines from the processing plants themselves. In the mines themselves, Europeans and Melanesians were employed in roughly equal numbers. In 1970, for example, the workforce in the nickel mines controlled by the SLN was made up as follows: Europeans Melanesians Wallisiens Others

40 36 11.5 12.5

percent percent percent percent

1 1 4

CHAPTER 10

In other mines, not controlled by the SLN, Melanesian miners were usually in the majority. At Doniambo, where perhaps more skill and supervision is demanded, the proportion of Melanesian workers was very small indeed. It has in fact diminished as a result of the slump. The composition of the work¬ force at Doniambo at the height of the boom, in 1970, can be compared with more recent statistics from 1980. It was approximately as follows: In 1970: Europeans Melanesians Wallisiens Others

55 12.5 15 17.5

percent percent percent percent

In 1980: Europeans Melanesians Wallisiens Others

49 10.5 16 24.5

percent percent percent percent

One conclusion from this brief survey must be that the rewards of the nickel boom were not equally distributed. Although the Melanesian i labour force expanded during the boom in the mining industry itself, new opportunities for Kanaks in the metallurgical plants were few, and at Doniambo, the Kanaks employed remained only a tiny minority. The review of the Doniambo workforce given above revealed that, at a time of slump or stagnation, the only expanding ethnic group was that composed of non-European immigrant labour. The rise of imported labour, from Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna Islands and elsewhere has parallels in the past. First convict labour, and then Asian workers were, as we have seen, substituted for the indigenous workforce. Polynesians and Wallis islanders were drawn by the economic boom, and the re¬ latively high levels of family allowances paid in New Caledonia. Tahitians were especially successful, as foremen, skilled workers and supervisors in the construction and nickel industries. Many of them are wholly or partly of Chinese descent. They are rather more sympathetic to the idea of independence than the Wallisiens, who are very much afraid of re¬ patriation. For them, there is so little, in terms of economic prospects, to go back to. In the 1980s, the presence of large numbers of Polynesian and Wallis islanders has a considerable political impact. Since most of this group has so far thrown its electoral weight behind its French colonial em¬ ployers, it has become extremely difficult to form an electoral majority in favour of Kanak independence. Thus the labour recruitment policies of the SLN have helped to prolong New Caledonia’s colonial status, and have denied promotional opportunities and also self-government to the indigenous Melanesian population. loday, therefore, we can no longer discuss colonialism in New Caledonia solely in terms of the relationship between the French and the Kanaks. Other, more recent migrants have a stake in the territory’s future, and will have an important influence upon it. One must not ignore, either, the large number of inhabitants of mixed race, the metis. I here are perhaps 13 000 descendants of unions between European men

Years

SOURCE: Annuaire Statistique 1977 p 15 and INSEE, 1983

and Melanesian women in New Caledonia, and many more than that are children of white and Polynesian or Vietnamese parents. But it needs only a simple recognition of the child by a white father to classify him or her as having European status. There are, in fact, limits to the degree of racial intermingling which has occurred. Mixed marriages appear to be much more common between whites and Polynesians or Asians than between whites and Kanaks. Bernard Brou boasts of a truly pluri-ethnic society in New Caledonia, but he himself provides the following figures from 1980: 1 European man in 4 married a spouse of another race; 1 Melanesian man in 32 married a spouse of another race. New Caledonian society is pluri-ethnic, it seems, only in the eyes of white males of European origin. By 1969, the presence of over 13 000 Tahitians, Wallis islanders, New Hebrideans and a few Indonesians, had made the Kanaks a minority ethnic group in New Caledonia. In 1976, there were almost 25 000 of these ‘other ethnic groups’, non-Melanesian and non-European, in New Caledonia, comprising 18.7 percent of the total population. In a sense, then, the demographic recovery of the Kanak population has been negated by this postwar immigration. Melanesians attacked it as a new form of'black colonisation’ of New Caledonia. Just as the Kanaks began to reassert themselves politically in the age of Maurice Lenormand, they were outnumbered. Nickel-mining for the SLN could be dangerous. Transport workers were particularly vulnerable to industrial accidents. In 1970, there was one death, and eight cases of incapacity lasting over a month, due to an accident at work. In 1971, there were no less than four deaths at the work face, and twenty-two incapacities through injury. Such accidents were usually caused by trucks and loaders slipping into the open quarries. Further deaths were recorded in 1979 and 1980. Melanesian workers provided much of the unskilled labour in the mining industry. This meant that their jobs were at risk in a time of mechanisation or retrenchment. Most of the management, the foremen and supervisors were Europeans, and this group was better protected against cuts, by virtue of its high status. Lay-offs after 1971 hit the leastspecialised workers hardest, and that meant the Melanesian workers tended to suffer. Water pollution was another consequence of nickel-mining which par¬ ticularly affected the Melanesian peasantry. In order to reduce water pollution, certain zones of the mainland were declared protected in 1972 and 1975. Outright bans on mining, however, were only imposed in the south of the island, and near Noumea, where unsightly mining waste might have a detrimental effect on the tourist industry. In the centre and the north of the island, where the Kanaks were very sensitive to river pollution, certain areas were merely classified as suitable for ‘regulated

mining activity’. Geologists commented in the mining report of 1981 that ‘it is quite illusory to imagine that one can prevent the discoloration of the water supply after heavy downpours of rain’. Some Kanaks did not agree. In 1978, demonstrations against water pollution from nickel mines were held at N’Goye, on the east coast, and gendarmes were shot at. In January 1983, a more serious incident occurred. Two gendarmes were killed, and four others received gunshot wounds, in an ambush at Sarramea. Water pollution was one of the grievances behind this attack. On 13 January 1983, the Kanak Socialist Liberation Party held a demonstration in Noumea against the colonial power and ‘its system of development which is polluting the rivers’. Opposition to the nickel industry has therefore played a part in the escalating violence of recent years. Much of the prosperity of the nickel boom thus passed by the Melanesian population. Wages rose, but only a small proportion of Kanaks belonged to the wage-earning labour force. The bulk of them were peasants, and although prosperity drew some like a magnet towards Noumea, the bulk of them received small benefit from the years of plenty. In 1984, about 8 000 Kanaks were wage-earners, of whom 20 percent were employed as domestics; 12 000 Kanaks were unemployed. This very gradual urban¬ isation of the Kanak population is reflected in the emergence of the USTKE (Union of Kanak and Exploited Workers), whose membership sympathetic to the independence movement, is to be found chiefly among hospital, post office and airport employees. Two-thirds of the Kanak population is supported by agriculture, and the fact that many major foodstuffs still have to be imported suggests how neglected New Caledonian agriculture has been, at a time of heavy investment in industrial modernisation. In 1970, for instance, 60 percent of New Caledonia’s foodstuffs were imported. At this time, too, exports of coffee and copra, both produced essentially by Melanesians, tumbled as a result of adverse climatic conditions. These features are symptoms of a severely overbalanced economy. The main sectors of economic activity remain the export of nickel, and the resale of imported goods. On the margins, thousands of Melanesians depend on predominantly non-commercial agriculture. They have been the victims of overspecial¬ isation and economic disequilibrium. The political consequences of the reign of nickel and the current slump remain to be outlined. The intervention of the SEN in local politics, however, is a matter for speculation rather than concrete proof. One or two facts are clear. The Lafleur family provides a link between nickel mining and right-wing Gaullist politics. In the 1950s, Henri Lafleur was the third most substantial miner in the colony, after the SLN and Pentecost. He represented New Caledonia in the Senate. His son, Jacques Lafleur, owned mines at Ouaco, he used the Doniambo processing facility, and was subcontractor to the SLN. He is currently the colony’s Gaullist deputy in Paris. This suggests a close connection between the

EVOLUTION OF TOURISM

20

19

18

17 16

15

14

13 12

11

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

1972

1973

1974

Only after the collapse of the nickel boom did touris attractive target for investment SOURCES: Annuaire statistique, 1978 and Comptes e'conomiques

New Caledonian nickel interests, and a right-wing party opposed to independence, and even hostile to the limited degree of autonomy granted by the Autonomy Statute in 1956. Maurice Lenormand’s Caledonian Union certainly felt that the machi¬ nations of the SLN lay behind attempts to sabotage the Autonomy Statute, and to unseat Lenormand himself. In 1958, a movement to force Lenormand’s resignation, supported by ex-Senator Lafleur, coincided with a recession in nickel production and the closure of a few mines. It coincided, too, with the euphoria of Charles de Gaulle’s arrival in power in Paris. Lenormand came to Paris to visit de Gaulle, but the general refused to give him an audience. Lenormand, however, stood firm, and his electoral support remained intact. In November 1958, new elections were called, but the Caledonian Union was again returned to power with eighteen out of thirty seats in the Territorial Assembly. Conservative forces could not overthrow Lenormand in the ballot box; other means had to be found. In 1961 Lenormand refused the SLN an investment grant, and he turned down SLN requests for tax relief on exports. From then on, his fortunes foundered. In March 1962, a bomb exploded in the premises of the Territorial Assembly. A month later, two culprits were arrested, both were discovered to be members of the Caledonian Union, and they claimed that Lenormand himself was as¬ sociated with the bombing attempt against his own government’s head¬ quarters. One of these men was Ciavaldini, a Vietnam War veteran, who had only joined the Caledonian Union three months previously. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for his part in the unsavoury affair. The other Gallewcki, was an ex-member of the Jewish terrorist organisation, the Irgun. Both seem typical of the extreme rightist thugs and criminal elements (the barbouzes), who hovered on the margins of Gaullist politics, without ever being completely disowned. It was never explained why Maurice Lenormand should have con¬ doned their action, or have been an accomplice in it. Nevertheless, Lenormand was condemned to one year’s suspended sentence by the Tribunal Correctionnel in Noumea, even though Ciavaldini recanted his original evidence and then tried to commit suicide. Lenormand was a parliamentary deputy, but since the French National Assembly was dissolved at the moment of the crime, pending new elections, he was unable to claim his parliamentary immunity. In 1964, his appeal was dismissed, he was disqualified as deputy, and accused of promoting independence ‘against European interests’. For European interests, Lenormand read: the SLN. The truth about these murky happenings may never emerge, but the conviction of Lenormand was the excuse for a concerted attempt to dismantle the Autonomy Statute, and to take power away from the Caledonian Union. In 1963, the Jacquinot Law, defended by Jacques Lafleur in Paris, reduced the executive council to an advisory role, and stipulated that it should be elected by proportional representation, not

1 20

CHAPTER 10

by majority vote. This would have effectively ended the Caledonian Union’s monopoly of portfolios. In fact, the law abolished the title of minister, as well as Lenormand’s position of vice-president of the ex¬ ecutive. The government personnel in New Caledonia, Jacquinot claimed, were incompetent and financially irresponsible. According to Lenormand, the law turned back the clock to 1946, and plunged New Caledonia back into its old, subservient colonial status. The end of autonomy, he claimed, was sponsored by the SLN. The Territorial Assembly

in

Noumea opposed

the

measure.

The

Communist Party denounced it as an instrument of the SLN, and voted against. The Socialist deputies walked out in protest. Late on a December night, at the end of the 1963 parliamentary session, the abolition of New Caledonian autonomy was rushed through parliament. The first attempts to loosen Parisian control over New Caledonia had come to an end. This was a watershed in postwar politics in the territory: it threw into question the aims of the Caledonian Union, and initiated a process of radicalisation in Melanesian political aspirations.

Main sources for chapter 10 I have followed the fortunes of nickel on the world market after the Second World War through the pages of a periodical, Marches coloniaux du

monde, which published occasional economic reports on specific industries and specific French colonies. Many details on the nickel industry and its labour force in New Caledonia are taken from the invaluable reports of the New Caledonia government’s own Service des Mines. I have consulted those reports for 1965, 1970, 1971, 1980 and 1981. See also the economic summaries on New Caledonia provided by INSEE (Institut National de la

Statistique et des Etudes economiques). Although these reports greatly clarify the employment policies of the SLN, and its economic role in the territory, its political activities are far less transparent. I have pieced together the fall of Lenormand through the pages of Le Monde, especially the editions of 20 March 1963, and 24 July

1963. Le Monde also reported the passage of the Jacquinot Law

between 12 and 16 December 1963.

CHAPTER 11

1964-1984: INTO THE KANAK CAULDRON

j

I

In June 1958, General de Gaulle came to power in Paris, and was soon to assume the extraordinary powers which put an effective end to the regime of the Fourth French Republic. His emergence from retirement forestalled a possible coup d’etat by the military in Algeria, against a political regime which had failed to find a solution to the long drawn-out colonial war. For some time, de Gaulle maintained a studied ambiguity towards the pro-colonial and military forces who believed he was their champion. ‘Je vous ai compris,’ he told the Algerian colons—‘I have understood you’. Before long, however, de Gaulle was speaking of ‘selfdetermination’, and in 1962, he finally negotiated Algerian indepen¬ dence, much to the relief and admiration of the French electorate. The extreme right still considered de Gaulle a traitor to French Algeria, and was responsible for several attempts to assassinate him. This crisis and its outcome enabled de Gaulle to pose as The Great Decoloniser, but his program of decolonisation did not extend to New Caledonia. New Caledonia does not have the same potential as did Algeria to inflame the military and paralyse the parliamentary process. Indeed, New Caledonia was very far from the centre of government attention during the Gaullist period (1958—69). We must endorse the judgement of the Australian analyst Alan Ward that ‘the depth of the political polarization in New Caledonia between Kanaks and nonKanaks is largely the result of selfish and maladroit policies by the French government in the Gaullist period’. One is tempted, however, to add . .and in the interwar period, the prewar period and the 1890s’. The move to the right which followed de Gaulle’s arrival in power worsened political conflict in New Caledonia, by encouraging the colons, and radicalising Kanak politics. Algeria cast a long shadow over French colonial politics—a shadow which stretched as far as the south Pacific. On 18 June 1958, between 500 and 1 000 colons demonstrated in Noumea, to demand the resignation of Maurice Lenormand. The timing was significant: not only had de 1 2 1

122

CHAPTER

1 1

Gaulle recently come to power in France, but 18 June was a sacred date in the Gaullist calendar. It was the anniversary of de Gaulle’s first historical broadcast, made from London in 1940, calling on the defeated French to carry on the struggle against Germany and against Vichy. The French settlers in New Caledonia, who had declared against the Vichy regime very early in the Second World War, remained ardent Gaullists. Their political sympathies have not greatly changed, judging by the French elections for the European parliament held in June 1984. In Noumea, no less than 75 percent of votes were cast for a combined Gaullist and Giscardien list headed by Simone Weil. Second place on the ballot in Noumea was taken by the extreme rightist Front National, with the exceptionally high score of 19.5 percent, led by Le Pen, recently accused of having tortured rebels in the Algerian War. The Socialist Party attracted less than 5 percent of the electorate in Noumea, and only just over 5 percent in the territory as a whole. Algerian parallels were quite explicit in the disturbances of 18 June 1958. The colons set up a Committee of Public Safety, in direct imitation of the Algiers putsch of the previous May. The European opposition to the Caledonian Union, and to the extension of the franchise to Melanesians, supported by leading graziers, the SLN and business concerns like Etablissements Ballande, were determined to force the government to act. The rebels held prisoner four members of the Territorial Assembly, they publicly molested Roch Pidjot, Melanesian minister of the rural econ¬ omy, and overturned his car. High Commissioner Grimald dissolved the local executive (conseil de gouvernement). Leopold Senghor even offered to mediate in the crisis. New elections were held, and Lenormand was again returned, but the extreme right was not silenced, as the next, successful attempt to oust Lenormand was to show in 1962. New Caledonia was not included in the dismantling of the French Empire in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, every imperial loss seemed to make the colonialists even more eager to cling on to what remained of the French Union. The loss of French Indo-China seemed to make the army more adamant about retaining Alge'rie franqaise. Then Algerian in¬ dependence made it imperative, for some, to keep France’s last re¬ maining colony of settlement: New Caledonia. As the deputy Claudius Petit put it in the National Assembly in 1971, in an unhappy phrase: ‘New Caledonia must console the Sahara.’ France’s Pacific territories have been described as the ‘confetti of Empire’. The bride and groom have long since disappeared; but souvenir-hunters are very determined to preserve some memento of the imperial occasion. The Algerian shadow over New Caledonia assumes human substance, in the form of about 2 000 pieds noirs (ex-Algerian colonists) who settled in the territory. Their presence ensures the continuity of the Algerian legacy to conservative mentalities. One of their number, Maresca, is the owner of the weekly Journal Caledonien, and he insists that the Algerian surrender must not be repeated in New Caledonia. The Erench presence,

1964-84: INTO THE KANAK CAULDRON

123

in other words, must continue. Ironically, the French presence is de¬ fended by people who have never known France. Settlers born in New Caledonia itself, in Algeria or other French overseas territories, would see little point in ‘returning’ to France if they were ever forced to leave. They would be much more likely to settle in New Zealand or Australia, where several have already made prudent investments (according to interviews carried out by Myriam Dornoy). These conservative interests are defending their own privileges at the same time as they urge the maintenance of ties with France. Their economic powers have already been suggested in the previous chapter, but these economic privileges are themselves preserved by exerting political influence, and by attempts to control opinion in the territory. The daily press is largely in their control. La France Australe, for example, was 75 percent owned by the SLN, and 25 percent by the Etablissements Ballande, whose director, Roger Laroque, was right-wing mayor of Noumea. Under the Gaullist regime, conservative interests succeeded in reversing the trend towards local autonomy initiated under the Fourth Republic after the war. The Billotte laws of 1969, for instance, transferred budgetary control back to Paris. In many ways, the administration of the territory seemed to reflect the interests of Paris, or of a powerful local oligarchy, rather than the interests of the indigenous Melanesian population, and the interests of white Noumea rather than those of the Kanak bush. While the whitecontrolled municipalities spent money on installing parking meters and swimming pools in urban centres like Noumea, more remote villages lacked even basic amenities like running water and sealed roads. The needs of tourists became a more pressing investment priority than remedying this material neglect of distant Melanesian communities. Tourism, not Kanak agriculture, was seen as the alternative source of income, when the price of nickel slumped. Gaullism comforted and reinforced conservative and colonial interests. At the same time, the attack on autonomy and the fall of Lenormand were followed by a parallel revival and radicalisation of Kanak politics. The Caledonian Union had united both Europeans and Melanesians, in a program of moderate reform and limited autonomy. With the fall of Lenormand, its possibilities seemed for the moment exhausted. It began to disintegrate under the pressure of various defections. There were defections on both sides: some European supporters now rejected auton¬ omy, and were to form the Caledonian Liberal Movement in 1971 (Mouvement Liberal Caledonien). At the same time, Melanesians began to take an independent road, a road along which they are still travelling today. The formation of various left-wing groups testified to a new desire to be rid of European political leadership. Niddoish Naisseline returned from Paris, where he had been a student in the heady days of revolution in 1968, to form the Red Scarves (Foulards Rouges) in 1969. The Groupe

124

CHAPTER

11

1878, referring to the insurrectional heritage of Chief Atai, focussed on Melanesian land rights. Other groups which broke with the Caledonian Union included the Caledonian MultiRacial Union (UMNC), established by Yann Uregei in 1970, which had a strong following in the Loyalty Islands. In the 1970s, several of New Caledonia’s Pacific neighbours attained independence: Fiji in 1970, Papua-New Guinea in 1975, the Solomon Islands in 1978. In 1975, the UMNC felt the time at last was ripe, and it became the first political party to demand outright indepen¬ dence for New Caledonia. In 1977, the party became the United Kanak Liberation Front (FULK), but Uregei had by now been outdistanced by another independence party, PALIKA. The Caledonian Union did not disappear. In the elections of 1979, it still had nine representatives in the Territorial Assembly. Its decline, however, indicated the growing weakness of the centre, in the face of rightist extremism, and Kanak demands for complete independence. Lenormand had personally held the Caledonian Union together, but the reconciliation of right and left proved beyond him. He opposed indepen¬ dence, which satisfied his white trade unionist supporters, but still attacked the French government in order to appear sufficiently radical for his Melanesian voters. In 1972, he became the unlikely ally of Niddoish Naisseline, who was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for insulting a French official. These equivocations eventually had to be resolved, and they were by Lenormand’s reluctant espousal of the goal of independence in 1977. That choice was in itself an indication of the growing power of Kanak political groups. The disintegration of the Caledonian Union had produced a very frag¬ mented political scene. The 1977 elections were fought by no less than eleven different parties. Two of them gave their clear support to inde¬ pendence: FULK and PALIKA. Two supported independence with reservations, as a long-term goal: the Caledonian Union and the UMNC. These parties elected thirteen representatives between them. PALIKA’s main strength lay in the Melanesian areas of the Loyalties and the East coast. FULK’s support was heavily concentrated in the Loyalty Islands, where it was the leading independence party. Their main opposition was the New Caledonian variant of the Gaullist party, the RPC/RPR (Rassemblement du peuple caledonienJRassemblement du peuple re'publicain), which elected twelve deputies, leaving a depleted centre which put the independentists in a minority. The geographical basis of right-wing support was virtually the exact opposite of that of the independence groups. The Gaullists’ main support lay in the centres of white population, that is, Noumea and the surrounding southern con¬ stituency. The old Caledonian Union slogan of‘Two colours, one people’ now looked anachronistic. Politics was becoming increasingly divided on both racial and geographical lines. These elections of 1977 were the first in the territory in which indepen¬ dence was an issue. It was opposed by European business interests, by

1964-84: INTO THE KANAK CAULDRON

125

the mining connection, by the pieds noirs, and by the Wallis Island immigrants, who feared repatriation if New Caledonia should become independent. It was clear who the partisans of independence were: independence was supported in 1977 by one-third of the electorate, but by 80 per cent of Melanesians. FULK had one deputy in the Territorial Assembly in 1977, and PALIKA had two. They both demanded the nationalisation of the SLN, and they promised that in an independent New Caledonia, Melanesians would be given priority of employment. This would inevitably antagonise the substantial population of recent immigrants. In addition, both FULK and PALIKA’s policies included the restoration of land to the Kanaks. Radicalisation had gone far since the early days of the Caledonian Union. It sometimes acquired a socialist and perhaps a gauchiste rhetoric. Niddoish Naisseline proclaimed in Reveil Canaque in 1970: ‘We oppose the capitalist killings, the Bible, the land thefts, alcohol and arms, the mass media owned by the bourgeoisie, which represents French im¬ perialism and white prejudices’. And yet this independentist rhetoric retained a fine sense of history and of indigenous traditions. The same author stated in the same organ in 1973: ‘Our Kanak people have lost their dynamism and they have become fatalistic, but the spirit of the legendary Atai should galvanise them to oppose the common enemy.’ The Parisian gauchiste was joined at the barricades by the ghosts of a more ancient native resistance against colonialism. PALIKA (Parti de Liberation Kanak) also invoked Kanak ancestors in a socialist struggle against colonialism. Its paper, Les Nouvelles 1878, was an obvious reference to the great insurrection of the nineteenth century, and the party program included the return of land stolen by missionaries, the government and the settlers. It also identified the SLN as a major obstacle in the struggle for cultural autonomy and real economic in¬ dependence. PALIKA’s version of independence was not one dominated, Rhodesian-style, by white interests, nor did PALIKA wish to inaugurate a Melanesian government, which would simply act as the agent or the puppet of colonial interests. PALIKA saw itself, in the words of Poigoune in 1977, in these terms: ‘We want a Cuban-style socialist party without a small Melanesian bourgeoisie. There will be no capitalist system and the nickel firm, the SLN, will not remain.’ This mixture of Kanak culture and European democratic socialism, this new combination which we have expressed emblematically in terms of the totem and the tricolour, was frankly considered in a recent inter¬ view with Le Monde by Hnalaine Uregei, nephew of the leader of FULK. In France, argued Uregei, the left wing finds the Kanaks' anticolonialist struggle embarrassing, because of their repeated references to cultural traditions and Kanak customary law. The French Communist Party, he went on, supports the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan precisely because the USSR is fighting to destroy a feudal system and Afghan customs. Hence for the left in Europe, there appears something reaction-

1 26

CHAPTER

I 1

ary in the Kanak struggle for independence and cultural autonomy. This is a line of argument, said Uregei, which we have long since transcended. Traditional Melanesian society, in the eyes of the independentists, is profoundly democratic, and not organised hierarchically as Polynesian society was. Kanak socialism can therefore build upon collectivist tribal structures (or their relics), in which wealth is shared. ‘We are trying,’ Uregei told Le Monde, ‘to modernise our thinking. The important thing for us is that independence is not going to wipe out the past and start afresh. For us to be socialists, we don’t have to kill the old man. . .’. The drive for independence was encouraged by the independence granted to other Pacific territories in the 1970s, and it was radicalised above all by the land rights issue. Some measure of land redistribution, seen in terms of the restoration of property seized illegally in the colonial past, is a demand of all independence groups, and a vital issue for the Melanesian peasantry. Because they demand a restoration of land to its original, Kanak owners, the independentists oppose land acquisitions by Wallis Islanders and other Polynesian immigrants. The land question, therefore, like the issue of Melanesian employment opportunities, tends to drive the Wallisiens into the anti-independence political camp. For the Kanaks, the land question is not merely an economic or an agricultural issue. Cultural and religious ties, as we have seen, link the Kanak to the earth which the Europeans seized for pasture, or mutilated for mineral extraction. Land is therefore a spiritual issue, and its owner¬ ship helps to define the cultural and national identity, which the Kanak independence movement asserts. The occupation of a particular area of land assures and strengthens the solidarity of the community, by re¬ uniting it with its ancestral past. For this reason, Kanaks can never regard land transfer in the same light as it is treated by European con¬ tractual law, and French land reforms fall short of expectations. During the presidency of Giscard d’Estaing (1974—81), land reforms were initiated. Plans were started to buy land from the white settlers on behalf of the French State, and begin piecemeal redistribution. Their success was vitiated by the reluctance of European owners to sell, except at exorbitant prices, and by the conservatism of the administration itself. Between 1978 and 1983, only about 35000 hectares had been redistributed. One ulterior motive of the government was to encourage the access of Kanaks to individual private property. Individual land ownership, rather than the preservation of the Melanesian reserves, was seen as necessary for better agricultural productivity. It would also promote the assimi¬ lation of the Kanaks into a western network of property relations, and, in consequence, integrate them more completely into French culture. This policy ran counter to the independentists’ desire to maintain the reserves, as bastions of Melanesian culture and autonomy in the white-dominated territory. The inadequacy of French land reform thus put greater press¬ ure on property-owning colons, who were increasingly harassed and in¬ timidated by Melanesians who wanted them to sell and leave. A more

1964-84: INTO THE KANAK CAULDRON

127

far-reaching measure of land reform is needed to satisfy Melanesian aspirations, probably including the transfer of the entire New Caledonian foreshore into Kanak hands. In 1979, at the time of the land reforms, Kanak reserves occupied only 10 percent of the surface of the GrandeTerre. In 1979, President Giscard’s new secretary' for overseas territories, Paul Dijoud, proposed a new plan for social and economic development in New Caledonia. He promised the Europeans further investment in nickel and tourism, and to the Melanesians he offered agricultural pro¬ gress, better educational opportunities, and some recognition of their historic grievances, including grievances over land ownership. There were plans to increase the number of Melanesian primary schoolteachers, who numbered only 20 percent of the total in 1980. An income tax was at last introduced for the first time, although it was levied at only 15 percent of salaries over about 2 000 French francs per month. There was a price to pay for these reforms, and the price was stricter metropolitan supervision of the territory’s affairs. Neither Dijoud, however, nor the regime he represented were pre¬ pared to make any political concessions whatsoever to the territory. No devolution of power from Paris was contemplated. Giscard’s solution for New Caledonia’s problems was, and still is to proceed towards ‘depart¬ mentalisation’. This idea simply means that New Caledonia’s status should become that of any of France’s mainland departments. Whatever financial advantages this might entail, it would mean no independent power for the white settlers, or for the Kanak independentists. ‘Depart¬ mentalisation’ entails even greater central control of New Caledonia by the bureaucratic French State. Giscard felt that if Paris was going to shoulder an ever-greater financial burden to sustain the colony in econ¬ omic hardship, then Paris should assert closer political control over it. But ‘departmentalisation’ is an answer with very little appeal either for the Caldoches or the Melanesians. Both, in their own way, favour greater autonomy from the authoritarian government in Paris. Although Dijoud had gone some way towards recognising Kanak claims on the land question, and on the question of social and edu¬ cational discrimination, his plan was rejected by the independentists. Dijoud made the futile suggestion that on the basis of the government’s offers, independence claims should be dropped for ten years. This blatant attempt to ‘buy time’ forced the independence parties to reject his plan. Tjibaou, who was then still a member of the Caledonian Union, con¬ tinued to demand independence, and denounced policies formulated in the exclusive interests of the nickel-owners. When the Dijoud Plan was officially adopted in the Territorial Assembly, the independentists, FUFK, PAFIKA, and the Caledonian Union, abstained from voting. The 1979 elections were held under a new law aimed at eliminating the excessive splintering of political parties. All parties needed to gain the support of 7.5 percent of the vote, in order to obtain representation

CHAPTER

I 28

V

BELEP

o k

MELANESIANS

50

100km

i

EUROPEANS

Over 70% of the population

■

□

from 50% to 70% from 30% to 50% under 30%

O

cs

V Over 25% of the population

POLYNESIANS

from 10% to 25% from 3% to 10% from 1 % to 3%

S 0 MARE

At the end of 1983 there were 145,368 inhabitants in New Caledonia 61,870 Melanesians (42.52%) 53,974 Europeans (37 12%) 12,174 Wallisian and Futumans 5,570 Tahitians 5,319 Indonesians 5,249 Miscellaneous origins 1,212 Vanuatuans

NOUMEA

0t

II

1964-84: INTO THE KANAK CAULDRON

I 29

in the Territorial Assembly. This forced the independence forces to combine in order to exert their full potential. They became the Indepen¬ dence Front, and won fourteen seats. The centre held seven seats, and the Gaullist RPCR fifteen seats. Once again, the independentists, with just 34.4 percent of the vote, were in the minority. It has been estimated that the votes of between 15 and 30 percent of the Melanesian electorate still eluded them. ‘Independence will in no way be granted,’ Minister Stirn had declared in 1975. The election of a socialist president in 1981, however, entirely changed the prospects for independence. The presidential election of Francois Mitterand produced a shocked and fearful reaction on the right, and initial euphoria on the left. The institutions of the Fifth Republic had not been designed by de Gaulle to allow the left access to the supreme direction of the state. They had, on the contrary, been designed to prevent precisely such a possibility. Both sides no doubt exaggerated the significance of the arrival of the left in power: Mitterand’s election helped to make the institutions of the Fifth Republic democrati¬ cally respectable. If the left did not have to overthrow the political framework bequeathed by Gaullism in order to take power, then de Gaulle’s 1958 constitution could enjoy a further lease of life. Right-wing fear and anger soon exploded in New Caledonia. In September 1981, a white independence leader, Declercq, was shot dead. In July 1982, right-wingers protesting against land reform invaded the assembly and engaged the deputies in fisticuffs. Tear gas was used to quell the riot going on outside the building. The independentists, however, drew new strength from the change of regime and the installation of a president who was soon prepared to put independence on the political agenda for the first time. When Minister Lemoine arrived on a visit in November 1983, he was boycotted by right-wing groups, and the independentists also walked out of the as¬ sembly before Lemoine was due to address it. They were thus not present to hear Lemoine propose five years of experimental self-government, followed by a referendum in 1989 to decide the island’s future. In an atmosphere of mounting violence, Lemoine had dared to outline a possi¬ bility France had hitherto refused to face: the possibility of progress towards New Caledonian independence. At a series of meetings held at Nainville-les-Roches, in France, in May 1983, Lemoine thought he had achieved a compromise agreement on the five-year experiment in autonomy. That agreement now lies in tatters. Mitterand’s independence referendum, originally proposed for 1989, was first brought forward to 1985, and has now been postponed until the end of 1986 or 1987. The imminent possibility of independence has produced political deadlock, and considerable violence. Right-wing resistance to independence also provoked the Kanak insurrection of 1984. The independentists decided to force the pace in the elections of 1984 to the Territorial Assembly. The recently formed FLNKS (Kanak

Insurrection, 1984: FLNKS militant, Elio Machoro, destroys ballot-boxes in the town hall of Canala, while municipal officials look on. This photo may have cost Machoro his life: he was shot dead two months later AAP/Fairfax

1964-84: INTO THE KANAK CAULDRON

131

Socialist Liberation Front) ordered a boycott of the election. The boycott was not followed by the moderate LKS (Kanak Socialist Liberation) party, which won six seats. Otherwise, the boycott enjoyed a spectacular success, for only about 50 percent of the electorate turned out to vote. A much larger number than anticipated had obeyed the FLNKS call to reject an autonomy which gave power to local white interests. With the elections, the rising had begun. Town halls were occupied by militants, barricades and roadblocks were set up, ballot boxes destroyed, and telephone lines cut. In Ponerihouen and We (Lifou), the local mayors were accused of destroying the votes of their own communes. The nickel town of Thio was virtually in control of the FLNKS, rep¬ resented by Elio Machoro. At Pouebo and Pondimie, the gendarmeries were occupied. On Lifou, the sub-prefect of the Loyalty Islands was held as a hostage for nine days. Jacques Lafleur, RPCR deputy for New Caledonia, and Dick Ukeiwe, elected president of the New Caledonian government, were right in telling Paris that an insurrectionary situation existed. The government immediately responded by reinforcing the army and police units in the territory. New squadrons of gendarmes arrived, bring¬ ing the total present to 900, together with 400 members of the local gendarmerie, and over 2 000 military personnel on the island. The govern¬ ment had little room for manoeuvre. The RPCR believed it had won a legitimate electoral victory, which it was not prepared to relinquish. The FLNKS demanded that the referendum on independence be brought forward, and that only the colonised inhabitants of New Caledonia, the Kanaks, should have the right to vote on decolonisation. In Paris, the new prime minister Laurent Fabius spoke in a major parliamentary debate devoted to the New Caledonian crisis in November 1984. In 1976, he reminded France, 900 European families owned more of New Caledonia between them than the whole Kanak population. Although the Melanesians represented 40 percent of the territory’s popu¬ lation, he announced, only 20 percent of their children enjoyed second¬ ary education. Out of 972 New Caledonians in Category A of the French public service (the highest rank), only six were Melanesians; out of 1840 in Category B, only ninety were Melanesians. Fabius blamed this state of affairs on the previous governments of the former President Giscard, and on their inertia. Meanwhile, as the politicians in Paris argued and postured, white settlers in the north of the territory packed their suit¬ cases, and began to retreat to the safety of Noumea. On 2 December 1984, President Mitterand sent Edgard Pisani to Noumea, as his personal delegate with exceptional negotiating powers. Pisani is one of France’s best qualified and most experienced public servants, an ex-minister of de Gaulle who had turned socialist. Although his arrival helped to defuse the situation, it failed to produce a long-term solution to the crisis. The Kanaks were prepared to release their hos¬ tages, and take down roadblocks, but Tjibaou had already inaugurated

132

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the provisional government of the new independent socialist state of Kanaky—a symbolic, but provocative act. The Kanaks insisted that they and they alone had the right to vote on the issue of the independence of New Caledonia. This was a demand which Pisani could not accept. Western democratic principles demanded that all New Caledonians should participate in the decision on the island’s future. On 16 December 1984, President Mitterand made a television broad¬ cast in which he grandly announced: ‘The territory is summoned to its emancipation.’ He was too late; the Kanaks had not been prepared to wait until 1989, when the question of their emancipation was supposed to be decided, by an electoral procedure bound to result in a majority unfavourable to independence. The FLNKS had not waited for a grand summons from the French president. In September 1984, the FLNKS had barely come into being; by December, it was negotiating progress to independence with the president’s special delegate. This was an amazing achievement for Kanak political action. In New Caledonia, the process of destabilisation continued: gendarmes mobiles arrived in Thio by helicopter, but failed to regain control of the town, which remained in the hands of the ‘provisional government’. A few days later, in the first week of December, the whites exacted a horrible vengeance. In an apparently premeditated ambush near Hienghene, nine Kanaks were shot dead. Amongst the dead were two brothers of Jean-Marie Tjibaou, president of the Kanak provisional government. This action, claimed the colons, was in reprisal for the arson of their farms in this northern district. The Kanak victims were not armed, and their wounded were finished off in cold blood under search¬ lights: this was the usual Caledonian technique of deer-hunting. In the light of this atrocity, the conciliatory attitude of Tjibaou and of most of the FLNKS is remarkable. This is not to say that there was no retaliation. The situation rapidly deteriorated. On the night of 16 December, six were hurt, two of them fatally, when a white-owned store at Bourail was the target for arson. Sporadic violence has continued ever since, making Pisani’s mediating role almost impossible. The rightist National Committee against Inde¬ pendence claims responsibility for several bomb explosions in Noumea. It is clear, he told the Parisian daily Liberation on 18 December, ‘that the majority of the island’s population is against allowing the autonomy agreement to run its course’. Pisani struggled manfully with the problem of preparing a referendum. He recognised that the FLNKS did not want to sever links with France completely, and he responded positively to their hope for some official recognition of Kanak claims to sovereignty in New Caledonia. ‘It is a question,’ Pisani said, ‘of the birth or the non-birth of a people.’ Inde¬ pendence, however, he told a French television audience just before Christmas in 1984, must be achieved by consensus. France’s strategic interests in the South Pacific had to be preserved, the legitimate interests

1964-84: INTO THE KANAK CAULDRON

133

of the Caldoches had to be protected, but the basic Kanak demands for sovereignty over their native land had also to be satisfied. This was a worthy program, but a very tall order in the violent circumstances which then prevailed in the territory. Consensus seemed a distant hope indeed in January, when a white settler was killed, and gendarmes beseiged and shot dead Elio Machoro, Kanak militant and ‘warlord’ of the FLNKS, together with his lieutenant Nonaro. Machoro had become notorious as a destroyer of ballot boxes and ‘dictator’ of Thio, where his followers in their Che Guevara t-shirts had successfully defied the French gendarmerie. He was shot only a few kilometres from the spot where Chief Atai fell in the 1878 insurrection. Pisani brought the referendum date forward to July 1985, but this decision had later to be rescinded. The question of voting eligibility in such a referendum still remains. According to Roch Pidjot, deputy for New Caledonia, only a colonised people can vote on their own selfdetermination. For the Gaullists, however, voting rights in French terri¬ tories should never be restricted on grounds of race. There is some room for compromise: the Caldoches will sensibly enough accept the disen¬ franchisement of very temporary white residents in New Caledonia, such as government servants on short-term postings. The FFNKS, as well as Niddoish Naisseline’s FKS, have spoken of accepting a transitional stage towards independence, and have compromised enough to suggest that only those residents with one parent born in the territory should vote on independence. The essential difficulties have not been solved. The ethnic balance of the electorate makes it very difficult for the FFNKS to secure a vote in favour of independence. If a compromise is not reached on voting eligi¬ bility, then new polarisation and new threats of electoral boycott can be envisaged. The latest French scheme to divide the territory into four autonomous regions does little to secure anything but the immediate future of New Caledonia. There is a further imponderable factor ahead: the French Fegislative elections of 1986 have removed the Socialist Party from power, before the independence referendum is held. The outcome is very far from certain. If, in spite of Pisani’s package of guarantees to the Caldoches, the majority votes non to independence, the French govern¬ ment, whatever its complexion, will be back exactly where it started.

Main sources for chapter 11 Two recent Australian studies have been extremely valuable in the preparation of this chapter, namely Alan WARD’S Land and Politics in New Caledonia (Canberra 1982), and Myriam DORNOY’s Politics in New Caledonia (Sydney 1984). Neither of these books, however, take the story beyond 1982. For more recent developments, I have relied on the press, especially the Parisian dailies Le Monde and Le Matin.

CHAPTER 12

PAST IMPERFECT AND FUTURE CONDITIONAL

My aim in tracing the impact of French rule in New Caledonia has been essentially a historical one. The story of the first contacts between Europeans and Melanesians, of the early confrontations between the French and Kanaks, and of the subordination and partial destruction of Kanak culture, all give a historical dimension to many elements of the present crisis. For while some ingredients of that crisis have originated since the Second World War, others are legacies of nineteenth-century colonialism. Melanesian claims to land rights carry clear historical inferences. When independentists demand the return of land appropriated by graziers, nickel-miners and the convict settlement, they seek to redress historical grievances, which were the inevitable results of the colonising process. My brief outline of the land problem in the nineteenth century may help to appreciate the basis for these resentments. The convict farms, and the ‘illegal’ encroachments of stock-rearers drove the Kanaks off the tribal land with which they had an intimate spiritual relationship. For Melanesian culture, the continuity of tribal and cultural life was en¬ dangered, as soon as the essential links with the land were severed. In a sense, these land seizures deprived the Kanaks of their history, as well as of their livelihood. They amounted to a denial of the colonised peoples’ experience of their ancestral past. The Kanaks became, in the phrase of the historian Eric Wolf, ‘a people without history’. They were pushed into the interior, and confined to the least fertile areas of the territory, while traditional agriculture suffered extensive damage. At the same time, their past and their spiritual security were destroyed. In claiming the restoration of ‘stolen’ land, the Kanaks are asserting their cultural identity, and reclaiming their own ‘stolen’ history. Independence claims also seek to reverse the process by which the Kanak population has become marginalised, relegated to the role of a subsistence peasantry and, at best, a reserve army of unskilled labour. The Melanesians do not reject the benefits of French civilisation, since for more than a century they have been prevented from enjoying them.

PAST IMPERFECT AND FUTURE CONDITIONAL

1 35

They were excluded from secondary education until after the Second World War, and they remain an underprivileged section of the school population. They were for decades neglected by the colonial medical personnel, and the most common European infections produced very high mortality levels in the era before the generalised use of antibiotics. Even the nickel boom of recent times did not share new prosperity equally among New Caledonians; its greatest beneficiaries were not the Melanesians but rather the French workers and other immigrants. It was the Kanaks’ historical fate to be pushed aside to make way for other groups of employees, considered harder-working, more sober, and better adapted to western standards of work discipline. First the convicts provided the colony’s labour force. Then, when the flow of prisoners dried up, immigrants from French Indo-China and Java took their place in the unskilled workforce. Today, the role of convicts and Asians has been assumed by new immigrants, from Polynesia and from Wallis and Futuna. They are now the targets for Kanak jealousy and contempt. The years of French rule failed to produce a Melanesian middle-class elite; a substitute, imported labour force blocked prospects for Melanesian social promotion. The political geography of contemporary New Caledonia is also better understood from a historical perspective. The opportunities for grazing livestock along the west coast initially attracted a concentration of white settlement to the west and the environs of Noumea. The insurrection of 1878 tended to confirm this elementary division between a predominantly white south and west, and a mainly Melanesian east and north. The repression after 1878, and the tribal reorganisation which accompanied it, resettled Melanesians on the east coast. This pattern of population distribution has determined postwar voting results, and still accounts for the main areas of white political strength (Noumea) and of the Melanesian pro-independence electorate (the north-east). The Foyalty Islands are a separate entity, for both ethnic and historical reasons. The population of the Foyalty Islands shows traces of ancient Polynesian immigration, which makes it slightly different from the bulk of the Melanesian inhabitants of the Grande-Terre. The Foyalty Islands experienced the impact of Protestant missionary activity, at the same time as the French Catholics were struggling to convert Kanaks on the mainland. There was never very much white settlement on the Foyalties, and they were established as native reserves at the beginning of this century. The independence movement here is not challenged by any colon interest in the Foyalties. Both colonists and independentists manipulate history for their own ends. Both sides in the conflict rely on historical myth to bolster their assumptions, and legitimise their claims for the territory. Tike all these historical myths, these ideas are successful in mobilising support for a cause, although their basis in factual reality may not always be very secure.

1 36

CHAPTER

12

One such myth surrounds the great insurrection of 1878, and the role of Chief Atai, often portrayed as an anti-colonial resistance hero and martyr. Although it may be politically valuable to base demands for independence on such valorous historical precedents, which are a source of pride to culturally independent Melanesians, our study has shown the historical exaggerations involved. Not all Melanesians were unanimous in the struggle against the colonial power in the rising of 1878. Some tribes had quarrelled with Atai, others had come to terms with the French, and received substantial benefits from them. The historical myth of 1878 conveniently minimises the extent of Melanesian ‘collaboration’. The colons, too, enlist history to support their vision of New Caledonian society. Their arguments that multiracial harmony has been successfully achieved in the past are sometimes based on a mythical version of war¬ time solidarity between whites and Melanesians. This historical myth of the Pacific Battalion, in which Kanaks and French New Caledonians fought side by side, is a very partial one. It ignores the degree of coercion employed in the recruitment of Kanak ‘volunteers’, which is better seen as part of a very long standing practice of labour requisitioning, organised through Melanesian chiefs. This is still a sensitive issue. In 1977, Mayor Wahnapo of Lifou declared at a remembrance ceremony: ‘The two world wars have been colonial wars and France has forcibly led to the slaughter the people of Lifou.’ The mayor was suspended from office. New Caledonia, to evoke yet another historical myth, is important to France, we are often told, as a last remaining colony of settlement. This is perhaps the strangest claim of all, and the fact that it is made at all is an extraordinary historical irony. For decades after New Caledonia officially became a French colony, France’s main problem in the terri¬ tory was precisely the problem of trying to populate it. It proved nearly impossible to persuade migrants to settle in this so-called ‘colony of settlement’. It was remote, populated by cannibals and the dregs of French prisons, and its economic promise had not been fulfilled. Right up to the Second World War, the colony could not attract enough settlers, and imported its labour force. The interwar years were a period of economic stagnation, and either low or actually declining population levels. Until the nickel boom, New Caledonia showed extraordinary reluctance to becoming a ‘colony of settlement’. Every work of history is a product of its time. This one is no doubt coloured by a pessimistic view of the territory’s prospects, which seems inevitable in the circumstances of tension and conflict which prevailed in 1985—1986. In May 1983, the foreign editor of the Sydney Morning Herald rashly predicted that ‘it is odds-on that New Caledonia will be indepen¬ dent within the next three or four years’. Three years later, the confidence of this sweeping assertion appears staggeringly wide of the mark. There now seems little reason to regard independence as either imminent or inevitable. The obstacles to independence are formidable. They include powerful

Vv%%v

1

November 1985: The graffiti on this war memorial announce the slow death of French colonialism in ‘Kanaky ’ AAP/Fairfax

138

CHAPTER 12

business and mining interests, like the Etablissements Ballande and the Societe' Le Nickel, linked to powerful multinational groups. The Societe Le Nickel has used imported Polynesian and Wallis Island labour, limiting the Kanak component of the industrial workforce. This situation will pose huge problems for any independent government in the territory. It will be forced to rely on white management if nationalised nickel pro¬ duction is to continue, since Kanaks have been effectively excluded from managerial and supervisory training. Economic prospects for the mining industry remain poor. An official economic survey of the territory in 1980 was subtitled ‘croissance zero’ —zero growth. The fall in the world’s consumption of nickel has reduced nickel’s contribution to New Caledonia’s gross domestic product from one quarter to one-sixth since the 1960s. The largest contributor to the territory’s economy is now the French administration itself, with its 9 000 employees. Nevertheless, the New Caledonian economy is still very much a dependent economy. The prospect for independence has also been made more remote by postwar changes in the ethnic balance of the population. The rising level of New Caledonia’s Melanesian population since the mid-1930s has already been made clear. Yet it has been matched by the rising number of New Caledonians of European origin, who have put the Kanaks into a minority, with the aid of non-white immigration from elsewhere in the Pacific. The demographic balance makes it virtually impossible for the Kanaks to achieve independence through the ballot box, unless one of two possibilities develop. One is that the colon population is somehow persuaded to renounce ties with France, or to accept land redistribution and the nationalisation of resources. This seems inconceivable today unless large numbers of white settlers are intimidated into leaving the territory altogether. Another possibility is that the independentists will enlist the sympathies of Polynesian and Wallisien immigrants. Given the Kanaks’ resentment against Wallisien land purchasers, and rivalries in the job market, there seems little likelihood of a compromise here. Wallis Island holds out no economic prospects to its expatriates; the Kanaks, they fear, will send them home if New Caledonia becomes independent. They must therefore be counted in the anti-independence camp. The legislative elections of 1986 may prove to be a setback for the independence movement. Mitterand’s presidency is due to run until 1988, and the Socialist Party can still claim to be France’s largest party, but it has suffered a predictable defeat. The return of the Gaullists to power, and the triumphant entry of the extreme right into the Chamber of Deputies will perhaps harden the government’s response to Kanak demands. As Elio Machoro prophesied in October 1984: ‘In ’86, it will be Chirac who will come to power. With a right-wing majority, can we ever be sure of gaining independence?’ The history of the colony has shown that the French left has contri¬ buted more to autonomy in the territory than has the right wing. In

PAST IMPERFECT AND FUTURE CONDITIONAL

1 39

1956, the socialists under Guy Mollet introduced the Autonomy Statute, which the Gaullist governments of the 1960s dismantled. The question of independence again came to prominence with the advent of a socialist government under the presidency of Mitterand. A victory for the right in 1986 may encourage settler resistance, and set the independence move¬ ment back at least five years. Independence, it must be acknowledged, does not necessarily mean an end to the French presence in the South Pacific. Melanesian leaders have accepted the need for a continuous French presence, which they do not yet consider incompatible with a recognition of Kanak sovereignty in New Caledonia. In addition to this, there are political, economic and strategic reasons why France fully intends to retain a foothold in the region. There is, firstly, the fear that the independence movement in New Caledonia will provoke similar agitation in the other remaining French overseas territories. French anxiety about the possible ‘domino’ effect of Melanesian nationalism is not entirely misplaced. Tiny anti-colonialist movements already exist in the French West Indies, and there are signs of an awakening native consciousness even in the miniscule territory of French Guiana. The president of French Polynesia, Gaston Flosse, supports the colons in New Caledonia with an enthusiasm which em¬ barrasses even Lafleur and the white New Caledonians themselves. Here, too, an independence movement could severely embarrass the French. The centrist French deputy Pierre Mehaignerie expressed a common fear in December 1984, when he warned against the danger of ‘contagion’ spreading from New Caledonia to the rest of France’s over¬ seas territories. There is also, perhaps, a vague economic reason why France wishes to maintain its foothold in the South Pacific. The Pacific basin appears to be a booming economic region, with excellent prospects for manufac¬ turing industry, and new investments. In the view of the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel, it may be in the process of becoming the dynamic hub of a new world economic system. If this turns out to be so, France would certainly wish to maintain some interest in the area. Strategic reasons, above all, influence France’s determination to stay, whether or not New Caledonia accedes to independence. The strategic importance of New Caledonia was fully demonstrated in the Second World War, when the United States chose the territory as a base for its operations against Japan, following the Battle of the Coral Sea. New Caledonia, said MacArthur, was a wonderful aircraft carrier. It com¬ mands the Pacific routes to Japan and Singapore, and therefore its fate is of interest to the United States, and the western alliance as a whole. Conservatives in the western alliance fear that the New Caledonian crisis may be exploited by the USSR, and that the territory may, after independence, become a sort of Pacific Cuba. In fact, the South Pacific

1 40

CHAPTER 12

remains one part of the globe where the Soviet Union has so far been conspicuous by its absence. Nevertheless, independent Vanuatu has offered shelter to the Soviet navy, and the USA is anxious both to exclude the Soviet Union, and to maintain free passage for its own ships in the South Pacific. For these reasons, there will no doubt be consider¬ able sympathy in Washington for a continuing French presence in New Caledonia. At the 13th South Pacific Conference, held in Guam in 1973, violent criticism of French colonialism provoked a walkout by the French delegate. Albert Henry, prime minister of the Cook Islands, hurled the following remark after the departing Frenchman: ‘If France walks out of the conference, it is our duty to help France walk out not only of the conference, but also of the Pacific’: admirable anti-colonialist sentiments, but which also run quite contrary to the west’s current perceptions of its own strategic needs. What is Australia’s role in the crisis? Given Australia’s attachment to the western alliance, its attitude is naturally an ambiguous one. Its support for French moves towards independence is tinged with the appre¬ hension that, if the French leave New Caledonia, a dangerous ‘destabilis¬ ation’ of the area will follow. Frangois Mitterand and Australian foreign minister Bill Hayden have indulged in a polemical battle over the com¬ parative treatment of the original inhabitants of Australia and New Caledonia: this polemic reflects little credit on either protagonist or on either imperial power concerned. Australia is obliged to compromise its backing for the Kanaks’ drive for independence by support for a con¬ tinuing French presence in the area. In addition, has Canberra investi¬ gated French Socialist claims that arms are reaching Caldoche militia via Australia? Independence, then, has powerful opponents, and equivocal allies. It is not necessarily synonymous with the expulsion of the French. In its support are the Melanesian parties like the FLNKS, whose tactics have proved extraordinarily successful in recent months, in bringing Kanak claims to sovereignty into the forefront of political discussions in Paris. In support, too, are friendly Pacific neighbours like Papua-New Guinea, whose prime minister offered assistance to the Kanaks if they speak with a united voice. Finally, as the French Communist Party maintains, history is on the side of the decolonisers. The inexorable march of history, however, has an awkward habit of requiring some powerful human assistance en route to its final destination: emancipation, de¬ colonisation, and the end of imperialism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARCHIVES: Archives Nationales, Section Outre-Mer, 27 rue Oudinot, Paris 7 (The overseas section is due for transfer to Aix-en-Provence in 1986)

Nouvelle-Caledonie 42 General Correspondence 1858—62 43 Kanak Insurrection 1878 — 79 85 Loyalty Islands—general correspondence 86 Loyalty Islands-—general correspondence 169 Justice 1917 180 General Correspondence 1914—20 203 General Correspondence 1936—39 231 General Correspondence 1858—1952 Further details of the contents of this series SCARR ‘French Government Archives’ Journal pp. 176-94.

1864—66 and 1887 — 94 1854—84

are given in Elizabeth of Pacific History 5, 1970,

Affaires Politiques AP AP AP AP

261 389 741 747

Elections and electoral laws 1949—57 Native Affairs 1944—48 Native Affairs 1907 — 39 Barthes Inspection Report 1935

PRINTED SOURCES: PERIODICALS Annales de la Propagation de la Foi Lyon 1845 — Annuaire statistique de la Nouvelle-Caledonie 1972— Bulletin de la Societe d’e'tudes historiques de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Noumea Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes economiques—Comptes e'conomiques de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Paris 1970La France Australe Journal Officiel de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Journal of Pacific History 141

142

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Journal de la Societe des Oceanistes Liberation Paris 1984—85 Marches coloniaux du monde Paris 1953—57 Le Matin de Paris Paris 1984—85 Le Monde Paris 1957 — 85 Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes Revue de I’histoire des colonies franqaises Service des Mines, Nouvelle-Caledonie et dependances—Rapport Annuel 1965—81 Sydney Morning Herald

PRINTED SOURCES: BOOKS AND ARTICLES Alberti, J.-B. Etude sur la colonisation a la Nouvelle-Caledonie: colonisation penale-colonisation libre Paris 1909 Anon. ‘Notes d’un colon sur la Nouvelle-Caledonie’, Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie 6th series vol.3 1872 pp 216—36 Anova Ataba, Apollinaire D’Ataia I’independance Noumea 1984 Balansa, B. ‘Nouvelle-Caledonie’ Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie 6th series vol.5 1873 pp 113 — 32 and 521-34Barrau, Jacques L'Agriculture vivriere autochtone de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Noumea (Commission du Pacifique du Sud) 1956 Bernard, Augustin L’Archipel de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Paris 1894 Bloc, Paul Les Confidences d’un cannibale Noumea 1966 Bourgeau, Jan La France du Pacifique Paris 1955 Brainne, Charles La Nouvelle-Caledonie: voyages, missions, tnoeurs, colonisation Paris 1854 Brookes, Jean Ingram International Rivalry in the Pacific Islands, 1800—1875 New York 1972 Brou, Bernard Memento d’histoire de la Nouvelle-Caledonie: les temps modernes 1774-1925 Noumea 1973 -‘Un Siecle de crises et de ‘booms’: les hauts et les bas de l’economie caledonienne’ Bulletin de la Societe d’etudes historiques de la Nouvelle-Caledonie 40 1979 pp 33-49 - Peuplement et Population de la Nouvelle-Caledonie: la societe moderne Noumea (Publications de la Societe d’etudes historiques de la NouvelleCaledonie no.23) 1980 Clifford, James Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian world Berkeley California 1982 Cook, James A Voyage towards the South Pole and round the world, performed in H.M.S. Resolution and Adventure, in the Years 1772, 1773, 1774 and 1775 2 vols London 1777 and Adelaide (Australiana Facsimile Editions) 1970 vol.2 Book 3 chapters 8—10 Cordier-Rossiaud, Georgette Relations economiques entre Sydney et la NouvelleCaledonie, 1844—1860 Paris (Societe des Oceanistes) 1957 Cousot, P.-M., capt. Notes d’histoire de la Nouvelle-Caledonie (1853—1946) Paris 1956

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i

143

Delignon, Lucien Les Alienations de Terres el la colonisation litre agricole en Nouvelle-Caledonie Paris 1898 Deschamps, Hubert and Guiart, Jean Tahiti, Nouvelle-Caledonie, NouvellesHebrides Paris 1957 Dornoy, Myriam Politics in New Caledonia Sydney 1984 Dousset-Leenhardt, Roselene Colonialisme el contradictions. Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1878—1978: les causes de Vinsurrection de 1878 Paris 1978 - Terre Natale, Terre d’Exil Paris 1976 Faivre, Jean-Paul, Poirier, Jean and Routhier, Pierre Geographic de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Paris 1955 Gabriel, Claude and Kennel, Vincent Nouvelle-Caledonie: la revolte kanake Paris 1985 Guiart, Jean ‘Fore-runners of Melanesian nationalism' Oceania 22 December 1951 pp 81—90 -—— L’Organisation sociale et coutumiere de la population autochtone Noumea (Commission du Pacifique du Sud) 1956 - ‘Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1985: commentaires’ Les Temps Modernes 466 May 1985 pp 2126-40 Guyon, J. Rapport a M.le Gouverneur-Ge'ne'ral de TIndo-Chine: la condition de la main-d’oeuvre indochinoise dans les Etablissements Franqais du Pacifique Australe Noumea 1928 Herbaut, Claude La Promotion melanesienne en Nouvelle-Caledonie Noumea 1966 LaBillardiere, J.-J.-H.de Relation du voyage a la recherche de La Perouse Paris 2 vols Year 8 (1800) LaHautiere, Ulysse de Souvenirs de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Paris 1869 Latham, Linda ‘Revolt Re-examined: the 1878 Insurrection in New Caledonia’ Journal of Pacific History 10 1975 pp 48—63 - La Revolte de 1878: etude critique des causes de la rebellion de 1878 en Nouvelle-Caledonie Noumea 1978 Lawrey, John The Cross of Lorraine in the South Pacific: Australia and the Free French movement, 1940—1942 Canberra 1982 Leenhardt, Maurice Gens de la Grande-Terre Paris 1953 (1st edn 1937) -Notes d’ethnologie neo-caledonienne Paris 1930 Legrand, M.-A. Au Pays des Canaques: la Nouvelle-Caledonie et ses habitants en 1890 Paris 1893 Mariotti, Jean Nouvelle-Caledonie: le livre du centenaire, 1853—1953 Paris 1953 Nisbet, Anne-Marie Litterature Neo-Caledonienne Quebec 1985 O’Reilly, Patrick ‘Paul Feillet, gouverneur de la Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1894—1902’ Revue de Thistoire des colonies franqaises 40 1953 pp 216—48 Person, Yves ‘La Nouvelle-Caledonie et l’Europe: de la decouverte a la fondation de Noumea, 1774— 1854’ Revue de Thistoire des colonies franqaises 40 1953 pp 5-215 Rau, Eric Institutions et coutumes canaques Paris 1944 Riviere, Henri Souvenirs de la Nouvelle-Caledonie: insurrection canaque Paris 1881

144

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rochas, Dr Victor de La Nouvelle-Caledonie: ses habitants, productions, moeurs, cannibalisme Paris 1862 Saussol, Alain L’Heritage: essai sur le probl'eme fonder melanesien en Nouvelle— Caledonie Paris 1979 - ‘Une Experience fourieriste en Nouvelle-Caledonie: le Phalanstere de Yate’, Bulletin de la Societe d’etudes hisloriques de la Nouvelle-Caledonie 38 1979 pp 25-34 Schreiner, Alfred Essai historique: la Nouvelle-Caledonie depuis sa decouverte jusqu’a nos jours Paris 1882 Shineberg, Dorothy They Came for Sandalwood: a study of the sandalwood trade in the south-west Pacific, 1830—1865 Melbourne 1967 ‘Un Siecle d’acculturation en Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1853— 1953’ Journal de la Societe des Oceanistes 9 December 1953, special centenary number Les Temps Modernes 464 March 1985, special issue on New Caledonia Union Caledonienne Pourquoi Oui a I’Union Caledonienne, Oui a TAutonomie? Noumea 1972 Ward, Alan Land and Politics in New Caledonia Canberra 1982

INDEX

AICLF, 103 Alcmene, 34

Algeria, 42, 54, 107, 121, 122, 123 Amane, Chief, 92 Angamarre, Governor, 106 Atai, Chief, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 124, 125, 133, 136 Australia, 9-11,36, 38, 41-2, 49-50, 74, 75, 81,82-4, 85, 100, 112, 123, 140 and see Sydney, Towns Autonomy Statute, 1956, 106—7, 108, 119-20, 138-9 Balade, 2, 4, 6, 7, 26, 29, 30, 32-3 Ballande, Etablissements, 96, 122, 123, 138

Barthes, Inspector, 88—9, 92, 141 Belep Is, 58 Beraud, colon, 54, 61 Blaise, Father, 29 Bloc, Paul, 16, 97, 142 Bouloupari, 46, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64 Bourail, 53, 58, 59, 63, 65, 71, 72, 81, 132 Bourgey, Lieutenant, 36, 74 Bourrate, Chief, 10, 16, 24, 54, 61 Brou, Bernard, 12, 40, 116, 142 Caledonian Union, 103 — 5, 106, 107, 108, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 144 Canala, see Kanala cannibalism, 3, 4, 6, 8, 15, 16, 21. 28, 32, 34, 45, 54, 95 cargo cults, 28, 101, 102 cattle industry, 49—50, 61 — 2, 63, 65, 73, 80, 94-5, 107, 134, 135 Chene, emancipee, 56, 59, 62 chiefs, 3, 7, 16, 17, 20, 21-2, 23, 24, 28, 37, 38, 46, 48, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 65, 92, 94, 95, 96, 102, 136

chrome, 48, 78, 112—3 Church, Catholic, 38—9, 76, 95, 96 Church, Evangelical Protestant, 38—9, 95 clans, 17-19, 20, 21-2, 23, 24, 51-2, 54, 63 and see Reserves coffee cultivation, 49, 72, 74, 75, 76, 80, 91, 97, 117 communards, 63, 68—70 Communist Party, Caledonian, 102—3 Communist Party, French, ix, 102—3, 120, 125, 140 convicts, see Penal Colony Cook, Captain James, ix, 2—8, 12, 15, 48, 142 copra, 36, 92, 117 Cru, Pastor, 38 Cutter, 30 cyclones, 17, 49, 78—80 D’Entrecasteaux, 2, 4—8 Diahot, 72 Dijoud, Paul, 127 DOM-TOM (French overseas territories), ix-x, 112, 122, 133, 139 Doniambo, 80, 109, 112, 113, 114, 117 Douarre, Mgr, 26—7, 30—32 Dousset-Leenhardt, Roselene, 12, 40, 55, 64, 66, 143 Du Bouzet, Governor, 45, 48, 50, 51 Ducos peninsula, 68, 89 Elections, European 122 French, legislative, ix, 133, 138 French, presidential, 129 Territorial, 106-7, 108, 119, 122, 124-5, 127-9, 129-31, 141 Ella, Pastor, 37 ERAP, 112

INDEX

Fabius, Laurent, PM, 131 Feillet, Paul, Governor, 34, 75-7, 78, 80, 81, 87, 89 FIDES, 105, 112 FLNKS (Kanak National Socialist Liberation Front), ix, 39, 129 — 31, 132, 133, 140 Fonwhary, 57, 61, 72 Forster, George, botanist, 3, 6, 12 Franc, French Pacific, 105 FULK (United Kanak Liberation Front), 124, 125, 127 Galli-Passebosc, Colonel, 57 Gaullism, 100, 104, 105, 107, 117, 121-2, 123, 131, 133, 138 and see RPCR gift-exchange, 2, 3—4, 19, 23—4, 32, 33 Giscard D’Estaing, President, 122, 126—7, 131 Guiart, Jean, ethnologist, 24, 66, 102, 143 Guillain, Governor, 10, 36, 52, 54, 73—4, 97 Guyon, Joseph, Governor, 81—5, 89, 143 Hienghene, 28, 54, 58, 59, 94, 132 Higginson, 49, 72, 73, 80 Houa'ilou, 39, 58, 59, 76, 101 IMETAL, 112 immigration, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 84—5, 135, 138 and see Japanese immigrants; Javanese immigrants; New Hebrideans; Polynesia, immigrants from; Vietnam; Wallis & Futuna Is Indige'nat, see Native Statute Indochina, see Vietnam infanticide, 20— 1, 89 Insurrection of 1878, x, 41,45, 46, 51, 53, 54, 56-66, 88, 95, 135, 136 Insurrection of 1917, x, 19, 64, 89, 94—5, 98 Jacquinot Law, 1963, 119—20 Japan, 110, 112, 113 Japanese immigrants, 81, 82, 84, 91, 105 Javanese immigrants, 84, 97, 105, 116, 135 Jones, Pastor, 35, 37, 38 Kanaks and see labour, Native Affairs Service, Native Statute, pilou, reserves agriculture, 13—16, 97, 98, 123, 126—7, 134 and see coffee, copra, taros, yams and alcohol, 10, 45-6, 89, 91 birth rate, 13, 89 burial customs, 4, 22, 23, 53—4, 62—3 childbirth, 20

1 46

circumcision, 20 diet, 15—17, 97 and see cannibalism emancipation, 99—108, 114, 116 housing, 17-18, 22, 86, 96-7, 104 in European eyes, 45 — 7, 55, 59 in industrial workforce, 105, 113 — 4, 116, 117, 125, 135, 138 labourers in Australia, 10 land rights, 124, 125-6, 127, 134, 138 languages, 9, 11, 17, 27, 30, 35, 95—6 marriage, 19—20, 34, 35, 92 population level, 13, 15, 34, 76, 86—9, 98, 115-6, 138 property, 32—3, 35, 41—54, 58, 59—61, 63, 65, 126 and see gift-exchange spiritual beliefs, 15, 19, 21, 22—3, 30, 32, 63, 126, 134 technology, 2, 11, 16— 17, 97 war, 17-19, 21, 95 weapons, 4, 11, 19,91,95 witchcraft, 91, 96 women, status of, 21, 34, 35 women, used by whites, 47, 56, 62 Kanala, 22, 43, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64 Kone, 64, 94, 95

LaBillardiere, naturalist, 4—5, 12, 16, 45, 143 labour, requisitioned, 46, 62, 63, 74, 86, 89, 91, 94, 96, 101-2, 103, 136 Lafleur, Henri, 106, 117, 119 Lafleur, Jacques, 117, 119, 131, 139 La Foa, 43, 56, 57, 59, 61,64 land concessions, 50, 51, 53, 58, 61, 69, 71, 74-5 Laperouse, navigator, 4, 6, 7 Laroque, Roger, 123 La Seine, 28 Leconte, Leon, 94, 98 Leenhardt, Maurice, 15, 16, 19, 25, 39, 142, 143 Lemoine, Georges, 129 Lenormand, Maurice, 104, 106, 107, 108, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124 Le Pen, ix, 122, 138 leprosy, 11, 88, 89, 91 Le Rhin, 28—9 Lifou, 9, 15, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 96, 131, 136 LKS (Kanak Socialist Liberation Party), 38, 117, 129, 133 locusts, 17, 49 Loi-cadre see Autonomy Statute Loyalty Is, 8, 9, 10, 15, 17, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 88, 95, 96, 106, 107, 124, 135, 141 and see Lifou, Mare, Uvea

INDEX

MacFarlane, priest, 35—8 Machoro, Elio, 39, 130, 131, 133, 138 malaria, 17, 43 Mare, 9, 10, 15, 34, 35, 37, 38, 88, 101, 103 Marist Fathers, 26, 27, 29, 40, 77 medical service, 84, 88 — 9, 101, 104, 135 metis (mixed blood), 114—6 Michel, Louise, 69—70 Missionaries, 8, 9, 10, 21, 22, 24, 26—40, 46, 53, 54, 63, 76, 125, 135 Catholic 26-34, 37, 38, 39, 40 Protestant 10, 26, 27, 31, 33—40, 76 Mitterand, President, ix, 129, 131, 132, 138, 140 Montravel, Tardy de, Governor, 43 Naisseline, Louis, 35, 37, 38 Naisseline, Niddoish, 38, 101, 102, 103, 123, 124, 125, 133 Native Affairs Bureau, 38, 86, 89, 91, 102 Native Statute (Indigenat), 89, 91, 92, 98 New Hebrideans, 49, 56, 57, 85, 116 nickel, x, 48, 71, 73, 78, 80, 81, 82, 100, 104, 105, 109-20, 127, 131 and see SLN Noumea, 10, 34, 39, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56-7, 58, 59, 62, 63, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 84, 89, 96, 97, 106, 112, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 131, 132, 135 Olry, Governor, 61 Ouagap, 30, 59 Ouameni, 57, 72, 74 Ouegoa, 101 Ourail, 43, 58, 62 Pacific Batallion, 85, 94, 95, 103, 136 Pacific troops in WW1, 22 Paddon, James, 10—11, 50 Paita, 11, 50, 54, 81 PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party), 124, 125, 127 Pallu, Governor, 81 Pardon, Governor, 34 penal colony, 43, 57, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68—74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 134, 135 Pentecost, 117 Person, Yves, historian, 12, 15, 40, 143 Pidjot, Roch, 107, 122, 133 pilou, 23 — 4, 91, 96 Pines, Isle of, 8, 9, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 43, 53, 58, 68, 71, 88, 105 Pisani, Edgard, 131—3 plague, 29', 30, 32, 80 Poindintie, 101, 131 Polynesia, French, x, 8, 139

147

contacts with 15, 17, 27, 34 immigrants from 85, 114, 116, 126, 128, 135, 138 Ponerihouen, 131 Pouebo, 29, 30, 32, 52, 54, 131 Pouma, 3, 10, 30 Poupinel, Father, 32, 33 Poya, 58, 65, 94, 95 Prise de possession, 1853, x, 26, 41, 59 Pritzbuer, Governor, 43, 52 rebellion, see Insurrection referendum on independence, 129, 131, 132, 133 Repiquet, Governor, 82 reserves, tribal, 51—2, 53, 65, 76—7, 88, 91, 92, 96, 101, 104, 125-7, 135 Reunion sugar planters, 49—50, 59 Richard, Governor, 88, 92 Riviere, Henri, Capt, 46, 47, 57, 63, 65, 143 Rochas, Dr V de, 20, 25, 48, 143 Rochefort, Henri, 69 Rougeyron, Father, ix, 26, 28, 30, 32 RPCR (Caledonian Gaullist party), 124, 129, 131 Saisset, Governor, 46, 53 Samoan catechists, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 sandalwood trade, 8—10, 12, 34 Sarramea, 117 Saussol, Alain, 52, 55, 66, 144 schools, 36, 38, 91, 95-6, 98, 102, 104, 127, 135 Second World War, 100-01, 122, 139 Servan, 57, 63 Sleight, Pastor, 36 Socialist Party, French, ix, 129, 133, 138, 140 Societefrangaise d’Oceanie, 27 Societe de la Propagation de la Foi, 26—7 SLN {Societe Le Nickel), 49, 72, 80, 81, 82, 105, 109-20, 122, 123, 125, 138 Star, 34 Styx, 54 sugar cultivation, 49, 57, 59 Sydney, x, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 29, 35, 41,43, 50, 81, 82, 136 taboos, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23 taro cultivation, 15—16, 22, 46, 51, 53, 62, 97 taxes, 92, 94, 97, 102, 104, 127 Teremba, 56, 57, 61 Testard, Commandant, 47 Thio, ix, 64, 80, 82, 96, 132, 133 Tieou, Chief, 94

i44 010 6 b Tjibaou, Jean-Marie, 39, 127, 131, 132 totems, 17, 19, 22, 23 tourism, 105, 116, 123, 127 Towns, Robert, 9—10, 24 trade unions, 104, 124, 117 Trentinian, General, 46, 59, 61, 63, 66 trepang trade, 9—10, 30 Treve, Capt, 35, 36 tuberculosis, 11, 88, 96 UICALO, 103-04 Ukeiwe, Dick, 131 Union Caledonienne (UC) see Caledonian Union Union fran^aise, 103, 106, 107, 122 Uregei, Yann, 39, 124, 125 USTKE (Union des Syndicats des travailleurs kanaks et exploites), 117

INDEX

Uvea, 15, 36, 37, 92 Viard, Father, 26, 27-28, 29-30 Vietnam, 59, 78, 84, 85, 88, 97, 100, 103, 105, 113, 116, 122, 135 Wallis & Futuna Is, 17, 26, 27, 30, 39, 45, 85, 92, 95, 113, 114, 116, 125, 126, 135, 138 Ward, Alan, 121, 133, 144 water pollution, 116—7 whaling, 8, 35 yam cultivation, 15—16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 36, 46, 62, 96, 97 Yate phalanstery 73 — 4 hydro-electric plant 84, 104, 112

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On 2 December 1984, Jean-Marie Tjibaou inaugurated the provisional govern¬ ment of the independent state of Kanaky. Four days later, two of his brothers as well as seven other Kanaks were shot down in an ambush in the north of New Caledonia. The Kanak insurrection of 1984 thrust this tiny French territory into the world’s headlines. The Totem and the Tricolour examines the historical background to the present crisis in New Caledonia, one of France's last remaining overseas possessions, and one of the last territories in the Pacific still denied independent status. It considers the earliest contacts between Kanaks and Europeans, pagans and missionaries, which had catastrophic consequences for the native Melanesians. They were driven off their land, their cultural life disintegrated, their population suffered a holocaust. However, they were never passive victims; the anti-colonial insurrection of I 878 is a significant historical precedent for today's independents. The author documents French humamtariamsm, neglect and greed - the good the bad and the ugly of the colonial experience. He suggests that the com¬ plexion of the ruling majority in Paris - Gaullist, Giscardien or socialist - has profoundly affected the territory's recent history, and argues that formidable obstacles still remain on New Caledonia's long, hard road to independence. Martyn Lyons was born in London in 1946, and educated at Oxford University. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children, and is Senior Lecturer in History at The University of New South Wales. He is a specialist in the history of France, and has published books and articles on the history of the French Revolution, and on French literature and society in the 19th century.

ISBN 0 86840 122 6