End Of The Oleaginous Culture ?
pp. 31-32 · Read in the full issue
Where The Depression Supplies Its Own Compensation
By Robert Dean Frisbie
ROBERT DEAN FRISBIE, a well-known American writer, who is at present living on one of the Cook Islands (Puka Puka ) has sent this article to the Pacific Islands Monthly.
We are glad to publish it because of its literary merit and its delightful humour; but Mr. Frisbie’s quaint and amusing generalisations must not be too widely applied.
The lower price being offered for copra certainly has caused some economic depression throughout the South Seas; but it is bringing about a social regression of the character described by Mr. Frisbie in only a comparatively few of the more isolated islands of Polynesia. In Melanesia (Western Pacific ) there is little change in social conditions —probably because the Melanesians’ manner of life has been little affected by the contact with Europeans.
It is probable that in the Cook Group, French Oceania, Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and New Hebrides, the conditions described, by Mr. Frisbie will apply: but almost all other Territories —particularly Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea, Papua, New Caledonia —have established industries which provide an alternative to copra, and industrial, commercial and social life in those places is going on as usual.
LET the Mau of Samoa be patient. Their white brothers will be glad to leave their silly little island after another profitless decade.
And let those who regret the passing of ancient Polynesian culture take heart, for they may live to see it return: the good of it and the bad of it, long-pig and a pageant of romantic gods, grass-skirts and loincloths, village utilitarianism and tribal wars.
It took a long time to smear a coat of civilisation on the skins of the Pacific Islanders. Up to the present, it has been the pride of the missionaries to exhibit brown sinners in white apostolic robes, of traders to exchange the kerosene light of a better life for mother-of-pearl and copra, of government officials to frown at the concupiscent natives who cohabit without a license.
Now, with copra at £7 a ton, the above mentioned benefactors are losing interest in the islanders. There is no soap on the remote atolls to keep white the apostolic robes —in fact, many of them are falling to pieces; and, with the traders’ kerosene lights extinguished, the governments are finding it difficult to apprehend the cohabiting natives.
In a word, it will not surprise me if missionaries, traders and officials alike politely tell the natives to go to the devil.
The officials, of course, will stick to the natives the longest, and their final departure will be keenly felt; but with governments simulating solvency when they should be declared bankrupt were they private concerns, they cannot be expected to remain permanently on nondividend-paying islands. After the departure of the officials the superficial veneer of civilisation will be washed away very quickly: in a few years the islanders will revert to savagery and the result of over a hundred years of work will disappear completely.
On many of the islands the reversion to ancient —and salutary—customs is evident.
The old men’s pipes are cold; grass-skirts and loin-cloths are taking the places of calico and denim as the last of the family
dresses and trousers are worn to ribbons; the fire-log and the rubbing-stick are returning; pearl-shell hooks are taking the place of steel ones, and ronga’a fishline the place of cotton line. Such luxuries as sugar, tea and bread were dropped from the family menu long ago, and now the coconut-oil lamp flickers dimly beside the empty and chiraneyless kerosene one.
And, because missionaries made clothes the important tenet of their religion, with the last of their frayed garments the natives will shuffle off the last of their Christianity—one cannot go to church in puris naturalibus. Jehovah and Jesus will remain, of course; but they will develop into mythical gods soon to be obscured in a fog of Polynesian superstition. . . . That is, if the price of copra does not improve.
Even with sugar at 6d a pound, a watery bar of soap at 1/6 and tobacco at 16/- a pound, the big trading firms cannot show a profit in their outlying stations, so they are closing them. “You cannot make sun-
beams out of cucumbers,” they say, sapiently, “nor profits out of copra- islands. ...” Needle-witted, those boys!
On Danger Island, the trading station has been closed, and we do not expect that many more vessels will visit the island.
Probably a man-o-war will call once a year to bring us the mail; but, as men-owar do not buy copra or sell gadgets, the people probably will be left to revert to their ancient material and spiritual culture.
The New Zealand Administration cannot be expected to clothe and provision the people gratis, nor can it be expected to subsidise vessels to buy copra at a great loss. And I do not believe that the missionaries will take any interest in islanders who are unable to pave their way to Heaven with silver shillings.
Who is there left to keep the torch of civilisation burning?
The present writer does not believe that the abandonment of the Pacific Islands need be altogether deplorable. Though the transitory stage to savagery will be painful, the natives will adjust themselves to the return of their ancient culture, slip easily into the ancient ways. Cannibalism, idolatry, nakedness will return; but so long as there is no profit in clothing the islanders’ bodies, filling their alimentary canals with corned beef and their souls
with the Gospel, we Europeans, I believe, will make our exit as gracefully as pos sible, without over-much worry about the fate of the Islanders. Our exodus is well under way, right now.
There is only one thing that can keep the Pacific Islanders from turning back to a savagery comparable to that in the days before Captain Cook, and that is an im mediate rise in the copra market.
How true that oleo-margarine civilised the South Seas; that butter-fat will “un civilise” them!