Sophisticated !

The Solomon Islander Wants To Be

An Account of Events in ESI During and After the Jap Occupation

By Donald Gilbert Kennedy

rjIHE Japanese, having established them- X selves at Tulagi and Guadalcanal, in May, 1942, began to explore and patrol the coastal areas in proximity to their main camps, wherever they went, they endeavoured to contact the natives, to make friends and to spread propa ganda. Acting apparently under strict orders, they made no attempt to molest the people. But their whole propaganda set-up failed. It failed dismally, and it failed through ignorance of one particu lar aspect of native mentality: No native could be friends with a man who had stolen his pig, or who had coun tenanced the stealing of his pig, or who had partaken of his stolen pig. And every Japanese on patrol had offended in one of these ways. The exponents of the propaganda of co-prosperity were ignor ant of this basic principle of native life.

A man’s pigs were his money in the bank, his title deeds to rank, the gift with which he capped the marriage feasts of the daughters of the clan. The ignorant Japanese officers allowed their men to rob, not only pig-styes, but also fowl runs, gardens and even clothes-lines and clothes-boxes for the scanty, worn and pitiful raiment of a native’s wardrobe. In the gardens, they often destroyed valuable plants by pulling them out of the ground, merely to ascertain whether there were edible tubers at the roots.

In the offences committed by white men in the past, these things had never been included. Although the white men had lost some prestige in native eyes, the Japanese had certainly put themselves completely beyond the pale. The coastal natives had lost their pigs, poultry and growing crops. The Japanese had lost whatever tolerance that may have come their way. Their loss was our gain and it behoves us not to forget that it was at some cost to many coastal villages.

Furthermore, in areas where the Jap anese made permanent camps—in Gua dalcanal, Florida, at Viru, Munda, Ren dova and Gatukai in the New Georgia Group, and in other places—the natives were forced to evacuate their villages, the houses of which were promptly torn down by the ant-like heirs of the Sun God to make bivouac shelters and roofs for gun pits and fox-holes. The natives moved to less accessible places and made new vil lages and gardens. They suffered from fever and other sickness in the damp jungle while their new homes were being prepared; they went on short rations until their new gardens came into bear ing. But there was surprisingly little grumbling and there was no talk of appealing to the Japanese for aid. They laid their material losses to the fortunes of war. fTIHE United States Forces captured Jl Tulagi and Guadalcanal in August, 1942, without great losses. The natives had been living and enjoying a semi-independent life of action. But with the occupation of their respective areas, from Guadalcanal to Bougainville, by our victorious forces, many left to seek em ployment in the Native Labour Corps, to sell curios and souvenirs to the forces v and to gaze, in awe, at all the astonish ing war paraphernalia of a machine-age civilisation.

Yet less than 10 per cent, of the people have had the privilege of so gazing. The remaining 90 per cent, will continue to live their humdrum lives in their remote

villages, to listen to the tales of their returned adventurers and to take their share of the spoils which accompany these on their home-coming. Many of the Solomon Islanders will never see an American. Such is their remoteness over steep mountain trail and deep ravine.

To natives who have rarely seen more than one 3,000-ton ship, at one and me same time, between themselves and the horizon, the appearance of a whole con voy of 10,000-ton transports, flanked by the long, low, creeping grey shadows of its naval escort, is a sight to hold them spell-bound.

On that memorable morning of August 7, 1942, from the high mountain villages of Guadalcanal, many an old man and shy “mary” who might never see an American in the flesh, gazed iii “wild surmise” at those forbidding grey shapes creeping silently along their coastal waters to deliver the first amphibious attack on the arrogant Nips who were then preparing to operate an airfield at Lunga.

After a few weeks, reports began to trickle back from the natives who had succeeded in establishing contact with the Marines, telling of shattering bombs dropped out of the sky, by day or night, of men tumbling into fox-holes, of men killed and men wounded, of coconut groves withered by the blast of war, of ’planes hurtling from the sky; of strange looking ships which opened at the bow and spewed on to the foreshore a rolling

traffic of trucks and bulldozers and half tracks and tanks and every variety of macnme Known to mechanised war. rE effect on the natives was stunning.

What the Japanese, or the labourers for the white man of the old, peace ful plantation days, had taxen weeks to perform with picK and shovel, the white men direct from the very homes of white men, were performing instantly, with miraculous, new, mechanical servants, which obeyed their every behest. Hills were swept away, rocks flattened, rivers bridged, houses erected, great holes exca vated in a matter of minutes. Our Melanesian watchers slipped back to the awe their grandfathers had known when the first great, white-winged canoes appeared over their horizon.

The white man had regained his pres tige. There was no explaining these astonishing things and this unheard-of mass-energy in the simple vocabularies of the islands. The eloquent know-alls would have to go to school again. And the pic ture was the same with every fresh land ing—the Russell Islands, Sege and Munda, Vila and Vella Lavella, Treasury Island and Empress Augusta Bay.

The Melanesian does not understand the significance of these things. He is caught in the vortex of something entirely strange and new, like his ancestors before him. But he hates to appear unsophis ticated, and so you see him to-day, on Guadalcanal, nearly two years after the first Americans landed and captured what is now the famous Henderson field, jostling his fellow-humans, in the round about of camp life, and imitating care fully their every look of worldly wisdom.

Here, on the main trunk road which parallels the beach, are unbroken lines of traffic roaring through the daylight hours.

There are lorries full of Uncle Sam’s men of all services; trucks packed with negroes; groups of Marines, sailors and soldiers, in twos and threes, going their

various ways with hopeful hitch-hike gestures. Here and there are groups of Solomon Islanders sauntering unconcernedly by the wayside, each dressed as

“s-a leatherneck's

doughboy’s trousers with nothing in between but a small, wiry, coal-black bod y and a face striving to look as sophisticated as that of any negro around.

Most of them seem to attach great importance to the magical charm of the identity disc, and there are few who have not a coin-shaped bit of bright aluminium, scratched with hieroglyphics and dangling from a string necklet. , .

an^C erT by’profS l artTste They

tov e sm S mar-

"enld 1“ thl technique of HawSfan

guitar an( i ukulele bands with their pi on king rhythmical tunes dear to the hearts of all islanders. When a cinema story 15 unintelligible through their failure to follow the speech, there is always an American buddy ready to interpret for them -