Book Reviews

Can There Be National Birth

Without Pain In Melanesia?

Melanesia is as yet innocent of turmoil, but the seeds are present.

And with three-quarters of the popu lation likely to be under independent governments by the mid-70s, Mela nesia’s likely response is being de termined now—although it’s too early to predict the probable results.

That’s one of the messages in H. C.

Brookfield’s new study of the Mela nesian Islands, Colonialism, Develop ment and Independence, in which pro fessor Brookfield does for Melanesia as a whole what Professor C. D.

Rowley did for New Guinea in his deceptively-titled, The New Guinea Villager.

He escapes his discipline (he’s these days Professor of Geography at Montreal’s McGill University), to be come a social scientist who is also an observer of contemporary trends. The result is a penetrating wide-ranging look at Melanesia’s past, present and possible future.

Professor Brookfield’s breadth of interests include the impact of tran sistor radios on the population (“The true value of radio remains totally unexploited”), the problems of lan guage and the paucity of trained Islanders, and the perils of political fragmentation (“it leads very readily to competition between small political units for foreign enterprise and aid, and hence to acceptance of conditions which a stronger nation would be more likely to resist”).

“Melanesian political apathy seems now to be a dying phenomenon,” he says, “But Melanesia’s suspicions at the continued admission of foreign enterprise are finally growing. Ques tions will be asked about wider and wider fields of enterprise now domi nated by foreign concerns, and it is not surprising that activists are emerging who demand more radical solutions than gradualist solutions.

The difference between radicalism and gradualism in this context he thinks, is nothing more than different concepts of nationalism. In a section headed, “Towards the Night of the Generals?”, Professor Brookfield sub mits that in Australian New Guinea

at least, the hopes of some Mela nesians who wish to be rid of colonial domination and at the same time hold their country together, are frankly centred on the model of military takeover.

The reasoning is that the Army is an elite group nationally recruited and “whoever wishes to hold power in the coming years of organising a nation must have its loyalty”. He concludes that in at least some of the Melanesian Islands it is “unlikely that national forces—however small —will involve direct involvement in the government.”

Although the examples chosen out of context may give a different im pression, this is a well-balanced, well reasoned book that shows clearly how well the eggs are scrambled in Mela nesia by two revolutions—the revolu tionary force of colonialism as it sets out to transform another society through invasion, and the revolution of independence, as it strives to re tain, or take, local control and thus halt the trend. Neither force is un

scathed.

S. Inder.

(Colonialism, Development And

INDEPENDENCE. By H. C. Brookfield.

Cambridge University Press. £4.80p).