Comment
Pacific Reborn
IT was G.B Shaw in his usual, selfish manner, who quipped, “The Americans are the only people who managed to pass from barbarism to decadence without being civilised in between”. In a comparable way Pacific communities are now being born into the post-modern, post-industrial world without being modernised first.
Post-modernism with its emphasis on complexity and cluttering, and post-industrialism’s on service and intellectual commodity are increasingly firming up a purchase on the lifestyles of Pacific peoples. One could ask whether this is a healthy sign or not or what caused this shunted (stunted?) growth. One of the important factors that produced this condition, was the presence of two types of colonists: a political and
an ideological one. Their combined influence implanted in Pacific peoples a quiescent and apathetic attitude to things, and reverence for the white man, who may not be emulated, and his paraphernalia the latter-day slogan “The Pacific Way” is an unconscious and neurotic reaction to this mentality. It was inevitable that the chance for smooth and gradual changes would be missed. Therefore the problem for the Pacific was to make the best of this circumstance.
All births are agonising and attended by lethal problems. Up to now gurus of development economists and sociologists diagnosing our condition, have always prescribed an economic panacea for all our ills, the same “solution” they prefer in other parts of the Third World. But, alas, here in the Pacific sociopolitical issues are fastly aclipsing the economic ones, a fact that must be worrying the “experts” and their theories!
The social struggle is not for subsistence or survival but between different ways of life, for which people would gladly sacrifice their subsistence and their lives. The people of Oceania are discovering new depths in old terms like liberty, rights, basic justice etc terms that have lain so long under the stifling bulk of convention and traditionalism, and about which talk in the past have by and large, merely window-dressing. The rediscovery of the Pacific by the outside world, and the impact of numerically growing educated elites are at the root of this
amazing outcome.
Everywhere in the island world things are stirring and bristling with difficulties. With Papua New Guinea problems seem to be insuperable. Those inherent in her relations with ruthless, and more powerful, neighbours are daunting enough.
And her inheritance has also been an unbridgeable chasm economic and sociocultural between small pockets of power wieldersin Moresby, Lae, and Goroka, and the untutored rural myriads. Therein lurk elemental
tensions, which, when conditions are favourable, will explode with titanic violence. Bougainville is paradigmatic. Vanuatu has something of the same problem but life there seems to have been reduced to wrangles between rival cults of personalities to the neglect of more useful avocations.
The situation in Tonga is both grave and bright. For the first time in her history we are seeing the emergence of a “parliamentary opposition”. This is provided by young MPs who model their political work on that of their counterparts in Australia and New Zealand i.e. critical monitoring of what the government is up to. They are not always understood as such and their motives are interpreted by their enemies in preposterous terms. Add to this the spectre of the ancient alliance between church and state beginning to show fissures with the two allies drifting apart.
Fiji, for her part, is embroiled in old social and racial problems and attempting belatedly to apply solutions that can only work if the clock is put back by about a century. Of the larger Pacific communities, Samoa is the only one that is not experiencing new internal strain. She shows no nationwide disaffection and can be the most conservative Polynesian community. Yet the Samoan system may be host to deep-seated and chronic stresses which are cultural and localised in nature.
In view of any impact ofchanges now taking place all around her, Samoa may be hugging a veritable timebomb.
The metropolitan powers currently most conspicuous in the Pacific are themselves far from being problem-free or models ofdiscernment or sensitivity. For example, everything Australia does smacks of the novice and is reflected in an overall of the cost-benefit principle. Socially and economically she is being transformed by a tug-of-war between American and Japanese models. And the economic horizon of New Zealand has been consistently deteriorating, and there seems to be no end in sight. For New Zealand some form ofdependancy would be hard to avoid.
France, with her awesome age, still insists in isolating everybody except reactionary elements who hope to benefit by Gallic alms. And the US, now diplomatically a fish out of water since recent events in the Eastern Bloc, is her same arrogant, callous self, with the Pacific, still her lake, and now {pace Johnston Island?) her dump to boot. Finallyjapan. She has natural integrity, the paragon of commercial astuteness, and has mountains of resources for aid, but, my God, she needs more of a historical sense and a cure for experiential myopia. □
The Islands