Painful but some

Letters

Painful but some worthwhile lessons

FUTA HELU in the September edition repeats, parrot fashion, fears of the terrible “Yoke of Colonialism” borne by the Pacific Island nations. It has been fashionable to comment as such by the educated elite, however I have yet to see in any of these one sided criticisms any vestige of thought as to what were the alternatives and where would the islands be today if the colonial era not occurred?

Islanders cling to the myth that paradise existed before they were rav aged by the European powers. In the absence of any organised form of educa tion prior to those days, apart from cultural lore, thousands of years of island history have gone largely unrecorded.

Thus it is not generally appreciated that all islands were ravaged by wars and disease, cannibalism was rampant in many islands and the average life

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expectancy perhaps twenty five years.

Some Paradise!

Do Futa and his ilk think that natural evolution, without outside influence, would have taken the islands to the standard of development they have reached today from societies that had not progressed much past the stone age by the beginning of the twentieth century?

Sophisticated societies existed but these were adapted to the needs of the almost total isolation of each island.

He speaks of “the departing masters had stripped their islands bone-dry of resources”; I would have felt the opposite had occurred. Large scale commercial plantations, which have been the backbone of each islands economy since independence, were developed then handed, free of charge, to the indigenous populations.

Perhaps this was not the original intention in developing these plantations and a profit motive was the driving force, yet a profit motive is the basis of the very democracy that the islands are now striving to achieve It has been a sad thing to watch the gradual deterioration of these assets over the post-independence era by mis management of one of the few major available resources.

Infrastructure, educational and health services for all islands were also developed and handed, again free of charge, to the new nations.

The success in continuing progress in these areas by the independent countries

has been much more encouraging than the agricultural achievements but these fields provide little revenue to sustain independence.

I do not propose that the colonial era

was an easy period or that the original intention of the colonial powers was to better the lot of

the indigenes.

Many mistakes

were made along the way and the benefits accrued varied between islands.

The indignity of

being controlled by

another race is also not to be belittled.

However, colonialism must be considered as an oft painful learning process that brought the islands through some one thousand years of development in half a century. I do not think this development could have occurred in any other way. Many, many problems face the newly emergent nations and life has become much more complicated but the islands peoples are now better prepared to face the challenges of the future.

Let us remember colonialism as a learning process, sometimes painful, but then what learning process is not. It was not altogether the evil that it is vogue to think it.

Michael Anderson,

Western Samoa

Futa Helu