Recent crises in Oceania, especially the military coups, civil wars, and armed secession movements in ethnically-diverse Melanesia in the southwest Pacific, have inspired a new wave of criticisms of indigenous regimes and cultures by metropolitan aid donors and security experts. As outside peacekeepers withdrew from Bougainville in 2003, ending its fifteen-year secession dispute with Papua New Guinea (PNG),³

other foreign military and police forces arrived in the war-torn Solomon Islands and publicly displayed their modern weaponry.⁴ Australian Prime Minister John Howard, with support from New Zealand, the United Nations and the Pacific Forum, has vowed “not to fail” his Pacific neighbors, where he says economic collapse, government corruption, and lawlessness require “remedial action.”⁵ Ben Reilly, of the National Centre for Development Studies (NCDS) in Canberra, has said, “we are today witnessing the progressive ‘Africanisation’ of the South Pacific region.”⁶ French geographer François Doumenge has applied that same racial label to Melanesia, which he calls a “black hole,” arguing that violent vendettas are a “distinctive trait” of the dark-skinned Melanesian peoples, which the “Anglo-Saxon” (British and Australian) removal of “colonial constraints” has allowed to resurface: “Order based on positive law is a notion foreign to Melanesian societies.”⁷

What lies behind these polemical, even racist, explanations for real or perceived crises in Melanesia and other Pacific islands? Certainly, one cannot deny the tragic disorder in the Solomon Islands, for example, where a powerless, bankrupt government asked for outside intervention. But there is a long tradition of negatively stereotyping the “tribal” world as unconstrained, animalistic and restless, the opposite of culturally bounded and ordered.⁸

In the mid-nineteenth century, legal scholar Sir Henry Maine wrote that tribes relied on mere kinship for political functions and “occupancy” rights to land, but modern states were founded on territorial sovereignty and individual property ownership.⁹ In 1855, after taking possession of New Caledonia in Melanesia, the French issued a decree that expropriated the lands of the native inhabitants, since the new territory was “not yet occupied by a civilised nation and only possessed by wild tribes. . . .”¹⁰ Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who was quite conscious of African analogies, said Melanesians lacked a sense of history because they had no writing; their oral traditions were social charters, not record-keeping.¹¹ In Africa, the known history of state-building and literacy in the Nile valley was deflected by absorbing Egypt into the antecedents of Western Civilization, thereby beheading the continent and relegating sub-Saharans (an evocative term) to darkness; they supposedly lacked the Hegelian evolution of Spirit from simple familyhood toward statehood.¹² Yet by the 1950s, some scholars were questioning this roaming, timeless, feuding-clan taxonomy of tribal societies. Isaac Schapera's comparative study of four southern African societies argued that European expansion had heightened their sense of political borders, but that they already had a sense of “locality” in addition to kinship. They had corporate land rights and governments, that is, communal decision-making that maintained both internal cooperation and external independence. Chiefs embodied tribal unity as activity organizers, diplomats and judges, but they respected the consensus decisions of customary advisory councils. Tribes could also assimilate non-kin client groups and grew more structurally complex with increased scale.¹³

In the 1960s, Lucy Mair applied Schapera's criteria for “primitive government” to east African case studies. Borrowing from the work of other scholars of Africa, she added that government did not necessarily mean statehood, that political systems existed even in small-scale, technologically simple societies, and that tribes were nations, in the sense of sharing common languages and territories if not always ruling elites. She also criticized British indirect rule policies that purported to enlist traditional leaders: “In some places, new positions of authority were created, and individuals enabled to dominate their fellows in ways that would earlier have been out of the question, while in others it was necessary first of all to reduce the power of existing rulers and then to seek to have them use it to new ends and through differently chosen instruments.”¹⁴

The traveling District Officer (note the quasi-nomadic mode) linked local African societies and the colonial government. He kept order, collected taxes and recruited labor through “civil service chiefs” in accordance with “the traditional way of life that their European rulers made,”¹⁵ a telling phrase. As Africans gained political independence without previous experience in running the central administration, they faced daunting tasks “never contemplated before the colonial era”¹⁶: “Now we are told that the recognition of traditional authority was a mistake from the first, that it supported the influences which are most opposed to necessary changes, and that it entrenched the sentiments of ‘tribal’ separatism which are proving disruptive in some of the new African states.”¹⁷ Forty years later, Mahmoud Mamdani agrees that colonial rule actually reified rural African ethnic identities for cheaper and easier administrative control, making it harder for multi-ethnic states to maintain stability within artificially imposed borders.¹⁸

Ian Downs described a similar dilemma in Australian-ruled PNG in the 1950s and 1960s. France, Belgium and the Netherlands, he said, directly “assimilated” some natives into educated administrative elites, undermining the “traditional institutions necessary for social cohesion” while alienating the trained cadres from their own people. Britain and its settler surrogates, however, preferred to push “traditional society up from below by working through tribal institutions and developing local government bodies that become part of the democratic political system.”¹⁹

Downs noted that this approach was transferred from Africa to PNG after World War II, as embodied in “native village councils” through which “The people had to be assisted to a condition where they could pay for their own social services and assume increasing responsibility in the management of their own affairs.”²⁰ But this one-size-fits-all approach, he said, did have problems. First, Australian patrol officers, who were used to having direct military command over appointed village constables or headmen, found it awkward to train indigenous councils “to carry out various functions additional to those they had traditionally exercised in their own society.” Second, the great number and linguistic diversity of indigenous societies meant that only those large enough and already involved in the cash economy could pay the necessary taxes to support the new councils and their activities, while others remained under patrol officer fiat. Third, such councils had only advisory powers, and in any case their only access to the central government remained the patrol officer, thus limiting the development of effectively democratic institutions. After 1963, Territories Minister Charles Barnes prioritized local economic development but resented indigenous nationalists who criticized the powerful influence of Australian businessmen in PNG. Barnes regarded the native village councils “as an alternative to participation in the central government.”²¹ African scholar Ali Mazrui visited PNG in 1970 before its independence and harshly criticized the Australians for failing to provide a more integrated political infrastructure that would encourage the formation of a national identity.²²

Mair had noted that British colonial projects of economic development and “good government” tended to serve outsider interests more than indigenous needs, because the “duty to impose” civilization wound up “overruling opposition.”²³

Downs admitted that generically conceived local advisory councils, which still had to follow the directives of the central administration, were “not a successful preparation for those wishing to take part in parliamentary government.”²⁴ As for “postcolonial” relations, the nagging tension between alien notions of civilization and bureaucratized village “traditions” continues. Arturo Escobar argues that Western-derived economic development theories, which outside powers and lending institutions routinely prescribe for the Third World, usually require that local traditions must change or be abolished to make way for modernization. The latter frequently translates into intimidation by multinational corporations, whose bottom line is calculated in profit margins for foreign stockholders, much as colonial enterprises extracted economic surpluses instead of reinvesting them locally. Such neo-colonial structures thus tend to perpetuate the trade disadvantages of exporting primary products, and often generate new ills: aid dependency, debt crises, austerity budgets, social disruption, and political instability as client elites cling to power: “Whatever these traditional ways might have been, and without idealizing them, it is true that massive poverty in the modern sense appeared only when the spread of the market economy broke down community ties and deprived millions of people from access to land, water, and other resources.”²⁵ In fact, the culturally encoded discourse of development can be traced historically back to traumatic upheavals in Western Europe that began with “the expulsion of peasants and serfs from the land and the creation of a proletarian class.”²⁶ Thus civilizing missions, or modernization/development, in unhappy combination with colonially frozen “traditions,” may well undermine, not strengthen, ex-colonies.

In short, ahistorical analyses that blame serious problems in Africa and the Pacific only on essentialist images of primordial ethnic tensions or traditional customs, without taking into account the structural changes caused by colonialism and its aftermath, sound suspiciously self-serving and raise questions about deeper outsider agendas. This essay will re-examine the rhetoric of “Africanization” in two ways, first by looking at the Afro-Pessimism vs. Afro-Optimism debate about that troubled continent and the transfer of the former to the Pacific, and then by addressing more subversive forms of “Africanization” that affected anticolonial Pacific intellectuals, with a particular emphasis on Melanesia and France's claim of success in New Caledonia. In conclusion, I will question the presumed causation of “Africanization” in the Pacific by putting it in broader context and arguing that it is ultimately an orientalist discourse, whose negative, timeless imaging of “others” is still being used to justify metropolitan hegemonies. Edward Said regards orientalism as a discourse for “dealing with the Orient [Third World] by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient . . . politically, sociologically, scientifically, and imaginatively. . . .”²⁷

The Ever-Dark Continent?

The recent alarms over disorder in Melanesia have a powerful precedent in negative media coverage of post-independence problems in Africa. In 1994, Robert Kaplan's essay in The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Coming Anarchy,” highlighted civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone that seemed about to destroy the very states that rival factions sought to control. He also added to his apocalyptic vision environmental crises such as droughts and exploding populations of ignorant poor, concluding that Africa was a “dying region” where inter-communal conflict was so brutal that desperate people found “war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down.”²⁸

In May 2000, The Economist again read the ongoing wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone as proof that Africa was a hopeless basket case. While acknowledging the disruptive impacts of the slave trade, European colonialism, and Cold War rivalry, African correspondent Richard Dowden blamed the continent's harsh natural environment, its traditional small-scale societies that were supposedly geared toward survival rather than development, and a systemic loss of self-confidence and the ability to trust one other. The result, he said, was “shell states,” where exploitative elites behaved one way toward outside aid donors and investors and another toward their constituencies, favoring their personal and family fortunes over the rest of the country. Dowden concluded that colonial rule had simply not lasted long enough to instill new ways of life or stable governance.²⁹ Robert Jackson has called many African regimes “quasi-states” that are sovereign in the juridical sense but otherwise so weak that the international community has to subsidize them and even intervene to keep order. He recommended more options for decolonization, “including more intrusive forms of international trusteeship.”³⁰ Many African writers have also criticized their post-colonial regimes, which George Ayittey labels “kleptocracies” that have betrayed their consensual indigenous traditions.³¹

In response to such “Afro-Pessimism,” other authors have argued that independence in Africa was not in itself to blame for all the coups, civil wars, debts, and poverty, and that the media often overlook signs of progress in order to sell sensational news stories. In 1998, David Gordon and Howard Wolpe wrote about the “Other Africa,” where half of its over fifty states were conducting multi-party elections and had economic growth rates at least double the rate of population increase. They pointed out that continent-wide improvements in health care had reduced infant mortality and increased life expectancy, despite the threat of AIDS, and that many countries were making noticeable transitions from instability and underdevelopment toward peace and economic dynamism (with high returns for foreign investors). These authors added that ethnic conflict in Africa was not necessarily primordial but rather reshaped by colonial transformations and Cold War support for one faction against another: “People do not fight because they are different but because they want the same things.”³²

The New African also attacked racist media coverage for perpetuating self-serving stereotypes and for generalizing about an entire region on the basis of selected trouble spots.³³

In 2003, a collection of articles called Afro-Optimism assembled several arguments against the frequent disempowering images of postcolonial Africa, which editor Ebere Onwudiwe said only perpetuated its inability to negotiate better relations with the outside world. He argued that African countries inherited unfavorable structural constraints from colonialism, which had not developed democratic processes, had taken out the economic surplus through monopolistic practices, had promoted raw material exports to the neglect of both manufacturing and food production, had suppressed the growth of a competitive middle class that might develop a national consciousness, and had imposed political borders that did not fit indigenous cultural realities. Nor could the small, educated elites left in charge generate the same level of revenue as their colonial predecessors, who had exploited forced or poorly paid native labor.³⁴

Education for real development, as opposed to extracting surplus, constituted a substantial financial burden and required time, and foreign aid came with tight conditions. The Cold War pressured or eliminated African nationalists and “encouraged bloody surrogate wars, introduced military coups, and propped up local military and civilian dictatorships.”³⁵ The flip-side of The Economist's “shell states” was that most African leaders had to serve “double constituencies”: outside powers and their own peoples, who suffered or rebelled when lenders forced regimes to cut government programs and obey the “free” market.

In spite of such daunting difficulties, contributors to Afro-Optimism pointed out that African traditions of kinship and communalism often serve the needs of everyday people better than artificial states do. Such resilient, dynamic solidarities engage in peaceful, constructive projects from money lending to starting schools, like informal corporations. African music, cinema, visual arts, and literature continue to flourish, and local-level democracy often endures despite state autocracy. Improvements in local economic development, communications, health, and scientific research in agriculture and against diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, and river blindness receive little media coverage to balance the trope of tragedy. In Ali Mazrui's chapter, “Afrenaissance,” he accuses the Western media of having a double standard: it treated Solidarity in Poland as heroic, not destabilizing, while the restraint shown by the victorious Rwanda Patriotic Front in 1994, in spite of the genocide waged by their ethnic rivals, was overlooked because it did not fit the African image.³⁶

Fantu Cheru, in his book African Renaissance, points to a “silent revolution” of democratization from below, where a whole range of voluntary associations such as labor unions, farmers, women's groups, human rights advocates, and environmentalists have resorted to boycotts, non-payment of taxes, peasant insurrections, and urban riots to resist autocratic regimes. Even in near-stateless Somalia,³⁷ local communities have created their own participatory governance and safer commercial climates, and across Africa thriving informal economies have seceded from the “national” audit books in order to pursue essential grassroots needs.³⁸

What emerges from these competing discourses is a spectrum of interpretations, ranging from harsh judgments based on outsider expectations and on indigenous frustrations with the results of imposed structures, to assertions of grassroots African agency despite the odds. Africa is after all the second largest continent, with over fifty countries and countless language and ethnic groups, so that generalizing either way risks ignoring that some regimes have turned brutal or disintegrated while others have instead been stable for two generations and even made the peaceful transition to multi-party democracy. Measuring success in terms of per capita income or “national” accounting often elides the surviving subsistence sector and the capacity of ordinary Africans to organize themselves, from squatter camps to informal enterprises. Outsider stereotypes of Africans lend themselves all too easily to ahistorical views about their propensity for government corruption and ethnic violence, while defensive responses acknowledge the serious crises caused by wars and droughts but also raise fundamental questions about the ideological lenses through which Africa is analyzed, and stand by the right of African peoples to self-determination. Valentin Mudimbe has challenged the negative Western “invention of Africa” for imperial purposes, and Achille Mbembe has attacked the image of “absolute otherness” assigned to Africa, arguing that apocalyptic images like Kaplan's are really dogmatic propaganda for social engineering that suppress “what African agents accept as reasons for acting. . . .”³⁹

Africa in the Pacific?

When Spanish explorers named New Guinea in the mid-1500s, they had in mind an older Guinea, the coast of West Africa, where the native people also had dark skin and fuzzy hair. It was a term laden with the moral darkness of the slave trade, and the myth of racial inferiority that supposedly justified such inhuman commerce.⁴⁰

Moreover, the small-scale societies with innumerable languages in Melanesia appeared to Europeans to be warlike cannibals and headhunters, not at all like the seductive Polynesian “noble savages,” another figment of the European imagination.⁴¹ Western Melanesia even had deadly malaria, which had made of West Africa a “white man's graveyard.” Both areas were colonized during the late nineteenth-century “scramble” for imperial real estate, and both would decolonize about a century later, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Africa and Melanesia both had valuable forests, minerals, and farmlands to exploit with cheap indigenous labor, and the political borders drawn by European colonizers were just as arbitrary in both regions, creating multi-ethnic territories where mixtures of coercion and collaboration simulated “persuasive” hegemony.⁴² Donald Denoon has shown well that Australian rulers in PNG “often saw Melanesian affairs through an African lens.” In fact, the colonizers of Aborigines and New Guineans felt such an affinity for the white settlers in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya that administrators of these so-called “sisters of the south” repeatedly drew purported analogies between their regions and consulted with each other about how to rule black natives.⁴³

Given such parallels and connections, it is perhaps unsurprising that recent analyses should compare Africa and Melanesia. Although the latter comprises only half a dozen small island countries compared to the vastness of Africa, the total populations and land areas in Melanesia actually dwarf the rest of Oceania (Polynesia and Micronesia⁴⁴

), so that statistically speaking, whatever happens there affects the vast majority of Pacific Islanders. Still, extending Melanesian data to the rest of the Pacific is problematic, given the region's diversity of indigenous cultural traditions and colonial experiences. Greg Fry has shown that Australian doomsday warnings about the South Pacific are traceable back to nineteenth-century attitudes about their regional “backyard” that resembled the United States myth of Manifest Destiny or the Monroe Doctrine. Negative Australian media representations of their Oceanian neighbors are often biased by worries about their own ex-colony, PNG: “It reflects a perception of the Melanesian countries writ large to cover all island countries of the Forum region.”⁴⁵ Fry criticizes the belittling “hole in the Asia-Pacific doughnut” image of Oceania as a long-standing metropolitan exercise in framing that is intended “to shape the lives of the people so bounded” and to set them up “for outcomes not of their making.”⁴⁶

As in Africa, doomsdayism soon followed self-government in Oceania, though according to its critics it was less justified. Fry and others especially attacked the Pacific 2010 publications from the NCDS in Canberra in the early 1990s.⁴⁷

A favorite target of complaint was journalist Rowan Callick's lead essay in the first volume, which portrayed a worst case “scenario” that claimed to be based on the data in the scholarly demographic chapters that followed. Callick predicted that by 2010, soaring island populations would drive up education costs and urban unemployment while opportunities for out-migration as a safety valve would dwindle. Given the limited land and resource bases of most Pacific island countries, ever-higher taxation, malnutrition, crime, drugs, AIDS, and environmental degradation would ensue, and the wealth and power gap between elites and others would increase, risking instability. Callick concluded that economic self-reliance was no longer an option, since Pacific countries needed to attract investment and aid from abroad. To do that competitively in the post-Cold War era, they had to reform by eliminating indigenous communal and chiefly traditions “to make room for people with special talents, especially to do business profitably.”⁴⁸ Besides economic restructuring, he said, family planning and switching to biodegradable packaging would also help to avoid this apocalypse.⁴⁹

In a special review forum in The Contemporary Pacific, three scholars criticized the first Pacific 2010 book, as had island leaders at the regional Pacific Forum.⁵⁰

Two said that serious readers should skip Callick's scenario and Ken Gannicott's more data-grounded overview that followed, and proceed to the volume's more balanced demographic case studies. Peter Pirie argued that Oceanian fertility rates were not only not alarming (2.2 percent) but actually declining gradually, that the highest rates were in western Melanesia which had a lower population density per land size and more diverse resources, that aid flows would likely continue, and that therefore most Pacific island countries would remain at the top end of the developing world. Geoffrey Hayes attacked what he regarded as the book's agenda, namely to scare leaders to adopt the World Bank's restructuring ideology, which he regarded as already outmoded, while Michael Levin raised the issue that subsistence production was not counted in the book's calculations, noting that many islanders were still part-time target workers in the cash economy. Pacific 2010 editor Rodney Cole responded by saying that the series was intended to alert indigenous leaders that they needed to develop “appropriate domestic policies.” More studies would follow, he said, that would address urbanization, women and education, health, the environment, and agriculture. Cole said Pacific island professionals had voiced real concern when presented with the NCDS findings. Whether expressing alarm over alarming predictions makes those predictions valid is questionable, but it is undeniable that problems of corruption, growing populations, and economic limitations do exist, as do postcolonial political crises in PNG, Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia.

As early as 1998, economist Oskar Kurer, who taught at the University of Papua New Guinea, warned that PNG risked catching “the African malaise”: low levels of economic growth combined with poor performance by a corrupt public sector.⁵¹

Then, in 2000, Reilly, again of the NCDS, resurrected the specter of doomsday. In an Asian Wall Street Journal article,⁵² he warned that the “chaotic” South Pacific was under threat from criminal gangs engaged in drug smuggling, money-laundering, and other schemes in its offshore banks, because metropolitan powers were not doing their police duty. His academic essay, “The Africanisation of the South Pacific,” claimed that the entire region was changing from an “oasis of democracy” into an “arc of instability.” He said that the region's three largest countries, all in Melanesia (PNG, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands), were now ruled by “governments installed by the bullet rather than the ballot” or were at least politically unstable, and the economic performance of the region was “sub-standard.” By “Africanization” he meant (a) rising tensions between military and civilian leaders, (b) ethnic conflict over resources, (c) weakening governance institutions, and (d) use of the state apparatus to gain wealth. He likened the expulsion of white settlers and South Asians from various African countries to Fiji's anti-Indian coups in 1987 and 2000 and blamed African-like inter-communal conflicts in Melanesia on “ethnic entrepreneurs,” linking them to the struggles over land and resources. Referring to the Westminster-style votes of no confidence that plagued PNG's Parliament and the consequent prevalence of local over national loyalty, Reilly asserted, “As in Africa, the democratic institutions of most South Pacific states were inherited from colonial powers rather than generated by or designed for the conditions that faced the newly independent countries themselves.”⁵³

As with previous doomsday warnings, the “Africanization” thesis drew criticisms. Stewart Firth of the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji, agreed that the “myth of the peaceful South Pacific was finally laid to rest in the year 2000,” due to coups in Fiji and the Solomons, while PNG suffered an army mutiny over downsizing and bloody antiprivatization street demonstrations. He also admitted that the Pacific Forum lacked the practical means to address such instability, but he disagreed with Reilly's application of the “Africanization” argument to all of Oceania, saying said that deeper historical issues lie behind surface ethnic conflicts in Melanesia, and that overall, Pacific island countries rank higher than African states in per capita GDP, literacy, health care, and other socioeconomic indicators. Firth argued that globalization, particularly in the form of pressures to privatize and restructure as the World Bank and other lenders insisted, was a broader issue that needed consideration, as the riots in PNG demonstrated.⁵⁴

Reilly responded by defending his “Africanization” thesis, using primarily PNG as an example of African-style corruption, instability, and weak economic performance, and arguing that the most recent United Nations Human Development Report ranked PNG and Fiji below some African countries, while other Pacific island states lacked reliable data.⁵⁵

A more extensive criticism came from Jon Fraenkel, who like Firth was a faculty member at USP. Fraenkel said that Reilly's articles were contemporaneous with other Australian media analogies between Melanesian and African troubles and with The Economist's “Hopeless Africa” issue, suggesting a broader metropolitan discourse. Fraenkel attacked Reilly's argument as weak, inconsistent, and empirically flawed and argued that the “Africanization” label “does little to advance our understanding of the causes of recent Pacific crises and is therefore unlikely to generate effective policy responses.”⁵⁶

He reasserted the lack of quantifiable data on subsistence sectors, which were “relatively strong” on the larger Melanesia islands and said that crisis-plagued African countries “performed considerably worse, in all respects, than their Pacific counterparts.”⁵⁷ He also critiqued Reilly's use of standard World Bank formulae about what combined factors constitute high risk in developing countries and cited Pacific examples to show that such Malthusian “laws” of dysfunction cannot cover all cases. Moreover, Fraenkel argued, compared to even the most troubled Melanesian states, “Africa's coups, insurrections and insurgencies have, for several reasons, been far more ruthless and military regimes have proved far more durable,”⁵⁸ because of the ready availability of Cold War arms and African refugee diasporas right across the border. In fact, Melanesia has so many small traditional societies that it was not old ethnic grudges but new economic migrations from New Guinea to Bougainville or from Malaita to Guadalcanal that helped fuel its conflicts.

Fraenkel concluded that the points where African and Pacific data intersect “refer to phenomena that have also been identified in many other parts of the world.”⁵⁹

The same could be said of Kaplan's “coming anarchy” essay, which ranged from Africa across trouble spots in Latin America, Bosnia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and South Asia. Even The Economist's “Hopeless Africa” issue included a host of crisis stories about Northern Ireland, Latin America, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, not to mention the clamor from eastern Europeans to join the European Union. And Reilly's notion of “ethnic entrepreneurship” brings to mind his own government's controversial “Pacific solution” of redirecting Asian refugees from Australia to poor Oceanian states.⁶⁰ Banaban scholar Teresia Teaiwa, formerly at USP and now at Victoria University in New Zealand, has challenged Reilly's presumption that Oceania was an “oasis of democracy” before 2000, given indigenous struggles over the past generation for independence in such places as New Caledonia, West Papua, and East Timor, or for “free association” in Belau despite the death by bullets of its first two presidents, who came under enormous U.S. pressure to remove an antinuclear clause from its constitution. The postcolonial military coups in Fiji in 1987 also demonstrated Reilly's “short sense of history.”⁶¹

New Caledonia: Candle in the Dark?

Lest we regard the “Africanization” debate as a conflict of interpretations among a few academics at NCDS in Canberra and USP in Fiji, the most sensationalist diatribe has been François Doumenge's portrayal of French-ruled New Caledonia as an exceptional success story in what he regards as the “black hole” of Melanesia. He defines “Africanization” as “the unmasterable anarchy rooted in ethno-cultural conflict, induced by decolonizations, in the same way that black Africa has revealed since 1960.”⁶²

As early as 1990, he was calling the independence of the South Pacific a “myth,” not only because of the perpetual need by small island states of outside financial aid but also because of the ethnic tensions revealed by secessionism in Vanuatu in 1980 and the coups in Fiji in 1987. He blamed antinuclear activism by Pacific Protestant churches and Australian and New Zealand labor unions for seducing indigenous Kanak anticolonialists in the 1980s into believing the false promises of Third World liberation ideologies.⁶³ Like other French academic commentators,⁶⁴ Doumenge saw opposition to French rule (and nuclear testing) in the Pacific as primarily “imperialist competition” from Anglo-Saxon rivals such as Australia and New Zealand. The Pacific Forum, he said, tried to neutralize French and American influence, but the presence of those powers was really the most effective “safeguard of the future” to prevent island paradises from becoming “real hells.”⁶⁵ In his “black hole” article he blamed thirty years of the Pacific Way for unleashing “uncontrollable violence” in Melanesia.⁶⁶ Local cargo cultists wanted the wealth that whites had, he said, and government corruption, criminal gangs, and clan vendettas followed the all-too-hasty decolonizations by Britain and Australia in the 1970s. What else could one expect from the descendants of “headhunters”?⁶⁷

Given Doumenge's attack on “Anglo-Saxon” conspirators and decolonizers, let us examine what he says about France's role in New Caledonia. “French colonization having been conducted according to republican norms,” he says, “the ‘assimilation’ of the indigenous Melanesians has always been the assigned goal, even in distant terms.”⁶⁸

This contrasted, he suggested, with the “Anglo-Saxon” practice of giving more autonomy to traditional leaders, which produced divided development among ethnic groups. His view clearly contrasts with Downs' judgment on the relative merits of French and British colonial policies, though it does echo the criticisms voiced by Mair and others of indirect rule. It should, however, be noted that in actual practice, metropolitan French rhetoric about assimilation was rarely followed up with action in the field as much as was another idea—“association”—which more closely resembled stated British policy.⁶⁹ Doumenge cites New Zealander Ron Crocombe's The South Pacific, which calls France “at times the most progressive colonial power in the Pacific,” because it gave equal citizenship rights to all its overseas subjects after World War II and “by 1957 had given its territories more autonomy than anywhere else in the Pacific except Tonga.”⁷⁰ It is quite true that Paris granted considerable self-government to its colonial territories in the 1950s, and even full independence to most of its African colonies in 1960, but Doumenge admits cryptically, “in the years 1970–80, it was not a possibility that France could envision the end of its presence in New Caledonia.”⁷¹ What he omits is what happened in between the 1950s and 1970s, namely that Charles De Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and over the next decade withdrew the autonomy that Paris had already granted to New Caledonia, causing radicals to begin demanding independence in 1969.⁷² Instead, Doumenge jumps ahead to 1998, when the Noumea Accord began to give the territory gradual autonomy, again, while postponing the independence issue for another generation.

Doumenge does mention the violent 1980s in New Caledonia, what the French call the “Events,” but he blames them on French Socialist encouragement of misguided Kanak hopes and distorted media coverage, downplaying the number of deaths (about fifty, mostly Kanak). This understated “blip” in his French success story is followed by vaunting the much higher per capita income that New Caledonia enjoys compared to its Melanesian neighbors, progress in land reform, the example set for Kanak by white settler enterprise, the recent expansion of nickel mining projects in the Kanak-run north and the settler-dominated south of the main island of Grande Terre, the ending of “ethnic ghettoes” in the capital in response to conflicts between native Kanak and immigrant Polynesians from Wallis and Futuna, and the pressure the local loyalists exert on pro-independence parties through a coalition with Kanak moderates.⁷³

What Doumenge supports is “durable reconciliation” through a high living standard for everyone that promotes a version of the Pacific Way in which “negotiation substitutes for violence.” France must remain in New Caledonia as the “indispensable arbiter” and economic developer, he argues, to ensure that its ethnic groups can achieve harmony “by a homogenization of styles and standards of living.”⁷⁴ In his last sentence he repeats his assimilationist sermon, recommending a “generalized hybridization (métissage) of people and convivial values which is very advanced in French Polynesia and must be the goal to attain in New Caledonia.”⁷⁵

It is clear that to Doumenge and other French academics, the leftist side of “republican order” was to be discouraged in New Caledonia, as was meddling by French metropolitan Socialists, even though they, not the Gaullists, negotiated both peace accords in 1988 and 1998 (and had granted autonomy in 1957). Doumenge, like the proponents of la mission civilisatrice in the nineteenth century, sees economic and cultural assimilation as the path to peace and stability even though two-thirds of New Caledonia's inhabitants are not of European descent. Not only does he squirm around the 1980s, when destabilizing conflict in New Caledonia attracted so much media concern in the region, as did nuclear testing in French Polynesia, but his triumphalist discourse attempts to minimize serious problems. These include the killings between indigenous Kanak and immigrant Wallisians in the St. Louis community, the mass street demonstrations against the INCO mining project in the south (which will pay the province and territory only ten percent of its revenues in exchange for prime nickel deposits at Goro/Prony⁷⁶

), and the unfulfilled provisions of the 1998 Noumea Accord that proposed a new local citizenship, preference for locals in hiring, and the limitation of voting on important issues to long-term residents. Kanak pro-independence parties have also expressed frustration at the dominant loyalist coalition's lack of collegiality, even though the Noumea Accord proposed they work together toward a common destiny.⁷⁷ Doumenge's plea for exceptionalism for New Caledonia in his “black hole” essay is consistent with the Afro-Pessimism, doomsday, and Africanization theses of other metropolitans, because it displaces concern away from the hegemonic agendas of outsiders and toward the presumed incompetence of indigenous others in the modern world. Kanak critics of his “black hole” article wrote a scathing rejoinder in the same magazine, calling Doumenge “the last white hole in Oceanian university research.”⁷⁸

Subversive “Africanization”

Australian and French discourses about the “Africanization” of the Pacific neglect an alternative connection between the two regions, one that has long contested outsider “social engineering”. Interviews with Kanak and Caledonian anticolonialists of the 1969 generation show that they were profoundly influenced, as university students in France, by liberation ideologies of the 1960s, whether leftist or Third Worldist. Such ideas also affected other Melanesian independence leaders in the region, and despite the supposed defeat of those “mythic” ideologies (Doumenge's words in 1990, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall), some of their critiques and feelings of solidarity are worthy of memory in the current age of globalization-from-above. They offer more indigenous voices to the conversations discussed so far regarding the problems facing the small countries of Oceania, most notably those in Melanesia. And they show that African analogies, from the perspective of indigenous supporters of decolonization, were not necessarily negative. Tom Mboya of Kenya, for example, visited PNG in 1964 and proclaimed that Africans and Melanesians were brothers in their struggle against colonial rule; he apparently impressed even Australian Territories Minister Barnes. Eight years later, PNG Minister of Education Ebia Olewale expressed his admiration for Kwame Nkrumah for having promoted national unity in Ghana, and for Julius Nyerere of Tanzania for his policy of non-alignment in the Cold War.⁷⁹

As we have seen, French scholars like to accuse the British, and their Australian and New Zealander surrogates, of “inflicting” independence on their Pacific colonies after World War II.⁸⁰

In fact, “Anglo-Saxon” scholars of decolonization in the region tend to agree that the Anglophone colonizers of the South Pacific often wanted independence more than the indigenous peoples did.⁸¹ Britain emerged from the Second World War weakened and indebted and decided to cut costs and pull out “east of Suez,” especially after the independence of India in 1947 and the loss of the Suez Canal to Egypt in 1956.⁸² But France, which had relied on colonial support of De Gaulle's exile government during World War II, chose to grant political rights to its overseas colonies and integrate them into a revived French republic.⁸³ Meanwhile, the United States would impose “strategic denial” and “free association” on its Micronesian territories in the northern Pacific during the Cold War.⁸⁴ The Anglophone South Pacific territories ruled by Britain, Australia, or New Zealand did decolonize primarily through peaceful negotiation and joined the British Commonwealth,⁸⁵ but this juridical generalization should not erase indigenous agency, even if it often appeared at first simply as the “localization” of colonial administrations.

In the 1960s, Britain gave increasing development aid and self-government to the Solomon Islands, yet also transferred to the colony many colonial officials from Africa. Educated Solomon Islanders soon published a local paper called the Kakamora Reporter, which regularly criticized the paternalistic attitudes and policies of this “Africa Corps.” Calls for independence came mainly from “a handful of tertiary graduates and university students and most of these were whisked into public service after their studies.”⁸⁶

The British introduced into the 1970 constitution a consensus system, which was based on African anthropology, and it was supported by Malaitan leader Peter Kenilorea as more Melanesian than divisive party politics. But by 1974 criticism from Solomon Mamaloni and other elected leaders caused the adoption of the Westminster system which, Warren Paia hinted, contributed to the lack of united, stable leadership.⁸⁷ If extending a generic form of consensus to the national level proved problematic, the lack of political parties and consequent coalition-building among individual district bosses had some merit in a population where the literacy rate was only about twenty percent. Solomon Islander workers also formed labor unions, led by some future politicians such as Bart Ulufa‘alu, and there was also a degree of continuity between the leaders of the post-war Maasina Rule self-government movement, 3000 of whose members had been arrested by late 1950, and the generation of politicians that achieved independence in 1978.

Jonathan Fifi‘i, for example, recalled the encounter between Solomon Islanders and African-American troops during World War II as a consciousness-raising experience. The mission schools had taught his people only to preach the gospel or to work as clerks in British colonial offices, but the African-American soldiers brought a new perspective: “We saw from the way other black people lived, when they came during the war, that we were being treated like dirt. They were being treated as equals.”⁸⁸

Ironically, the U.S. army was still segregated in World War II, but black troops assigned to support duties often appeared to Melanesians like true “big men” who had supplies to distribute to earn respect. “When we made our demands in Maasina Rule,” Fifi‘i said, “things started to change. If we hadn't fought to win power for our side, it might still be the same.” He served in his country's elected legislature from 1968–1980 and as a cabinet minister, advocating the return of native lands and respect for customary law. He traveled widely, including to Africa, seeking models for self-government. By the 1980s, however, he concluded, “What we have now is what's called ‘neo-colonialism.’”⁸⁹

Nkrumah, who led the first black African country (Ghana) to independence in 1957, coined the term neo-colonialism, which he defined as nominal independence while the economy (and thus much political decision-making) is still directed essentially from the outside.⁹⁰

Michael Somare of PNG's Pangu Pati visited Ghana and former British colonies in East Africa in the late 1960s and appreciated the danger that Nkrumah had described. He said it was “inspiring to visit black countries where people managed their own affairs. It was clear that the British had trained many more Africans than the Australians had trained Papua New Guineans.” He noted that, “Many of the African politicians, civil servants and academics we met clearly thought that we had not been fighting hard enough for our independence. . . . I made up my mind that, next time, Papua New Guinea would show a more progressive face to our African friends and that we would be worthy to stand next to countries that had produced Nyerere, Kaunda, Mboya, and Nkrumah.”⁹¹ Somare suggested that Pangu's party name was inspired by the Kenyan party names Kanu and Kadu.⁹² For further inspiration, he read Mboya's book, Freedom and After, while visiting the United States, where he met both poor and middle class African-Americans and was surprised to find that he was accepted more readily by white Americans than African-Americans were. He came home thankful that Melanesians were the vast majority in PNG.⁹³ When he became Chief Minister of his country, he vowed to avoid neo-colonialism and to nurture contacts between PNG and the Afro-Caribbean bloc in the Commonwealth.⁹⁴ The Eight-Point Plan of development that his new government proposed was regarded as “Tanzanian” in thinking because it was anti-elitist and rural-oriented. In fact, it was inspired in part by the 1972 Waigani Seminar at the University of Papua New Guinea, where speakers with African experience such as René Dumont had warned young Melanesian intellectuals against the pitfalls of copying Western models.⁹⁵

Another link between African intellectuals and those of PNG was the writing course that Ulli Beier taught at the University of PNG beginning in 1967. Beier and his wife Georgina had worked at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where they played a similar role in creating a climate in which indigenous writers and artists could express their feelings about drastic cultural change, racial discrimination and anticolonialism. Their home became a meeting place for Western-educated young intellectuals who felt a loss of identity.⁹⁶

John Waiko went on to write an African history M.A. thesis in London that compared religious anticolonial resistance in Africa with that in his own country.⁹⁷ After becoming a historian at University of Papua New Guinea, Waiko wrote his own history of the country, which takes issue with the simplistic idea of outsider-driven independence. He argues that Pangu Pati's success in the 1968 House of Assembly election “hastened the process of political decolonisation.”⁹⁸ Despite a proposal to create a “homegrown” power-sharing system in the cabinet (which Waiko implies could have resembled grassroots consensus), Pangu pushed for the Westminster system, whose votes of no confidence in a country of extreme cultural diversity (with 700 languages) have caused problems of continuity in coalition governments, just as in the Solomons. Moreover, the economic development of PNG's mineral and forest resources have led to disruptive social and cultural change, creating new identity formations, urban drift without traditional values, and new class divisions between the elite and the masses which encouraged corruption. The negative effects of transnational mining corporations, as on Bougainville, are especially destabilizing, Waiko says, and rising popular frustration over incomplete modernization is mitigated only partly by the continuing strength of the subsistence sector for the rural majority.

A key figure who bridged the civil servant route that Somare followed and the young intellectual writings and art encouraged by the Beiers was Albert Maori Kiki, who used Ulli Beier's tape machine and editing to write his autobiography.⁹⁹

Beier said that Kiki reminded him strongly of the charismatic Ezekiel Mphahlele, a South African then in exile in Nigeria. Like his fellow Pangu founder Somare, Kiki had risen up through the public service, frequently clashing with his superiors over discriminatory rank, wages, and housing for indigenous workers. He attributed the decline in cultural traditions to the missionaries (whose religious message he had never accepted in school, where he was beaten when his own parents did not attend church) and to colonial taxation that forced young men to migrate to earn low wages. While training in medicine in Port Moresby, he saw a documentary about community development work in Nigeria: “that film really inspired me.”¹⁰⁰ He wrote a letter to his cousin, promising that when he returned home, “I was not going to let things continue in the old rut.” While studying pathology in Fiji, he made friends with both native Fijians and Indians and found more freedom to circulate without racial segregation than in Moresby: “My trip to Fiji changed many things for me. For the first time I had the possibility to compare.”¹⁰¹ Ultimately, he concluded that in Australian-ruled PNG, “it was the exclusive policy of white supremacy that was creating deep dissatisfaction and was in fact stimulating the development of New Guinean nationalism.”¹⁰² He unsuccessfully supported a presidential system for PNG to maintain political unity; unsurprisingly, the Australian press labeled the first secession movement, at Buka on Bougainville in 1962, a “Little Katanga.”¹⁰³

John Kasaipwalova had already become radicalized at Queensland University in Australia, and his poem “Reluctant Flame” is often cited as the most overtly political composition of the Beier group, as in this excerpt against cultural neo-colonialism:

Leo Hannett had been expelled from a seminary and wrote anticolonial plays and short stories. He also helped to found a Black Power group at University of Papua New Guinea that drew inspiration from Stokely Carmichael, the African-American black nationalist who later befriended Nkrumah. The group admitted that it was small, but vowed to act as a catalyst and submitted a paper to one of the United Nations visiting missions that urged Australia to grant PNG independence. The Black Power group was particularly critical of the neo-colonial PNG elite that was content with “exchanging the white political actors with black ones and letting them play the same game within unchanged political machinery . . .”¹⁰⁵

It said that Papua New Guineans needed to overcome their colonized inferiority complex and take more pride in their own heritage, which included a fundamental sense of brotherhood and animistic respect for interdependence. Hannett and others complained about racial discrimination in hiring, salaries, housing rents, and bank loans and insisted on an all-black House of Assembly by 1972, universal education, the nationalization of natural resources, and control over foreign investors. They expressed solidarity with other liberation movements of the day and argued, “Freedom is never given freely, it must be fought for and wrenched from the oppressors.”¹⁰⁶

Some intellectuals tried to articulate a “Melanesian Way” or “Melanesian Socialism” to suggest a third, communalist path between colonial capitalism and Soviet Marxism, much as Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Leopold Senghor grappled with notions of the African Personality, African socialism, or Pan-Africanism.¹⁰⁷

The Pacific Way that Doumenge mocked in his “black hole” article was coined in 1970 by Fijian Prime Minister Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara in his post-independence speech at the United Nations. It suggested a regional identity that emphasized a consensual approach to negotiating issues, which he said drew from indigenous traditions. To make this idea more concrete, Mara also helped to found the annual Pacific Forum of regional leaders.¹⁰⁸ Bernard Narokobi of PNG wrote a series of newspaper essays from 1976–1978 advocating a Melanesian Way of “peaceful, non-violent, person to person” conflict resolution that drew from the ancient civilizations of Melanesian peoples.¹⁰⁹ Ton Otto compares the Melanesian Way to Senghor's Négritude, because it “developed in opposition to a dominant Western presence [and] is not primarily conceived as a national identity. It refers to a wider region . . .”¹¹⁰ Because of counter-evidence of precolonial warfare, the Bougainville secession, and Fiji coups, both these idealistic concepts have had their indigenous critics. Epeli Hau'ofa of Tonga has called the Pacific Way a reformulation of local identities by culturally alienated, self-serving pan-Pacific elites.¹¹¹ Though Solomon Islander Tarcisius Kabutaulaka values the Melanesian Way as an attempt to decolonize minds and to promote cooperation among neighboring states, as embodied in the sub-regional Melanesian Spearhead Group, he says that at the grassroots level, people are more likely to identify with “wantoks,” or fellow language speakers, a substructure that so far has undermined the vision of Melanesianism.¹¹²

If the Pacific or Melanesian Ways remain somewhat vague and problematic, the idea of Melanesian “socialism” also serves primarily as a rhetorical counterpoint to colonial capitalism. Ironically, two of its most philosophical advocates have been priests: Walter Lini of Vanuatu and Jean-Marie Tjibaou of Kanaky/New Caledonia. Like the African versions that stressed the communal ownership of land and the sharing of resources,¹¹³

Melanesian socialism arose during the Cold War and synthesized similar values from diverse indigenous traditions that new leaders hoped to extend to a national scale. Lini had felt alienated during his studies in the Solomon Islands and New Zealand by the lack of local cultural content in the curricula. In 1968, he joined the Western Pacific Students' Association in Auckland, where he helped to found the monthly magazine Onetalk that would address concerns shared by the students, and later, as deacon of the Anglican cathedral in Honiara, he helped to start the Kakamora Reporter: “we hoped it would encourage Solomon Islanders to express themselves to the public and to other Pacific Island people.”¹¹⁴ He continued to organize and publish in his own country, co-founding what became the Vanuaaku Pati (Our Land Party) that led the former New Hebrides to independence in 1980. Lini built his nationalist movement on respect for indigenous custom and on restoring all lands to indigenous ownership, but faced with the attempted secession of two islands he had to ask PNG to help suppress the revolt on Santo, which had private French and American backing.¹¹⁵

Like his counterparts in PNG who advocated the recognition of a Melanesian Way, Lini's notions of Melanesian Socialism and Melanesian Renaissance were intended to counter Cold War pressures to choose sides in the global ideological competition between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Vanuatu's antinuclear and nonaligned stances made it the most radical state in Oceania, as Lini opened diplomatic relations with Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, and the U.S.S.R. This included a fishing agreement with the Soviets, even though half of his government's revenues came from Western foreign aid (mainly British, French, and Australian). His vision of Melanesian Socialism was not particularly radical in practice, apart from the land issue, but rather embodied what he regarded as spiritual values similar to those of the early Christian church such as communal sharing and humanistic compassion (as opposed to individualistic materialism), as well as indigenous cultural revival against alien influences. Instead of Marx, Lini invoked the African-American leader Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Members of Lini's party had studied at UPNG when its faculty included expatriates with experience in and overt sympathy for Nyerere's Tanzanian socialist experiments. Those expatriates also served as consultants in Vanuatu. In fact, ni-Vanuatu nationalists visited Tanzania and Libya for training, and Lini called Nyerere “my comrade” and borrowed ideas from him for his leadership code. Ralph Premdas has acknowledged the challenges that Lini faced in building more than 100 language groups into a nation-state with a less dependent economy, but he calls Melanesian Socialism “an incipient ideology . . . required to facilitate unity.”¹¹⁶

Ati George Sokomanu, who was president of Vanuatu in the 1980s, put it more bluntly in 1992: “The political demand is to reconstitute, reclaim, revive and reinvent, because of what has been destroyed or lost under colonial rule. . . . The white man's way is not the same as that of the black man.”¹¹⁷

Tjibaou studied at a Catholic seminary and by 1966 was serving as a vicar at the cathedral in Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia. He pursued his studies in France in 1968, where he came under the influence of anthropologists with African experience, then left the church and committed himself to a Kanak cultural revival. In 1975, he organized a festival of arts called Melanesia 2000 in Noumea and went on to lead the Caledonian Union party and support Kanak independence. In 1984, he became president of a provisional Kanak government, but French repression prevented independence, and after negotiating a peace accord in 1988, Tjibaou was assassinated by a Kanak radical. Today, the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Noumea enshrines him as a martyr for Kanak nationalism. He was the leading philosopher of the Kanak liberation movement and articulated a vision of nation-building among the twenty-eight indigenous language groups in the country, using the Melanesian Way or Melanesian Socialism as pragmatic cultural metaphors for the construction of a consensus-based Kanak identity in a nonaligned, interdependent Oceania. His search for a syncretic “third way” resembled that of Lini and Nyerere, but settler opposition and his death prevented implementation.¹¹⁸

European and other non-Kanak loyalists, who make up a slight majority in New Caledonia, blamed Libya and leftism for the tragic violence of the 1980s,¹¹⁹ while Kanak anticolonialists and their sympathizers read that revolt as the result of long-term Kanak nationalism.¹²⁰

Still more radical discourses emerged from other Kanak and Caledonian students who studied in France in the late 1960s and participated in the May 1968 student-worker uprising that ultimately undermined the presidency of Charles De Gaulle. Most notable was Nidoish Naisseline, the son of a high chief on Mare island, who like Hannett of PNG demonstrated his awareness of Third World liberation movements and discourses from outside the colonial educational system. Naisseline read works by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Amilcar Cabral, among others, and was encouraged by anticolonial teachings of his French Protestant mentors. He also learned about Marxism but unlike some of his fellow students did not adopt it, because he said Marxists still talked down to native peoples (and after all, he would become a high chief himself). By the mid-1960s he began contributing essays to the Caledonian student paper in France, Trait d'Union. Like Césaire and Senghor, who had founded the Négritude movement, he revalorized a derogatory term, Canaque (later Kanak¹²¹

), which French settlers applied to Melanesians, and defended indigenous customs against Western assimilation policies. He also drew from Hegel and Sartre in arguing that Kanak had to assert their identity to earn recognition, much as African-Americans and Africans were doing. He outlined three phases that a native student passed through: rejection of his denigrated heritage, then return to it but without solace from nostalgia, and finally realistic synthesis in a new Melanesian Personality. Adapting Fanon's transformative vision, Naisseline wrote, “A new combat is born, that of the liberation of the native: to give him a chance, to see him finally restored to his dignity and responsible with all Caledonians for the happiness of everyone.” On his return home in 1969, Naisseline and others confronted what they regarded as French “recolonization” (withdrawal of political autonomy, and a new wave of immigration during a nickel mining boom) with a series of anticolonial protests. By the mid-1970s, they demanded Kanak Socialist Independence and formed a new political party that would ally with Tjibaou's and others into a united front.¹²² Such radicalism was the product of a long history of racial discrimination in colonial Melanesia.

Whose “Africanization”?

This essay is not the place to seek final answers to the issues it raises, indeed such solutions will not be easy to achieve in any case. But what emerges from the competing discourses about the nature of decolonization in Africa and Oceania and its aftermath is a tension reminiscent of the nineteenth-century age of imperialism. While outside donor voices recommend allowing the “free market” to handle everything and abolishing any traditions that impede “modernization,” indigenous voices defend their ways of life and criticize intrusive superpowers. It seems clear that media images of Melanesians as simple primitives engaged in age-old clan warfare do not accurately describe the efforts of Melanesian intellectuals and politicians to grapple with the challenges their countries face any more than they explicate African affairs. Moreover, the term “Africanization” implies an almost exclusive indigenous agency in causing post-independence crises. It neglects the powerful roles played by outside forces, and its unproblematic transfer to the Pacific seems to portray it as a kind of epidemic as dangerous to the “civilized” world as AIDS. The tendency to generalize from crisis cases to encompass an entire region is equally questionable. From a comparative perspective, Latin America has taken more than a century to move, as a region, away from mostly authoritarian regimes, instability and dependence, and it still faces serious challenges.¹²³

A similar process is underway in Africa within a much shorter time frame, despite some terrible crises, while the Solomon Islands remains the only “failed state”¹²⁴ in Oceania so far, though Nauru and PNG are facing serious financial problems.¹²⁵

Ahistorical analyses often depend more on media images or on ideology than careful homework. For example, many African countries have already been trying to implement the prescriptions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for a generation, as have Pacific island countries. Yet despite the contributions this obedience has actually made to state crises, the doomsdayers still seek to impose, perhaps by force, metropolitan expectations based on contested assumptions. In 2000, Jerry Rawlings of Ghana blamed specifically the austerity measures required by the Bretton Woods lending institutions for undermining his efforts to build a more stable, democratic system; the national currency was allowed to “float” on the world market and declined in value by more than 1000 percent, a disaster for development projects.¹²⁶

In 1998, in the Solomon Islands, a newly elected government adopted structural reforms insisted on by the Asian Development Bank, but so much opposition arose that the government was overthrown by a coup two years later.¹²⁷ The idealistic Eight-Point Plan in PNG ran up against the reality of deep dependency on Australian grants-in-aid and on revenues from the Panguna copper mine on Bougainville, which was run by a transnational corporation that demanded minimal interference.¹²⁸ It could be asked whether colonialism, as such, prepares anyone for real independence, if the economy is still confined essentially to exporting primary materials that are subject to drastic world price fluctuations, to ongoing dependence on outside capital because the colonial surplus was rarely reinvested locally, and to consequent debt-servicing by the Western-educated elite, which often has to obey outside interests as much as, or more than, its own people's development needs.¹²⁹

The cultural diversity in colonially invented African and Melanesian states is quite apparent and very challenging. The United Nations supports the maintenance of such “national” borders in the name of preserving territorial integrity in ex-colonies, but such arbitrary frameworks often fail to reflect indigenous cultural realities, either in Africa or Melanesia, where language groups were compressed or partitioned to suit rival foreign colonizers.¹³⁰

In addition, each country has also undergone significant socio-economic changes in the recent past that have contributed to new identity formations. In Fiji, for example, British colonialism created a bipolar society by bureaucratizing the indigenous chiefly hierarchies and confining economic participation to indentured sugar workers from India who became half the population.¹³¹ PNG, which contains 700 native language groups, has faced several local separatist movements against an artificial central state¹³², but the Bougainville rebellion was also a direct response to a transnational copper mining project that began under Australian rule; it paid almost nothing to indigenous landowners, polluted their lands, and brought in outside labor.¹³³ In the Solomon Islands, internal economic migration from Malaita to Guadalcanal created new regional, not traditional ethnic, identity confrontations.¹³⁴ In Vanuatu, an oddly shared colonial rule by longtime rivals Britain and France added new cleavages to local diversity, thus creating what Lini called “pandemonium”¹³⁵, and in New Caledonia, as discussed above, lost political self-government granted in the 1950s and new immigration during a nickel boom exacerbated tensions and produced the united indigenous front that polarized the country. Perceived “ethnic entrepreneurship” may thus mask relatively new class or regional divisions.¹³⁶ In Africa, Thandika Mkandawire points out that the well-publicized atrocities committed against rural civilian populations by rebel factions, rather than demonstrating primordial “tribal” conflicts, are often the result of displaced aggression by failed urban power contenders who have no secure base in the countryside.¹³⁷ Such civil wars are still often manipulated by outside economic interests, as they were during the Cold War.¹³⁸

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan countries increasingly locate security threats in the Third World, and for good reason, since they continue to exploit poor countries' resources and populations to maintain prosperity and stability at home.¹³⁹

Hau'ofa has pointed out that Oceania today is embedded in a regional economy linked intimately by migration, trade, and market-creating aid that is dominated by metropolitan powers like Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. This reduces the national sovereignty of South Pacific island states so much that “there cannot be any real change without fundamental structural alterations in Australia and New Zealand”¹⁴⁰—one could also add France and the United States. Mkandawire has pointed to a contradiction in the neo-liberal coupling of “opening up” developing economies and promoting democratic self-determination. Cold War superpowers and the World Bank often found it far more efficient to deal with authoritarian regimes that depended on their financial support, and in the post-Cold War era, international technocracies continue to dominate struggling regimes whose daunting structural challenges have not simply disappeared.¹⁴¹ In the Pacific, David Hanlon has discussed the ways that “development” and “modernization” have been used as discourses of domination, and David Gegeo has advocated consulting with local inhabitants about the forms of development that have meaning for them, rather than introducing programs from above that generally prove ephemeral at best.¹⁴²

Recent World Bank initiatives, drawn largely from its experience in Africa, that seek to promote “good governance” in the Pacific are on the one hand a positive trend away from the facile support once given to autocratic regimes in the name of anti-Communism. But on the other hand, critics in the region argue that “reform measures must specifically relate to the country's geography, history, society and economy, and should not blindly follow other countries.”¹⁴³

What is particularly lacking in the doomsday scenarios about Africa or Oceania (especially Melanesia) is thus attention to local circumstances, the ongoing role of outside economic forces, and the concern of many indigenous peoples to protect their cultures from relentless globalization. That last point is a sensitive issue among Pacific island leaders and ordinary citizens today, especially since so many people now migrate toward new sources of cash income, whether in-country urban centers or metropolitan industrial economies abroad. The Contemporary Pacific devoted a special issue in 2001 to such deep concerns about ongoing pressures to assimilate to the Western atomization of social identities, often disguised as “individual rights.”¹⁴⁴ What is needed, at minimum, is thus culturally sensitive negotiation with indigenous regimes, not simply the forced adoption of foreign models on the basis of presentist, ideological analyses. Otherwise, the critiques of neo-colonialism once voiced by African and Melanesian intellectuals will remain suspiciously accurate, despite the supposed end of the Cold War.

Writers like Doumenge and Reilly treat the postcolonial civil wars, coups, secession movements, and corruption issues in Oceania today as products of eternal cultural defects, which they claim prove that self-rule for Pacific island countries was a mistake. Yet a quick review of the traumatic changes that the West had to endure to “modernize,” from religious wars through the commercial, industrial, and political revolutions and world wars that finally yielded stable nation-states after mass suffering and bloodshed (right up through the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s), would suggest that using current crises as pretexts to denigrate indigenous sovereignty in the Pacific or Africa is at best disingenuous. Indeed, recent studies in world history indicate that beginning as early as the Neolithic era, resource-maximizing, urban-centered societies have regularly displaced entropy outward, as they consumed the raw materials and the human labor of others like, to reverse Doumenge's rhetoric, black holes.¹⁴⁵

Expanding states often destabilized less centralized neighbors through their economic and diplomatic policies, even as they sought to protect their own security by creating successive dependent allies on their periphery.¹⁴⁶ In the Pacific, Peter Hempenstall has noted that “unequal contracts” between imperial powers and local leaders in the nineteenth century “led to a series of crises that could no longer be contained locally but spilled over to affect the perceptions of European powers about their security needs. The results of this chain reaction, in virtually every case, were decisions to annex and incorporate more and more land into the mosaic of European empires. The Pacific is a particularly good example of what was happening world-wide.”¹⁴⁷

Cynics have said that local nationalisms, when carefully nurtured and defused through accommodation, could provide a clever means to decolonize superficially while keeping ongoing control through acculturated, dependent elites.¹⁴⁸

But the “structural violence” that these transnational class relations engender tends to produce rather fragile states.¹⁴⁹ Moreover, such systems of domination do not smoothly translate into Western-derived models of “good governance” based on a democratic civil society, especially given the confinement of diverse language groups inside artificial states that still serve mainly the interests of outsiders. In the words of Kabutaulaka, “national consciousness cannot be imposed. It has to be created and cultivated over a long period of time.”¹⁵⁰ As Deepa Ollapally noted ten years ago, the New World Order looks suspiciously like the old one in the nineteenth century, when superpowers intervened abroad to ensure their own interests in the name of civilization: “the former axis of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is being replaced by the North-South divide between rich and poor countries.”¹⁵¹ In some cases, today's “unequal contracts” rather blatantly clarify the high degree of metropolitan agency in discursive “Africanization.” For example, when French Polynesia (Tahiti) sought a new autonomy statute that would give its elected president some powers that were independent of the local assembly (similar to those of the President of France), Parisian legislators warned that it was dangerous to grant such authority, since decolonization in French-speaking Africa had threatened democracy.¹⁵² In settler-dominated New Caledonia, where the 1956 statute granted a significant degree of self-government, a pied noir exile from Algeria who is now high in the administration has called that reform “abusive,” because it was intended for African colonies seeking independence, not for a French settler colony in the south Pacific.¹⁵³ The 1998 Noumea Accord again promised the territory autonomy, but settler President Pierre Frogier echoed Doumenge when he said that while other Pacific island states were falling into anarchy, New Caledonia, rich in strategic nickel, was determined to “do France proud.”¹⁵⁴

Even more dramatically, Australia, alarmed by the 2002 terrorist attacks on its tourists in Bali, has taken up the discourse of Reilly's “arc of instability” and has begun to challenge the self-government of Pacific island states, especially in Melanesia. It has organized military interventions and police operations in the Solomons and PNG, placed inspectors in local finance ministries to see that aid money is spent the way Australia wants it to be spent, and engineered the election of an Australian as head of the regional Pacific Forum, despite indigenous opposition.¹⁵⁵

Prime Minister Howard predicted that Australia would engage in other interventions,¹⁵⁶ though he quickly rejected the label of “sheriff” of the South Pacific that U.S. President George W. Bush applied to him during his Asian tour.¹⁵⁷ Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has defended the new proactive approach, saying, “sovereignty in our view is not absolute. Acting for the benefit of humanity is more important.”¹⁵⁸ PNG Prime Minister Somare, already upset about the Forum election, reacted angrily to the accusation that his country, too, was in danger of becoming a failed state. His Foreign Minister warned against a “colonial era approach” to aid and investment in mineral-rich PNG.¹⁵⁹ Solomon Islander and Member of Parliament Alfred Sasako reported that Australia was under pressure from the United States over concerns that North Korea was planning to ship arms to radicals in the Middle East via South Pacific companies and vessels. Although he expressed gratitude for Australia's peacekeeping, he noted that a major factor in that country's about-face on intervention, after ignoring earlier Solomon Islander pleas, was “Australia's strategic interest.”¹⁶⁰ Still, at the August 2004 Pacific Forum meeting in Samoa, most island leaders, including Somare, seemed resigned to Australia's dominant role in the region, even if its concerns were not always the same as those of islanders. Howard told the audience, “This is our patch, and we have a special responsibility in this part of the world.”¹⁶¹

What makes the “Africanization” accusation in the Pacific so orientalist is the degree to which its explanatory rhetoric ignores history, namely the destabilizing effects on indigenous societies, albeit with varying combinations of outsider and local agency, by several centuries of foreign contact, colonialism, and development projects. Rather than seeking deeper solutions to very real current crises, by consulting with local inhabitants about what kinds of development they want or renegotiating trade and investment terms, or even borders, this revived “otherizing” discourse instead proposes that outsider police presence will always be necessary: not only should aid money be spent more accountably or metropolitan security interests be protected from the recurring specter of disorder, but indigenous peoples are deemed too incompetent to run modern states. Yet the complex reconciliation negotiations between PNG and Bougainville in recent years suggest that there may well be substance as well as idealism in the Melanesian Way.¹⁶²

The self-serving interventionist analysis now in vogue among metropolitan leaders risks going beyond indirect neo-colonialism. Rather, it resembles what Kanak radicals criticized in the 1960s, namely “re-colonization” by foreign rulers after a brief period of autonomy.