The History of the Solomon Islands and other stories…Part I

I have now officially been here for “a while”. There are many ways I have come to this surprising realisation, ranging from the mundane, to the existential, to the downright relevant (to you lot anyway). First, during a 7 day cataclysm my shower gel ran out, rapidly followed by toothpaste, facewash, razor blades and deodorant – I am now forced to rely on dodgy Chinese Colgate and Australian deodorant brands with names like “Hard Yakka”. More profoundly, I came to the realisation that I no longer think of myself as being “away”, a subtle but fundamental shift in perception – “my world” no longer feels like it is 10,000 miles away. Third, through a combination of being busy with work and good old fashioned laziness, I now for the first time have delayed writing on this ol’ blog for much longer than I intended. Apologies. Anyway, to make up for it I thought I’d broach a more hefty subject matter on this Sunday evening, as I sit listening to Johnny Cash and waiting for some pana to become something that I’m hoping will resemble baked potatoes. For those with an aversion to all things vaguely historical, feel free to slip away now and come back in a week for pictures of moths the size of cats.

In utter contrast to England, and even more so compared to my last place of residence in the Middle-East, history in its modern conception of statehood and politics has been astonishingly brief in the Solomon Islands. Blink and you’d miss it. In fact, it’s safe to say that most of the world pretty much has. But for observers of the last quarter of a century since independence in 1978, events in the Solomon Islands have taken a familiar turn for those used to witnessing the ravages of political elitism, corruption and exploitative foreign companies in umpteen countries across the world. Then, in the late 1990s and in 2000 in particular, events transpired that have uniquely and definitively shaped the modern political reality of the Solomon Islands, and will continue to do so, for good or for bad, for many years to come. I plan to share a few of these more sordid tales from Solomon Islands’ modern history at some point in the not-too distant future. But first things first, a few words (as that is all I know) on what came before that.

Although in one sense my journey to the “other side of the world” has had me boggling at the size of our planet, in another sense the world seems somehow smaller and my perception of it more manageable. Perched on the islands of the South Pacific I get the feeling that, if the world did turn out to be flat after all, this would certainly be the “edge”. As migrating humans gradually spread out and settled all the many lands of the world hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was the South Pacific islands that proved hardest to reach. Apart from the Solomon Islands, none of the Pacific Islands were reached by humans till around 1500 BC, and many others were only inhabited even later (including, astonishingly, New Zealand, which was settled by the Maori only about 1000 years ago). Though of course there have been many remarkable pioneers and frontier breakers through the ages, surely these great sea voyagers of early Pacific Islanders are among the most incredible. Not least because it was they who completed the final link in the chain of human migration, somehow managing to navigate the impossibly huge stretches of the Pacific Ocean to the East to reach South America, already settled by its own people. It amazes me to imagine what could have driven them. What inner spirit or belief persuaded them to climb into a canoe and sail off into the great blue unknown, not seeing land for weeks on end but to continue to their destiny regardless? How many canoes must have been absorbed into the great mass of water, swallowed by seas that regularly destroy modern ships? Sitting on a beach in the Pacific imaging those early days of discovery, you are reminded of the broad sweep of human migration that came before it. And somehow, perhaps through the reminder of just how interconnected all the peoples of this world really are, the world seems a smaller place.

(Off to see the incas?)

But as I said before, the Solomon Islanders were first inhabited by humans a little earlier, arriving from the East around 25,000 BC and living as hunter-gatherers. They must have liked it, as they stuck it out alone for the next 20,000-odd years. Then, about 5,000 years ago, further migrations from the East and what is now Papua New Guinea took place. These new peoples intermixed with the earlier settlers to form the ancestors of today’s Melanesians, the dominant racial/cultural group in the country (the minority Polynesians in the country arrived much later from the West, settling the remote and far-flung islands of the Solomons - including Tikopia - around 1500 AD). Solomon Islanders in this period, according to the Lonely Planet, “practised shifting cultivation, fishing, hunting, carving, weaving and canoe-building…Ancestors were worshipped and blood feuds, head-hunting and cannibalism were common”. Peaceful times then.

Things changed dramatically from the 16th Century (1567 to be precise), when a certain Spaniard named Mendana arrived in search of gold (King Solomon’s stash to be even more precise – hence the naming of the country), having sailed from Peru. The subsequent tales of Missionaries and Blackbirders I will leave for another day.