Wantok (part one)…

“Wantok to rule them all, wantok to find them,
wantok to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”

Old J.R.R must have spent a bit of time in the Solomons to come up with that little gem, but in this case it will take more than one furry little hobbit to come along and wipe the all pervasive wantok system out of existence. From the moment you arrive it is impossible to ignore the constant references to this mysterious concept, and to be honest, after just a few months living here I am far from grasping the complex subtleties and full implications of how it shapes one’s world and human interactions.

Now I’m sure there have been extensive books written all about the wantok system, and that copious (Scandanavian?) anthropologists have filled libraries of journals dissecting its meaning and role from every possible perspective. I won’t aim to compete with these experts for accuracy or completeness, but instead simply offer a few observations I’ve noticed relating to how the notion of wantok affects the lives of friends and colleagues in the Solomons.

The word wantok is Pijin for ‘one talk’ – and traditionally your wantok was simply those who spoke your language, i.e. your tribal group and immediate family. These days, at least in Honiara where people from all over the Solomons (and even the world) live side by side, your wantok is a slightly more flexible concept. Wantok customs of behaviour, for example, often extend to close friends regardless of where they’re from. Similarly, I’m often told that not only good old Brits, but also Aussies and sometimes any white-skinned folk whatsoever are ‘wantok blo iu’. None of this is particularly unusual. Visit any multicultural city in the world and you find whole neighbourhoods dominated by a particular nationality and culture. In fact, given the huge ethnic diversity in the Solomon Islands, society here is incredibly integrated and tolerant. What is unique, though, is the role that wantok rules and customs play in shaping human interactions, in particular related to property…

... sorry, gotta run...to be continued

In other news:

• Peter’s back: I’m slightly concerned by the number of people who’ve told me how much I actually do resemble Crouching Peter. Jeez, I was only joking guys, but then all the fellahs in the photo do happen to be under 4ft 6” so I don’t blame you. Anyway, my back is now better and I’ve recently made a return to green pastures with the Bokolo bulls.
• Vegetable planting has commenced, and I am now waiting with bated breath to see whether tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, aubergine, lettuce and broccoli will thrive or wilt under the Solomon sun. Germination was a cinch, and transplantation not hard either, though a little back-breaking. Unfortunately, the night after all the labour Mbokona experienced an almighty storm, and for a couple of hours in the middle of the night I lay on my back listening to the rain pounding on the roof and picturing what it was doing to my little green babies. Three days later and we’re still getting spectacular downpours. Each morning, expecting the worst, I inspect the damage. Incredibly, the little blighters are hanging on in there. They look pretty frail and sad, to be sure, but they’re hanging on. I may be setting up stall in Honiara Central Market yet.

Creatures...

Sunday evening, and I am way too full and sleepy to write about history, or politics, or Solomon life, or even the spectacular waterfall four friends and I marched to on Saturday, and from where we splashed and floated our way downriver, through narrow and high gorges with towering green walls on either side. There is good reason for my current state of horizontalness… several kilograms of Vanuatu beef. Last week Fiona went to Vanuatu, the nearest country to the Solomons, and returned with 25kg of gorgeous Vanuatu beef, the stuff of legend in these parts, and which a friend who is living there favourably compares with Argentinean meat. So this weekend I’ve been making the most of the huge chunks of prime steak that have fortuitously found their way into my fridge. I kicked off proceedings with the old pub classic of egg, chips and steak yesterday eve, such a belly-filling success it was promptly repeated this morning for brekkie and followed by an Oriental style beef stir-fry for lunch and delicious beef curry for dinner. I sound like a greedy pigpig, but believe me, this kind of eating is a rare luxury for me over here so I make hay while the sun shines.

I have not seen a single cow here on the Solomons, as apparently all were eaten during the tensions, but these isles are teeming with other creatures great and small. Crocs twice the size of me or you, beetles that whirr towards your head like toy helicopters, and moths the size of cats. Below are a few photos, including a couple of my beloved geckos.

Politics, football and the new Peter Crouch…

For the last few weeks things have been pretty busy at work. Busy, that is, for the Solomon Islands (since by 5.45pm each day everyone in CBSI has scarpered and security have locked up, scope for really busting a gut is limited). One of the main reasons for this burst of activity is that we in the Economics Department are currently undertaking end of year consultations with all the major companies, NGOs and government ministries in the country, a fascinating close-up perspective of what makes the wheels of the economy turn (albeit creakingly) and which I hope to describe a little more at another point. Another reason has been the government’s attempt to slip through new legislation raising the minimum wage by the small matter of 470%. This caused a predictable amount of consternation among local businesses (even the trade unions were concerned this might not be the best idea), who requested that the Central Bank submit a report on the likely impact of such a policy change, and for which I was responsible. Which finally brings me in a roundabout way to the first of the photos; informed by Labour Division that the Minimum Wage bill would be discussed on the opening day of Parliamentary sessions, I popped up and took a peep. There was no mention of the Minimum Wage of course, but was great to see the various larger-than-life political characters here in the flesh, and the building is quite pretty on the inside.

About the same week as I made my debut on the political scene here, I also pulled on a Bokolo Blues football shirt for the first time. Each year in April there is an inter-bank soccer competition in the Solomon Islands, and last year, to everyone’s surprise and after years of trying, the Central Bank team succeeded in snatching the trophy from under the noses of the larger commercial banks. In the months since then, however, the blue shirts have remained tucked away while their victorious owners have tucked into plentiful quantities of motu fis, pigpig and SolBrew, losing a bit of zip in the process (I am told). So we’re starting our training early this year, and the return to action was much anticipated. In the days leading up to our first game there was a blizzard of correspondence on the intranet: discussion of tactics, optimal playing positions, and much lewd cackling about the magical properties of Deep Heat, or even better, Coconut Oil. Transport to the game had me chuckling to myself too, as twenty Central Bank workers all in uniform crammed into the open back of our blue truck and whizzed down the road. Our opponents for the game - the mighty Telekom Hypers.

So what of the game itself? To roll out the oldest of football clichés: t’was a game of two halves, both for the team as a whole and for the red-faced Englishman. We raced to a 3-0 lead, only to get torn apart in the second half but still clung on to win 3-2. Two aspects of the game here will take some getting used to. First, the heat is unbelievable, even at five in the afternoon. After just a few minutes of the gentle warm-up jog I was (not the only one) wheezing away, struggling to gasp in enough of the muggy air. By the second half I was completely gone, but wondering if this might still be better than an icy January morning trudging out onto the half-frozen mud of Hackney Marshes, awaiting with trepidation the first smack of the football onto wet and cold thigh. At least I wasn’t the only waetman with a beacon for a face – a friend of mine here who’s from the East End works for Telekom and was sweating it out in their midfield. The second big difference is the rock hard ground, which makes the ball bounce and bobble around like crazy, and which made me look a wally on a number of occasions.

Did I mention that I was a striker? Well I was, for the first time in my playing career. And surprisingly, I seem to have cemented myself in that position. The reason, it became clear to me after five minutes, is that they see me as their new Peter Crouch (a lanky praying mantis with a magic touch and a toothy grin, for those not familiar with this English icon). I showed a willingness to actually head the ball a couple of times and that was it: as the goal keeper and defenders hoofed the ball in my vague direction I was being urgently urged to “flick it on”. Fortunately, and again just like our man Crouchie, I also revealed a hitherto undiscovered ability to score spectacular goals. Well, one to be precise, in the single game I’ve played so far, a looping volley from outside the area catching the goalie off his line. Clearly, my talent was wasted playing out of position in the tangerine of Acland Burghley, the white of Mullet Argyle and the green of Monj Too.

That’s all for this evening folks. If any of you are totally bored hearing about football, and would rather read about some other specific aspect of life here, whether it’s “how to eat a mango” or “why are the Solomon Islands so darn poor?” then email me and I’ll do my best to oblige. If anyone is dieing for further updates on Peter Crouch’s surprising move to the Solomon Islands, then let me know and I will be happy to give blow-by-blow accounts including injury status (currently sidelined with a slight lower back pain from an unfortunate water skiing incident).

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.