Pacific leaders have declared a climate crisis in the region and are demanding an end to coal mining.
The declaration was signed by several regional leaders at the Pacific Islands Development Forum in Fiji on Tuesday.
The declaration expresses grave concerns about the impacts the climate crisis will have on the Pacific.
In it, the Pacific Islands Development Forum called on governments of countries with high carbon emissions to stop hindering climate change efforts.
It also demands all coal producers immediately stop any new coal mining and phase out all existing production over the next 10 years.
The declaration asked the development forum’s 14-member states to immediately end subsidies on fossil fuel production.
Echoing 2018’s Boe Declaration from the Pacific Islands Forum, Tuesday’s declaration affirmed “that climate change poses the single greatest threat to the human rights and security of present and future generations of Pacific Island peoples”.
The move was welcomed by environmental non-profit 350.org, with founder Bill McKibben calling it a “very powerful manifesto”.
“The election, in the Pacific, of the government of Australia that continues to want to expand coal mines is a slap in the face to everyone else in that region and in the world,” he said in a videoed statement.
Bainimarama calls for concrete commitments to cut emissions
Meanwhile, Fiji’s prime minister said Pacific leaders should accept nothing less than concrete commitments to cut emissions at next month’s Pacific Islands Forum Summit.
Frank Bainimarama will be attending his first summit since 2008.
Fiji was suspended in 2009 in the wake of the 2006 coup and the abrogation of the then-constitution.
Mr Bainimarama had said he would stay away until New Zealand and Australia were no longer full Forum members.
In a speech at the Pacific Islands Development Forum – which was set up by Fiji after its suspension – Mr Bainimarama said the region cannot accept any watered-down commitments.
At last year’s forum, Australia was exposed as having attempted to water down a resolution that declared climate change the region’s greatest security threat.
Mr Bainimarama said the region needs greater commitments from the region’s bigger neighbours, hinting at Australia and New Zealand.
“Fiji and the Marshall Islands have already announced our intention to revise our own nationally determined contributions, and I urge this … membership to do the same and demand the same from the more developed economies, including and especially our large neighbours in the Pacific.
“We should accept anything less than concrete commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions in line with the most ambitious aspirations of the Paris Agreement. We cannot allow climate commitments to be watered down at a meeting hosted in a nation whose very existence is threatened by the rising waters lapping at its shores.”
IN these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at the origins of words in Tok Pisin.
The historical connection between English and Tok Pisin is obvious. This is why we often call Tok Pisin “Pidgin English”. But where do all the non-English words come from and why are even many English words used differently in Tok Pisin than in English?
The vast majority of Tok Pisin words come from English, although often their meaning has changed. Sometimes the change is the softening of an English swear word. The first English speakers Pacific Islanders encountered were sailors, who were not hesitant to use swear words. The Pacific Islanders who met them could not tell a swear word from a harmless word, so they ended up using expressions such as “mi bagarap” (from English “buggered” or “buggery”, an old rude word for “sodomy”) and “sit bilong paia” (literally, the “shit of the fire”) for “ashes”.
Some English expressions were drastically shortened Perhaps the best example of this is “olsem” (“like”, “similar”), which is how early Pacific Islanders heard “all the same”. The English language has changed since the 1800s, so some English words used then which made their way into Tok Pisin are no longer used in modern English. We no longer use “gammon”, for example, which became Tok Pisin “giaman”, or “by and by”, which first became the marker of future action “baimbai”,later shortened to “bai” and today even “ba”.
Other English words were used by Melanesians with meanings from their own languages. In many languages, the word for “brother” means “a sibling of the same sex” and the word for “sister” means “a sibling of the opposite sex”. Early Tok Pisin speakers used the same meanings, so that a woman would speak of “brata bilong mi, Maria” and “susa bilong mi, Adam”. Similarly, in many areas we speak of “ai bilong haus” (literally “eye of the house”) for “the front door” or “front yard”, a literal translation from Austronesian languages. Very Pacific wordings such as this show that Tok Pisin was a creation by Pacific Islanders and not, as some people still believe, something consciously taught or introduced by Germans or other Europeans.
Even though the Portuguese never colonised Melanesia, Tok Pisin has several words from Portuguese, such as “save” (Portuguese “saber” / “know”), “pikinini” (Portuguese “pequeno” / “small”). These are common to pidgin and creole languages around the world and reflect the early pidgin Portuguese varieties that developed wherever the Portuguese settled in Asia.
Later English-speaking sailors came in contact with these varieties and tried to use these words whenever they came across people with whom they could not communicate. The first Melanesians they encountered could not, of course, tell the difference between the Portuguese and English words they heard from the sailors’ mouths and so took up save and pikinini along with English words.
The first speakers of Tok Pisin were Austronesian speakers who found that they could use words that were common in Austronesian languages when speaking to speakers of other Austronesian speakers in Tok Pisin. This is how words common across many Austronesian languages, including Malay, such as “susu” (“milk”, “breast”) entered the language. When Malay-speaking workers were brought to the Gazelle Peninsula and plantations in Madang, they also brought the word “binatang”, which means “animal” in Malay, but “insect” in Tok Pisin. Perhaps this was because they thought New Guinea insects were as fierce as the tigers and elephants back home?
New Guinea was colonised by Germany, with the colonial capital in Kokopo. It is therefore not surprising that early Tok Pisin has many German and Kuanua (Tolai) words. At one time most of the words for tools and household items came from German. Later as generations of Papua New Guineans have had education in English, most words adapted from German, such as “srang” (closet, cupboard) and “hebel” (lever) have been replaced by English words. Nevertheless, there are still a number of German-derived words in Tok Pisin, such as “tabak” (tobacco) and, in some areas, beten (pray).
As the centre of Tok Pisin has moved away from the Gazelle Peninsula, many words of Tolai origin, such as “limlimbur” have been replaced by words from English (“wokabaut”). Many words from Kuanua and New Ireland languages related to it do remain, however, especially those such as masalai (“spirit”) and “kulau” (young coconut” that describe things that are particularly Melanesian and not European.
Christianity was introduced to Melanesia around the same time that Melanesians were developing Tok Pisin to speak to each other. The languages of the early missionaries brought a number of words still used in church circles today. German beten has already been mentioned. Other words include “bogen” (“arch”) from German, “pater” (“priest”) from Latin, and “lotu” and “talatala” (“preacher”) from Polynesian languages.
The origins of two common words, “maski” (“never mind”) and “sanguma” (“sorcerer”, “sorcery”) have long been difficult to ascertain. Dr Karl Franklin of SIL has found evidence that “maski” comes from an expression in a southern Chinese language that made its way into the pidgin Portuguese of Macau and later the pidgin English of Hong Kong. Sailors stopping at those ports picked up the expression and used it on the first ships that came to Melanesia.
“Sanguma” is still a mystery. An almost identical word with the same meaning, “sangoma”, is commonly used in southern Africa today. It is quite possible that German colonial workers travelling between German Southwest Africa (today Namibia) and German New Guinea carried the word from one of their colonies to the other, but there is no evidence to back up this hypothesis.
As we have seen, while English has been the basis for Tok Pisin vocabulary, Tok Pisin speakers have adapted these words to fit their way of speaking and thinking, while at the same time also adopting words from other languages that they spoke or encountered. Tok Pisin is very much a Melanesian creation, but it can trace the roots of its vocabulary to languages from around the world.
• Professor Volker is a linguist living in New Ireland, and an Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University in Australia. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at craig.volker@jcu.edu.au. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page.
THE Government is looking at merging the National Lands Commission and the Land Titles Commission under a new organisation which will be called Lands Tribunal Commission, Minister for Justice and Attorney-General Davis Steven says.
Steven presented a statement in Parliament yesterday on the National Lands Commission (NLC) and said the commission was established under the National Land Registration Act and it conducted hearing on former customary land acquired by the colonial government prior to independence to ascertain if any settlement awards could be awarded and kept a register of such national land.
“It is also important in ensuring titles are formally issued to the state as this is a very important factor when discussing economic development issues in the context of our country,” Steven said.
He said it was one such practical issue that was discussed as part of the government’s efforts to address the themes developed for the leaders’ summit this year.
“So under the current white paper on Law and Justice in Papua New Guinea, there is a proposal to merge both the NLC and the Lands Titles Commission as the Lands Tribunal Commission,” Steven said.
He said the Department of Justice and Attorney-General had initiated administrative arrangements on the merger and was finalised for the legislative framework subject to any further review of the white paper.
“I hope to bring before Parliament for consideration when it is ready,” Steven said.
Vanuatu’s capital of Port Vila has witnessed one of its biggest exhibitions of art, with around 5,000 carvings and woven Melanesian products presented for sale last week.
Local organiser Tyson Stanley Ghera told the Daily Post newspaper that it is the first initiative of its kind, organised between the sister cities of Honiara and Port Vila.
Mr Ghera said it was possible it would become a regular event to promote an opportunity for carvers and weavers of the two Melanesian countries to exchange skills, training and business.
Most of the products come from Marovo Lagoon in the Western Province of the Solomons, where approximately 70 percent of the people are carvers or weavers.
IT’S a little known detail of the so-called ‘blackbirding’ trade: how a group of Aboriginal Australians ended up in Vanuatu, never to return home.
Chief Richard David Fandanumata has travelled to Australia from Vanuatu to see the land his great-grandfather came from.
He hopes to find his lost relatives with just a handful of clues.
“I want to find out where Manuma from, that name,” he said. “If any Aboriginal people know ‘Manuma’ or ‘Makuma’, that is the place where my great-grandfather was taken.”
Chief Richard’s great-grandfather was an Aboriginal Australian who ended up on the island of Tongariki around 1910.
His story starts with the so-called ‘blackbirding’ trade of the mid to late 1800s.
Thousands of workers were tricked, kidnapped, or occasionally came willingly, from the Pacific Islands to work in Australia’s sugar cane fields.
Chief Richard’s forebears from Tongariki were among them. He says the men were chained and sometimes beaten. They worked for some time at a sugar factory in Caboolture, but may have moved between towns for work.
Emelda Davis, chairwoman of the Australian South Sea Islanders Port Jackson, said Pacific Islanders often lived closely alongside Aboriginal people.
“Given the nature of that trade, you had Indigenous, Torres Strait Islander and South Sea Islanders all working alongside each other under slavery conditions,” she says.
This close interaction sometimes led to marriages – and violence.
In 2012, Chief Richard and his brother Abel David, a former Vanuatu Member of Parliament, were part of a group of South Sea Islanders who travelled to Bundaberg for a ‘sorry’ ceremony, apologising for the past killing of Aboriginal people.
Ms Davis says the workers were acting under instruction from their bosses.
“This was something, their hands were forced, in order to do this, tribal warfare, in order to clear the land, but same time, our people took on board the young children that were abandoned,” she says.
An estimated 7000 Melanesian workers were deported after 1901 when the White Australia policy kicked in.
“We’ve always been aware of the Australian Aboriginal descendants living in Vanuatu,” says Ms Davis.
Details of exactly how they ended up there and what happened next are unclear. But tales have been kept alive by oral histories passed on through families.
Generations of Chief Richard’s family have told how his great-grandfather, a man named ‘Manuma’ or ‘Makuma’, depending on the dialect, was rescued at sea and taken to Tongariki with returning workers.
He narrowly avoided a grim fate.
“They should have ate him, because we [were] still cannibals at that time, but chief says we’ll take care of him, and chief gave him his daughter to marry,” he said.
“[It was] because of his hair. Curly… Aboriginal hair. So chief says don’t kill him, we’ll keep him.
“That’s where my grandmother was the daughter of that man, Manuma.”
Pastor Yanick Willie
Yanick Willie is a pastor and also from the island of Tongariki.
His family story tells of two children who were smuggled into the hold of a ship called the Lady Norman.
“They bring with them two children, namely Willie Tutukan and Rossi. We are born out of these two little children. Willie Tutukan married to a Tongariki woman.”
Pastor Willie says there are now about 400 known descendants of Willie Tutukan and Rossi, living in Tongariki and elsewhere.
He says Aboriginal descendants today face discrimination in Vanuatu.
“It’s very hard, we are always under discrimination,” he says.
“They look down on us and… sometimes call us ‘trouble people’. We have been hurt.”
Last week the men, along with several other descendants, travelled to Australia to make the first steps towards finding their long lost family members.
Tukini Tavui of the Pacific Islands Council of South Australia helped facilitate the trip after hearing of their plight through Dr David Bunton, whose own forebears were missionaries to Vanuatu in the 1800s.
“I think it’s important that Australians are aware, particularly Aboriginal people, that they have families over there that were taken during those times, in the early 1900s,” he says.
Chief Richard David says he knows finding his family will be a difficult task, but even being in Australia has been healing.
“It’s been hard today, but there will be tears of joy since we are coming back home.”
VanuatuIndependent – THE head of the South Pacific Tourism Organisation says better including local communities and indigenous people is the key to offering unique travel experiences.
Christopher Cocker said culture was at the centre of what was on offer in the Pacific and a recent global meeting had emphasised the need for indigenous people to have more of a voice in the way tourism was planned and developed.
He said tourists to the region also needed to be encouraged to branch out when they travelled to the region to gain a more authentic experience of the diverse cultures they were visiting.
“A Fiji experience or a Cook Island experience is not just lying around in the poolside etc and enjoying cocktails and the sun, sand and sea and watching a one-off show, cultural show, but to go out to the communities, go out to the villages and learn more of what’s happening there as well as mix and mingle with the indigenous people,” Mr Cocker said.
He said Pacific countries needed to treasure the fact that indigenous people represent the majority of Pacific populations and they should take steps to nurture their culture to share with visitors.
Descendants of the two Aboriginal children who were taken to Vanuatu in the early 1900s.
HUNDREDS of South Sea Islanders living in Vanuatu complain they are being discriminated against because they have Aboriginal ancestry, and say they want official Australian recognition.
One, Vanuatu policeman Pakoa Rudy Rolland, said the problem has become so bad that more than 480 Aboriginal people on the island of Tongariki are fringe dwellers, living as second-class citizens with restricted access to land or proper education.
“My father told me since I was a boy we were Australian Aborigines living here,” Mr Rolland said.
“I have Vanuatu ID but still in my heart I know I don’t belong here. I want the recognition from our government in Canberra that we have the rights all Australian citizens have.”
According to family legend, ‘blackbirded’ New Hebrides sugar plantation workers returning from Tweed Heads soon after 1901 took home with them two Aboriginal children, a brother and a sister named Willie Tutukan and Rossie. Circumstances around the pair being snatched are murky, but by various accounts their parents had either been killed or had disappeared.
Mr Rolland, who belongs to the Tongariki Australian Aborigines Association and is Willie Tutukan’s great-great-grandson, said he had been brought up with the story of the journey by his mother’s brother, who is still alive and is the grandson of one of the children’s abductors.
Willie Tutukan and Rossie went on to marry and raise families, with the details of their Aboriginal past told and retold among their descendants.
But Mr Rolland said that whenever a small issue arises … ‘the native people of Tongariki always criticised us and always told us that we are not from Tongariki but we are black Australian Aborigines and we have no right over land in this island’.
He said he grew up ‘just accepting it’ to be true that he did not have full status in the eyes of the indigenous Ni-Vanuatu.
A forum this weekend at the University of South Australia will examine the issue and revive an apology made six years ago in Queensland by Vanuatu Chief Richard David Fandanumata for historic wrongs.
Chief Richard told Aboriginal people in Bundaberg during a 2012 visit that his ancestors had been forced by their white captors to ‘terrorise and kill’ the indigenous landowners of the area in order to open it up for agriculture.
Although the removal of the two siblings probably came several decades after this atrocity — and far to the south — their Vanuatu descendants believe the kidnappings came from some sense of responsibility for the children’s welfare because of wrongs done to Aboriginal people.
The Australian has been shown official Vanuatu government documentation establishing descendants of ‘Rossie who is a pure Aboriginal bloodline from Australia’. While some blackbirded returnees took adult partners home, the abduction of Aboriginal children was rarer.
South Sea islanders have only in recent years been officially recognised as a distinct group in Australia. However, there are no reciprocal rights or recognition for those who, like Mr Rolland and his family, claim an Australian connection from abroad.
THIS IS NOT for those who are only after the tried and tested wave magnets — those consistent spots where you’ll find “guaranteed waves” aboard a luxury surf charter boat. Not that there’s anything wrong with booking your two weeks’ annual leave around a surf break known for waves six months of the year.
But scratch the surface a little and you can find options on the fringes, the harder-to-get-to places. The spots that, as you read this, have waves that are going unridden. Like Melanesia.
IN the suburbs of Vanuatu’s capital Port Vila, Chief Edward Cavanough is an Australian researcher and writer focusing on public policy and international affairs. Boborenvanua awaits trial on bail.
The middle-aged chief spends his days processing kava root, an intoxicant experiencing an international boom, tending to a small taro plantation and dreaming of a triumphant return to his village of Lavatmengamu – the de-facto capital of the Turaga Nation of which he is the leader.
“All of Vanuatu will turn out to greet me,” he laughs, prompting smiles from his supporters who have gathered in front of his temporary residence in Port Vila.
In December 2015, police arrested Chief Viraleo and nine other men in Lavatmengamu– a small and isolated settlement located on Pentecost Island – and brought them to the capital to stand trial on charges including burning property in a neighbouring village.
A few days before their arrest, fishermen from that village entered Lavatmangamu’s coastal territory to harvest sea cucumber from the reef, invoking the chief’s ire.
“I summoned them to a meeting and gave them three options: they could either pay a fine to make amends … or they could leave, and be banished from the community. If not, I’d be forced to take actions,” Viraleo says.
Eyewitnesses told Al Jazeera how villagers, including children and pregnant women, ran into the jungle while their homes burned. Violence of this kind is unusual on the island.
Turaga Nation’s coat of arms on display inLavatmengamu – the pig’s tusk featuresprominently.
Viraleo doesn’t deny the allegations. He simply says his response to the territorial encroachment was legal under ‘kastom’ law – a traditional form of governance dictated by chiefs, and recognised in Vanuatu’s constitution.
He believes the charges are politically motivated and designed to halt his controversial movement – a multifaceted lifelong project that has seen him devise an alternative currency – the Tuvatu – which is pegged to traditionally valued pigs tusks, invent a script for his native Raga language, and declare his corner of Pentecost the ‘Turaga Nation’. But with the removal of Viraleo from its base in Pentecost, his movement, which emerged in 1983 as a response to generations of French and British colonial influence, is now floundering.
The kustom economy: a distant revolution
Northern Pentecost is rarely visited by outsiders. Its one outlet to the world is a grass landing strip visited by two light aircraft each week – if the weather holds.
The south receives more visitors, particularly seasonal day-trippers who come to see its famous land-diving ceremony – a traditional form of bungee jumping.
Lavatmengamu, in the northeast, is particularly remote. Hours from the airstrip, only the sturdiest of vehicles can descend the mud track to the village. Despite being a coastal settlement, accessing Lavatmengamu by boat is challenging, with the shore blocked by reefs and only a handful of entry points.
It is here that Chief Viraleo has pursued a project that aims to harness Pentecost’s traditional economy with the objective of ultimately enabling his people to prosper.
Tuvatu currency.
Viraleo’s Tuvatu currency – which has not yet been printed – is pegged to the value of pigs’ tusks and intends to be a paper representation of Pentecost’s traditional economy. It is designed to be exchanged with recognised currencies in Vanuatu and elsewhere in the world.
In Pentecost, and across Vanuatu, the pig’s tusk is a traditional symbol of wealth, still widely used as a means of kustom exchange throughout rural communities. Tusks can take 10 years to grow and are recognised to be worth at least VT 18,000 (about $150). While many commodities, such as food and clothing, are grown and produced within local communities, tusks are still regularly used to pay for property, school fees, debts, and celebrations, such as weddings. Viraleo’s hope is that Pentecost Islanders will one day use Tuvatu to buy necessities, such as medicine and basic building materials, from formal economies.
Much of Vanuatu retains a subsistence agricultural lifestyle that generates little recognised wealth. For the hard-working but income-poor citizens of Vanuatu, the Western economic system brought by foreign powers simply doesn’t deliver. For many, Viraleo’s idea of a currency that values a traditional means of exchange in a way that Vanuatu’s official currency, the Vatu, cannot, has found fertile ground.
A chief in northern Pentecost proudly displays his collection of pigs’ tusks which are used as a means of commerce across the island.
Birth of a dissident
In 2001, in a United Nations indigenous peoples conference in New York, Viraleo first declared his homeland Turaga Nation, catching the attention of Vanuatu’s government.
“Ever since I went to New York … the government have been keeping tabs on me, seeing me as almost a dissident,” Viraleo says.
Viraleo’s agenda has caused some authorities in Port Vila to be nervous. The Reserve Bank of Vanuatu has gone so far as to announce possible legal action against Viraleo, should he begin trading with his currency. His movement bears the hallmarks of a genuine separatist push by promoting its own currency, education system, language and legal framework as a means to fill a perceived governance vacuum across rural Vanuatu.
“The government here in Vila only really takes care of 20 per cent of the population. It takes care of the 20 percent who are living in town and have jobs, but the 80 per cent living in rural areas … they have their local chiefs, but there [is] no central government to take care of them,” Viraleo argues.
Hilaire Bule, the spokesman for Prime Minister Charlot Salwai, says Viraleo has little support on Pentecost. If he is acquitted ‘only his village will celebrate his return’, Bule says.
While the Constitution recognises kustom law and commerce within Vanuatu, Viraleo’s Tuvatu has ‘no legitimacy as a genuine form of currency’, he says.
A Pentecost Islander whose property was destroyed in the fire, who did not want to give their name for fear of retribution, says some neighbouring villagers fear the chief’s return and are critical of the ‘slave-like’ devotion he demands of others.
Some of Viraleo’s co-accused have pleaded guilty and in their defence said they have felt influenced and threatened by the chief, reported Vanuatu’s Daily Post.
Even so, support for Viraleo is apparent.
Hilda Lini, Vanuatu’s first female MP and former health minister, is a long-time supporter of Viraleo and the Turaga Nation, and has provided accommodation and legal counsel for his legal struggle. In northPentecost, Viraleo has inspired devotion. Norris, 18, a student from Laone, a village in Pentecost’s far northwest, walked eight hours each day to Lavatmengamu to learn from Viraleo.
Tony Wilson, editor of the Vanuatu Independent newsmagazine, believes Viraleo ‘has polarised’ the local Vanuatu community, highlighting an old fissure between those who advocate for kustom law versus those who are in favour of the Western system of governance.
Lavatmengamu falls quiet
With its leader indefinitely awaiting trial in Port Vila, Lavatmengamu’s activity has ground to a halt, and the village feels almost abandoned.
A small village on the mud track to Lavatmengamu in northeast Pentecost is seen by drone.
Its population, once in the hundreds, now only numbers a few dozen. My guide in Levatmangamu says most inhabitants deserted the village after Viraleo and his men were arrested.
Before the incident, scholars from all over Vanuatu came to train at the kustom school and learn from the chief.
Today, Viraleo’s classroom is empty. On the chalkboard, notes from the last lesson are fading. A kustom bank, reportedly housing billions of Vatu worth of pigs’ tusks, is closed so long as the chief’s handcrafted timber throne sits empty. And the Tuvatu remains just a dream, rather than the beating heart of a kustom economy.
The chief concedes his movement has lost all momentum as he fights to clear his name. He says since his arrest, “All the work that I have been doing in Lavatmengamu has stopped.”
Viraleo tells Al Jazeera he will defend himself in court, and is optimistic his acquittal will come soon. But his prosecution seems certain from the government’s perspective.
“You cannot take revenge … you cannot take national law or kustom law into your own hands. That is what Viraleo was doing,” Bule says.
As Viraleo’s future remains in question, so too does the future of his kustom movement, the Turaga Nation – and his dream of Vanuatu prospering off the back of its traditions.
Understanding the wantok system as a socio-economic and political network in the Western Pacific is critical to understanding Melanesian societies and political behavior in the context of the modern na-tion-state. The complex web of relationships spawned by the wantok system at local, national and sub-regional levels of Melanesia could in-form our understanding of events and development in Melanesian states in the contemporary period. This paper will analyze the concepts and historical roots of wantok and kastom in Melanesia, with particular reference to the Solomon Islands. It will also assess the impact of colo-nialism in the development of new and artificial wantok identities and their (re)construction for political purposes. It concludes with a con-textual analysis of wantok as an important network in the Solomon Islands emphasizing its central role to people’s understanding of social and political stability and instability.
