Kiribati
A Micronesian nation of low coral atolls scattered across the central Pacific, gathered around the maneaba, the meeting house at the heart of every village. The complete guide, the forces first.
Kiribati is a Micronesian nation of some one hundred and twenty thousand people, spread across thirty-three low coral islands strung over an immense reach of the central Pacific astride the equator. Its life turns on the maneaba, the great meeting house that stands at the heart of every village and is the seat of all community decision, and on te katei ni Kiribati, the Kiribati way, the body of custom the maneaba holds. Beneath these lie the bonds of the utu, the wide kin who share land and answer one another's call, and a life drawn from the narrow atoll and the wide sea, by the coconut, the taro pit, the canoe, and the fish. Christianity now fills the islands, and Kiribati faces the rising ocean as the low nation most exposed to it on earth.
Te katei ni Kiribati
The way of life on these atolls has a name of its own, te katei ni Kiribati, the Kiribati way, the body of custom and right conduct by which an I-Kiribati lives. It took shape over centuries of voyaging and intermarriage among the islands, until the scattered communities of the chain shared one way of living, and it has held since, carried not in books but in the meeting house, the elders, and the daily manner of the people. To live by te katei is to know one's place in the kin and the community, to show the proper respect to those owed it, and to set the good of the group before the wish of the self.
The keepers of the way are the unimwane, the old men of each village, the elders whose age and knowledge give them the right to speak for the community and to decide its affairs. In a society that kept no king over the whole land but governed itself village by village, it was the council of these elders, gathered in the meeting house, that held authority, weighing matters and reaching agreement together, and their word still carries great weight even as a modern state has grown over the islands.
The values the way teaches are those a crowded atoll requires. Humility is prized and boastfulness scorned; a person does not put themselves forward or stand above their fellows, and even in the famous dance the performer keeps a grave and unsmiling face. Respect runs upward to elders and outward to kin, and the sharing of what one has is not generosity but duty. The blessing offered in the meeting house, and the wish the nation took for its own, asks for health, for peace, and for prosperity, the three goods a people living small on the open ocean most need. To grasp Kiribati is to begin with te katei, the quiet, binding way that lets many people live close together on very little ground.
The maneaba
At the heart of every Kiribati village stands the maneaba, the meeting house, and it is the centre of the whole of island life. It is the largest building in the village, an imposing open-sided hall whose vast roof of pandanus thatch is carried on stout posts of coconut wood and slabs of coral, raised by the labour of the whole community, every family lending its hands and its materials to the work. The word itself joins the sense of gathering to the sense of the land and its people, and the building is exactly that: the place where the community becomes one body. Its making has changed little since the first great maneaba was raised on the island of Abaiang centuries ago.
The maneaba is the seat of government, of justice, of ceremony, and of feast. Here the unimwane meet to decide the affairs of the village, to settle disputes, and to weigh questions of custom, doing so in the open before the assembled people so that all may see and hear; here marriages, deaths, and the great occasions of the community are marked; here the dances are performed and the visitors received, for the maneaba is also a house of refuge and of hospitality, where a stranger may claim shelter and protection.
What orders the maneaba is the boti, the appointed places where people sit. Each family and clan has its own spot along the walls of the house, inherited through descent and fixed by long custom, and a group's boti carries with it that group's rank, its part in the proceedings, and its right to speak on certain matters. To know where a person sits is to know who they are and what they may do, and the seats were prized so highly that quarrels over them could split a village. So central is the meeting house to the I-Kiribati idea of order that the nation gave its own parliament the name of the maneaba, governing the whole republic in the image of the village hall.
The utu and the bubuti
Kiribati society is built of kin, in rings that widen out from the single household. The smallest is the mwenga, the household under one roof; around it stands the utu, the wide body of relatives linked by blood and by shared rights in land; and at the centre of each utu sits the kainga, the ancestral family estate, the ground of a common forebear from which the kin take their name and their belonging. A person is born into several utu at once, holding rights in each, and those who live on a given kainga have the greatest voice in its affairs and the largest share of what its land yields.
The lines of kin and land run through both parents alike. An I-Kiribati inherits rights from the mother's people and the father's people both, belonging to many groups and tracing claims through either side, so that the web of relation spreads wide across the village and the island. In so small and so interrelated a world, almost everyone is kin to almost everyone, and a person is held and placed by that net of relation from birth.
The duty that binds the kin together has a name, the bubuti. A bubuti is a request made by one relative or friend of another, and it is a request that, by custom, cannot well be refused: to turn down a bubuti is to wound the relationship and to fall short in one's obligation, and so what is asked, whether goods, labour, or help, is given. This is the deep reciprocity of atoll life, the assurance that a person in need may call on their kin and be answered, and that what they have may in turn be called upon. It is the great strength of the society and, in the modern world of wages and scarce cash, a heavy weight as well, for the earner cannot easily refuse the many who may ask. To belong to Kiribati is to live within the utu and under the bubuti, never alone and never wholly one's own.
Land on the atoll
On a coral atoll the land is narrow, low, and scarce, a thin ribbon of sand and reef rock seldom more than a few feet above the sea and often only a stone's throw from lagoon to ocean, and on such ground every plot is precious. In Kiribati the holding of land does more than feed a family; it underlies and cements the whole order of who a person is and where they belong. Rights in particular pieces of ground, inherited within the utu, fix a person's place in the kin and the village, and land is held, worked, and passed down with great care, the boundaries known and the claims remembered across generations.
Because the ground is so confined, the I-Kiribati learned to wring food from it by labour and ingenuity. The chief work of cultivation is the growing of babai, a giant swamp taro raised in pits dug down to the fresh water that lies beneath the atoll, each pit tended for years and its great corms saved for the most important feasts, so that babai is at once a food and a measure of a family's diligence and standing. Around the houses grow the coconut, the pandanus, and the breadfruit, the trees that clothe the atoll and feed its people.
The scarcity of land has shaped the country's history and its present alike. Holdings are small and often scattered, divided and subdivided among heirs until a family's ground may lie in many tiny parcels, and disputes over land have always been among the sharpest in island life, which is why the colonial government set about recording titles and why land transfers are now registered. Above all, the lowness of the land is the country's peril, for ground that rises so little above the ocean has little to spare when the ocean rises, and the same narrow strips that have held the I-Kiribati for three thousand years are now among the most exposed on earth to the swelling sea.
The canoe and the navigator
A nation of islands flung across so much ocean lived by the canoe, and the I-Kiribati were among the great seafarers of the Pacific. The local craft, the te wa, is an outrigger canoe built from the materials the atoll affords, its hull lashed together with coconut cord and balanced by an outrigger float, and shaped over generations into a vessel of real speed and grace. With it the islanders fished the lagoon and the open sea and crossed the wide water between their scattered homes, for in a country of thirty and more separated islands the canoe was the only road, the means by which people travelled, carried news, and shared what they had.
To sail such distances out of sight of land called for the navigator's art, and the I-Kiribati mastered it. Without chart or compass they read the sky and the sea, steering by the rising and setting of the stars, by the set of the long ocean swells against the hull, by the winds, and by the flight of seabirds making for land at dusk, holding a course across days of empty water to a low island that shows itself only when one is nearly upon it. This knowledge, learned by heart and handed down by word and practice, joined Kiribati to the wider Pacific feat of voyaging that peopled the ocean's every habitable speck.
The sea was not only the road but the larder. The men fished the reef and the lagoon and the deep water beyond, by line, by net, and by trap, taking the fish that has always been the people's chief food, and the rhythms of the tide and the season ordered the work of the village. To this day the canoe under sail on the lagoon is the very image of Kiribati, and the skill of the boat-builder and the fisherman is honoured as among the truest marks of an I-Kiribati man.
The dance
The supreme art of Kiribati is the dance, te mwaie, and it is unlike the dance of anywhere else in the Pacific. Its inspiration is the frigate bird, the great seabird of these waters, and the dancer's movements echo the bird: the arms held wide and still like outstretched wings, the body poised, and then the sudden sharp turning and jerking of the head. The frigate bird is dear to the I-Kiribati, for it guides the lost fisherman toward land, foretells the weather, and stands for peace, and it is the bird the nation set upon its flag. The dancer wears ornaments and a skirt of island materials and moves to chanting and the beat of the body and the hands, for the music of Kiribati is made chiefly of voices and rhythm rather than instruments.
The dance is not light entertainment but a grave and demanding art. The performer's face stays solemn and unsmiling throughout, for to smile while dancing is held to be vulgar: the dance is the telling of a story and the showing of the dancer's skill, beauty, and endurance, and it is to be done with dignity and full seriousness. A fine dancer is admired and long remembered, and the old belief held that a dancer could draw the very eyes and hearts of the watchers by the power of the performance.
The dance belongs to the maneaba and to the great occasions of the community, performed at feasts, at welcomes, and at the gatherings that mark the turns of the year and of life. There are many named dances, standing and sitting, slow and fast, each with its own form, but all share the bird-like grace and the unsmiling discipline that mark the Kiribati style. In a land of few possessions and little ground, the dance is one of the people's greatest treasures, a thing of beauty made wholly out of the body, the voice, and the memory of the frigate bird over the sea.
The food and the feast
The food of Kiribati is the food a coral atoll can give, and at its centre stand the fish and the coconut. Fish from the lagoon, the reef, and the open sea is the daily staple and the chief source of nourishment, eaten fresh, dried, or raw, and a household's skill at catching it is a measure of its wellbeing. The coconut palm is the tree of life of the islands, giving its flesh and its water as food and drink, its sap drawn off and boiled down to a sweet syrup or left to ferment into a sour toddy, and its dried meat, the copra, long the one good the islands could sell to the world.
Around these grow the other gifts of the atoll. The pandanus yields a sweet fruit, the breadfruit a starchy one, and the babai, the great swamp taro raised in its pits, is the prestige food saved for the feast, the dish that does honour to an occasion and to the family that provides it. From so spare a land the I-Kiribati built a varied table, and what the ground and the sea give is stretched by care and by sharing, for in a place of scarcity no one eats well while a neighbour goes without.
The feast, the botaki, is the great expression of this abundance and this sharing. At a marriage, a death, a church day, or a gathering of the community, the kin bring their food to the maneaba and lay it out together, and the assembled people eat as one, the giving and the sharing of food being among the deepest courtesies of the culture. To host well, to give generously, and to see that every guest is fed is to honour both one's kin and oneself, and the feast in the meeting house, with its food, its speeches, and its dancing, is the fullest picture of Kiribati life at its happiest.
Faith: church and old spirits
Kiribati today is a thoroughly Christian country, and the church stands beside the maneaba at the centre of village life. The faith came with missionaries in the nineteenth century, the first being American Protestants who landed in the northern islands, with Catholic priests following, and the islands divided roughly between the two, the people of some islands and families becoming Catholic and others Protestant. A little over half the nation is now Roman Catholic and most of the rest belong to the Kiribati Protestant and Uniting churches, with smaller numbers of other denominations, and Sunday is widely kept for worship and rest, the church and its singing a great part of community life.
That division left its mark on the country. The rivalry between the Catholic and the Protestant missions was sharp, and the loyalties it bred ran deep, becoming an undercurrent in the politics of the islands and the nation that has not wholly faded. Yet across the divide the church is woven into te katei, the old way, so that Christian worship and Kiribati custom are lived together rather than apart, the one having settled into the other over the generations.
Beneath the church lies the older world the islands knew before it. The I-Kiribati told of a creator and of a host of spirits, the anti, who filled the sky, the sea, and the land, and of an ancestral homeland in the west, Matang, from which fair forebears were said to have come; they honoured their ancestors and both feared and courted the spirits in all the doings of life. Much of this older belief has passed under the long teaching of the church, but its sense of a world alive with spirit, of the nearness of the ancestors, and of the powers that move the sea and the weather has not wholly gone, and it lingers within the Christianity that the islands now hold as their own.
The nation
Kiribati is a republic of some one hundred and twenty thousand people scattered across thirty-three islands, of which all but one are low coral atolls and the last, Banaba, a raised island of rock. Its few hundred square miles of land lie strewn across more than three million square miles of ocean in three groups, the Gilberts in the west where most of the people live, and the far Phoenix and Line islands to the east, the whole spread straddling the equator and the line of longitude where the day changes, so that the country reaches into all four quarters of the globe. Its people are almost entirely I-Kiribati, one of the most homogeneous nations in the Pacific, speaking the Gilbertese tongue, a language that has no letter for the sound of an English s. The capital crowds onto the islets of South Tarawa, where more than a third of the nation now lives.
The country took its present shape under and after British rule. The Gilberts became a British protectorate at the end of the nineteenth century and later a colony joined with the Ellice Islands; the war brought the Japanese and then, in 1943, the terrible Battle of Tarawa, among the bloodiest of the Pacific; the Ellice Islands parted to become Tuvalu, and in 1979 the Gilberts won their independence as the Republic of Kiribati, taking the local form of the old colonial name. The island of Banaba carried a heavy fate, its rich phosphate dug away over eighty years and exhausted just as independence came, and most of its people resettled far off on Rabi in Fiji, where their descendants live still, holding a seat in the Kiribati parliament.
The life of the nation is modest and exposed. With little land and few resources, Kiribati lives by subsistence and fishing, by the sale of copra and of licences to foreign fleets to fish its vast ocean, by the wages its trained seafarers send home, and by aid, and it counts among the poorer and more remote states on earth. Over all of this hangs the rising sea, for a nation whose ground stands barely above the ocean is among the first places in the world that the warming sea may take, and Kiribati has become a clear voice in the world's reckoning with that danger, even seeking ground abroad against the day the water comes. Through all of it the deep order described in this guide endures: the maneaba and the elders, the utu and the bubuti, the canoe, the dance, and the Kiribati way, carried by a people who have lived three thousand years on the thinnest of lands in the widest of oceans.