Solomon Islands
A Melanesian nation of seven hundred thousand on a thousand islands east of New Guinea, bound by the wantok, led by the self-made big-man, and paid in shell money. The complete guide, the forces first.
Solomon Islands is a Melanesian nation of some seven hundred thousand people on a long double chain of nearly a thousand islands in the southwestern Pacific, east of New Guinea. Its life rests on a few deep forces: the wantok, the bond of those who share a language and blood, who must help one another; land held by the clan and the line, and the kastom, the custom, that governs it; a leadership earned not by birth but by giving, the way of the big-man; and a real wealth of shell money and pigs that settles marriages, wrongs, and deaths. Christianity covers the islands now, woven together with the older world of ancestors and spirits beneath it, across one of the most varied small nations on earth.
The wantok
The bond that holds Solomon Islands society together is the wantok, a word from the islands' pidgin that means, plainly, one talk: the people who share a language are held to be of one blood and one family, and a person's wantoks are the wide circle of kin to whom they belong and on whom they may rely. To be someone's wantok is to owe them help and to be owed it in return. If a woman falls sick, her wantoks tend her garden and mind her children until she is well; if a man runs short, he may ask his wantoks and expect to be given to, knowing he will be asked in his turn. This web of giving and asking is the safety net of Melanesian life, the reason that a person with kin is never truly destitute, and the reason that nothing one has is wholly one's own.
The wantok is more than warmth and support; it is also the frame of a person's rights and place. It is through one's wantok group, the clan and the speakers of one's tongue, that one holds a claim to land, to gardens, and to fishing grounds, and a person without a wantok is a person without standing or ground to stand on. In a country of some seventy and more languages, each language is its own world of kin, and the loyalties run first and deepest to one's own.
The same bond that gives Melanesian life its security has a harder side in the modern country. The duty to one's wantoks does not stop at the village, and a Solomon Islander who gains a position, a job, or public money is pressed to share its benefits with their kin, so that the noble obligation of reciprocity can shade, in office, into favouritism and the placing of one's own. Much of the strain of building a fair modern state on these islands turns on this: that the wantok, which makes a village whole, sits uneasily with the rules of an impartial government. To understand the Solomons is to begin with the wantok, the bond that is at once the country's greatest strength and its hardest knot.
Land, line, and kastom
Beneath the wantok lies the land, and in Solomon Islands the land belongs to the line. The great majority of the country's ground is not owned by individuals or the state but held by clans and lineages together, under custom rather than title, passed down within the group and worked in common. A person belongs to the land of their line and draws from it their gardens, their identity, and their place, and land is the deepest matter in the country, the thing most fought over and least willingly given up.
How the line runs differs across the islands. In much of the country a person belongs to their mother's line, and land and clan membership pass through the mother, so that the matrilineage is the body that holds the ground; on Malaita and in some other parts it is the father's line that carries them. Either way, one is born into a group rooted in a particular ground, and the senior men of that group speak for its land and press its claims, in the village and before the courts.
Over all of this lies kastom, the pidgin word for custom, which in the Solomons means at once the traditional beliefs of a people, the customary law by which they live, and above all the customary ownership of land. Kastom is not written but carried in memory and precedent, and it governs how land is held and passed, how disputes are settled, and how a wrong is made right, running alongside the introduced law of the state and, in much of village life, ahead of it. The country even keeps special courts for custom land, an admission that the deepest questions of the islands cannot be settled by the imported law alone but must answer to kastom and the line.
The big-man
In most of Solomon Islands a leader is not born but made, and the way he is made is by giving. The Melanesian leader is the big-man, a man who rises not by inheriting a title but by gathering wealth, in pigs, in shell money, in the yield of many gardens, and giving it away in great feasts and gifts, so building a following of people who are bound to him by what they have received. It is through this giving that a big-man is created: his generosity puts others in his debt and his obligation, and his standing rests on the number who look to him and the lavishness with which he can provide for them. Skill in oratory, in the managing of exchange, and in the binding of people to oneself makes a big-man, where in other lands birth would make a chief.
This is a different idea of authority from the inherited chiefship of Polynesia or the graded ranks of Vanuatu, and it runs throughout Melanesia. A big-man's power is personal and must be won and held by his own effort; it does not pass automatically to his son, and a man who ceases to give ceases to lead. Some parts of the Solomons, especially the islands settled by Polynesians, do keep hereditary chiefs, and the word chief is now used loosely across the country, but the older Melanesian pattern is the self-made man of influence rather than the inherited lord.
The logic of the big-man did not end with the coming of the modern state but flowed into it. A politician in the Solomons is expected, like a big-man, to provide for his supporters and his wantoks, to bring back money and benefits and share them out among his own, and his following is held by that largesse as a big-man's always was. This is a source of much of the country's trouble with corruption, for the old and honourable duty to give to one's people, carried into the handling of public money, becomes the diverting of that money to one's own. The big-man remains, for good and ill, the Melanesian shape of power.
Shell money, the pig, and compensation
The traditional wealth of Solomon Islands is shell money, and it is no mere ornament but a true currency with a known value in cash. It is made of small discs of shell, ground smooth, drilled, and threaded onto strings, and the great centre of its making is the Langalanga Lagoon on the island of Malaita, whose people have shaped it for generations. The standard piece, the tafuliae, is several long strands worn together, and the red shell is the most precious; such money is used across the country to pay a bride price, to meet the costs of a funeral feast, to settle a wrong, and to seal the great exchanges of kin, as well as worn as adornment and a mark of standing. The old strings are now treasured and handed from father to son, and the making of new ones grows rare, yet shell money is still given even at the highest level, a tafuliae pressed upon an honoured visitor to the nation.
Beside the shell money stand the pig and the garden's yield, and together they are the coin of every great occasion. A marriage is made with a bride price of shell money, pigs, and food carried from the groom's people to the bride's, the two kin groups joined through the wealth that passes between them; in recent times modern goods may be added to the older valuables, but the shell money remains the heart of it.
The deepest use of this wealth is to mend what has been broken. In the Melanesian way, a wrong, an injury, a death, or an offence against custom is not punished so much as paid for: the one at fault, and their kin, give valuables, shell money and pigs, to the wronged party, and this compensation wipes out the affront and restores the bond between the two sides. The whole order of village peace rests on it, for a quarrel left unpaid festers into feud, while a compensation properly given and accepted closes the matter. To hold wealth in the Solomons is to hold the means of marriage, of mourning, and of peace, the shell money and the pig carrying the same weight here that bead money carries in Palau and the fine mat in Samoa.
The lagoon and the sea
The sea divides the people of the Solomons as much as it joins them, and the islands have long known a difference between the saltwater people, who live on the coast and the lagoons and take their living from the sea, and the bush people, who live inland in the high forests and live by their gardens. The two were often wary of one another, and at times at war, and the difference still marks the islands, in livelihood, in custom, and in pride of place.
Out of that division came one of the most striking sights in the Pacific: whole islands made by hand. In the lagoons of Malaita, at Langalanga and at Lau, the saltwater people built up islands from the sea floor, piling coral stone on the reef over generations until they had raised dry platforms above the water, and there they set their villages of stilted houses, a chain of some scores of man-made islands strung along the lagoon. They built them, it is said, to escape the raids of the bush people and the sickness of the shore, and to live close to their fishing grounds, and people live on them still, on ground their ancestors carried stone by stone out of the sea.
The vessel that carried the sea peoples was the canoe, and in the western islands it reached a high art in the war canoe, a long plank-built craft fitted together without nails and inlaid with shimmering pieces of pearl shell. At its prow rode the nguzunguzu, a carved head of a guardian spirit, set there to ward off the spirits of the sea and to watch over the voyage, in the days when such canoes carried raiding parties across the water. The sea was the road, the larder, and the battlefield of the old Solomons, and the lagoon islands and the inlaid canoe are what that life left behind.
Panpipes, dance, and carving
The Solomons are famous in the world of music for their panpipes, and above all for the panpipe ensembles of the 'Are'are people of Malaita, in which many players, each with a set of stopped bamboo tubes, weave their parts into a music of great intricacy and a deep, breathing, almost hypnotic sound. There are panpipes small enough to hold and others built so large that the player moves his own head across the tubes to sound them, and beside them the bamboo bands, who beat out a rhythm by striking tuned lengths of bamboo. This music, sounded for ceremony and for pleasure, is among the most distinctive in the Pacific and has carried the name of the islands far beyond them.
The carving of the Solomons is as fine as its music. The islanders work a dark, close hardwood, often ebony, and set into its black surface small pieces of pearl shell and nautilus that catch the light, making bowls, figures, and ornaments of a striking beauty. The canoe-prow guardian, the nguzunguzu, is the best known of these carvings, but the same art shapes the round chest ornaments called kapkap, discs of pale clamshell overlaid with a fine filigree of turtle shell, and the war shields once inlaid with countless tiny squares of shell. Such pieces were not made for sale but worn and used as marks of rank, power, and prestige.
Dance and song carry the life of the islands as the carving and the panpipes do. Each people has its own dances and its own custom singing, performed at the feasts and the gatherings that mark the turns of life, the dancers in the ornaments of their kastom, the songs holding the stories and the genealogies of the group. Here, as across Melanesia, the arts are not a thing apart from life but the very form in which a community remembers itself and shows itself to others.
Faith: church, kastom, and the Brotherhood
Solomon Islanders are now overwhelmingly Christian, the faith brought by missionaries from the middle of the nineteenth century and now holding all but a small part of the people. The largest church is the Church of Melanesia, the Anglican church of the islands, with the Catholic, the South Seas Evangelical, the Methodist, and the Adventist churches sharing much of the rest, and across the country Sunday is given to worship and rest and the church stands at the centre of village life. Out of the Anglican church grew an institution dear to the islands, the Melanesian Brotherhood, a native order of unmarried brothers, the Tasiu, who go out to carry the faith into the remote places and who are widely held to wield a spiritual power of their own against the old spirits of kastom. Several of these brothers were murdered during the troubles of recent years, a martyrdom mourned across Melanesia.
Beneath the church lives the older world that the islands have not wholly set aside, a world of ancestors and spirits. The dead were held to remain powerful and present, their skulls and relics kept in shrines and their favour sought, and a force called mana ran through people, places, and things; certain places and acts were tabu, set apart and forbidden. On parts of Malaita the ancestors were bound up with the shark, and the sharks of certain waters were revered as the dwelling of the dead and called to from the shore. Much of this older religion has faded under the church, but its sense of a world thick with spirit and of a duty to the ancestors has not, and it colours the Christianity of the islands still.
The old world had its darkness too, which the islands do not hide. In the western islands, head-hunting was once a part of life, raiding parties going out by war canoe to take heads that were held to be needed for the rites of the community and for the standing of its men, until the practice was ended around the turn of the twentieth century under the weight of colonial rule and the church. That history is part of the long passage by which the islands came to the faith they now hold, kastom and Christianity meeting, struggling, and at last settling into the single inheritance that orders Solomon Islander life today.
The village and its courtesies
Most Solomon Islanders live where their people have always lived, in small villages and settlements scattered along the coasts and up the river valleys, and the great majority of the country dwells in the countryside rather than the towns. Life there turns on the garden and the sea: the women tend plots of yam, taro, sweet potato, and cassava that feed the family, the men fish the reef and the lagoon, and the wantoks share the work and the yield among themselves, so that a household lives within a wide circle of kin numbering, it is often said, in the hundreds.
A visitor enters this world as a guest and must come as one. Away from the few places set up for travellers, one does not simply arrive in a village but seeks the leave of its people first, for the ground is held under custom and not every community welcomes the stranger; the courteous traveller asks the local authorities or the village's leaders before coming. Within the village, dress is modest, the manner calm and unhurried, for Solomon Islanders set no store by haste and read a pushing, hurrying way as poor manners. Certain places are tabu, sacred or forbidden, and not to be entered or photographed without leave.
Over the village lies the rhythm of the church, and Sunday is kept quiet and given to worship and family. The week is the slow round of the garden, the reef, and the gathering, and the courtesies that bind it are those of the wantok: to share, to give when asked, to take part in the feasts and the obligations of one's kin, and to keep faith with the custom of the place. The village is the wantok and the kastom made into a way of living, and its courtesies are simply the daily form of belonging to it.
The nation
Solomon Islands is a country of some seven hundred thousand people spread across a long double chain of nearly a thousand islands, of which six are large, running down the sea northwest of Vanuatu and east of New Guinea. Its capital is Honiara, on the island of Guadalcanal, and the rest of the people live across Malaita, Makira, Choiseul, Santa Isabel, the New Georgia islands, and a scatter of smaller isles and far atolls, some of the outliers peopled by Polynesians and one community by Micronesians resettled from Kiribati. It is among the most varied small nations on earth, with seventy and more languages held together by the pidgin all share. Once a British protectorate, it became independent in 1978 and remains a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth, the British sovereign its distant and ceremonial head of state.
The islands carry a heavy modern history. In the world war they saw some of the bitterest fighting of the Pacific, the long battle for Guadalcanal, whose waters took so many ships that they are called the Iron Bottom Sound, and the islanders served as scouts and watchers through it. Two decades into independence the country fell into its own conflict, the Tensions, a bitter struggle on Guadalcanal between the island's own people and settlers from Malaita over land, work, and the crowding of the capital, which killed perhaps two hundred, drove tens of thousands from their homes, and broke the government, until a regional force led by Australia came in to restore order and stayed for years. Peace has held since, though unrest has flared again in the capital, and the country navigates hard questions of land, of logging, and of its place between greater powers.
The life of most Solomon Islanders, though, goes on much as it has, by the garden, the reef, the wantok, and the kastom this guide has described. The economy leans on subsistence and on the felling of the islands' forests, an export that cannot last, and the low coral islands of the country are among the first places on earth to be lost to the rising sea, some already gone beneath it. Through war, conflict, and a changing climate, the deep order of the Solomons holds: the bond of one talk, the wealth that mends what is broken, and the land that belongs to the line, carried by one of the most diverse peoples in the world into an uncertain age.