The Shark God (19 page)

So I headed for the port. Two ships made the run to Santa Cruz. They were tied up to the same crumbling cement pier. One, the
Eastern Trader
, looked like hell: she was a garbage heap of grease, great flakes of exfoliating rust, and flapping laundry, but her deck was stacked with fuel barrels.

“When can we go?” I asked her skipper.

“We wait,” he said.

“For what?” I asked.

“Petrol,” he said.

“But your ship is loaded with fuel,” I said.

“That's the airplane fuel. We need diesel, and we don't have the money to pay for it just yet.”

“So when will you have the money?”

“When our passengers pay us.”

“And you've been waiting how long?”

“Not long. A month, maybe.”

It was the same story across the dock, on the MV
Temotu
, which looked slightly more reliable, and whose Chinese signage revealed a long life on the Pearl River Delta trade.

At least ships had run during the civil war. There had been money then. Now everything was grinding to a halt, and I was stuck.

So I wandered around and met the unhappy people of Honiara, who were not like the fresh-scrubbed, just-blessed innocents of
Vanuatu. It was as though all ease and subtlety had been drained from them. Men told me things like, “Our country is fucked.” Urgent women invited me to meet their daughters. Everyone was afraid: of ex-militants, thugs, and extortionists, but also of the police. No wonder: after the armistice, as many as two thousand ex-militants had been enlisted by the Royal Solomon Islands Police as “special constables.” Putting them on the government payroll certainly hadn't convinced the militants to turn in their stolen guns, nor did it reform those who had been responsible for all the torture, rape, intimidation, and murder during the war. People were afraid of Harold Keke, afraid that in a moment of utter madness the last of the Weather Coast militants might march across the mountainous spine of Guadalcanal and storm the capital. But they were even more afraid of Keke's enemies, men like Jimmy Rasta, one of the supposedly reformed Malaita Eagle commanders.

War had been good for Jimmy Rasta. The man was a nobody before the tension, but now he commanded a private army of former militants. Everyone in Honiara had a Jimmy Rasta story. Some people were impressed by the way he passed out handfuls of dollar bills in the street. Most weren't. They talked about how Rasta's boys had extorted thousands from shopkeepers, bludgeoned protest leaders, and assassinated at least two police officers. Rasta's gang could be hired to rough up or kidnap anyone you didn't like.

I figured if I couldn't escape Honiara's darkness, I might as well confront it. Rasta ran a bottle shop on the highway near the airport. I went there and asked the dull-eyed lad behind the counter to pass a note on to Rasta for me. I was curious to know if Jimmy thought he was going to hell. That's not what I wrote in my note. I wrote that I was meeting with all the most important men in the Solomon Islands.

I returned to the bottle shop three times. Finally, Rasta rolled up in a battered Toyota SR-5, reggae pumping so loud the car's doors rattled. He must have been about thirty. He was Bob Marley
gone gangsta: thick dreadlocks, baggy jeans, and a delicate gold wristwatch. He handed me a warm SolBrew and led me out back. We sat on a couple of beer crates by a pond of discarded oil.

Rasta, whose real surname was Lusibaea, told me that he had been a peaceful guy before the ethnic tension. But one night in 1999, some of Harold Keke's boys had burst into his village and shot up the place. Rasta's grandfather was so scared, his heart stopped beating. In the following months, the bodies of Rasta's
wantoks
started turning up in creeks and gardens. The police did nothing, so Rasta and his friends raided the police armories and took their revenge. But all that was in the past, he told me proudly. Now that the tension was over, he ran a private security business, providing employment to more than thirty boys. No, they didn't use guns. How could they use guns? The boys had given their guns back: all their SR-88s, their M-16s, and their LMGs, all long gone.

I wanted to say, “Jimmy, you're lying. Everyone in town says that your boys are always shooting at people,” but I was too scared. I sat and drank my beer, listening to him rant about his enemies, which included the Melanesian Brotherhood.

“The
tasiu
are false prophets. They
garem
no magic powers. Look, they stopped at my headquarters one day, trying to cause trouble, and my boys went and broke two of their walking sticks. Has anything bad happened to us since then? No. Nothing.
Mi no fraet long olgeta tasiu.
”

This was not the story most people told. They said that the boy who broke the walking sticks was now crippled. His hands had shriveled up.

“Some people think you should be in jail,” I said quietly.

“What?” Rasta grunted.

I chickened out. “When will your country have peace?” I asked instead.

“Peace? We
garem
peace. Look, my store is open. Business is good.”

He winked at me, beamed, slapped me on the knee.

“Look, I'm a Christian boy. South Seas Evangelical Church. Are you a Christian boy?”

“Um…”

“Well, if you are, then you know that everything happens according to God's plan. From the day we are born, God knows what will happen to us. He has a plan for us. All will be well, my friend. All will be
gud tumas.
”

But all was clearly not good in Honiara. Hundreds of people had returned from the provinces to demand payback for land, property, or relatives they had allegedly lost during the conflict. They called it “compensation.” The price for killing a man? In Darkness Time, it had been a life for a life. Under the Western legal system, it had been a prison term. Now it was cash. If you had a gun, you didn't need any justification for your compensation claim. You just found the national finance minister and demanded he write you a check. That's why the Ministry of Finance had been wrapped in razor wire.

The tension ebbed and flowed like the tide. When it rose, you could feel it. It was thick and heavy, and it covered everything with a dark, sticky film, like betel spit. That's when you watched your step. That's when you looked into people's eyes, not too long but long enough to check their intentions. The streets were full of excitable young Rambos, bored mongrels with betel-stained lips, teeth razor-sharp with rot, wandering between the garbage fires in packs or squatting in the dirt, spitting red, smoking, waiting. Shortly after I returned from Rasta's place, a bright-eyed lad called to me across the street: “You watch out!” he shouted cheerily.

Then quickly:

Distant shouting.

Pop-pop
, gunfire.

Suddenly we were all stampeding madly for cover. I hid behind a shipping container. There was the lad, giggling.

“What happened? What happened?” I asked breathlessly, peering out at the empty street.

“
Mi no savve
,” he said, husking himself a betel nut. “But
long Honiara, taem olgeta pipol run, yu run olsem.
”

 

Christianity was supposed to have saved the Solomon Islands from this sort of chaos and violence. When I asked people in Honiara why their ancestors had converted, they usually answered with one word: peace. Christians did not raid neighboring villages at the behest of their ancestral ghosts. They did not hunt each other or eat each other. They did not live in fear. This was the gift of the imported god. It was, some of them said, as though Christianity had saved islanders from the savage part of themselves.

This idea was naturally supported by European versions of history. English chroniclers have long characterized Solomon Islanders as people in desperate need of spiritual and practical guidance. “The Melanesian Mission did not reach the Solomon Islands a day too soon,” wrote Austin Coates in
Western Pacific Islands
, a 1970 Colonial Office–sponsored summary of British rule in the region. “This was a society in a state of rapid disintegration, due principally to an appalling, and evidently rather recent, spread of cannibalism, head-hunting and black magic,” he wrote. “Brutality had reached such a pitch that it was brutality no more; it was normal.”

This hysterical assessment was rooted in the writings of early chroniclers, who seemed to relish scenes of horror and brutality. There was the traveling mission historian A. R. Tippet, who noted that near a mission station on Choiseul, skulls were hung from the branches of a banyan tree somewhat in the manner of Christmas tree baubles. There was the resident trader, John C. MacDonald, who claimed to have witnessed a canoe-launching ceremony in 1883 at Nono Lagoon during which a slave boy was dunked underwater until exhausted, then decapitated. MacDonald reported
with morbid fascination how the child's body was paraded around the village canoe house until the blood ceased to pulse from the neck, then cooked along with a pig. Travelers were hungry for stories of local depravity whether they witnessed them or not. In
The Light of Melanesia
, my great-grandfather offered these nuggets from Makira, just east of Guadalcanal:

“Often it has been a chief living only a few miles off who [starts] in the dead of night and, at early dawn, surprises the sleeping population, murders every one, takes their skulls for his new canoe or house, and paddles back with as much human flesh as his people can dispose of. Close to Wango, one of our school centres, I was shown a village which had been wiped out only a few years ago. The forty skulls then taken are probably still in existence, but the people near a school do not care to talk of such exploits, nor exhibit their spoils.”

Here it is tempting to stop and wonder: If islanders weren't relating these stories to my great-grandfather, then who was, and what was the storyteller's agenda? Or, one could simply pass on more of his tidbits, like this one:

“Infanticide is terribly common, almost universal, and it is the old women who are in fault. They are eager to kill babies as soon as they are born, that the young mothers may not be kept from work in the fields, which then would fall heavily upon the old and childless. I asked, of course, in what way the population of a village was kept up. I was told that in all coast villages it is the custom to buy boys and girls of six or eight from the bush people, who apparently do not practice infanticide.”

I am suspicious of this sort of history because it comes entirely from European writers who had much to gain in portraying Melanesians as degenerate savages. Whether all the details of these stories are true, they have helped shape modern Melanesians' own version of history. Darkness Time was a time of violence, slavery, gore, and depravity.

But a closer look reveals that Europeans delivered a cargo of shackles, swords, and gunpowder along with their Bibles.

Take the first encounter between Europeans and Solomon Islanders. In 1567, the Spanish viceroy of Peru sent his nephew, Alvaro de Mendaña, out into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish believed that the Inca had once sailed a fleet of reed boats across the Pacific to islands inhabited by a fabulously wealthy black race. They fantasized that this was Ophir, the biblical source of the gold King Solomon used to build his temples in Jerusalem. The conquistadors wanted the gold, but Mendaña declared he would also bring the discovered race under the dominion of the Catholic Church.

It took Mendaña nearly a year to find an island big enough to resemble the imagined kingdom. He called the island Santa Ysabel and claimed all the surrounding shores for his king and his god, but the islanders refused to share their yams with his starving crew. Relations reached a low point when ten of Mendaña's men paddled to shore on Guadalcanal to obtain water. Only one survived. “The dead were cut into pieces,” wrote chief purser Gomez Catoira. “Some without legs and without arms, others without heads, and the ends of all their tongues were cut off, and their eyeteeth drawn, and those whose heads were left had had the skulls cut open and the brains eaten.” Mendaña certainly didn't turn the other cheek. His soldiers burned hundreds of houses and killed at least twenty men. The native dead were drawn, quartered, and left at the spot where his own men had been killed. Mendaña then headed home to report he had found the fabled islands of King Solomon, though he had found no gold, silver, or spices, nor had he converted any heathens.

Early British adventurers did not pretend their mission had anything at all to do with God. They were after hardwood, then laborers, and then the islands themselves. The traders were frequently sworn enemies of the church. They armed natives with shotguns and, according to Henry Montgomery, were indirectly
responsible for murderous attacks on Anglican mission schools. “Mission work has no greater enemy than the ungodly white man, for the foes within the household deal the most deadly blows,” he despaired, finding Guadalcanal still defiantly heathen.

Britain took the Solomon Islands on as a protectorate in 1893. Its first resident commissioner, Sir Charles Woodford, insisted the rambunctious natives needed a “firm and paternal” government. But one reason the islands were so unquiet was that Woodford was wresting land out of native hands so that it could be sold or leased to white planters. Why was Woodford so keen to sell land? He needed revenues to fund his firm and paternal government. It was a catch-22 with explosive consequences.

Some planters did buy land from hereditary owners: one district was bought for £20, two thousand porpoise teeth, two hundred dog teeth, a case of tobacco, a case of pipes, a case of matches, one piece of calico, two knives, and two axes. But elsewhere, Woodford simply annexed hundreds of thousands of acres of supposedly “unoccupied lands,” most of which he had never seen, and licensed it out to planters. When islanders resisted the theft, Woodford or his allies responded with murderous force. For a time, Woodford's efforts to “purify” the Solomons looked a lot like traditional Melanesian blood feuding.