The Shark God (21 page)

The lost tribe theory had gained momentum during the civil war, particularly when Malaita Eagle commanders circulated a treatise whose author used quotes from Genesis and Deuteronomy to “prove” that Malaitans shared their pride and aggressiveness with the sons of Jacob. Malaitans, who had never gotten along particularly well with each other, suddenly had a myth to bind them: they were different from the primitives across the water. They were bound by history and collective superiority. They were the lost tribe! It worked until the armistice was signed in 2000. Then Malaitans turned their guns and machetes on each other again.

All this saddened the bishop. Christianity was supposed to free the Malaitans from their fears and their restrictive
kastom
rules, but a perverted version of
kastom
was enjoying a kind of resurgence. Various Christian sects were bringing the old
tabus
back, especially rules regarding women. They forbade women to wear shorts. They forced women to remain in isolation during menstruation. They jacked up the price of brides to include hard cash as well as the traditional exchange of shell money. One breakaway priest had a vision that told him that women should not be permitted to wear ribbons in their hair.

The greatest perversion of all had occurred with the age-old
kastom
of compensation, said the bishop. Islanders had once relied on grand feasts and the ritual exchange of pigs, shell money, and favors to create bonds between clans and to reconcile all kinds of
disputes. But the cash economy had twisted compensation into a grotesque caricature of itself. Malaitans were now demanding mountains of cash for bride price, war damages, and affronts real and imagined. The compensation racket was making men like Jimmy Rasta rich. It pretended to be
kastom
, but it was extortion, pure and simple. Example: A boy in the bishop's youth choir had touched a girl on the shoulder. The girl's brothers had demanded $400 for the indiscretion.

The bishop put me up in the spare room of his tin-roofed bungalow. I studied him, his household, and what I had wrongly thought was his exile. In 1996, Terry Brown had been living in Toronto when the Church of Melanesia announced it needed a new bishop for Malaita. He had spent a few years teaching in the islands, so why not put his name forward? He was elected in a unanimous decision by a committee of Melanesian clergy. He came to Melanesia alone, but his aloneness was not tolerated. The bishop's Melanesian predecessors all had installed their extended families in the official residence, but Terry Brown did not have a family. It didn't matter. The residence was like a sponge. It gave him one.

There was George, a bright-eyed Polynesian teen who had adopted the bishop as his father. George's function in the house seemed to be to prance Pan-like about the house and hold guests' hands. He had discovered glitter paint at a church dance. It sparkled from his eyebrows the night I arrived.

There was Derrick of the deep facial scars and dark moods. One afternoon, Derrick asked to borrow the stick of underarm deodorant he had found while digging through my pack. I said fine. Then he rubbed it through his beard. Derrick had once been Auki's Casanova, but he had fallen in love with the wrong girl. Her family demanded fifteen lengths of common shell money, two yards of red shell money, two thousand dolphin's teeth, and a whopping $6,000 in bride price, all of which was taking Derrick years to raise. The bishop paid him to drive his truck.

There was jovial Thomas, who arrived for tea and toast on the bishop's veranda each morning, and whose wife would invariably come searching for him by midday. Thomas was very skilled at driving race cars on the bishop's new computer.

Then there was gentle Tony, who took care of the bishop and quietly nagged the others to do their dishes. They were an immensely likable bunch.

“Melanesian society is corporate,” the bishop explained to me one night as he cooked sausage stew for the gang. “There are no individuals here. You are either part of the community or you are quite simply considered something less than human. I have never been alone here—I am not permitted to be alone.”

The bishop's residence reminded me of a fraternity house. Dirty dishes were stacked high. Walls were flecked with dried tomato sauce. People came and went without knocking. Strangers lurked in the kitchen, poked their heads into the refrigerator, then froze when they spotted me watching through the screen door. There was a note tacked to the bishop's bedroom door: “Please don't search through drawers and take things that aren't yours.” The boys in the house were not servants. The bishop did most of the cooking. The boys borrowed his slippers and sweaters. They went to the market with his money to buy yams and returned with pockets full of betel nut instead. They played games on his computer late into the evening. They teased him. They rarely called him bishop. They yelled at him from the veranda. “Big B!” they shouted. “Come out, Big B!” And the bishop would shake his head and chuckle to himself.

For a time, I thought the bishop was being taken advantage of. Perhaps he was, but no more than any other Solomon Islands big man. This is the essence of the Solomon Islands
wantok
system: if you are a big man, you are obliged to share your wealth. If you have food, your
wantoks
will come and eat it. If you have money, they will ask for it. If you start a canteen store, they will clear the
shelves before you can sell anything. Clothes they will borrow, permanently. If you join the government and move to a house in Honiara, your
wantoks
will move in with you and pester you until you divert some of that government cargo their way.

The bishop confided to me that at first he had been shocked by the touching, the familiarity, the closeness, the relentless communalism of Melanesian life. Now it made him smile. He wanted to write a book to convince people in places like Toronto that this was a better way to live. It is hard to disagree. His peculiar home was the warmest and most loving I had entered in years.

I lingered for days while the boys planned my invasion of the Kwaio bush. One afternoon, as we shared tea and biscuits on the veranda, George grabbed my hand excitedly: we could climb over the spine of the island and surprise the Kwaio! Nope, said the bishop. Too dangerous. Better to start from the Seventh-day Adventist mission on the east coast. A dirt road crossed the island north of Auki; from there, I could catch a canoe down the coast to the mission. The road hadn't been maintained since the start of the war, but Derrick insisted that with him at the wheel, the bishop's truck could make the crossing. I told him I knew that “road” didn't really mean “road” in Melanesia.

On Sunday, I went with the boys to the tin-roofed cathedral, where I saw the bishop finally transformed into the Victorian version of himself. He towered above his congregation, a giant in cream vestments and shining tassels. He wore a honey-gold miter and clutched a great curled staff. He swung a silver censer full of incense, and the smoke drifted around him as he prayed. The bishop's magnificence carried me back to my childhood, to the morning of my father's death, to the bishop of Tasmania gazing down at me from his portrait, noble, good, at peace with God. Now the choir rose, and the cathedral echoed with the sound of pipe drums. Two dancers appeared, teenage boys with bare shoulders shining and stone discs clattering on their chests. The boys
stamped their feet and shook their rattles. The cement floor vibrated as they punched the air and charged up the aisle toward the bishop. In their wake came two girls, breasts bound with strands of shell money, arms straining under the weight of a wooden tablet. The tablet was decorated with flowers. On it was an open Bible. The girls brought the Bible to the bishop. He lifted it and he kissed it.

This was not the moment that revealed the bishop to me. He had not imposed all this Anglo-Catholic ritual on the islanders. It was they who had preserved it since Victorian times and only recently layered it with
kastom
's drumbeat. It was they who had provided the bishop with his finery and insisted that he read at least part of the liturgy in English, rather than Solomons pidgin. No, I saw the bishop most fully after the service.

Raindrops thundered down on the tin roof, but still the people poured out of the church onto the lawn. There, the drummers were joined by a pipe band. The pipers blew on hollowed sections of bamboo. The drummers smacked at the open ends of sections of PVC pipe with their flip-flops. The rhythm was playful. People formed a circle and began to dance under the flowering trees. They surrounded the bishop, who had changed back into shirtsleeves and shorts. They took him by both his hands and pulled him in among them, and they shrieked with joy as he lurched about, elbows high, eyes raised ecstatically to the sky. “Look at B! Look, he dances like a frog!” George shouted. And the rain fell on the bishop, and mud squeezed out from the lawn and splattered his great calves, and flower petals fell from the trees, and the big man closed his eyes and giggled like a tickled child.

I felt a surprising joy, and as the wind swept across the grass and the eastern sky, I allowed myself to be pulled into the dance. And I realized this:

The bishop had not come to Malaita to rule. He did not love Malaitans because they revered him, deferred to him, waited on
him, or obeyed him—for they did none of these things. This bishop loved Malaitans because they bossed him around. They harangued and chided him. They yelled at him. They invaded his house, asked him for favors and money. They were not afraid to touch him, not afraid to pat him on the shoulder while he was cooking, not afraid to grasp his hand tightly, without reservation and for no particular reason at all. He loved them because they ate his stews, and when they were finished, they leaned back and belched in unself-conscious contentment; because he had spent years in a northern metropolis where good people lived half-lives, and he had known what it was like to rub shoulders with thousands of them and still feel an immense, crushing solitude. He loved Malaitans because they surrounded him like water, because they made him know beyond any doubt that he was not alone, and in this way they were proof that his god, the God of Love, was real.

It was not easy to reach the heathens in East Kwaio. The road across Malaita's mountainous spine was more like a mud luge track than a road. Descents were easy. Ascents were a problem. The bishop's truck sank like a hippo in the red clay at the bottom of each hill, and I climbed out and pushed along with Tony and Thomas and the dozen-odd hitchhikers we had collected en route. Derrick would stomp on the gas, the tires would fling great gobs of doughlike mud at our faces, and the truck would lurch from rut to rut, groaning more emphatically with every new bluff. Finally, it refused to advance any farther.

The boys were outraged and shamed at the thought of my car
rying on alone, but they felt better after they had cajoled one of the hitchhikers into guiding me to the coast and carrying my gas jug. (I had brought along five gallons of fuel because there was none left on the east side of Malaita. Without fuel, it would be a long paddle down the coast to the Adventist mission at Atoifi.)

“Oh, no,” I told the hitcher weakly. “
No, yu no kari petrol blong mi
,” and then I handed the jug to him. He glared at me and strode off with it. I scurried behind. An hour later, he dumped the jug on the road, accepted a month's wages for his effort, and disappeared on a side trail. Then I was alone. I balanced the gas jug on my shoulders above my backpack and carried on. The overcast sky began to lose its late-afternoon glow. The mud stuck to the soles of my sandals until they were as heavy as ski boots. I slipped, swore, pulled off the sandals, and trudged on. Tall grass grew like an endless hedge down the middle of the track. I walked through the end of twilight, expecting to see lights around each new bend, but there were no lights, and no sounds other than the rustling of the forest. I pulled out my headlamp and walked into the night. I cursed the road and the disappearing hitchhiker and islanders in general for going to war instead of keeping up their roads. I cursed myself for not simply waiting a week and catching the supply plane to the Atoifi mission.

Sometime in the middle of the night I saw a faint glow in the forest. I followed it until it became a lamp in the window of a plywood shack. A sign outside the shack announced: Peace Monitoring Council. That was good. The PMC had been formed to encourage militants to give up their guns. Three people answered the door when I knocked: a grandfather, a thickish woman, and a quivering young man. It was too dark to see their faces, but I knew they were good people because they made me a hot cup of tea and offered me a bed and a mosquito net for the night. What a coincidence, they told me when they heard my destination: they would be taking a canoe down to the Atoifi mission in the morning.

The young man, whose name was Patrick, announced he would tell me a funny story from the time of ethnic tension. Once upon a time, Patrick had worked with his best friend, Chris, at the Shell Oil station in Honiara. When the tension began, Patrick joined the Malaita Eagle Force, but Chris joined the Guadalcanal side, the Isatabu Freedom Movement. That was a real scream, said Patrick, because the Eagles had machine guns while the poor IFM boys had to make do with machetes and homemade pipe guns. Patrick insisted that he and his friends had killed at least sixty-eight Guale boys in Marau, thirty-eight in Kakabona, and twenty-five more in Kombule. He met his best friend again after the fighting was finished. “Chris said to me, ‘Hey, if you had seen me at the battle of Alligator Creek, would you have shot me?' I told him, of course I would. And it would have been easy, because I had my SR-88, my machine gun, and Chris had to make do with his homemade pipe gun and his prayers! Ha!”

“Prayers?”

“Yes, they were all begging their ancestors to protect them from us. It didn't work. How could magic work against our machine guns?”

“So you guys didn't try using magic?”

“Some of the Eagles did. An old man once came to our bunker with a powerful black stone from Choiseul. He said it would stop the IFM's guns from firing. That didn't work, so we decided to pray to God instead. We prayed every morning before our battles.”

“Surely God wouldn't help you kill people!”

“I know, I know,” Patrick said, barely able to contain his laughter. “We didn't ask Him to help us win. We said, ‘God, we know you are against what we are doing here, but please can you wash us with the blood of Jesus Christ? Can you make us clean again?'”

“Asking for forgiveness even before you sinned,” I said. “That's cheating.”

“I know, it's crazy, isn't it?
Funi tumas!
”

Morning came, or something like morning. A deep gray glow crept beneath the belly of the overcast sky. It was not bright enough to penetrate the forest along the trail or to transform the oily black hue of the cove we reached after an hour's walk. The sun never did appear in East Kwaio. When I look back and try to remember scenes from the next few days, the mountains, the people, the mission, the machetes…all these things return to me in a muddy twilight of charcoal, rotting mahogany, and leaden shadows. It was like moving through Atlantis, a world made heavy and cut off from the truth of things by a hundred fathoms of murky jade.

The peace monitors had arranged for a
kanu
, which was not a canoe but a fiberglass skiff. We slid out through the mangroves and headed south across still water, skirting the inside of a long barrier reef. East of the reef, there was nothing; we were tracing the rough edge of the world. A storm billowed like a sail under the gray roof of the sky, then swept over us. The sea exploded with raindrops. I hid under my windbreaker and watched the shore. As we droned south, the mountains grew taller and pushed out through the coastal plain so that eventually they thrust directly from the edge of the mangroves. Their slopes were not pristine: the jungle was cut and torn like a mangy scalp, a patchwork of cultivated fields, burned patches, and bare red earth.

My great-grandfather was captivated and drawn to these mountains when he sailed along the Malaitan coast in 1892. “I could discern columns of smoke rising here and there in the recesses of the valleys. I pictured the rivers running down from the folded hills, and thought how cool the air must feel far up there above the heated plains by the shore. No white man had ever penetrated these recesses: that was the wonderful thought.”

There may have been a grave beauty to the place, but what I felt was an immense hostility, as though the bush itself was urging
me to keep my distance. I was not sure if this feeling came from the moment itself or from the history I had read, because the first white men to actually penetrate these hills brought with them a legacy worse than death.

The Kwaio version of this history would have been forgotten outside the bush had survivors not passed the details on to Roger Keesing, an anthropologist who lived among them in the 1960s. Before he died in 1993, Keesing and historian Peter Corris wrote down this story of Malaita's last stand against empire. I carried it with me.
Lightning Meets the West Wind
charted the collision that would define Kwaio culture for a century.

In the old days, wrote Keesing, the Kwaio hills were ruled not by chiefs but by
ramo
, warrior leaders whose power and wealth lay in their ability to collect and distribute blood money. The
ramo
were frequently assassins, quite willing to commit murder in order to exact vengeance on wrongdoers, to enforce the rigid codes of Kwaio conduct, or simply to collect bounty. They were generous givers of feasts and sacrifices to the ancestors, and therefore favored by the spirits. The most powerful
ramo
of all was Basiana, a warm and constant family man who also happened to have executed a score of people. He killed adulterers and thieves. He killed when he was insulted. He killed a cousin because the man had wrongly eaten part of a sacrificial pig. Basiana was proud, stubborn, and ruthless, and he surrounded himself with warriors armed with Snider rifles. The ancestors favored him.

Kwaio life under the
ramo
was not especially peaceful, but the people's good relationship with the ancestors brought certainty and contentment. All this began to change in the 1920s, when the colonial government demanded a yearly head tax—in pounds sterling, no less—from all able-bodied men. Since islanders were still trading in shell money and pigs, the tax forced them to work on white plantations, which was exactly why it had been introduced. The
ramo
saw this as a direct challenge to their rule.

The man charged with collecting the tax was the British district officer William Bell, a tough bastard with a hot temper. Bell had spent years trying to pacify the Malaitan warlords. Those who would not give up their violent ways were caught and hanged. Like Basiana, Bell was proud, stubborn, and ruthless. Like Basiana, he surrounded himself with armed men, though his were a constabulary of Christian converts. And like Basiana, he was thought to positively reek with
mana
. Bell and Basiana knew each other's reputations. They were destined for a confrontation.

Basiana watched as his neighbors to the north and the west were subjugated. He watched them forsake their ancestors in favor of the white man's god. As Bell's power and notoriety grew, the coastal Christians taunted the Kwaio
ramo
.
Missa Bello
will make women of you all, they said.

In 1927 word drifted down the coast that Bell was coming to Sinalagu Harbor to demand not just the head tax but all the rifles in Kwaio. This was too much to ask. Not only were rifles sacred (Basiana's had been consecrated to a warrior ancestor), but Bell had armed the coastal headmen who were loyal to him. The loss of their rifles would render the Kwaio
ramo
impotent and would mean the end of their sovereignty. Basiana called his fellow
ramo
together and made his case for an attack on Bell. Those who had traveled into the white man's world begged him not to do it. “The white people aren't the same,” warned a man who had once been interned in the colonial prison. “If we kill them, our homeland will be finished. No child will be left, no woman will be left. They'll destroy everything.” Basiana would not be denied his last stand. He reminded the
ramo
of the strength of their ancestors. Weapons were gathered, and priests killed dozens of pigs to enlist the ancestors' support.

Word of the impending attack tumbled down the mountainsides. When Bell arrived in Sinalagu Harbor, his coastal allies warned him to stay on his ship. Just shoot the bushmen on sight,
suggested his Malaitan constables. Ignoring them, Bell went ashore, arranged the constables in and around his tax house, sat down behind a table at the front of the building, and opened his ledgers. A long line of warriors carrying rifles, clubs, spears, bows, and arrows appeared on the mountainside above. Basiana's men numbered at least two hundred. They screamed fearfully, but everyone knew that only two or three of their rifles were actually capable of firing, while Bell had a modern arsenal of two dozen rifles and two revolvers.

The warriors formed a line in front of Bell's table. Basiana concealed his rifle between his arm and his torso. He worked his way forward, surrounded by his kinsmen. Bell looked up from his scroll just in time to see Basiana raise his rifle butt with both hands and bring it down toward his head as though he was chopping wood. The district officer's skull exploded. His body went limp. Then the Kwaio warriors swarmed, cutting down Bell's party with a hail of spear, knife, and ax blows. Within minutes, Bell's assistant and thirteen loyal constables were dead. The clearing was strewn with blood, guts, and limbs. Only two of the attackers were killed. It was a glorious victory for Basiana. It was also his last.

Enemies both white and black salivated at the chance to exact revenge on the Kwaio. Hundreds of Malaitans volunteered to help avenge Bell and the dead policemen. Dozens of white planters and traders came forward, too. Within two weeks, an Australian warship steamed into Sinalagu Harbor. A punitive expedition of 50 sailors, 50 native police, 25 white volunteers, and 120 native carriers marched into the Kwaio hills. Villages were torched. Pigs were shot. Chemical defoliant was sprayed onto vegetable gardens. After six weeks the Australian navals retreated to Sydney, leaving the native police—most were Kwara'ae, the Kwaio's bitterest enemies—to administer justice. Now the Kwaio apocalypse began in earnest.

The native police used their new authority and firepower to exact vengeance for grievances going back generations. Dozens of
Kwaio were shot. The female relatives of Bell's killers were gang-raped. Some police hacked off the hands and feet of the dead, piled them on the corpses, then called out tauntingly to the victims' ancestors. Sacrificial stones were defiled. Ancestral relics and drums were smashed and burned. Skulls were taken from shrines and thrown into women's menstruation huts. This humiliation of Kwaio ancestors was the most devastating crime of all. Everyone knew that angry ancestors punished only their own descendants.

Basiana surrendered and was hanged with five of his allies. More than sixty other Kwaio were shot or hacked to death, and thirty died of dysentery in jail. But half a century later, Roger Keesing's informants put the death toll in the hundreds, because after the destruction of their shrines, the Kwaio were effectively abandoned by their ancestors for generations. Sacrifices stopped working. People fell ill. Taro stopped growing. Hundreds of people starved.

The apocalypse was both physical and metaphysical. The mountains still exuded sadness and hostility. No wonder I felt something like anger sweeping down from amid the sheets of hot rain.

The Seventh-day Adventist mission appeared on a bluff above the ocean, its tin roofs glistening like broken glass in the dull light. We tied up to a pier made from a heap of coral rock and hiked up toward the mission and its hospital. The Adventist compound was a jarringly ordered collection of offices, verandas, and hedgerows in complete discord with the tangle of vines and gardens that cradled it. A generator thrummed somewhere out of sight. A line of children in white shirts filed out of a cement-block church.