The Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia (Pacific Islands Monograph Series) - Hardcover

Chappell, David A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0824838181 ISBN 13: 9780824838188

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press, 2013

Synopsis

In 1853, France annexed the Melanesian islands of New Caledonia to establish a convict colony and strategic port of call. Unlike other European settler–dominated countries in the Pacific, the territory’s indigenous people remained more numerous than immigrants for over a century. Despite military conquest, land dispossession, and epidemics, its thirty language groups survived on tribal reserves and nurtured customary traditions and identities. In addition, colonial segregation into the racial category of canaques helped them to find new unity. When neighboring anglophone colonies began to decolonize in the 1960s, France retained tight control of New Caledonia for its nickel reserves, reversing earlier policies that had granted greater autonomy for the islands. Anticolonial protest movements culminated in the 1980s Kanak revolt, after which two negotiated peace accords resulted in autonomy in a progressive form and officially recognized Kanak identity for the first time. But the near-parity of settlers and Kanak continues to make nation-building a challenging task, despite a 1998 agreement among Kanak and settlers to seek a “common destiny.”

This study examines the rise in New Caledonia of rival identity formations that became increasingly polarized in the 1970s and examines in particular the emergence of activist discourses in favor of Kanak cultural nationalism and land reform, multiracial progressive sovereignty, or a combination of both aspirations. Most studies of modern New Caledonia focus on the violent 1980s uprising, which left deep scars on local memories and identities. Yet the genesis of that rebellion began with a handful of university students who painted graffiti on public buildings in 1969, and such activists discussed many of the same issues that face the country’s leadership today. After examining the historical, cultural, and intellectual background of that movement, this work draws on new research in public and private archives and interviews with participants to trace the rise of a nationalist movement that ultimately restored self-government and legalized indigenous aspirations for sovereignty in a local citizenship with its own symbols. Kanak now govern two out of three provinces and have an important voice in the Congress of New Caledonia, but they are a slight demographic minority. Their quest for nationhood must achieve consensus with the immigrant communities, much as the founders of the independence movement in the 1970s recommended.

About this title

About the Author:

David A. Chappell is associate professor of Pacific history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

The events of November 1984 didn’t just happen―although it is by no means clear exactly what conjuncture of circumstances caused them to take the form that they did. Michael Spencer, It’s Not All Black and White (1988, 182)

To the refusal of self that colonialism imposes on us, we oppose the acceptance of self. Nidoish Naisseline, Cité Nouvelle, No 525, 1970.

Assassinations, ambushes, massacres, gunfights at roadblocks and rural homesteads, destruction of property, the influx of thousands of French riot police and paratroopers to defend white settlers and mining firms from armed blacks in Rastafarian dreadlocks―such dramatic news images typified reporting on the Kanak uprising in New Caledonia in the 1980s. In rhetoric reminiscent of the Algerian independence war of the 1950s, the conservative metropolitan newspaper Le Figaro attacked the Socialist regime in Paris for allowing a “Caledonian disease” of criminal terrorist disorder to threaten France. A local loyalist Melanesian leader, Dick Ukeiwé, blamed the “infiltration of Marxism in this part of the world through links between the [Kanak Liberation Front] and Libya, Cuba and the Soviet Union.” Le Figaro portrayed the indigenous rebels as “savages” living in the “stone age” who obeyed the “law of the jungle,” and reporter Thiérry Desjardins asserted, “there is no Kanak culture or civilization” (Spencer 1988, 180–185). Yet behind such sensationalist stereotyping lay a long history of foreign labeling and colonialism.

The term “Pacific” itself came from Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, because he felt relieved to escape the storms off Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America. Europeans created such names for their own mapping (Kirch 2000). By the eighteenth century, the vast island world in the heart of the Pacific that ancient voyagers had first settled and linked together with exchange systems was called “Polynesia” (many islands); it later became the eastern part of “Oceania.” In the 1830s, northwest Oceania became “Micronesia” (tiny islands) because of its many coral atolls, though it also has large volcanic islands, and the southwest became “Melanesia,” a racial label meaning islands of dark-skinned peoples. In culturally diverse Melanesia, Europeans created “new” place-names for convenience, including “New Caledonia,” named after Scotland by British explorer James Cook in 1774. The term kanaka, a Hawaiian word for “person,” traveled around the region in shipboard and plantation pidgin and became canaque in French. Descendants of colonial settlers in New Caledonia would later call themselves calédoniens, while “Melanesian” was often a more polite label than canaque for the indigenous people. In the 1970s, local nationalists revalued “Kanak” (an invariable term, whether singular or plural) as a unifying identity formation because the indigenous people spoke thirty languages. Etymology and polarized politics ultimately pitted Pacific “Scots” against Melanesian “Hawaiians.” But the 1980s Kanak uprising was not simply about timeless ethnic markers, “tribal” warfare, or the Cold War.

Three historical changes had pushed New Caledonia to the breaking point. First, from 1959 to 1969, France unilaterally withdrew previously granted self-governing powers from the territory in order to keep control of local nickel mining, which it regarded as a strategic resource. The democratically elected majority in the Territorial Assembly called that regression a betrayal of trust. An analogy might be if the US Congress had revoked Hawaiian statehood and pushed back the clock to the territorial period before 1959. Second, in violation of United Nations General Assembly resolution 2621 (1970), the French state and its local administration deliberately encouraged new immigration during a nickel-mining boom in order to marginalize supporters of self-government. Kanak were already a slight demographic minority, and many felt that their identity as a people was in danger of extinction. Third, in response to these two structural changes, young New Caledonians returning from university studies in France, who had experienced the May 1968 student-worker uprising, felt that powerful outside interests and a flood of migrant opportunists were extinguishing local progressive voices and recolonizing the country. They formed a protest group, the Foulards Rouges (Red Scarves), in what became known as the Kanak Awakening (Réveil Canaque). Increasing political, ethnic, and economic polarization thus culminated in the pro-independence revolt of the 1980s. Together with widespread opposition to French nuclear testing in the Tuamotu atolls near Tahiti, the Kanak struggle to decolonize also aroused anti-French sentiments around the Pacific.

Despite the revocation of local self-government and the artificial creation of a loyalist majority through orchestrated migration, pro-French settlers seemed unwilling to believe that their metropolitan-educated offspring could turn toward anticolonial behavior on their own. Criticisms of state repression in New Caledonia or of nuclear testing in French Polynesia were attributed to intrusive global leftism or to an “Anglo-Saxon” conspiracy to seize France’s colonies (NR 1986, Doumenge 1990). A local-born history professor at the University of New Caledonia also critiqued “Anglo-Saxon” writing about his country for having “in their mirror the situation of first peoples in their own countries.” He said such authors did not contextualize French colonialism within the larger historical process of European expansion: “The Caledonian case thus seems to have been a particular site for expiating the general sins committed by colonization in the Pacific islands.” The United States, Australia, and New Zealand “became sovereign not in the name of the aborigines but in the name of multi-communal societies that more or less marginalize a certain number of migrant communities and the indigenous peoples” (Angleviel 2003a, 139).

The comparative study of colonization is certainly a topic that needs more work in the Pacific, and anglophone settler countries of the region have indeed marginalized their own indigenous minorities and aroused protest movements. At first, post–World War II decolonization in New Caledonia had moved even faster than in anglophone Oceania, for example in the granting of French citizenship and voting rights after 1946, yet that progressive trend had reversed direction after the return of Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958. Meanwhile, most of the anglophone south Pacific colonies decolonized peacefully in the 1960s and 1970s. When several postcolonial secession revolts in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea and military coups in Fiji made headlines in the 1980s, some French writers then argued that the “anglo-saxons” had “abandoned” their colonies too soon by “inflicting” independence on them suddenly, whereas France had chosen to stay on as a peacekeeper and developer (de Deckker 2000, 133–135). As recently as 2002, a French geographer wrote that instability was making Melanesia into the “black hole” of the Pacific, except for French New Caledonia, despite the armed Kanak uprising in the 1980s that forced Paris to negotiate. He blamed indigenous cultures for creating their own problems rather than any changes caused by foreign colonialism or development projects (Doumenge 2002; Chappell 2005). Insulted Kanak retorted by calling him “the last white hole in Oceanian university research” (Tahiti-Pacifique Magazine, Jan 2003, 43).

Near-parity between indigenous and immigrant inhabitants creates a peculiar kind of stress. Imagine, for example, if almost half the population of the continental United States, Hawai‘i, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia were indigenous: what forms of politics might result? In independent Fiji, the tension caused by such a bipolar indigenous-to-immigrant ratio provoked the country’s first military coup in 1987 because Fijians controlled the army and wanted to suppress a perceived threat to their paramountcy by Indo-Fijians. New Caledonia has had a similar bipolar ethnic ratio, but when France revoked its autonomy, local anticolonialists had no organized military card to play because the country was not independent. The indigenous Kanak kept their civil rights but felt pushed aside by immigration and had to improvise to survive. That raised the question of how the nation should be defined. Was New Caledonia a settler state that extended France around the world, as most immigrants advocated, or an indigenous-centered country in Oceania, as pro-independence parties asserted? Could it somehow become both, working toward “a common destiny,” as the Noumea Accord of 1998 has proposed? Perhaps it can through further consensual negotiations, but the legacy of the loss of autonomy and renewed immigration in the 1960s and 1970s was a structural rupture that explains why the 1980s uprising occurred when it did. That trauma has left deep scars on the generation who experienced it. In short, unilateral recolonization, after a real taste of local self-government, was a dangerously anachronistic policy.

So was French nuclear testing in the region. US and British atomic bomb tests in the Pacific had already stopped before the aboveground test ban treaty of 1963. Yet that year de Gaulle told French Polynesian representatives that a scientific testing facility would solve their budget woes. French nuclear tests had to shift away from the Sahara after Algerian independence in 1962, and European protests about fallout had already forced the testing underground before the program moved to the Pacific. Yet in 1966, France began exploding atomic bombs aboveground in the fragile Tuamotu atolls. After region-wide protests over the fallout, the tests were finally moved “below” ground in 1974, into holes drilled in the porous basalt under the coral. In 1985, French secret agents even bombed a Greenpeace protest vessel in Auckland harbor in New Zealand, killing a photographer (Firth 1987). Given de Gaulle’s desire to use overseas territories to help rebuild the prestige of France after World War II (Aldrich 1993), it could be argued that Gaullist France was actually more obsessed with national rivalry than the Anglophones who were supposedly “abandoning” the south Pacific. When de Gaulle observed the first atomic blast over Moruroa lagoon, the wind insisted on making France a “great power” with its own nuclear deterrence (de Gaulle 1966a). Like France, the United States and Britain had regarded Pacific islands as “remote” (from their own voters), but their bomb testing had already stopped. France blamed criticism of its own nuclear testing on a regional conspiracy of “Anglo-Saxon” labor parties, unions, and churches (Doumenge 1990). Yet the Nuclear Free and Independent Movement attributed the local inability to stop nearly two hundred French bomb blasts in the Tuamotus and ongoing US missile testing in the Marshall Islands to “nuclear colonialism” (Robie 1989; Danielsson and Danielsson 1986).

The challenge posed by ethnic polarization in New Caledonia resulted from a century of colonial segregation, which exacerbated “the sometimes difficult coexistence in the contemporary period of communities emerging from the colonial period, some still clinging to certain outdated privileges while others would seek an unshared sovereignty that excludes later migrants” (Angleviel 2003a, 139). That “unshared sovereignty” refers to the slogan of “Kanak independence” proclaimed by local activists from 1974 on. It was actually a call for re-centering the country in Oceania, where identities are based on relationships with others. But settlers saw that call as a reverse racism that would turn the old colonial racial hierarchy upside down instead of as an invitation to build new kinds of alliances. The polarization theme cannot be avoided in any study of New Caledonia, but a purely dichotomous ethnic approach ascribes inevitability to the 1980s. It suggests a conundrum without a solution, except perhaps in belated “multicultural” assimilation or in provincial partition. Once drawn, ethnic boundaries tend to endure (Barth 1969). Nevertheless, the unilateral withdrawal of autonomy from New Caledonia in the 1960s was a policy decision based on metropolitan self-interest, so it was both structural and contingent. So was this consequence: in July 1969, returning university students spray painted anticolonial graffiti on the walls of public buildings in the capital, Noumea, on the eve of Bastille Day, when the French celebrate their own revolution of 1789. At first a handful of young students on “active” summer vacation, the Foulards Rouges would give rise to an independence movement that ultimately redefined the nation. But their role in sparking the genesis of local nationalism has so far been insufficiently studied.

France annexed New Caledonia in 1853, but formal negotiation between Paris and the local inhabitants did not occur until the 1980s, after activists had forced it to happen. The consensual peace accords of Matignon-Oudinot in 1988 and of Noumea in 1998 proposed economic “rebalancing” between the Kanak and non-Kanak communities and working toward a shared future in a context of restored autonomy. With hindsight, participants and observers in the country’s postwar history have seen missed opportunities. Maurice Lenormand, former leader of the multiethnic, autonomist Union Calédonienne (UC), called the 1960s negation of autonomy a “lost opportunity” that “ruined decolonization” (1991, 155). Ismet Kurtovitch and Jean-Marc Regnault have said the same about the polarization that undermined the UC’s optimistic motto of “two colors, one people” (2002, 165–166). Peace accord negotiator Alain Christnacht described the revocation of the 1956 loi cadre (or enabling law, which had first granted autonomy) as a “missed opportunity” that led to the independence movement (2004, 37–39). Former UC minister Jean Le Borgne said that the Gaullist regime ended a decolonization process, and by 1982 several leaders who had opposed autonomy in 1958 finally supported it, but too late (2006, 585–589). Former conservative politician Georges Chatenay noted the historical irony that peacemaking efforts in 1988, after the Kanak revolt, resembled those of 1982–1984, when centrists and Kanak formed a coalition (1994, 342). The pendulum swings of French domestic politics repeatedly exacerbated local contradictions, as Paris continued to extract prestige and profits from overseas territories in return for small fractions of its national budget (Freyss 1995).

Based on what I have discovered in my research in local archives and in two dozen interviews with participants, I think the voices of protest in the 1970s deserve to be heard again, in hopes that they may be better understood this time as communities seek a future together. Kanak nationalists and settler leftists both opposed colonialism. The former wanted respect for their cultural identity as the indigenous inhabitants and, on the main island of Grande Terre, to recover lost lands. The leftists condemned racial inequality and economic exploitation of the multiethnic working class and proposed democratic socialism. The two categories of activists were not mutually exclusive; their relationship was at times syncretic or symbiotic. For example, a Kanak nationalist told me about a smal...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0824838181
• ISBN 13: 9780824838188
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320