Pacific Islands Monograph Series, 26. Honolulu: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa; University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xx, 527 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$59.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3814-0.
Since 1979, David Akin has spent about five years working and researching in the Solomon Islands, at first as a Peace Corps volunteer when he and Kate Gillogly, then his wife, helped Kwaio set up the Kwaio Cultural Centre, in central Malaita. His work for the Centre is highlighted in Roger Keesing’s 1992 Custom and Confrontation. The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy. Akin’s unpublished PhD thesis (1998) is entitled Negotiating Culture in East Kwaio, Malaita. But it remains unclear to what extent his graduate research was geared towards the analysis that he presents in the book under review. Quite appositely, the anthropologist Akin describes his book as a “political history of the island of Malaita” (1). True to the book’s title, the focus is on the Maasina Rule, the revitalization movement earlier discussed in books by Peter Worsley, Roger Keesing, Hugh Laracy and others. In a book in the making he discusses kastom, particularly with regard to Kwaio women.
As regards the book under review, Akin documents the historical background of Maasina Rule in its first four chapters. The British Solomon Islands Protectorate appears here as a model backwater: under-administered, under-staffed and economically under-developed. Malaita became the provider of labour, often indentured, first to plantations in Queensland, later elsewhere in the Solomon Islands. Akin agrees with (100) Caroline Mytinger’s 1942 observation: “Malaitans were scattered all through the islands; the houseboys were Malaitans, the boat boys were Malaitans and [also] the labour lines on the plantations … .” World War II provided a sharp contrast. In the war effort Malaitans were again employed as labour, but this time in a quite different regime: better funded and less repressive. Out of those regimes Maasina Rule emerged, from late 1943.
Akin details that emergence in chapter 5 and continues in chapters 6, 7 and 8 with the responses of the colonial administration. Although he writes (2) that his discussion is influenced by Gramsci, Foucault, Said and Bernard Cohn, their influence remains largely implicit. With a few exceptions, the flow of events is the main organizational device of his account. The exceptions are sections in which he presents, for instance, vignettes of Maasina Rule leaders (173–80), and an analysis of what Malaitans mean by, in Solomon Pijin, kastom, in contrast to custom (209–13). For a proper analysis of what Malaitans attempted to achieve by Maasina Rule, Akin quite fittingly considers it necessary to grasp what they meant by kastom. He discusses the topic repeatedly; I cite two examples. The first is: “Kastom ideology encompassed twin goals: the expansive transformation and advance of Malaitan society and a reassertion of valued indigenous ways, many relatively new and many Christian” (241). And the second: “Kastom is … a modern and evolving political philosophy born from colonial and postcolonial experience” (342).
Notwithstanding their ethnic diversity, with Maasina Rule Malaitans started carrying out a common program. Most moved to the coast where they built large settlements, “towns.” They appointed their own chiefs and refused to pay tax. Together these joint actions were an extraordinary achievement. They were possible, in part because they were fuelled by the kastom philosophy, as characterized above, and in part because, in Akin’s words, “the real power of Maasina Rule flowed upwards from ‘the rank and file’” (172).
After an accommodating start in 1946, by August 1947 the government’s reaction to Marching Rule became hostile and repressive. The measures taken were harsh, in hindsight astonishingly so. They included mass arrests, followed by criminal charges, court proceedings and jail sentences. But they did not succeed in breaking the movement. Malaitans answered by well-ordered civil disobedience , thus continuing their common stand. A stalemate ensued, broken in 1952 by a new High Commissioner for the Western Pacific who conceded many Maasina Rule demands, notably in administration and local jurisdiction. At this point Akin ends his account. In chapter 9, the final one, he appraises Maasina Rule. He views it a success, in many respects. Notably, it “transformed government-Malaitan relations in enduring ways” (329).
To write his book, Akin has assembled an extremely impressive range of data, in part the result of what must have been painstaking archival investigations. And in part he makes use of oral communications by, especially, Kwaio, collected during his field research. He acknowledges support from Ben Burt, who worked among the neighbouring Kwara’ae, also from the 1980s. Nevertheless, he assesses that the data are incomplete and he expresses the hope that future research by Malaitans themselves will “fill the many gaps” (188). It strikes the reader that Akin does not mention, in addition, the likelihood that the historical record will remain contested. In any case, Akin has managed, quite admirably, to fashion the multitude of data into a very readable account that is likely to remain authoritative for a long time.
The book’s bibliography comes to 67 pages. While the main text counts 345 pages, it is followed by 97 pages of endnotes, in the main collective ones combining references for and additions to entire paragraphs. There is a profusion of names, as regards the Europeans, due to the rapid turnover of government officials. Fortunately, when names are listed in the bibliography—and many are—Akin has added their function, or functions, in the administrative and missionary organizations.
In comments in chapter 9, Akin makes it clear that the 1952 conciliation contained seeds of dissension, given that Maasina Rule adherents, and also the followers of kastom movements elsewhere in the Solomon Islands, regarded their organizations as means to interact with the government “from a position of autonomy and equality” (341). How did that work out? Given the time and the length of his fieldwork, Akin seems well placed to discuss the topic in a sequel to this highly commendable book.
Anton Ploeg
Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
pp. 383-385