Whakarerenga iho | Legacies of ‘Blackbirding’

Legacies of ‘Blackbirding’

‘Blackbirding’ was a term coined to describe labour ‘recruitment’ practices that were centred on coercion, power disparities and both overt and covert violence within the Pacific region. Plantation systems of commodity production within the Pacific, notably in Queensland and Fiji, but also Sāmoa, Hawai’i, Tahiti and other places, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. These contributed to a global commodities market that was soon impacted by the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the Southern United States.^[1] Smelling the potential for profit in the gap left by American-produced commodities in the early 1860s, planters and would-be planters (many setting out from New Zealand and Australia) established sugar, cotton, and other plantation crops in the Pacific. Ships were engaged to acquire labourers from elsewhere in the Pacific, notably the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and the Solomon Islands, to work on these plantations.^[2] The labourers found by blackbirders were to be paid, but only at the end of a three- or sometimes five-year-long term, and mortality was high.^[3] Particularly in the initial years of this trade in human beings, kidnapping, trickery and violence were cornerstones of the traders’ behaviours. While historians differ in their perspectives about the degree to which labourers came freely to work on plantations in the later years of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is clear that these labourers were subjected to others’ wills to a significant degree.^[4]

Blackbirders, traders and planters were not the only Europeans travelling through and moving people around the Western Pacific in the nineteenth century. Members of navies, and Anglican and other religious missionaries—more official and ‘respectable’ faces of empire—were also moving throughout the Pacific, ‘keeping order’, colonising and controlling existing inhabitants, and trying to convert and educate them too. Without conflating these various activities, it is important to reflect upon the ways in which people travelling for different purposes worked together and alongside one another. Sometimes they collided forcefully. The Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, John Coleridge Patteson, was killed while visiting Nukapu in the Solomon Islands, a place he had been before and where he had forged relationships. His death has variously been explained, both at the time and since, as an act of revenge against violence visited on locals by other Europeans, as an act of revenge because of the ruse of some blackbirders who pretended to be missionaries in order to gain the trust of the young men they went on to kidnap, or as resistance to Patteson’s desire to take some young men away from Nukapu temporarily for educational purposes—an action which paralleled the practices of blackbirders from the perspective of villagers: both missionaries and blackbirders sought to take young men away from their homes.^[5] In response to his death, a British naval ship, RMS Rosario, which had been deployed to act against blackbirders, shelled the beach at Nukapu.

Another way in which the movement of people around the Pacific for labour purposes draws in the work of missionaries is that many people were converted to Christianity while working away from the places they were born.^[6] 27,027 contracts of indentured labour were entered into by Melanesian people in Fiji between 1864 and 1911, and perhaps several thousand people of Melanesian origin remained after the cessation of the labour trade to Fiji in 1911.^[7] As former Anglican Archbishop and historian Winston Halapua has argued, it was the movement of Melanesian people in Fiji away from the plantations and into Levuka and Suva that both positioned them as people needing assistance (assistance which the Fijian government neglected to provide) and placed them in proximity to Anglican ministers, who took ‘responsibility’ for their welfare.^[8] While not all Melanesian or even Solomoni people living in Fiji today are Anglican, the majority are, and churches are often at the geographical centre point of their settlements today.

If the young men who chose to remain in Fiji after their contracts ended got married, they usually married Fijian women (and their descendants often did so too). More than 110 years after the end of importing Melanesian people to Fiji for their labour, their descendants are highly culturally-integrated, but because rights to land and tribal membership are predominantly patriarchal in Fiji, many people in the Solomoni and Ni-Vanuatu communities have no permanent access to land in Fiji, and therefore no stability in terms of growing their own food, or setting down stable roots for themselves and their families into the future.^[9] Their categorisation as ‘other’, rather than as Fijian, by the government, limits their capacity to acquire scholarships to study at university, and therefore limits the kinds of work that they can aspire to. Many families have long been stuck in a low-income cycle.^[10] As Rev. Dr. Eseta Mateiviti-Tulavu has argued, many people with Solomoni ancestors are not afforded the same respect or opportunities as if they had been recognised as indigenous Fijians.^[11]

We are working on two initial projects in this space. One will map the movements of missionaries, traders, labourers and others across the Western Pacific in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, showing the scale of human movement and the intersections of formal empire, private commerce, and religious evangelism. The other seeks to provide a platform to explore the life experiences and family histories of members of the Melanesian community in Fiji; we offer them the opportunity to express and share their own stories in their own ways. By acknowledging, exploring and listening to these histories, we recognise the ways people’s life circumstances have been influenced by the action and inaction of humans in the past, and encourage action for positive change and self-determination in the present and future.

 

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Footnotes

¹ Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘The Fiji Labor Trade in Comparative Perspective, 1864–1914′, Pacific Studies 9, no.3 (1986): 121.

² Winston Halapua, Living on the Fringe: Melanesians of Fiji (Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 2001), 19, 22.

³ Ibid., 34, 37–38.

⁴ Doug Munro, ‘The Labor Trade in Melanesians in Queensland: An Historiographic Essay’, Journal of Social History 28, no.3 (1995): 609-627; Hilary Summy, ‘Fiji’s forgotten people: the legatees of ‘blackbirding’,’ Social Alternatives 28, no.4 (2009): 39.

⁵ Peter Corris, ‘Passage, Port and Plantation: a history of Solomon Islands labour migrants, 1870-1914’ (PhD Thesis, The Australian National University, 1970), 51; Charles Fox, ‘A Sermon by Canon Charles Elliot Fox on the Occasion of the Centenary of the Consecration of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson’, February 24, 1961, https://anglicanhistory.org/oceania/fox_patteson1961.html

⁶ Halapua, Living on the Fringe, 51–52.

⁷ Jeff Siegel, ‘Origins of Pacific Island labourers in Fiji’, The Journal of Pacific History, 20, no.1 (1985): 47; Halapua, Living on the Fringe, 27; Summy, ‘Fiji’s Forgotten People’, 39.

⁸ Halapua, Living on the Fringe, 61.

⁹ Ibid., pp.15–16.

¹⁰ Eseta Mateiviti-Tulavu, Identity, Relationship and Indigenous Epistemology: Solomonis of Fiji (Blessed Hope Publishing, 2017), 39

¹¹ Ibid., 158–159.