Land, Identity and Conflict on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands

Abstract

This paper examines the recent history of settlement and conflict on Guadalcanal in Solomon Islands and the corollary emergence of competing ‘settler’ and ‘landowner’ identity narratives. Settlers from the island of Malaita were initially able to obtain rights to use customary land on north Guadalcanal but subsequently fell victim to a Guale project of exclusion. This project was informed by the breakdown of social relationships—both between landowners and settlers and within landowning groups themselves—and sharpening socio-economic differentiation amongst Guales along a north–south axis which has seen those from the relatively deprived south coast emerge as important actors. Localised grievances around land and settlement have been mobilised to the larger project of autonomy for Guadalcanal driven in part by a desire to capture a greater share of the benefits that flow from the island's resource industries. Against this backdrop of rapid socio-economic change, two competing identity narratives have emerged—a Malaitan settler narrative and a Guadalcanal landowner narrative—each of which seeks to establish a morally legitimate claim to property rights and economic opportunities on Guadalcanal. I provide windows onto each of these identity narratives and explore their articulation with historical and contemporary struggles over land and resource development.

Keywords:

• Solomon Islands
• land
• settlement
• conflict
• development
• indigeneity

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two of the editors of this special issue, Gina Koczberski and George Curry, for reading an earlier draft of this paper and making very useful suggestions for revisions. I also received some useful comments from two anonymous referees. I take full responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation.

Notes

1. The interviews were conducted in the context of a research project examining the motives and experiences of men who joined the rival militant groups during the conflict of 1998–2003 (Allen 2007). As such the voices examined are primarily those of former militants. However, some material from interviews with non-combatants is also presented, and the perspectives of traditional leaders, politicians, intellectuals and local non-government organisations are gleaned from published sources. Most of the interviews were conducted during a 9-month period of fieldwork on Guadalcanal and North Malaita in 2005 and 2006.

2. This section focuses on settlement in the rural wards east of Honiara, which is where most of the displacements and evictions occurred during the tenson. That said, many of the issues discussed equally apply to the settlements that started to emerge around Honiara in the 1970s (see Alasia 1989; Storey 2003; Chand & Yala 2008) and to the peri-urban areas west of Honiara (Monson 2010).

3. The Moro Movement, now known as the Gaena'alu Movement, is a ‘back to custom’, anti-colonial movement that emerged on the Weather Coast in the late 1950s (Davenport & Çoker 1967; Bennett 1987, pp. 316–17). While the precise extent of the Movement's current influence and membership is not known, its leadership claims several thousand followers mostly on the eastern side of the Weather Coast and adjacent hinterland.

4. Along with ‘Guadalcanal’ and ‘Malaita’, the third large island- or regional-wide ethnic grouping in Solomon Islands is ‘Western’ or ‘West’, referring to Western Province and sometimes including Choiseul Province. Like Guadalcanal, Western is relatively resource rich as a result of its timber resources, and revenue-sharing arrangements with the central government were a central concern of the ‘Western Breakaway Movement’ that emerged on the eve of independence in 1978. Western has not experienced in-migration and settlement to the same degree as Guadalcanal, and nor does it share the latter's sharp internal socio-economic divisions. That said, the Breakaway Movement was driven, in part, by anxieties about becoming part of an independent nation dominated by the ‘Malaitan Mafia’ (Bennett 1987, pp. 327–30).