The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  The Guadalcanalese armed themselves. Some borrowed hunting shotguns. Some found leftover World War II rifles, which they oiled, polished, and loaded with salvaged ammunition. Some made their own guns from drainpipes and auto parts. The gun collectors had a vague but passionate notion of “getting their island back”—even though most of them, including Harold Keke, hailed from the Weather Coast, which was nowhere near Honiara. The militants were more interested in money than justice. They demanded $20,000 for every murder allegedly committed by a Malaitan since independence. The prime minister cut a check for the compensation claimants, but it bounced. Chaos mounted. With their homemade guns, their axes and spears, and their anger, Keke and his wantoks crossed the island and rampaged along the north coast, chasing Malaitan settlers from their gardens and setting fire to their homes. Thirty thousand refugees—a third of the population of Guadalcanal—fled, seeking shelter in the heart of the capital or crowding onto rusty passenger ships and retreating to the provinces. Most were Malaitan. By June 1999, almost every settlement on the outskirts of Honiara had been trashed and burned.

  It was not hard for Malaitans to take their revenge. During the previous decade, the country’s leaders had grown increasingly nervous about a war that was already taking place on the Papua New Guinean island of Bougainville, just an hour’s paddle from the Solomons’ most westerly islets. The fighting had occasionally spilled across the border, so the Solomons government bought $10 million in automatic weapons from the United States, ostensibly to protect the country from invasion. The guns were held in the Royal Solomon Islands Police armories. Since most of the police happened to be Malaitan, it was a cinch for the newly formed Malaita Eagle Force to make off with two thousand machine guns. The Eagles forced the prime minister to resign and transformed Honiara into a Malaitan fortress. They ripped off a wide-gauge machine gun from the bow of a police patrol boat, mounted it on a bulldozer, and voilà, they had built the islands’ first tank.

  Not to be outdone, their Guadalcanalese enemies raided a gold mine and made off with a dump truck that, with a little creative welding, became the country’s second tank. The two sides blew up bridges and gas stations. They burned down hotels, churches, and villages. They strafed mission stations, and they invaded hospitals and clinics in order to finish off the wounded. Heads were mounted on sticks along the highway. Decapitated bodies began turning up amid the pineapples at the central market. Neither side would admit casualties, but at least two hundred people were killed in the first half of 2000.

  Finally the militants squared off at Alligator Creek, just east of the international airport. The creek’s coffee-colored waters were streaked with whorls of blood. The tension was revealed as the war it really was. The fighting let up only when a group of men wearing black shirts, black shorts, white sashes around their waists, and copper medallions strung from their necks marched to the middle of the bridge. The Melanesian Brotherhood had had enough of the killing. They held their walking sticks in the air: sunlight reflected off shards of inlaid abalone, white snake eyes glowed. The tasiu prayed for peace. Some fools actually shot at them, but witnesses all agree the bullets were deflected by those magic walking sticks.

  After a cease-fire was declared in 2000, Solomon Islanders managed to elect a government. International aid was flowing in. Life in Honiara should have been getting better. It was not. Every month of peace brought more dysfunction, more anarchy, more bloodshed. The economy was in the toilet. Foreign businesses had packed up and left. The government was beyond broke. The villagers who controlled the capital’s water source turned off the tap each afternoon to punish the government. Machine guns were still floating around the countryside. Neighbors were settling scores in hillbilly-style shootouts. Schools had been closed. Hospitals were running out of medicine. Malaria was making a comeback. Money did not flow. Phones did not ring. Boats did not sail. Planes did not fly.

  With its potholes, ruptured drains, dust, wire mesh, tree stumps, and open sores, Honiara looked like the worst of suburban Mexico City. It had the crude aesthetic of an industrial park and the haggard air of a refugee camp. The sidewalks were crowded with hundreds of makeshift stands selling cigarettes and betel nut, the city’s two favorite addictions. The ground was stained indelibly red, like the hands of Lady Macbeth.

  I headed down Mendana, the capital’s one avenue, past the Anglican Cathedral with its memorial to Bishop Patteson, past the yachtless yacht club, past the diesel generators that kept the air conditioners flowing in Honiara’s three office buildings, past the video club where Chuck Norris beat the shit out of the Vietcong again and again on a wide-screen TV, past the spit-smeared walls and unkempt grounds of the National Museum, past the Ministry of Finance, which cowered behind a giant Slinky of razor wire. I stopped by the office of Solomon Airlines, where a relief map on the wall showed an airport at Nendo Island in the Santa Cruz Group. Nendo was three days’ sail east of Honiara, but less than forty miles from Nukapu, my grail, the center of the Patteson myth. Sign me up, I said. Not so fast, said the agent. Santa Cruz was the Hotel California of flight destinations: a plane could get to the group, but it could not return. Nendo had run out of fuel months ago. The only way to get there now was by ship.

  So I headed for the port. Two ships made the run to Santa Cruz. They were tied up to the same crumbling cement pier. One, the Eastern Trader, looked like hell: she was a garbage heap of grease, great flakes of exfoliating rust, and flapping laundry, but her deck was stacked with fuel barrels.

  “When can we go?” I asked her skipper.

  “We wait,” he said.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Petrol,” he said.

  “But your ship is loaded with fuel,” I said.

  “That’s the airplane fuel. We need diesel, and we don’t have the money to pay for it just yet.”

  “So when will you have the money?”

  “When our passengers pay us.”

  “And you’ve been waiting how long?”

  “Not long. A month, maybe.”

  It was the same story across the dock, on the MV Temotu, which looked slightly more reliable, and whose Chinese signage revealed a long life on the Pearl River Delta trade.

  At least ships had run during the civil war. There had been money then. Now everything was grinding to a halt, and I was stuck.

  So I wandered around and met the unhappy people of Honiara, who were not like the fresh-scrubbed, just-blessed innocents of Vanuatu. It was as though all ease and subtlety had been drained from them. Men told me things like, “Our country is fucked.” Urgent women invited me to meet their daughters. Everyone was afraid: of ex-militants, thugs, and extortionists, but also of the police. No wonder: after the armistice, as many as two thousand ex-militants had been enlisted by the Royal Solomon Islands Police as “special constables.” Putting them on the government payroll certainly hadn’t convinced the militants to turn in their stolen guns, nor did it reform those who had been responsible for all the torture, rape, intimidation, and murder during the war. People were afraid of Harold Keke, afraid that in a moment of utter madness the last of the Weather Coast militants might march across the mountainous spine of Guadalcanal and storm the capital. But they were even more afraid of Keke’s enemies, men like Jimmy Rasta, one of the supposedly reformed Malaita Eagle commanders.

  War had been good for Jimmy Rasta. The man was a nobody before the tension, but now he commanded a private army of former militants. Everyone in Honiara had a Jimmy Rasta story. Some people were impressed by the way he passed out handfuls of dollar bills in the street. Most weren’t. They talked about how Rasta’s boys had extorted thousands from shopkeepers, bludgeoned protest leaders, and assassinated at least two police officers. Rasta’s gang could be hired to rough up or kidnap anyone you didn’t like.

  I figured if I couldn’t escape Honiara’s darkness, I might as well confront it. Rasta ran a bottle shop on the highway near the airport. I went there and asked the dull-eyed lad behind
the counter to pass a note on to Rasta for me. I was curious to know if Jimmy thought he was going to hell. That’s not what I wrote in my note. I wrote that I was meeting with all the most important men in the Solomon Islands.

  I returned to the bottle shop three times. Finally, Rasta rolled up in a battered Toyota SR-5, reggae pumping so loud the car’s doors rattled. He must have been about thirty. He was Bob Marley gone gangsta: thick dreadlocks, baggy jeans, and a delicate gold wristwatch. He handed me a warm SolBrew and led me out back. We sat on a couple of beer crates by a pond of discarded oil.

  Rasta, whose real surname was Lusibaea, told me that he had been a peaceful guy before the ethnic tension. But one night in 1999, some of Harold Keke’s boys had burst into his village and shot up the place. Rasta’s grandfather was so scared, his heart stopped beating. In the following months, the bodies of Rasta’s wantoks started turning up in creeks and gardens. The police did nothing, so Rasta and his friends raided the police armories and took their revenge. But all that was in the past, he told me proudly. Now that the tension was over, he ran a private security business, providing employment to more than thirty boys. No, they didn’t use guns. How could they use guns? The boys had given their guns back: all their SR-88s, their M-16s, and their LMGs, all long gone.

  I wanted to say, “Jimmy, you’re lying. Everyone in town says that your boys are always shooting at people,” but I was too scared. I sat and drank my beer, listening to him rant about his enemies, which included the Melanesian Brotherhood.

  “The tasiu are false prophets. They garem no magic powers. Look, they stopped at my headquarters one day, trying to cause trouble, and my boys went and broke two of their walking sticks. Has anything bad happened to us since then? No. Nothing. Mi no fraet long olgeta tasiu.”

  This was not the story most people told. They said that the boy who broke the walking sticks was now crippled. His hands had shriveled up.

  “Some people think you should be in jail,” I said quietly.

  “What?” Rasta grunted.

  I chickened out. “When will your country have peace?” I asked instead.

  “Peace? We garem peace. Look, my store is open. Business is good.”

  He winked at me, beamed, slapped me on the knee.

  “Look, I’m a Christian boy. South Seas Evangelical Church. Are you a Christian boy?”

  “Um…”

  “Well, if you are, then you know that everything happens according to God’s plan. From the day we are born, God knows what will happen to us. He has a plan for us. All will be well, my friend. All will be gud tumas.”

  But all was clearly not good in Honiara. Hundreds of people had returned from the provinces to demand payback for land, property, or relatives they had allegedly lost during the conflict. They called it “compensation.” The price for killing a man? In Darkness Time, it had been a life for a life. Under the Western legal system, it had been a prison term. Now it was cash. If you had a gun, you didn’t need any justification for your compensation claim. You just found the national finance minister and demanded he write you a check. That’s why the Ministry of Finance had been wrapped in razor wire.

  The tension ebbed and flowed like the tide. When it rose, you could feel it. It was thick and heavy, and it covered everything with a dark, sticky film, like betel spit. That’s when you watched your step. That’s when you looked into people’s eyes, not too long but long enough to check their intentions. The streets were full of excitable young Rambos, bored mongrels with betel-stained lips, teeth razor-sharp with rot, wandering between the garbage fires in packs or squatting in the dirt, spitting red, smoking, waiting. Shortly after I returned from Rasta’s place, a bright-eyed lad called to me across the street: “You watch out!” he shouted cheerily.

  Then quickly:

  Distant shouting.

  Pop-pop, gunfire.

  Suddenly we were all stampeding madly for cover. I hid behind a shipping container. There was the lad, giggling.

  “What happened? What happened?” I asked breathlessly, peering out at the empty street.

  “Mi no savve,” he said, husking himself a betel nut. “But long Honiara, taem olgeta pipol run, yu run olsem.”

  Christianity was supposed to have saved the Solomon Islands from this sort of chaos and violence. When I asked people in Honiara why their ancestors had converted, they usually answered with one word: peace. Christians did not raid neighboring villages at the behest of their ancestral ghosts. They did not hunt each other or eat each other. They did not live in fear. This was the gift of the imported god. It was, some of them said, as though Christianity had saved islanders from the savage part of themselves.

  This idea was naturally supported by European versions of history. English chroniclers have long characterized Solomon Islanders as people in desperate need of spiritual and practical guidance. “The Melanesian Mission did not reach the Solomon Islands a day too soon,” wrote Austin Coates in Western Pacific Islands, a 1970 Colonial Office–sponsored summary of British rule in the region. “This was a society in a state of rapid disintegration, due principally to an appalling, and evidently rather recent, spread of cannibalism, head-hunting and black magic,” he wrote. “Brutality had reached such a pitch that it was brutality no more; it was normal.”

  This hysterical assessment was rooted in the writings of early chroniclers, who seemed to relish scenes of horror and brutality. There was the traveling mission historian A. R. Tippet, who noted that near a mission station on Choiseul, skulls were hung from the branches of a banyan tree somewhat in the manner of Christmas tree baubles. There was the resident trader, John C. MacDonald, who claimed to have witnessed a canoe-launching ceremony in 1883 at Nono Lagoon during which a slave boy was dunked underwater until exhausted, then decapitated. MacDonald reported with morbid fascination how the child’s body was paraded around the village canoe house until the blood ceased to pulse from the neck, then cooked along with a pig. Travelers were hungry for stories of local depravity whether they witnessed them or not. In The Light of Melanesia, my great-grandfather offered these nuggets from Makira, just east of Guadalcanal:

  “Often it has been a chief living only a few miles off who [starts] in the dead of night and, at early dawn, surprises the sleeping population, murders every one, takes their skulls for his new canoe or house, and paddles back with as much human flesh as his people can dispose of. Close to Wango, one of our school centres, I was shown a village which had been wiped out only a few years ago. The forty skulls then taken are probably still in existence, but the people near a school do not care to talk of such exploits, nor exhibit their spoils.”

  Here it is tempting to stop and wonder: If islanders weren’t relating these stories to my great-grandfather, then who was, and what was the storyteller’s agenda? Or, one could simply pass on more of his tidbits, like this one:

  “Infanticide is terribly common, almost universal, and it is the old women who are in fault. They are eager to kill babies as soon as they are born, that the young mothers may not be kept from work in the fields, which then would fall heavily upon the old and childless. I asked, of course, in what way the population of a village was kept up. I was told that in all coast villages it is the custom to buy boys and girls of six or eight from the bush people, who apparently do not practice infanticide.”

  I am suspicious of this sort of history because it comes entirely from European writers who had much to gain in portraying Melanesians as degenerate savages. Whether all the details of these stories are true, they have helped shape modern Melanesians’ own version of history. Darkness Time was a time of violence, slavery, gore, and depravity.

  But a closer look reveals that Europeans delivered a cargo of shackles, swords, and gunpowder along with their Bibles.

  Take the first encounter between Europeans and Solomon Islanders. In 1567, the Spanish viceroy of Peru sent his nephew, Alvaro de Mendaña, out into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish believed that the Inca had once sailed a fleet of re
ed boats across the Pacific to islands inhabited by a fabulously wealthy black race. They fantasized that this was Ophir, the biblical source of the gold King Solomon used to build his temples in Jerusalem. The conquistadors wanted the gold, but Mendaña declared he would also bring the discovered race under the dominion of the Catholic Church.

  It took Mendaña nearly a year to find an island big enough to resemble the imagined kingdom. He called the island Santa Ysabel and claimed all the surrounding shores for his king and his god, but the islanders refused to share their yams with his starving crew. Relations reached a low point when ten of Mendaña’s men paddled to shore on Guadalcanal to obtain water. Only one survived. “The dead were cut into pieces,” wrote chief purser Gomez Catoira. “Some without legs and without arms, others without heads, and the ends of all their tongues were cut off, and their eyeteeth drawn, and those whose heads were left had had the skulls cut open and the brains eaten.” Mendaña certainly didn’t turn the other cheek. His soldiers burned hundreds of houses and killed at least twenty men. The native dead were drawn, quartered, and left at the spot where his own men had been killed. Mendaña then headed home to report he had found the fabled islands of King Solomon, though he had found no gold, silver, or spices, nor had he converted any heathens.