The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “Sometimes I see people from Israel and the Middle East and I think – ‘They are like me,’” Saro said. “But if you ask me who in the world looks like us and has our kastom I would say Ethiopians.”

  “Is there any connection at all between the Solomon Islands and Ethiopia?” I asked, and I thought, Yes, there is a certain resemblance.

  “I will tell you a story,” he said. “There was an Ethiopian on a certain ship. He was there illegally –”

  “A stowaway,” I said.

  “Indeed. And when they found him after some days at sea they wanted to send him ashore. They said, ‘Who are you? Where do you come from?’ And the Ethiopian looked straight at them and said, ‘I am from the Solomon Islands.’ ”

  Fagi said, “I have heard this story myself.”

  “The ship continued onward and when it arrived in Honiara the man was put off. We took him into custody in the police station. He spoke perfect English. He looked exactly like us, and he lived here for over a year. While he was here, no one ever questioned him or asked him where he came from. The people looking at him believed he was from the Solomons. He wanted to stay longer, but his government was notified and he was sent back to Ethiopia.”

  It was now dark, and the channel was silvery-black, like a sea of ink. The islands we had been looking at for the past hour, while we had been drinking, had vanished, blackened, and become part of that depthless night.

  “Savo’s gone,” I said.

  “They have no lights,” Fagi said. “They have no electricity, no roads, no telephone. Only those funny scrub ducks they call megapodes.”

  It sounded a wonderful place.

  “Megapode means ‘big foot,’” I said.

  “I think you are a teacher,” Fagi said.

  “Do I need permission to go to that island?’’’

  “Yes. It is a good idea. You must ask permission to go to such places. But you always get it. And I know the man you should see.”

  It was the Minister of Housing, one Allen Kemakeza, whose home village was on Savo Island. I did not imagine that a government cabinet minister would see me at short notice to discuss the possibility of my paddling to an obscure island for the purposes of my camping and examining the nesting habits of the big-foot bird. But as this was the Solomons I gave it a shot the very next day, calling his office the first thing.

  “He is not here,” his secretary said.

  “When do you expect him?”

  “He usually comes to the office at nine. But you could call him at home.”

  It was eight-thirty in the morning, and I was a perfect stranger – nevertheless, she did not hesitate to give me the minister’s home telephone number, so that I could ask him to do me a favor. From my point of view, this seemed a happy way of running these islands.

  I called the minister’s house and asked if I could see him.

  He said, “I have a little problem here, but I will be at my office in an hour. Meet me there and we can talk.”

  He had no idea who I was or what I wanted, yet at a moment’s notice he was prepared to meet me.

  The new six-storey Ministry of Housing, in which Mr Kemakeza’s office was located, was the most obvious building in Honiara – it was four storeys higher than any other building in town, and contained the country’s only elevator. Barefoot youths in T-shirts and sunglasses sneaked in and went for joyrides on the elevator, leaving timid graffiti behind on the walls as a testimony that they had been there.

  This building was so inappropriate it had to have been a result of foreign aid – one of those self-serving boondoggles in which a Western country gives money in the form of a contract to one of its own builders to put up an expensive structure no one really needs. It was dungeon dark inside this strange building – strange, because in spite of its newness doors were broken, locks hung loose, doors were off their hinges, floors unswept, and all the signs were scribbled on pieces of paper and taped to walls. Few lights were working. Most of the offices were empty. It was clearly a building no one had gotten used to, but it was being broken in – neglected and vandalized in a way that would make it seem habitable to a resident of Honiara.

  I followed a scribbled sign and its arrow to an office that was bare except for a Melanesian boy sitting in a chair. He had golden skin and fuzzy blonde hair, worn in an Afro the dimensions of a basketball.

  “I have an appointment to see the minister,” I said.

  “Dis way,” he said.

  Allen Kemakeza was in an office that was equally bare of furniture. He was seated at a desk, initialing tattered file folders. Stocky, about forty or so, he wore an old faded shirt and shorts. Later he told me that he had been a policeman for about twelve years, and that he had risen in the ranks of the People’s Rights Party. But he still had the look of a policeman – tough, skeptical, ironic, physical, resentfull, suspicious, not particularly talkative but very attentive; the sort of man who looks as though he has survived a few fights. He had a cop’s hard gaze.

  I introduced myself, told him where I was from, that I had been traveling around the Pacific and that I was interested in going to Savo, preferably by paddling my collapsible boat, to look at the egg fields of the megapode birds.

  “Are you a teacher?”

  “Do a little teaching, do a little writing,” ][ said, smiling fatuously and trying to sound like a harmless pedagogue.

  “What made you start traveling around the Pacific?”

  “My wife and I separated, and it seemed a good way of, urn,” – I thought fast – “no getum bikpela bagarap in hia,” and I tapped my skull.

  “Mi savvy tumas,” he said. “I can make arrangements for you on Savo.” Then he fidgeted and hesitated, and finally said, “What do you know about this Iraq business?”

  “Only what I hear on the radio. I listen every day – to Radio Australia, the Voice of America or the BBC, whichever comes in clearest.”

  This was at the time President Bush had given Saddam Hussein an ultimatum for withdrawing Iraqi troops from Kuwait; the multinational force was in place, and the deadline was a few weeks away. It was that period when everyone speculated about what might happen in a shooting war – when people said that casualties on both sides could run in the tens of thousands, that Israel would be attacked, that a nuclear device might be detonated by the Iraqis, and so forth. In fact, no one had any idea at all what would happen in the event of a war, and so anything was possible, even Doomsday.

  “You think there will be a war?”

  “I have no idea. I hope not.”

  He pushed his file folders aside. He said, “It will be terrible. Already we are noticing the effects of the trouble in the Middle East. The price of fuel in Honiara has skyrocketed.”

  There were very few motor vehicles in town, and just a handful of trucks and buses on Guadalcanal, but the overloaded boats and rusty ferries that ran among the islands needed fuel. Even the short trip to Tulaghi in a little boat with an outboard motor cost the equivalent of about five American dollars, which represented a week’s pay for a Solomon Islander.

  “If there is a war, do you think it will lead to World War Three?’’

  “No. Because the Soviets wouldn’t be able to afford it. They seem to be on our side, or at least neutral, because they need economic assistance from the US and Europe.”

  “They are poor now.”

  “Everyone is poor except the Japanese.”

  “But why are they the only rich ones?”

  “Because it is a one-race, one-language, one-family island of desperate overachievers who have a fascist belief in their own racial superiority,” I said, and I could see that I had struck a chord, because Mr Kemakeza clasped his hands and smiled. “These little people have a palpitating need to dominate the world and will do anything at all to sell their stuff. In the nineteen-seventies when the rest of the world refused to trade with South Africa because the whites there were treating Africans like scum the Japanese were so eager to do business the
y had themselves reclassified as white and made billions. They eat whales, they strew driftnets all over the Pacific, and they accept no immigrants. They are frugal, too – the largest money-savers in the world, which means they have the richest banks. Everyone on earth owes them money.”

  “They are doing business here.”

  “Bikpela no lilik?”

  “Bikpela pis bilong tins,” he said. “Fish cannery. I am also Minister of Taxation, and I have been dealing with a complaint from this Japanese company here, Solomon Taiyo, fish business. They heard that I was giving a tax concession to a Canadian company. They said, ‘Why don’t you give us a tax concession?’ I pointed out to them that they had a tax concession twenty years ago, when they started. It is an incentive to new businesses. They said, ‘But we have been losing money for twenty years.’”

  “What do they do with their canned fish?”

  “Some they sell locally and some they export.”

  “How can they have lost money all this time and still be in business?”

  “I don’t know. But they say so. It is a joint venture, with the Solomons government.”

  “So you haven’t been earning any money from it?”

  “It is hard to say. Their book-keeping methods are complicated. For example it is all done in Japan. We never see their records.”

  “Fish in Japan is expensive, and everyone eats it. I should say that they have been making a fortune. They are using you – probably cheating you. Why don’t you consider the fact that they need you much more than you need them?”

  It seemed to me grotesque but typical that the wrinkleproof executives in this Japanese company were taking advantage of this poor barefoot country, robbing them of one of their few valuable commodities and staple foods, fish.

  The minister said, “Solomon Islanders are too kind.” He looked out the window at the patched and broken roofs of Honiara. “But when we lose patience – then, you will see.”

  “What will I see?”

  “We will ask questions.”

  “Don’t ask questions. Threaten them, close them down, freeze their assets,” I said. “Or why not demand that they allow you to send a delegation to Japan to start a business there?”

  I could just imagine the welcome they would get in Japan, these black bushy-haired Solomon Islanders, with bones in their noses and the raised welts and scars of x’s cut into their foreheads and cheeks. Even an unscarred minister like Kemakeza would be treated as though he was subhuman and offered shiny trinkets in return for his country’s natural resources of timber and fish. And what laughs of derision would greet the islander’s request to start a business in Nippon: Mi laik opim kwiktaim kampani bilong bisnis.

  “Why do you let them manipulate you? You’re a government minister. You deal with taxes.

  This is your country.Summon the book-keepers and accountants to your office and mekim long pinga long – point that out.”

  He was smiling broadly now. “Yes, yes.”

  With a flourish, he wrote a letter and folded it and slipped it into an envelope marked On Her Majesty’s Service.

  “When you go to Savo, give this to my brother. His name is Nathaniel Mapopoza.”

  On the way to the elevator he told me that, as a policeman, he had gone to England, to Bradford in the north to take a course in police tactics. He had liked England, he said.

  “You can walk at night. Go to a pub. Go to a disco. The people are friendly. In New York it was the same. I was safe.”

  “So you liked New York?”

  “Yes. But New Guinea is wuss,” he said, slipping mildly into Pidgin. “There it is more dangerous. Why is it more, Mr Paul?”

  I told him why I thought Port Moresby was dangerous – too many homeless people from the highlands, no common ground, no shared culture; and he inquired further, listening carefully to my answers.

  At last he released me, saying, “Go to Savo. Stay as long as you like. I hope I will see you again, and we can talk.”

  “I have to buy some food now to take with me.”

  He then uttered a strange sentence: “There are many eggs in Savo.”

  9

  The Solomons: In the Egg Fields of Savo Islana

  A large group of gaunt and hollow-eyed Solomon Islanders watched me set up my boat under the palm trees at Honiara. Untypically for Melanesians, they made no move to help me. It was hard to tell whether they were pirates or castaways – they could have been either. At times like this, laboring under the unfriendly gaze of pitiless islanders, I seriously wondered whether my solitary island-hopping was such a great idea. But I knew that if I were home I would be cursing the traffic and wishing I were here, on a sunny day under the palms, preparing to launch myself across the open water.

  I left my boat in the care of a sympathetic-looking old man, and set out to buy a week’s provisions in town – the standard items. Afterwards, seeing that I still had spare room, I bought a few extras – two six-packs of beer and some five-pound tins of Australian cookies labeled “Conversation Biscuits.”

  Outside one of the stores a ragged boy was showing some passers-by a bird squashed into a narrow basket and so I joined the curious group. The bird was green and red, the size of a small thrush, and cheeping miserably.

  I said, “Where did you catch this bird?”

  The boy did not understand.

  I said, “Dispela pisin where you gettim?”

  “lnna boos.” In the bush.

  “Wanem nem bilong dispela pisin?”

  “Dispela ‘laru.’”

  A lorikeet, one of the twenty-one species found in and around the Solomons.

  “Is gutpela pisin?”

  “Ya, dispela numbawan. Dispela p isin savvy toktok, savvy sing-sing. Everyting numbawan.”

  But trapped in the basket it certainly was not talking or singing now.

  I was torn between interfering, buying the bird and liberating it (as I had once done to an edible owl in China), and simply observing the daily life of a Solomon Island poacher – seeing what would happen. Within a few minutes a Melanesian man wearing bangles and earplugs stepped forward and thrust the equivalent of nine American dollars into the poacher’s hand and carried the protesting lorikeet away.

  Back at the shore, the group of fifteen bedraggled men with wild hair, wearing only shorts, still stared at me with hollow eyes but now they were on the deck of a battered sailboat anchored just off the beach.

  “They are from the weather coast,” an islander named James told me. That explained their piratical faces: they had a weatherbeaten, windward look.

  I was glad to be heading off the lee shore, in a calm sea, with plenty of time to paddle to Savo. James came from Savo himself, from the village of Monagho, where he urged me to stay. But I told him that I was going to Kemakeza’s district. I told him I would visit him.

  “That is the north of the island, where the eggs are.”

  Another gnomic utterance.

  “Is there a strong current out there?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Any sharks?”

  “During the war, when all those boats were sunk, there were planti tumas sak, because of the bodies,” James said. “And for years planti moa. But these days not many.”

  Rather than head straight out from Honiara, paddling across fourteen miles of open water, I kept near to the coast, using an excellent nautical chart showing the whole of the Sealark Channel. I paddled west about twelve miles to the village of Visale at Cape Esperance, where I had a rest on the beach, and then struck out north for a six-mile crossing. I was always somewhat wary of these channels, because of the current, or a sudden change in weather, so I paddled hard for an hour and did not ease up until I was near the island.

  Savo, which from Honiara had seemed like a small hump in the ocean, was on closer inspection a mountain in the sea, a gently rounded volcano, with green slopes. The southern end was rocky, but I could see palms and white beaches along its eastern side. I chose to paddle a
long it because I was tired, and I knew that I could safely go ashore at any point.

  The villages were small, set just inland, and I was reassured by the pretty huts. People who wove huts out of split bamboo and thatched them and lashed them as carefully as these Savo islanders had done, had to be hospitable traditionalists. If I had seen tin roofs and cinder blocks, the sort of sheds with swinging doors and padlocks that aid agencies often built for such people – in the innocent belief they were doing them a favor – I would have been very worried. I regarded such dwellings and such violated villages as unpredictable, full of nuisances. Villagers living under tin roofs stenciled A gift from the people of the United States of America, and eating food aid, regarded people like me as a soft touch. I was all for foreign aid, but there was a certain type of aid that undermined people and made them dangerous.

  In Savo there was no apparent sign that any village had been penetrated by the West. And just offshore men and boys fished from dugout canoes. Seeing a settlement on a great sandy beach, I paddled to one of these canoes.

  “Wanem nem bilong dispela ples?” I asked a fisherman, pointing to the huts.

  “Dispela Pokilo,” he said.

  “Balola village i stap we?”

  He waved his hand to the west and said, “Klostu liklik.Go stret.”

  He was right. Balola was very near, but when I landed and dragged my kayak up the sand I was surprised by its air of desertion. No one watched me come ashore, no children shrieked at me, no dogs barked at me, no women were dumping trash on the beach, nor were any men fishing in the low surf. I passed from the early evening light of the beach to the cool crepuscular darkness of the small village that lay damply beneath the dense foliage of trees. Some chickens hurried and clucked on the path, but it was only after walking from one end of the village to the other that I found a person – a man named Aaron, who had bushy sidewhiskers and a gammy leg.

  “Hello. Yu savvy tok Inglis?”

  “Pisin,” he said.

  “Plis yu nap halpim?” I asked and showed the letter the minister had given me. “Mi laik toktok Nathaniel Mapopoza. Mi givim dispela pas.”