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Kiribati Aspects of History
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December 30, 2018
A really local history
No doubt the majority of world histories in print in English have been written by professional historians or tested authors. No doubt a large percentage of those have been white men and an increasing number of white women. Historians from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific usually have trained in universities dominated by the codes and practices developed in Euro-America. So it is quite unusual to find a national history written by locals who may not fit into any of those molds we often expect.
Kiribati, once known as “the Gilbert Islands”, was a late comer to the stage of world history. Not much is known about events there before the 19th century when a) Europeans found it and b) writing was introduced. There is, of course, a body of stories, legends, and myths which have some relationship to “history” as we know it, but cannot be taken as being proven by any sort of record. On top of these there is just the culture of people as it existed up to the dawn of the 20th century, and a history of how it was already changing due to outside contacts with whalers, beachcombers, traders, and missionaries. This slim book, written by a large number of non-professional I-Kiribati in the late 1970s, starts with a compilation of information about the legends and the traditional lifestyle. After that, there is discussion about wars that took place over land and religion (Christian vs traditional), about the early European contacts and missionaries, the style of government imposed by the British colonizers who didn’t want to spend much money on unprofitable dots on the map (they lumped Banaba together with the Gilberts, but didn’t use much profit from the Banaba phosphates to help the rest), the socio-economic changes that occurred, the experience of the islanders during WW II, and the progress towards independence. There are a number of photographs of colonial days as well as small maps of each atoll. Though I would say this was a praiseworthy first step, I think a more defined, closely-organized, and deeper attempt to describe Kiribati’s history is still to be written. I hope it will be an I-Kiribati who gets to write it. Given the prediction that the atolls may be underwater in this century, it is all the more important that the task be undertaken before the flood.
No doubt the majority of world histories in print in English have been written by professional historians or tested authors. No doubt a large percentage of those have been white men and an increasing number of white women. Historians from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific usually have trained in universities dominated by the codes and practices developed in Euro-America. So it is quite unusual to find a national history written by locals who may not fit into any of those molds we often expect.
Kiribati, once known as “the Gilbert Islands”, was a late comer to the stage of world history. Not much is known about events there before the 19th century when a) Europeans found it and b) writing was introduced. There is, of course, a body of stories, legends, and myths which have some relationship to “history” as we know it, but cannot be taken as being proven by any sort of record. On top of these there is just the culture of people as it existed up to the dawn of the 20th century, and a history of how it was already changing due to outside contacts with whalers, beachcombers, traders, and missionaries. This slim book, written by a large number of non-professional I-Kiribati in the late 1970s, starts with a compilation of information about the legends and the traditional lifestyle. After that, there is discussion about wars that took place over land and religion (Christian vs traditional), about the early European contacts and missionaries, the style of government imposed by the British colonizers who didn’t want to spend much money on unprofitable dots on the map (they lumped Banaba together with the Gilberts, but didn’t use much profit from the Banaba phosphates to help the rest), the socio-economic changes that occurred, the experience of the islanders during WW II, and the progress towards independence. There are a number of photographs of colonial days as well as small maps of each atoll. Though I would say this was a praiseworthy first step, I think a more defined, closely-organized, and deeper attempt to describe Kiribati’s history is still to be written. I hope it will be an I-Kiribati who gets to write it. Given the prediction that the atolls may be underwater in this century, it is all the more important that the task be undertaken before the flood.
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