misfortune of finding its mission led by Kapu, a Hawaiian missionary entrusted by Bingham to spread the good word. Tabiteuea means “kings are forbidden,” and it seems likely that Kapu took this as a challenge. Evoking the hellfire and damnation that would surely befall those who clung to the old beliefs, Kapu managed to convert much of North Tabiteuea. He became known as Kapu the Lawgiver, and soon he drew his zeal toward South Tabiteuea, where the inhabitants remained stubbornly opposed to him. Kapu decided that this would not do and he organized an army of the converted to descend on the south. Until then, warfare had been unheard of on Tabiteuea, where disputes were traditionally settled mano a mano. Unlike a number of other islands in Kiribati, Tabiteuea had no experience with a chiefly system and the wars that chiefs initiate to keep themselves busy. Instead, on Tabiteuea every family had land, every man was a king, and governance, what there was of it, was conducted in the maneaba by the village unimane. Kapu’s effect on Tabiteuea was like Napoleon’s on Europe—revolutionary and immensely destructive. With his army of Christians, Kapu descended on the south of the island. Armed with shark-teeth swords and spears fitted with the lethal barbs of the stingray, Kapu’s army swarmed around the pagans, who had gathered around an old cannon salvaged from a wrecked ship. The cannon was fired once until rain extinguished any hope of fighting the onslaught. Within hours, nearly a thousand southerners lay dead. Most had been decapitated. And thus Tabiteuea became Christian.
As the years went by, the zealotry of the early Protestant missionaries lessened, primarily because on most islands it got them nowhere, but also due to competition from Catholic missionaries, who were amenable to smoking and drinking and dancing, which gave them a powerful competitive edge in the pursuit of I-Kiribati souls. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, the northern Gilbert Islands, long the domain of the American Board of Missionaries, had become predominantly Catholic, while the southern Gilberts, which had come under the sway of the more lenient Samoan missionaries sent there by the London Missionary Society, had become largely Protestant, a division that continues to this day. The Catholics, however, drew the line at polygamy and nakedness and gradually, island by island, the tradition of having multiple wives withered into memory, and the I-Kiribati began to cover themselves up in cloth, which allowed them to experience the same skin infections that bedeviled the I-Matangs.
Into this atmosphere of agitated missionaries, unscrupulous traders, and chiefly wars fueled by drink, guns, and delusions, the arrival of the British Empire was not entirely unwelcomed by the I-Kiribati. In 1892, Capt. E. H. M. Davis of the Royalist arrived on Abemama to plant the Union Jack and declare that henceforth the Gilbert Islands would exist as a protectorate of Victoria, by the Grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and Empress of India. He then moved on to every other major island in the group and said likewise. The I-Kiribati said okeydokey, possibly because Davis immediately banned trade in guns and alcohol, and soon went so far as to banish the more obstreperous missionaries, including Kapu the Lawgiver, two moves that in a very short while returned to the islands a peaceful languidness that they had not seen since the advent of the whalers. The chiefly wars that had riddled life in the northern Gilbert Islands gave way to Land Commissions and local magistrates. A few of the more murderous I- Matangs who had long stirred trouble on the islands were tried and either expelled or shot. The activities of traders were regulated, and as a result of there now being actual rules, many traders left. The Protestant missionaries were told to lighten up when it came to dancing. The power of the chiefs, which had been artificially enhanced by guns and traders, devolved to the unimane. In short, within a remarkably brief period of time, Pax Britannica descended on the islands. That this occurred I think is less a tribute to the peripatetic colonial officers, who were ordered to administer both the Gilbert and Ellice Islands without the Colonial Office actually providing them with a boat, but more to the desire of the I-Kiribati to reclaim their world from the rancorous influence of the I-Matang reprobates who had settled on the islands. The British certainly didn’t invest much in Kiribati. In fact, they didn’t even want it. The islands were claimed solely as a check on German and American aspirations in the region. But the power of empire resonates, and for a few happy years, the British colonial model of benign paternalism brought to the islands a stability and order that many had thought lost. The British colonial habit of training locals to handle most administrative tasks is quite likely what introduced something approaching a national identity among the I-Kiribati, whose collective identity was focused almost exclusively on their home islands.
The British experience in Kiribati, such as it was, considering that at no time did the British have more than a dozen colonial officers stationed there, might have remained essentially benign were it not for the discovery that on one of the islands there existed an actual, honest-to-goodness, extremely valuable natural resource. Since this is Kiribati, it is not surprising that this resource was based on shit, specifically old bird shit, which is also called phosphate, probably because it is considered impolite to discuss bird poop, whereas discussing phosphate seems sophisticated and manly, if also boring. This treasure trove of bird shit was discovered on Banaba, long called Ocean Island by I-Matangs, an island that lies by itself, roughly three hundred miles southeast of Tarawa. Unlike the other islands in Kiribati, Banaba is a raised island, shaped like an upturned canoe, with a peak that rises to a lofty one hundred feet above sea level. The island is only about four square miles in size, but it had twenty million tonnes of phosphate deposits. For these twenty million tonnes of phosphate, in 1900, the Pacific Islands Company signed an agreement with someone they presumed to be the chief of Banaba. This agreement gave the Pacific Islands Company, which was to become the British Phosphate Commission, the right to mine all phosphate deposits on Banaba in exchange for an annual payment of fifty pounds sterling, “or trade to that value.” The agreement would be in force for 999 years. Someone listed as King of Ocean Island signed with an X mark. Of course, there was no need for such a lengthy contract. The phosphate deposits were thoroughly extracted by 1979, the year of independence for Kiribati. But with the phosphate, so too went the soil, the pandanus trees, the coconut trees, and pretty much everything else necessary to sustain life on an island. Today, only about thirty people live on the blasted remains of Banaba. The rest of the Banabans were removed to Rabi, an island in Fiji, in the 1950s, when the British realized that phosphate mining had rendered Banaba uninhabitable.
Obliterating islands in the Pacific, of course, was the prerogative of superpowers, both rising and diminishing, and in the 1960s the British decided to drop a few nukes on Christmas Island, just to see what would happen. I am always stunned by the presumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific. What if some Pacific Islander decided to blow up an A-bomb in Yorkshire, or a hydrogen bomb in Minnesota, or a nuclear bomb in Provence, just to see what would happen. There would be a fuss, I’m sure. Just imagine the letters to the editor. The British say that their testing on Christmas Island, a renowned bird colony, led to no long-term ill effects. The Fijian soldiers stationed there, however, might think otherwise. They were subsequently bedeviled by cancer. Their wives miscarried and the children that were born often had birth defects.
One would think that the I-Kiribati would at least have some very mixed feelings regarding their historical experience with the I-Matang world, but this turns out not to be the case. When I asked Bwenawa what he thought of about it, he said: “It was very good. They civilized us. Before, we were very savage. And now we are all Christian.” You never knew for certain whether Bwenawa was just messing with your head, or whether he meant to casually dismiss the entire narrative of colonialism and exploitation that fills Western college textbooks. Christianity was certainly very important for Bwenawa. He has, at various times in his life, been a Catholic, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Mormon, and even a Baha’i. Today, he is an elder in the Kiribati Protestant Church. “It is all the same. We must love God and we must love one another.” To this end, Bwenawa was seeking to unify the Kiribati Protestant Church with its archrival, the Catholic Church—just a heads- up for the guys in Rome.
And the I-Kiribati are positively effusive when it comes to the British colonial era. This was brought home to me one night when we were invited to attend a reception for the visiting British high commissioner. Typically, the diplomatic cocktail circuit on Tarawa, such as it is, is characterized by a highly immoderate consumption of beer, the occasional fight, and a general atmosphere of keg-party debauchery. The reception for the British high commissioner, however, had ambition. I knew this because on the invitation it mentioned that men would be required to wear “trousers.” The English, of course, are well known for fancying a peculiar sense of decorum over things like climate. They are, remember, the nation responsible for kneesocks. The half-dozen lawyers in Kiribati still do their business in horsehair wigs and black robes that billow above their flipflops. But never before had an invitation on Tarawa stipulated that men had to wear “trousers.” I could understand shirts, and possibly shoes, but pants on Tarawa seemed pretentious. Only Mormon missionaries wore them.
Nevertheless, on the appointed evening I donned a pair of trousers, and like everyone else at the beachside reception, began to sweat profusely. I envied Sylvia.
“I’d kill to wear a skirt,” I said.
