The Transmission of Power

Did Kwaisulia succeed in transmitting his power and influence through his children and descendants? Kwaisulia's oldest son Kaiviti and nephew Kaa acted as his lieutenants, and achieved some recognition. It was Kaiviti who arrested two murderers on Kwaisulia's behalf when a request came from the colonial powers in Tulagi in 1902.

Kaiviti and Kaa carried on Kwaisulia's policy of co-operating with European authority: in 1909 one of them earned commendation…. However, they must have realised that opposition to the Christian missions was inexpedient…. In the years following his father's death, Kaiviti (and probably Kaa also) must have joined the S.S.E.M.^[5] … In this way Kaiviti and Kaa were able to wield influence by adapting to a new force in their society rather as Kwaisulia had done. The authority and prestige associated with the name of Kwaisulia, something of which was passed on immediately after his death to his elder son and nephew, have endured until more recent times, for in the 1940s his last surviving son, Kakaluae, was appointed government headman of Lau and subsequently chosen by the Lau people as their Marching Rule “chief.” (Corris 1970,265)

The case of Kakaluae deserves closer inspection. If Kaiviti and Kaa emerged in a transitional period when mission influence was becoming strong, Timi Kakaluae's career developed in the period when effective colonial administration was established on Malaita, complementing yet in competition with the power of the S.S.E.M., the dominant mission on the island. Whereas Kaiviti became a Christian, Kakaluae remained pagan, following his father's commitment to custom. Kakaluae was picked out by W. R. Bell, the first District Officer to become a strong presence on Malaita (Keesing and Corris 1980), to join the constabulary—no doubt partly because, as Kwaisulia's son, he carried some prestige as well as a potential for forcefulness and bravery. Kakaluae rose to seniority within the constabulary, and played a prominent part in the punitive expedition in 1927, after Bell was assassinated by Kwaio strongmen (Keesing and Corris 1980).

A retrospective sketch of Kakaluae's career written by the District Com-

missioner, Malaita, apparently in 1952 (BSIP 28/VII/B/1), sums up his career and shows how it was connected to Kwaisulia's:

T. Kakaluae, Adagege Village, Age 58, Heathen.

Decorated with Jubilee Medal in 1935, and Certificate of Honour in 1951.

One of the great heathen chiefs of the Lau Lagoon he succeeded his father Kwaisulia as such in 1937. He entered the Armed Constabulary in 1920 and rose to the rank of corporal in 1927 when, after the death of Mr. Bell, he was appointed a Government headman for the entire area Lau-Baegu-Baelelea and Makwanu. He was confirmed as chief headman of the Lau Lagoon and achieved the rank of Sgt. at Tulagi. Since, he has done invaluable work as Government headman on the most senior scale, standing aloof from MR [Maasina Rule] activities in 1947–1950. He is greatly respected far outside his domain of indigenous authority and his aristocratic connections throughout the Central Solomons are considerable. So far as sectarianism allows he may be regarded as an elder statesman of Malaita and certainly of the Northern areas. Self-educated, reserved, the complete snob, yet a die-hard Tory, his value to the [Malaita] council will be considerable even if it does spring from the respect in which he is held generally and not from his own peculiar brand of enlightened despotism.

This account requires some unpacking: Timi Kakaluae's career as agent of the colonial state did not run a totally smooth course.

As early as 1935, S.S.E.M. missionary Norman Deck referred to Kakaluae as “the most prominent District Headman on Malaita” (BSIP 1/III/F. 36/9/ pt. 1). Yet Kakaluae's role as Headman and his interest as a strongman in customary terms were sometimes in conflict, as Government reports from the 1930s show. In 1936, he was pressing claims for the title to Basakana Island, in rivalry with a fellow north Malaita strongman, Irobaua (Malaita Quarterly Report, 6/30/36; BSIP 29/I/1/1936).^[6] In 1937, he was locked in a conflict with his deputy, Salaimanu (BSIP 14/36); and in the investigation, Kakaluae's demands for customary compensation for an unintentional desecration of his daughter's death—seemingly taking advantage of his colonially conferred power—were upheld: “I think that Kaluae^[7] acted in the correct manner. Had there been any suggestion of a fine in English money it would obviously been [sic ] wrong but the whole thing is strictly in accordance with their old custom and the people concerned are pagan” (BSIP 14/39). The District Commissioner's report to the Resident Commissioner portrayed Salaimanu as a man of vastly lesser status than Kakaluae: “Naturally, apart from his government appointment, he can not expect to be treated with the respect shewn to a man of Kaluae's influence.” To suggestions that Kakaluae was using his power as Headman to advance his personal and factional interests, the District Commissioner noted that “the man suspected of [a] murder is the chief of Saua Is.: and a friend of Kaluae's.” He pointed out that

in asking the District Commissioner to hold an inquiry, “Kaluae acted in an absolutely straightforward manner.”

The British were clearly bending over backward to rationalize the acts of a man they had backed so strongly, and in whose loyalty they had placed so much faith—and a man whose status and legitimate authority in “traditional” society they apparently never questioned. But both the times and the colonial cast of characters were changing. By 1940, accusations that Kakaluae was using his power as Headman to advance his own factional interests could no longer be ignored. He was accused of condoning and covering up an assault by men from Sulufou and their allies on a group from Funaafou, in a quarrel growing from an insult and a customary curse. (Recall Kakaluae's father's wars to establish hegemony over the lagoons.) Kakaluae did not report the assault, but was persuaded that it should be settled by the exchange of compensation. The District Officer (BSIP 29/I/5) wrote that “District Headman Kaluae was undoubtedly extremely negligent in not reporting the matter immediately and was severely censured by me. I am not prepared, however, to comment on his fitness to carry out his duties since I have so little knowledge of him.” The subsequent investigation (1/III/19/3, 1941) led to a triumph for Kakaluae's old rival Salaimanu: “As a result of an administrative inquiry held on his activities, District Headman Kaluae of Tai was dismissed from his post by His Honour, the Resident Commissioner, who subsequently approved the appointment on probation of Salaimanu in his place. Salaimanu is a man who is both liked and trusted by the people of Tai.”

An account from a District Officer's report in 1946 (Laracy 1983, 123) notes: “For many years [Kakaluae] was Government Headman but lost his job when he used his position to have a number of Sulufou people sent to prison and at the same time protected the Adagege and Funafou people who were at least as blameworthy if not more so.”

This was a time of political conflict in northern Malaita. Enilana (“England”) Kwaisulia^[8] had led a Lau delegation to 'Are'are in 1944 to find out about the new political movement there. Enilana had come back strongly supporting Maasina Rule (Laracy 1983, 117–118; 132). Kwaisulia initially accepted appointment as a Maasina Rule Head Chief for Lau, then backed off when he discovered the degree to which this committed him to an antigovernment position incompatible with his role as Headman. Maasina Rule presented a quandary to the Headmen, whose considerable local power depended on loyalty to a British administration that had scattered in the face of the Japanese invasion, and had been dramatically upstaged by the massive American presence. Some, like Maekali of Malu'u, remained unambiguously loyal—partly because the Maasina Rule leaders in their communities were their old adversaries in local power struggles, the S.S.E.M. elders. Others, like Kakaluae, had more difficult tasks of retaining both local power and

colonial patronage in the face of massive support for Maasina Rule. The District Officer's 1946 report (Laracy 1983, 123) goes on to comment:

Until his appointment as Masina Law chief Kakaluae had lived quietly and refrained from taking an active part in politics. During the war he gave useful and loyal service on Tulagi….

Kakaluae determined to win his district for the Government and not the Masina Law. He found difficulties. Although his name carried a great deal of weight among the older men it did not have the same force with the young men. He found his Masina Law position less and less congenial.

Although he was reappointed Headman in October 1945, Kakaluae's political influence was never fully reconstituted, either vis-à-vis the colonial government or the people of the Lau area. His prestige with his own people had been eroded by the turbulent events of Maasina Rule, when the Lau lagoon was split into pro- and antigovernment factions and the loyalist Headmen had acted as agents of mass arrests and political repression. His standing in the eyes of the government had never been fully restored, given both the blots on his record and his initial support for Maasina Rule.

Perhaps, however, the most important factor in his political decline was simply that times, and modes of colonial administration, had changed. The old style of heavy-handed direct rule of the prewar period had given way to local experiments in indirect rule and limited representation of indigenous interests. A “native Headman” deemed by the colonial rulers to be a mighty chief, proud and dictatorial to his own people—and still holding fast to pagan custom—no longer served the needs of gradual democratization in an island becoming dominated by Christianity. In 1954 Kakaluae was still Headman; but the District Commissioner, Malaita, reported the following:

Chief Headman Kakaluae would not be a good member for the Lau Native Court. I have the greatest of admiration for him as a stalwart supporter of Government and direct administration but he … just cannot find his feet in an indirect administration…. I believe that [he is] only waiting for the day when [he] can draw a pension and retire from public office. Kakaluae commands little influence in Lau although his standing with the government is respected…. He is regarded as a man of the past, which he unfortunately is. (Letter from District Commissioner, Malaita, to Senior Assistant Secretary for Native Affairs, 29 April 1954; BSIP 12/I/29)

Kakaluae's historical moment, and the mode of leadership he emulated— combining the style of his father and the style of Bell—had passed.

It is worth pausing to reflect on some issues of interpretation and agency. It would seem that whereas Ivens and Corris sought to demystify Kwaisulia's supposed chiefly status, on which his son Kakaluae's claims to chiefly status so clearly rested, the colonial administration took as beyond doubt the customary legitimacy of the mantle of authority Kakaluae inherited. The

British in the Solomons, as in Africa and India, had a vested interest in establishing a congruence between the indigenous elites they empowered and the structures of rank and authority in precolonial society. It served their interests to accept and sustain the illusion that the lad Bell had plucked from Adagege as a police recruit a decade after his father's death, a figure created by and in the colonial state, was legitimate successor to his father's exalted rank and fame.

This, then, raises squarely the problem of agency. Was Kakaluae architect of his own destiny, or a colonial puppet? The question is too-simply posed. We see here a process in which an able and gifted man seized opportunities to gain and use power in ways congruent with his customs and the ways of the ancestors to whom he still sacrificed. To him, his British masters were to be used and deceived, as well as respected and feared.

We find this manipulation as early in Kakaluae's career as 1927, when as a corporal in the constabulary he led patrols scouring the mountains of central Malaita for Kwaio fugitives implicated in the massacre of District Officer Bell. In 1975, Kakaluae told anthropologist Ian Frazer how he had ordered his patrol to shoot unarmed prisoners, to avenge tenfold his own Lau kin who as native police had been killed during the assault on Bell and his party. Kakaluae and his fellow corporals Maekali and Ba'etalua, who also became Headmen after the assassination of Bell, spoke proudly, late in life, of these deeds which customary honor had demanded; but they had maintained staunchly at the time to the District Officer that only a few prisoners had been killed, and that these had been “shot trying to escape.”

We see fragmentary evidence in the record I have set out of the way Kakaluae sought during his career as Headman to use the power and authority conveyed by the colonial state to pursue his personal interests and those of his kin and allies (continuing his father's projects of political domination, but carefully staying within a framework of “custom” in order to avoid violating Protectorate laws or his duties as Headman). Controlling wealth in shell and dolphin-teeth valuables, partly by virtue of his power and influence as Headman, Kakaluae had reinforced a traditional status that in turn reinforced his aura of customary legitimacy vis-à-vis the colonial state. This aura of customary legitimacy and great hereditary authority—the mantle of his father—enabled him to maintain an empire within the lagoons and along the coast of northern Malaita, where the colonial administration then needed to make only sporadic appearances: entrusted to Kakaluae, things were in good hands.

As I read the record, his undoing in 1940 came partly because he eventually miscalculated, usurping too much colonial authority in running his own empire according to “custom”; but it may have come partly because a new and excessively zealous District Officer intruded on this empire more

than his predecessors had—perhaps induced to do so by the scheming rival Salaimanu.

Kakaluae and his fellow Headmen, then, like their counterparts in colonial India and Africa, were throughout their careers both users and used, both agents of manipulation and objects of manipulation. It served both Kakaluae's interests and those of the administration for him to be both a powerful traditional chief and a loyal colonial servant, and for the contradiction between these roles to be disguised.

What, in the longer run, has come of Kakaluae's project? For it would seem that in colonial Melanesia, such leaders have characteristically sought to convert what for them was a contingent and rather precarious power into a longer-term and more solidly based advantage for their children and other close kin. The first generation of “native” functionaries of the colonial state (and their counterparts in mission empires) knew full well that they—uneducated and speaking only Pidgin, subjected to racism and cultural prejudice—were ultimately only petty subordinates far down the social scale of colonial society. Their close contact with Europeans and their potential access to patronage gave them means to attain for their children what they knew they could never attain for themselves.

Melanesian leaders who gained their power as intermediaries with Europeans, as functionaries within the colonial state, or as leaders of millenarian or political resistance, have in many cases been successful in securing a prominent place for their children and grandchildren, as political biographies in modern Melanesian states attest.

Kakaluae was notably less successful in transmitting advantaged status to his children. One of his sons, Kakui, married the sister of Enilana Kwaisulia, and then divorced her in 1954. Two and a half weeks later, Kakui and Enilana came to blows at a Lau market-ground, and Kakui was knocked down and his face scratched. Kakui accepted a tafuliae shell valuable as compensation, but remained bitter about his public humiliation. Shortly afterward, Kakui and his half-brother Sada (also Kakaluae's son) encountered Enilana at the market, apparently conspiring to kill him. Kakui killed Enilana in front of a large gathering, with Sada intervening “after England had been struck down by Kakui” (Criminal Case no. 17/54, report of Judicial Commissioner, BSIP). Kakui and Sada were sentenced to death and hanged—the last prisoners to be executed in the Protectorate. That “both accused are … sons of Timi Kakaluae, a senior district headman,” carried no weight in the trial—a fact that greatly embittered their father after decades of service to the colonial government (Ian Frazer, personal communication). A surviving son works in the Ministry of Transport, Works and Utilities, in charge of allocating furniture for government houses.

Whether the more general patronage established through Kakaluae

helped his other kin to more successful careers is unclear. A generation of leaders prominent in the late stages of the colonial period and in the postcolonial period, including one of the country's first two Anglican bishops, have emerged from Sulufou and Adagege. However, I have not been able to establish the degree to which direct connections can be traced from Kwaisulia through Kakaluae and into the following generation, in terms of the perpetuation of power through patronage and elite education.

An interesting question^[9] is whether the retrospective representations of Kwaisulia and Kakaluae by contemporary Lau people reflect the old lines of factionalism and family interest that emerged during the careers of the father and of the son. Do Irobaua's descendents, or the family of Salaimanu, represent the two strongmen in less positive terms? I have only fragments of information on this,^[10] but I strongly suspect that representations of Kwaisulia and Kakaluae are very much matters of political contention within the Lau Lagoon. A sign of this sort of contention is the controversy in which I became involved, regarding the representation of Kakaluae's police comrades-in-arms Ba'etalua and Maekali, from neighboring To'abaita. The book on the Bell massacre (Keesing and Corris 1980) documents at some length how Ba'etalua, Maekali, and Kakaluae ordered the shooting of prisoners by the constabulary patrols that they led. Contemporary To'abaita politicians, including Ba'etalua's son, attempted to ban the book from circulation in the Solomons (see Keesing 1990).

Kakaluae's career does serve clearly to illustrate the way Melanesian leaders have used the power of the colonial state to achieve prominence. The new political arenas, the new paths to power, were no less real than those of “traditional” society, with its pigs and shell valuables; but to the anthropological eye, they have always smacked of opportunism and lacked the “authenticity” of the cultures we have come to Melanesia to study. It was not the Kakaluaes of Melanesia that anthropologists have written about.^[11] Their contemporaries who led millenarian cults have received some attention; but most of all, we have focused on “big men” doing what big men should do:

giving feasts, exchanging valuables, presenting pigs. That leads us to some wider questions.