In Kia there is a feast for everything. In fact, when I went to the House of Chiefs earlier in the month, my work was one of only two non-feast-related topics on the lengthy agenda. Admittedly, I was unthinkingly impressed by the level of organisation that they had achieved in this place where otherwise, government barely exists. It wasn’t until a few weeks later though, that I realised the less-inspiring objectives of Kia’s governance.
When Victoria Bako died, her life was honoured with two feasts in as many weeks. Twice, the chiefs gathered their young men and sent them out to gather fish and turtles and vegetables to offer as a shared token of appreciation for Mrs Bako’s achievements. Much was said, during the speeches at these feasts, of her role in establishing the Mothers Union in Isabel Province. And at the most recent feast, she was also thanked for her contribution to Conservation in the province. In fact, my superior made a speech to give thanks to the late Mrs Bako for initiating the project that eventually became the Arnavons Community Marine Conservation Area. To Mrs Bako, we were told, we could be grateful for “twenty years conservation around Kia”.
This made me pause while chewing my turtle meat. It wasn’t that the turtle didn’t taste nice that made me pause; it was quiet delicious. It wasn’t either, that I didn’t appreciate Mrs Bako’s contribution to conservation; the community had surely come a long way since she had been borne. It wasn’t even the irony of talking about “successful conservation” while myself and several hundred others were tucking into the meat of a critically endangered species, though it did seem slightly humorous.
What really made me shudder was that I couldn’t believe that this fat little man, along with the fat little chiefs who had spoken before him, were really grateful to Mrs Bako at all. All she had done was complicate matters for them; this feast was a testament to their deceit, their stubborn resistance. The fifty year-old, endangered parrot fish, the numerous turtles, big and small, the hundreds of huge milk fish that had been netted during a spawning aggregation, all of this cooked and served up by a troop of hard-working women who would be grateful to have what was left when the men had been served – these were not tokens of appreciation, they were monuments of our collective defeat of Mrs Bako and her ideals of sustainability and female empowerment. The shells and scales of these creatures that were strewn about the dead reef out from the village were, in essence, tiny and not-so-tiny statues giving the fingers to Mrs Bako in her grave.
In reality, the purpose of these feasts was not to celebrate how great Mrs Bako was but to reinforce how good this family is. This feast would have to be bigger and better than the Eta’s family’s feast to celebrate the life of the late Chief Clement Eta next month. And this is the solemn truth of governance in Kia. There may be hundreds of unhealthy children, rampant alcoholism and domestic violence, and the whole village may be facing starvation within the next decade, but that is not the point. No solution to these issues would do anything to address the interests of those few men with power, and so, until we can change this, there is little to do but eat up.
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