The Story of Fai‘ota: Resolving an Ancient Conflict in Malaita, Solomon Islands

ABSTRACT

The people of Malaita in Solomon Islands identify with their ancestors through genealogical histories that shape relationships among families and clans. In 2020, John Omani, one of the authors of this article, was involved in a reconciliation between two clans whose ancestors had quarrelled 17 generations ago. He reviews this history, documented by co-author Ben Burt, and they examine the issues of ancestral culture and Christianity underlying the relationship between the clans and the ancestors, who they still respect but no longer pray to. The reconciliation ceremony shows how Malaitans have maintained ancestral values of conflict resolution over a century of colonial change.

Key words:

• Solomon Islands
• Malaita
• genealogical history
• conflict resolution
• Christianity
• kastom

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Akin for helping us develop this article from his deep understanding of Malaitan culture and to David Oakeshott and Debra McDougall for constructive reviews.

Notes

¹ Geoffrey M. White, Identity through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

² Ben Burt, Tradition and Christianity: The Colonial Transformation of a Solomon Islands Society (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994).

³ Burt provides full accounts of both versions of Fai‘ota’s story in his Kwara’ae Histories: Oral Literature from Solomon Islands (privately published via Amazon, 2021), 63–70.

⁴ For more details of this history, see Burt, Tradition and Christianity.

⁵ See David Akin, Colonialism, Maasina Rule, and the Origins of Malaitan Kastom (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013).

⁶ For an explanation of Malaitan law on such matters, see David Akin, ‘Compensation and the Melanesian State: Why the Kwaio Keep Claiming’, The Contemporary Pacific 11 (1999): 35–67.

⁷ See Ben Burt, ‘Changing Exchange Values in Solomon Islands’, in Values and Revaluations: The Transformation and Genesis of ‘Values in Things’ from Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. H.P. Hahn, A. Klöckner, and D. Wicke (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2022), 47–58.

⁸ See Rodolfo Maggio, ‘According to Kastom and According to Law’: ‘Good Life’ and ‘Good Death’ in Gilbert Camp, Solomon Islands’, in The Quest for the Good Life in Precarious Times: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Domestic Moral Economy, ed. Chris Gregory and Jon Altman (Canberra: ANU Press, 2018), 57–86.

⁹ See Akin, ‘Compensation and the Melanesian State’.

¹⁰ For an example of Idu at work, see Ben Burt, Malaita: A Pictorial History from Solomon Islands (London: British Museum Research Publication, 2015), 195.

¹¹ Burt, Tradition and Christianity.

¹² Comparative Constitutions Project, Solomon Islands Constitution of 1978 through 2014, https://constituteproject.org/countries/Oceania/Solomon_Islands (accessed February 8, 2024).

¹³ S.G. Carter, G. Fry, and G. Nanau, Oceanic Diplomacy: An Introduction, In Brief 2021/23 (Department of Pacific Affairs, Australian National University), https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/247293 (accessed February 7, 2024).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Omani

John Omani – Gwauna‘ongi clan, Malaita, Solomon Islands

Ben Burt

Ben Burt – Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, British Museum, London, UK [email protected]