’Back to the farm” move in the Pacific

Press, 4 October 1977, Page 40

’Back to the farm” move in the Pacific

NZPA Pago Pago A "back to the farm” movement aimed against big Power social planners engulfed the 22 nations of the South Pacific Conference, led by a Methodisteducated Solomon Islands doctor, according to United Press International. The message by speaker after speaker from the small Pacific Island nations came across loud and clear in the new $400,000 air-conditioned auditorium: •'We don’t like what you have done to our children with your modern. money-oriented European educators. We '• ant to return to our old way of living.” Speaking against the system that made him an urbane, brilliant speaker a a foreign tongue, Mr George Kalkoa, of the New Hebrides, asked in precise English what benefits the Pacific Islanders had gained from their Western education. Our girls go from the

farms to the town schools. Next we see them riding behind a long-haired youth on a motor-bike, then in a pub. Then they come back to the farm and bring mum and dad an illegitimate baby. We must do something to change this," Mr Kalkoa said. Mr M. Y. Vivian, whose nation of Niue consists of 12 villages, said that Western education had "taken brown natives from my island and made them into brown palangis (Caucasians or Europeans).” For 20 years Niue children had been taught all about using electricity but had had no electricity until this year.

"The education we have had is for elsewhere in the world, but not for use in Niue. It is time for us to unlearn.” he said. But it was Dr Gideon Zoloveke, aged 55, a former World War II coast watcher from the Solomons, who held the conference audience in 15 minutes silence as he pleaded in schoolboy English for a return to the land, to the old values of home Ynd village, and the

restoration of dignity to the individual. “Let us not talk too much and waste time,” he admonished fellow delegates listening with earphones in deep, upholstered chairs. “Let us go into facts now,” he said. “What is needed in our islands is individual family, individual earning capacity, and individual land ownership. The key point in our island societies is the family, and how can we help families to help themselves?

“In the Solomons we are trying to return from the colonial, commercial agriculture to subsistence agriculture. What we need is to develop the humans — not the colonial system which is interested only in imports and exports and commercialism,” Dr Zoloveke said.

Other speakers continued on the same theme: that maybe Pacific Islanders should trade in their adopted European way of life and return to the land with its primitive but more'satisfying existence.