The words of a lost Kanaky president

Press, 13 May 1989, Page 25

The words of a lost Kanaky president

Excerpts from speeches and interviews printed in “The Kanak Dispatch” over the last year, gleaned and translated by Peter Low, a senior lecturer in French at the University of Canterbury:

• “The future is there to be built... we need the people of both races to co-operate in making our country a prosperous country and a country that is going somewhere.”

• “I think the fundamental demand linked to our demand for independence is in a sense the fear of universality, the fear of losing those things that make us the inhabitants of a particular part of planet Earth ... “We have this particular way of looking at the world and we say that beyond, there are the ancestors. There are those ones there on the other side of the mirror that reflect our own image. The world of those present, but also that of the invisble absent-present ones, they are the same world. There, that’s our conception. There

is no proof that this conception is more false than any other. And that is the conception that makes us live, that says that we are people of that place there ... “For me the cultural aspect is crucial because it is what gives flavour to existence. You can make the most profitable economic systems in the world, but we' are not robots to live in those systems. We are here with a human dimension that means that in the most modern, soft, satisfying comfort we are still a sum of needs and transcendances always wanting to become better, or more, or other — and that is written in the cultural aspect.”

• “We will never win a battle of copies. To copy the French, or the Americans or the Japanese is a useless effort. We must fight and use the economy for the affirmation and proclamation of who we. are.”

• “We are our custom. We think of our dead, we have our own ways of thinking, of dancing. We have our forms of dance, our forms of thought,

our forms of poetry, our reservedness, our values.”

• “I have insisted strongly on the environment — that those who invest here should take account of the fragility of our little land and its environment, of our population which is small and which is engaged in reorganising itself culturally.”

• “We ask to be respected, but we ask that everyone should start today to build the future we want to share, taking account of the poverty of some groups and riches of others so as to make together a country in which there are people who thank heaven that they have the sun and the sea.”

• “There is an old traditional saying: ‘You don’t eat with your back turned.’ That means that if you have a good meal in front of you and there is somebody around, then you must share your meal; you cannot be at your ease eating alone.”

• “We must not live in hate; hatred prevents building.”

• “Forgiveness is something that people build, just as peace is.”

• “It requires a lot of willpower to build together so that the wounds remain only as scars; it’s a long-term task.”

• At the end of a television interview, he was asked: “When you take stock of your political action, your statements, your successes, your projects, what is the essential thing? What ultimately drives you forward?” TJIBAOU: “Above all, it’s the hope that what one tries to do enables the people of our country to enjoy a better being, a better life, and to one day die in peace and joy. All that is what makes one fight every day, run all the time, so as to hope. Hoping that one day the people will return your smile because you have helped them be better, what they wished to be.”