“Ce souffle venu des ancêtres”
[This breath came from ancestors]
— Jean-Marie Tjibaou
In August 1975, I visited an island in the Pacific called Ouvea which is part of the Loyalty Islands group to the east of New Caledonia. Australia was in turmoil with the Whitlam government under severe attack from the right. A constitutional coup was in train. Kissinger had approved of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor;
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was the conservative president of France at the time. His pictures adorned the walls of the Mayoralty building in Fayoue in Ouvea.
I went to New Caledonia, primarily to learn French. We could not afford Noumea, so we got on a steamship carrying asphalt and went to Ouvea, sleeping on the deck and eating Chinese rice provided by the ships cook. The locals put us up in a thatched hut near the beach and gradually they got to know me and my girlfriend. I participated in protests against ‘la loi debre’ outside the local gendarmerie … people threw rocks at the building, and I could tell that more violence was to come. The following day, I saw the French navy arrive on the beach and take away 18 and 19 year olds for compulsory military service. Armed struggle for independence seemed inevitable.
I returned a couple of years later to find that things had not got any better. And then years afterwards, in 1988, I heard about French Paratroopers storming caves in northern Quvea and murdering people from the village where I had stayed.
There is more to my short stays in New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands, both at a personal and a political level. Ouvea was a small island under French occupation to the east of New Caledonia; just before I arrived, there had been a demonstration that surrounded the local gendarme’s building at Fayoue, with french authorities locking themselves inside. People on the island were opposed to French laws, specifically La Loi Debré.
Their objective was to have their children learn their own language first at school and to learn French as a secondary language. The French tricolour would hear no word of it.
Ouvea’s main industries were copra and tourism. I remember a general store at Fayoue being run by an arab man and his family, I think they were from one of the French colonies in North Africa (Algeria?).
There was a tourist resort for the ‘metropoles’ (Parisians) come out to the tropical paradise (colony) on their August ‘vacances’. Some seemed afraid of the local men because, being copra workers, they carried machetes dangling from their wrists to cut coconuts (not tourists).
But tourists did not seem to realise that or if they did the metropoles confined themselves to the chlorinated swimming pool in the resort when only a few metres away there was the most heavenly beach and sea that one could imagine. Fear kept them from the salt water.I stayed on the island with local indigenous people; they provided a simple thatched roof hut for accommodation. We slept on grass mats. I will always remember their openness and generosity to two young Australians who had arrived at their island by chance on a ship carrying drums of asphalt for the aerodrome landing strip being constructed.
For the Caldoche settlers, not all of whom are French, had been there for generations but in the end, their occupation all came down to nickel, land and enslavement of Kanaks.
French occupation was brutal in Algeria, but the colonists had their murderous side in Nouvelle Caledonie as well.
And the struggle is ongoing. – Ian Curr, 23 February 2025.
We re-print this interview with Rock Haocas, member of the Confederal Board of the Union Syndicale des Travailleurs Kanak et des Exploités / Union of Kanak and exploited workers (USTKE), conducted on May 10, before the current colonial repression started. – Posted first on 2024-05-19 in Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie.
On May 13, Macron had the Nationale Assemblée (the French parliament) pass a constitutional law « unfreezing » the electoral body for New Caledonia’s provincial elections, to include tens of thousands of voters from metropolitan France.
On May 1st in Paris, hundreds of Kanak demonstrators joined Parisian workers in protesting against the unfreezing of the electoral body. Is this historic?
As a former Parisian, I often demonstrated on May 1st: there were less than ten of us Kanaks. The current mobilization, both in France and at home, is historic. On April 13 in Nouméa, 80,000 people took to the streets in response to a call from the CCAT (Cellule de Coordination des Actions de Terrain), a group of mostly Kanak, but also non-Kanak, people who were outraged by the French state’s heavy-handed approach, and who want our country to achieve full sovereignty (there are around 115,000 Kanaks out of the island’s 270,000 inhabitants). They are fed up with colonial policy, which is being forced through without taking into account the opinions of the local population, particularly the colonized people.
The constant objective is for the Kanak people to be in a minority in their own country…
Let’s recall a few facts. Before France took possession of the island in 1853, and especially before the presence of Europeans, there were over 400,000 Kanak. By 1920, the first census had reduced this number to 20,000! Subjected to the Code de l’Indigénat – i.e., colonization by settlements – the Kanak were confined to reservations. After being granted the right to vote in 1946, elected Kanak representatives gradually became the majority in local institutions. But with the nickel boom of the 1970s, Gaullist Prime Minister Messmer decided, in a letter in 1972, to organize « mass immigration of French citizens from mainland France » in order to « avoid the danger » of « nationalist demands from the indigenous populations ». For our part, our elders recognized in 1983 that the non-Kanak populations settled on the island were « victims of history » and should have the same rights as Kanaks in an independent country.
The government claims that unfreezing the electorate is « democratic »…
After the assassination of the nineteen Kanak activists in Ouvéa by the French army (May 1988), and then the Nouméa Accord in 1998, the agreements signed with the state froze the electoral body (a freeze confirmed by Chirac in 2007 through a constitutional law) and provided for the organization of referendums on the accession to sovereignty. The first two referendums (2018 and 2020) have shown that the number of supporters of independence is growing steadily. When in 2021, in the midst of mourning after the Covid epidemic, the Kanaks asked for the third to be postponed, Minister Lecornu objected: « In a democracy, elections are held on time. » Today, Macron and Darmanin are postponing the provincial elections to push through a new constitutional bill to unfreeze the electoral body, so that local institutions are at the beck and call of the French government… in the name of « democracy ». But what is democracy in a colonial context?
If Macron is so determined, it’s obviously for the control of nickel, but is it also to preserve the French military base?
Nickel is a source of great wealth, and an industry revived by the development of electric batteries. But there’s also a tendency to militarize the country. De Gaulle used to say, « France has no friends, only interests. » So it’s in the interests of the French state, not ours. We’re told again and again: « Beware of China: if you’re independent, you’ll lose France’s protection.” You’d think were supposed to say thank you for colonizing us to protect us from China!
What is the place of USTKE?
Since its creation, the USTKE has been part of the anti-colonial struggle. We say that the system that colonizes the Kanak people is the same one that exploits the workers. The class struggle espouses the anti-colonial struggle. Just look at how some bosses behave! And the extreme difficulty Kanak people have in gaining access to positions of responsibility. USTKE is also a force for change: with the pro-independence parties, we enabled the creation of the factory of the North, took part in the fight to preserve the factory of the South and supported the employees worried after this mobilization. In addition, many Kanak work in tribes, which is not wage labour: field work, fishing, subsistence farming… but they suffer just as much from this system. « Factories, tribes: same fight!” Today, the struggle goes beyond the political framework; there is a social awakening, but above all a popular awakening.
Interview on May 10 by Dominique Ferré