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Return to the Islands

Unwanted Monogamy

Unwanted Monogamy


Five female faces

Monogamy was forced on the Gilbertese by British law at the turn of the century, when Protestant missions had been at work in the islands for about fifty years, and the local administration for a decade more or less. There was no popular demand for it. On the contrary, except in one or two southern islands, tremendous pagan majorities still clung to the polygamy of their ancestors and the strictly controlled system of sex conduct that went with it. But nobody spoke for the pagans; the page 98petition of the sectarian minority went through to London backed by the administration (so much must be said in fairness to the Colonial Office of the day), and that was abysmally that.

As soon as the new law came into local force, a multitude of women who had enjoyed the honourable status of secondary wives under the old system found themselves suddenly converted into potential adulteresses. That is to say, the criminal code of the day allowed of no distinction between the situation of a sub-wife and that of any ordinary breaker-up of homes: she could be brought to trial before her island court and imprisoned for common adultery if anything so contumacious as pagan love or loyalty tempted her still to cling to the father of her children. By the same token, the rising Christian generation was taught from village pulpits to call her children bastards, and did so, freely.

The pagans liked and admired the white man: not even this treachery could shake their incredible loyalty to him; so there was no attempt anywhere to rebel against the law. Only, after lifelong partnerships, hundreds of secondary wives were put away in shame by their men, while as many women, whose mates would have held them despite everything, returned to their villages rather than stay and be placarded as harlots. There were many suicides among the middle-aged.

A quarter of a century after the event, I talked with a pagan friend of Tabiteuea whose mother had preferred death by her own hand to living on, either in unlawful concubinage with his father or in desolation without him. Though she was only a sub-wife, she happened to love both her man and his ceremonial bride, her elder sister.

So she said one evening to her son, who must have been about twenty at the time, "Your father will be happy with my sister, and she will always be good to you for my sake. As for me, I shall be better out of the way, since the law has made a shameful woman of me. I go now. Tell them I died loving them."

page 99

The boy took her words for nothing but a cry of grief more bitter than usual. He put his arms round her, saying, "Neiko [Woman], we shall have each other. I will go and live with you in your father's village."

She smiled at him: "You are a good son," she said, returning his embrace. "Stay here and be a joy to your father." Then she walked out into the bush and hanged herself.

The next day, his father and aunt hanged themselves to the same tree. They doubtless felt, with his mother, that life was no longer worth living in a world of memories that the law had dishonoured for ever.

Looking back at the tragedies of depopulation caused by interference with the native custom in other groups of the Pacific, one is amazed at the vitality that enable the Gilbertese as a race to survive the murderous shock of compulsory monogamy. It is, indeed, true that the population figures showed a steady annual retrogression through the first dozen years of the new century; but the tide had already turned by 1915 and there has been a sustained forward movement ever since. I believe that this dramatic recovery was due to the unquenchable humour of the average pagan villager, which, as time went on, inspired him to escape from heavy new realities not by running away from them, but by using them, in the spirit of the old mime burlesques, as stuff for his Rabelaisian laughter. I have seldom seen a funnier piece of burlesque than one dating from the earliest 1900's (revised for my delight at Tarawa in 1925) in which a resident commissioner and a missionary, renowned both for their grimness and their intransigent dislike of each other, were mimed in the joint act of purloining forty odd sub-wives from the High Chief of Abemama and having them locked up for adultery—because they wanted the ladies for themselves. It was, of course, as untrue as it was indecent, but it left me feeling that nothing less than an angle of light could have inspired the gallant resilience of spirit which, under the very hammer-stroke of national disaster, had risen to make fun of the strikers.

page 100

Then again, the villagers soon realized that the law was an ass in action. Though it had formally banned a number of sex courtesies between 'in-laws' which pagan custom had honoured, its powers of prevention in practice were strictly limited. What its minatory clauses could and, very quickly, did do was to destroy the stern code of reciprocal duties—the moralities, in short—which conditioned the ancient sex-exchanges. These duties were too many and varied for their faithful observance to pass unnoticed, so they were jettisoned. But the sex-relations themselves were more easily kept secret, and the spice of danger added to them by the law's threats acted as a strong challenge to adventurous minds. Such affectionate mutual courtesies as the temporary exchange of wives between brothers or close friends were stubbornly maintained for many years after they became criminal offences. A new success-value was added to the villagers' lives—the psychological fulfilment of beating the ogre of the law in pursuit of love within the ancient pattern—and this compensated happily for the loss of the older values. It certainly drove them farther and farther away from the Christian ideal of sex restraint which (one must suppose) the law as well as the missions had in view; but it contributed as I believe, more vitally than any other single factor towards the rebirth of their interest in life among the ruins of their ancestral system, and so also, in the end, towards the survival of their race.