My Say
Of Aid and Cargo Cults
The Government Will Take Care of Everything, Right?
Melanesia’s cargo cults make colorful copy for visiting travel writers and journalists, not to mention anthropologists. Inspired by the witnessing of the delivery by great birds, in the way of cargo aircraft, descending from the skies to unload packages of wonderful things, the people of some Melanesian villages founded cults and worshipping places in the hope of the heaven-sent deliveries of treasures to them.
Some cults have waited decades for deliveries their way, so far in vain but never without hope. In other parts of Melanesia, and in Micronesia and Polynesia, a later cargo cult definitely produces the goods but at a dismaying cost. This cult spawns a disease that the afflicted dislike hearing being diagnosed as “hand- out mentality.”
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It isn’t confined to the Pacific Islands, but that is no escape from facing up to a condition that has seeped through the region to sap the energy of once highly self-reliant people. Self-reliance was once a necessity for survival in the Oceanic environment, and an absolute necessity for the occupiers of the sparsity of the Pacific’s atolls.
It perhaps first began to ebb towards the end of the Pacific war, nearly 60 years ago, when Pacific Islanders picked through the debris left by millions of intruding combatants. They found a lot of useful stuff, and it was for nothing, or for nothing much.
From the end of that war until the 1960s and 1970s, when political independence dawned for colonies, colonial rulers increased their meagre finding on development spending on projects intended to furnish recipients with the bare necessities of self-rule. Since the range of this endowment was indeed bare it didn’t at first imbue the Pacific’s emerging nations with the feeling of having scored a big lottery win.
This scenario changed. France, from the 1960s, began to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into outfitting some of its Polynesian islands for nuclear tests, so utterly unbalancing the economy and society of French Polynesia and, much later, to quell political unrest, similarly presented the indigenous tribes of New Caledonia with great expectations.
In Micronesia the United States preserved its military grip on the region by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on converting the once self-sufficient inhabitants of atolls into pathetic dependent recipients of its stipends.
Independent Samoa’s near neighbor, American Samoa, was hooked on food stamps and a free television service.
Waves more aid came from the European Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Now China and Taiwan are paying in competing for the affections of Pacific Islanders able to support them diplomatically on the international stage one way or another.
The Pacific’s mostly indigent island nations certainly need economic support. Quite a lot of what has flowed their way has been used well. But quite likely even more, as the management of Fiji’s insolvent government-owned national bank airily explained away huge losses, can be written off as “water under the bridge.”
The great misfortune from this flow of fortune is that Pacific Islanders, who generally collect more aid per head than other developing regions, are now infected with the fatal belief that the world owes them a living; that aid descends on them as naturally as clouds deliver rain and palms deliver coconuts. This belief has flowed from governments down to villages, where the once vigorous spirit of initiative has been diluted by policies that saturated the inhabitants with the belief that all needs, and some luxuries, are a right destined to be delivered free from the government.
This is presently plainly evident in the wreck of the civil strife ravaged economy of the Solomon Islands, where an insolvent and suspect government is engaged in a squalid spending spree with money from Taiwan. There, in Fiji, and elsewhere, there are targets to be hooked politically with free cargo delivered in the name of new cults and labeled as positive discrimination.
Traditional enterprise is crumbling under the weight of education, health, electricity, fisheries and an array of other aid-delivered but eventually derelict assets.
For as any cultist knows not just delivery but the cost of running, maintaining and repairing cargo is sure to be looked after by someone up there in the sky for those prepared to simply do nothing more but wait, and wait, and wait.
Contact Giff Johnson at pacmag@NTAMAR.com.
