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  • Ce souffle venu des ancêtres . . . L'œuvre politique de Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1936-1989)
  • Eric Waddell
Ce souffle venu des ancêtres... L'œuvre politique de Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1936-1989), by Hamid Mokaddem. Nouméa: Expressions - Province Nord, 2005. ISBN 2-9519371-2-1; 411 pages, appendixes, written in French, bibliography, index. CFP3900.

When Jean-Marie Tjibaou was assassinated on Ouvéa in May 1989, shock waves swept across the Pacific. His face figured on the front covers of the following month's issue of both Pacific Islands Monthly and Islands Business, while seven months later Pacific Islands Monthly declared him "Man of the Decade." Yet, ironically, many Anglophone Oceanian intellectuals spontaneously wept over the death of his assassin, Djubelly Wéa. The reason was simple: Wéa was a radical, uncompromising, and an avowed Anglophile who had studied in Fiji. Tjibaou was, in comparison, a somewhat mysterious figure, prone to ­com­promise and with a limited profi­ciency in English. He navigated in a universe that was unequivocally Oceanian, but was also grounded in the larger realm of the world's colonized peoples, and characterized by a marked attachment to certain aspects of French and European civilizations.

Unlike the vast majority of Pacific leaders of his generation, Tjibaou left an enormous legacy of interviews and speeches, as well as several important writings. He also deeply marked those that crossed his path, for he had charisma, vision, and a remarkable command of the spoken word. A biography by the Le Monde journalist Alain Rollat was published shortly after his death (Tjibaou le Kanak, 1989), while the French anthropologists Alban Bensa and Éric Wittersheim produced a collection of his speeches, writings, and interviews a decade ago (Jean-Marie Tjibaou, La Présence Kanak, 1996). Otherwise, until very recently, there has been little apart from a scattering of articles. The tide is, however, turning. An ­English translation of La Présence Kanak was published a few months ago in Australia (Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Kanaky, 2005), while at virtually the same time, this substantial study of Tjibaou's political thought and actions appeared in New Caledonia.

Ce souffle venu des ancêtres is, without a doubt, an important book. It is also, at first sight, a somewhat disconcerting one for Oceanian scholars nurtured principally on the writings [End Page 315] of anthropologists, geographers, and historians. Hamid Mokaddem teaches philosophy at an école normale (teachers' training college) in New Caledonia and his pioneering study is couched in a multitude of ­references to key figures in Western philosophy—above all Hegel, but alsoBadiou, Foucault, Plato, Deleuze, Elias, Barthes, Lardreau, as well as to other thinkers, such as Halbwachs and Blanchot—who are unlikely to be familiar to most Anglophones. At the same time, Mokaddem makes it clear that his intent is not to encapsulate the trajectory of Tjibaou in philosophical discourse, in the manner that others have imposed an anthropological discourse in their studies of Oceanian lives and experiences.

Mokaddem affirms that, in Jean-Marie Tjibaou, he is in the presence of a Great Man, in a civilizational sense—as distinct from a Big Man, in Melanesian anthropological terms—and his concern is to explore the greatness of the person. Specifically, his intent is to reveal the political philosophy of the leader of the Kanak independence movement in the late 1970s and 1980s, in a context where Tjibaou's politics are inscribed in culture, where his thoughts and actions are closely interwoven, and where he occupies the center stage at a critical moment in the history of a people trapped in a violent colonial experience. The intellectual portrait that Mokaddem proposes is one of a leader nourished by the quiet voice ofthe ancestors, confronted by the harsh reality of the present, and possessing the ability to dream of the future. Yetthe book does not claim tobe a biography. Its avowed aim is rather to"explain and make understood the greatness of a work of ­politics" (expliquer et faire com­prendre lagrandeur d'une œuvre ­politique) (24).

This particular objective renders Cesouffle venu des ancêtres a distinctly unconventional scholarly work. The...

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