In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xv Preface You never know how the past will turn out. Bob Dylan When I first visited Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia, an old caldoche (settler) in Vallée du Tir told me, “Politics? There’s too much politics here for a small country.” The prospect of complexity appealed to the academic historian in me, but I was not on a simple treasure hunt for research data. I recognized a familiar pattern in human behavior. In 1968, I had joined the US Peace Corps to teach English in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), a former French colony in West Africa that faced the daunting task of building a nation out of dozens of local ethnic groups. More than a generation later, I was teaching modern Pacific Islands history at the University of Hawai‘i, and I wanted to learn more about New Caledonia, a French Overseas Territory near Australia. It is a multiethnic society that had suffered violence in the 1980s among indigenous nationalists, France, and pro-French immigrants . Africa’s struggle to build stable plural societies within artificial borders and foreign state structures was shared by culturally diverse Melanesia in the Pacific. The ethnic tension in New Caledonia also reminded me of Hawai‘i, where indigenous people are a minority, so I was testing my own views on decolonization. I was also carrying personal and political baggage in my research on New Caledonia. I had applied to the US Peace Corps in 1968 not only because my university studies focused on Africa but also to avoid military conscription into the American war in Vietnam. My studies of history had convinced me that Vietnam was not simply a case of Communist expansion in the Cold War but an example of Third World nationalism. That rising force often expressed itself in leftist rhetoric because overseas colonies tended to be ruled by capitalist powers. Anticolonial rebels needed outside help (often from the socialist bloc) and alternative approaches to development. I vividly remember sitting in my local draft board office, at the age of twenty-one, across from a young woman who listened to my plea to teach in West Africa. I found myself feeling silent resentment over the fact that as a woman she was in no danger of being drafted to kill or be killed in a misguided war. xvi Preface She looked at me as if I were a naive child and decided, “All right, we’ll let you do your thing for two years. Then you can come back and do our thing.” My “thing” soon placed me in front of six middle-school classes, each with fifty African students, who wanted to know the answers to such questions as why America had stolen Muhammad Ali from Africa to make him join its army and whether it was true that every time an American woke up, he took a rifle and shot someone from his window. I learned a lot about perspective from them and their families. One evening in 1969, while I sat with my hosts around a campfire in a rural village, a radio announced that the Americans had just landed on the moon! Everyone looked up at the bright disk in the sky, and a man asked me why anyone would want to go there? Did it make sense for me to say that the United States did it to beat the Soviets or to collect rocks? I referred to one of their stories about an old man who was always beating his drums on the moon to distract wayward children: we went up there to bring him down to earth, I said. They all laughed, saying that he was very dangerous, and passed me some more palm wine. As it turns out, an indigenous story in New Caledonia says their ancestral creator spirit, Bumé, came from the moon. I now wanted to understand the genesis of the 1980s “Events,” as the French called the indigenous uprising in New Caledonia. Specifically, I was investigating the radical Foulards Rouges (Red Scarves) of 1969. Some of them had participated in the May 1968 student-worker revolt while attending universities in France. When they returned to their colonized homeland , they sparked an independence movement. We were of the same generation , separated by national borders but immersed during our formative years in a worldwide quest for progressive change and in idealistic opposition to racism, inequality, war, imperialism, and conformity. Two specific links are quite striking. First, the war...

Share