The Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia

Chapter 2 Building Castles in China

56 Chapter 2 Building Castles in China Whoever has not left his country and his people will never understand to what extent those are dear to him. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1967, 136) When the kids leave for school or go to France, the elders always say, “Go look for fire to bring back home.” Jean-Marie Tjibaou, quoted in Ce souffle venu des ancêtres (Mokaddem 2005, 120) In spring 1968, New Caledonia’s Territorial Assembly sent a delegation to Paris to explain that they wanted autonomy restored to their country. But no one in the government would listen, most notably Overseas Minister Pierre Billotte. The May student and worker uprising was disrupting the capital. One evening on Rue Gay-Lussac, young protesters asked Gaby Paita of the UC to help them put up a barricade. He did so, even prying up pavement stones for throwing at the police. Before long Paita, who was almost forty years old, found himself running at full speed away from the feared Republican Security Companies, or CRS (riot police), who clubbed him before he escaped (Paita 1999, 93–95). Jean-Paul Caillard, a Caledonian medical student who had planned a social outing, was clubbed on the head by the CRS. A photo of him bleeding all over his suit appeared in L’Express (figure 2.1). The experience radicalized him, so he helped to organize a New Caledonian action committee at the Sorbonne. He has kept a Paris paving stone as a souvenir of that youthful baptism (Caillard 2001). Nidoish Naisseline, son of a Gaullist high chief on Maré in the Loyalty Islands, was a student of sociology at the Sorbonne. He had read the works of anticolonial rebels from Amilcar Cabral to Che Guevara. Impressed that men of color had influenced French radical thinking, he protested alongside leftists. In May 1968 he crossed paths with “Danny the Red,” a leader of students who occupied the Sorbonne (Naisseline 2001). The revolt kept Max Chivot, a married Caledonian economics student, from joining up with Algerian pieds noirs because he found liberation discourse more appealing (Chivot 2001). New Caledonian students and legislators were seeing the “mother country ” firsthand, and it was in dramatic turmoil. Caledonians of European Building Castles in China 57 descent were visiting the fabled homeland of which their elders had spoken . But it was a more complex version of France than their small colonial settlement in the south Pacific. The métropole contained a motley congeries of symbols and narratives, including a lively tradition of Bohemian dissent and political upheaval. Since the 1789 revolution that gave France its national holiday, the country had experienced a dozen constitutions, industrialization, impressionism, surrealism, existentialism, and new wave cinema and novels. For Kanak, it was another kind of pilgrimage—a role reversal from being indigenous to joining an immigrant community of Africans and other Third World voyagers in the troubled heart of the power system that ruled their homelands. The timing of the students’ arrival in the 1960s was momentous because the Algerian liberation struggle had stimulated new debates over decolonization. In addition, an international youth movement contested militarism, racism, and imperialism, among other oppressions. Just when New Caledonia was being dragged backward FIGURE 2.1. Jean-Paul Caillard in 2001 and in May 1968 (inset). Photo by author and inset from Jean-Paul Caillard Private Archive. 58 Chapter 2 politically, the students encountered new critical perspectives and protest tactics, some of which they would apply back home. An old French expression jested that a daydreamer was someone who was “building castles in Spain,” but some young New Caledonians in France would actively imagine revolutionary utopias in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, and perhaps even the Caillou, or rock, as many residents called Grande Terre. A “Caillou” in de Gaulle’s Boot? Formal education in New Caledonia, once left primarily to missionaries, was the privilege of a small minority until after World War II, when more state funding gradually became available. In the early 1950s, even among the local European population, only 7 percent of men and 5 percent of women had a secondary school diploma, and Melanesian education levels were even lower (Thompson and Adloff 1971, 507). Most Melanesians attended Catholic or Protestant mission schools rather than the state secondary schools, while the reverse was true for white Caledonians, who tended to go into the civil service unless they had sufficient...