Bridging Mental Boundaries in a Postcolonial Microcosm: Identity and Development in Vanuatu

1. Mental Rivalries and Condocolonialism

chapter 1 Mental Rivalries and Condocolonialism Between peoples with temperaments as dissimilar as the French and the English [the Condominium] was doomed to disaster from the beginning. There is a complete lack of that sympathetic co-operation so essential in such an obviously exacting enterprise; neither trusts the other for a minute. —A. J. Marshall, The Black Musketeers The experiment has always been and will always be a failure, until such time as Frenchmen are no longer French and Britishers no longer English. —Tom Harrisson, Savage Civilisation The British and French were like two wild dogs, ¤ghting for a bone between them—and we were the bone. . . . Each pulled the other in a different direction. They didn’t work together. I tried to straighten them out. . . . There are Black Frenchmen, there are Black Englishmen, but there aren’t Black kastom men. —Jimmy Stephens, interview, August 1991 The Condominium which governed—or neglected—the New Hebrides for so long, and whose stamp is still very much felt in contemporary Vanuatu, has had no dearth of detractors. It has been the butt of some very acerbic, but also literary, thrusts. Edward Jacomb invoked Cato and Carthage in 1914 (“Delendum est Condominium” [It must be destroyed ]), excoriating the Condominium as an “experiment . . . based on a negation of all previous political experience.”1 Mocking the tricephalous (British, French, and Spanish), character of the Condominium ’s highest judicial tribunal, the Joint Court, Jacomb later wrote a play entitled the Joy Court (1929). Writing under the pen name Asterisk, Robert Fletcher parodied the archipelago as Isles of Illusion (1923). Native organization compares favorably with colonial administration in Savage Civilisation (1937), in which Harrisson characterizes the Condominium as a “bastard” and the Joint Court as “pure musical comedy.”2 Marshall (1937) castigated the Condominium as “a tragic compromise 29 . . . the most insane and disastrous experiment in the history of modern colonial enterprise . . . a completely asinine arrangement.”3 Administrators privately joked that the Condominium institutionalized a mésentente cordiale.4 Contemporary commentators have been no more charitable. In the title of his independence-issue book, Vanuatu’s ¤rst prime minister, Father Walter Lini (1980), invokes the old farago of Condominium as “Pandemonium.” Jeremy MacClancy, playing on the of¤cial designation “sphere of joint in¶uence,” recasts this unique colonial arrangement as “a system of joint neglect”;5 his concise history is aptly entitled To Kill a Bird with Two Stones. Critically engaged writers, such as Grace Molisa, Nikenike Vurobaravu, and Howard Van Trease, have been more disparaging minus the humorous quips: “the Anglo-French Condominium . . . was so inef¤cient and cumbersome. . . . The Vanuatu people were neither consulted in its establishment nor involved in its operation .”6 Even the most objective of analyses admits that the Condominium “assumed its form by a series of accidents and through patching together a variety of institutions separately created and never intended to work with each other. . . . The [b]asic constitution of the Condominium . . . was a patchwork of ambiguous compromises formulated by amateurs.”7 To appreciate fully the mental boundaries bequeathed to ni-Vanuatu, we need to assess the historical, cultural, and institutional peculiarities of this one condominium. condominia of note and a west african counterpart Arguably the longest-lasting condominium in recorded history is that of Andorra, wedged in the eastern Pyrenees between France and Spain. In 1278 Andorra was placed under the joint suzerainty of a Spanish bishop and a French nobleman. With the suppression of the monarchy, the head of state has come to assume French responsibility for Andorra. Communications and educational services are provided by both Spanish and French governments. Faisans Island in the Bidassoa River is also, as it has been since 1856, a French-Spanish condominium. From 1816 until 1919 a Prussian-Belgian condominium prevailed over Moresnet, until it was annexed to Belgium. Sakhalin Island, jointly administered by Japan and Russia, functioned as a condominium for two decades beginning in 1855. Two of the (uninhabited) Phoenix Islands of the former Gilbert and Ellice Paci¤c islands group, Kanton and 30 chapter 1 Enderbury, were under joint British and U.S. administration from 1939 until 1979, when they were joined to the new nation of Kiribati. Several maritime areas have been declared to be de jure condominia, including the Bay of Fonseca, which abuts Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. As a colonial construction, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium over the Sudan rivals that of the New Hebrides...