Plantation labourers: Our forgotten heroes

By KEVIN PAMBA

THE aging coconut trees around Rapopo Plantation Resort near Kokopo, East New Britain, and the word “plantation” in the name of this property reminded me of a bygone era.
It was the same as I travelled between Kokopo, Vunapope, Kabaleo and Rabaul, and saw the old coconut plantations last November.
The era in question was a period when the young agriculture-based economy of pre-independence and immediate post-independence Papua New Guinea relied on the plantations mostly owned by foreign businesses.
Being labour-intensive, the copra plantations needed manpower. So the plantation owners looked to the mainland. They started with “bonded labour” from the Sepik area in the early years (besides a break during WWII) who served the plantations in the New Guinea region. Focus then shifted to the Highlands region for unskilled labour in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the Highlands labourers went to work in the rubber plantations in the Papua side, in what is now Central, and others made it to the New Guinea Islands, principally East New Britain.
Former University of PNG academics Azeem Amarshi, Kenneth Good and Rex Mortimer, in their 1978 book titled Development and Dependency: The Political Economy of Papua New Guinea, made the following observations about the indentured labour movement out of the Highlands:
• The (colonial) government instituted the Special Highlands Labour Scheme in 1950, through which numbers of indentures increased dramatically from 2100 in 1953 to 15,400 in 1968; and,
• Highlanders made up 62 per cent of the total agreement labour employed in the primary sector during the latter year (1969), making a very substantial contribution to coastal plantations.
The academics went on to point out the two colonial territories of Papua and New Guinea’s place in world history in terms of bonded labour.
“Papua and New Guinea have been among the last frontiers of bonded labour within international capitalism,” the book said.
“The indentured workers in the two colonies were particularly exploited, since the small-scale and scattered nature of copra plantations had the effect of pushing up costs and transportation costs and depressing wage levels to the absolute minimum.
“The planters could continue to maintain very low wages for very long periods because the labour frontier could be pushed further and further inwards and outwards from the coastal plantation centres, labour itself was bonded, and there was no competition for labour supplies.”
John A Ballard, in his chapter in the 1983 book titled Electoral Politics in Papua New Guinea: Studies on the 1977 National Elections, offered the following reason why Southern Highlands men became targets for plantation labour work: “The Southern Highlands, with no export crop, served as a reservoir of unskilled labour and received only limited services. The province today is heir to this colonial policy, ranking last or nearly last among provinces in most indices of social and economic development.”
Able-bodied young men from the different villages and hamlets of my paternal tribe joined the army of Southern Highlanders headed for the plantations in ENB. For these uneducated men, barely exposed to modernisation, it was the best thing to do to “earn” an income.
Growing up, I heard folks in the villages talk about our men, which I never saw or barely knew, as being away in the plantations in ENB.
Longing for the return of their loved ones from the plantations, local youths composed a song that made the inter-village six-to-six string band circuit in the early 1980s. Sung in the Kewa language of eastern Southern Highlands, the song went something like “Nambis-su pasa naki ambi na epea, Nambis-su yago me lisa pale ya” (A boy who went to the coast has not returned yet, maybe he was killed by his coastal peer).
When some of the men returned from the plantations in the early 1980s, their arrival created such a scene as mothers and other relatives wept and expressed their joy of seeing their sons return. It was like men returning from the dead.
Few others never returned, opting to remain with their host communities.
In the latter years, former Southern Highlands governor, the late Anderson Agiru, used to recollect the “plantation labourer” story to encourage his people to use the same energies as their forefathers who worked the plantations to work on their land to build the province.
As Hela governor, Agiru also spoke passionately about an agriculture-based economy through building the agriculture growth centres in Koroba and other place in Hela and Southern Highlands.
He spoke of the centres as a catalyst to bring people back to the land instead of having nirvana-like wishes for gains from the enclave petroleum extraction business in their province.
By and large, the concept of “bonded” or “indentured” labour is a largely forgotten part of our history. The plantation labourers may never be accorded hero status nor will they be bestowed any honour.
Yet, these labourers made significant sacrifices to leave their homes to go away to places where their ancestors never set foot to till the soil. They literally put their bodies on the line in the searing heat of the tropics to build the young economy from their sweat, tears and blood.
The plantation labourers of the colonial era from the vast expanse of the Sepik to the Highlands are our national heroes we have forgotten to acknowledge.