by Philip Dwyer
New Caledonia’s place at the geographical and historiographical intersection of the French Empire and the Australian colonial frontier is also worth noting by way of introduction. Some of the tools of colonial rule and violence used in New Caledonia had their origins in Algeria ( l’indigénat ) or had been tried in French Guiana and Australia (penal colonisation), while its cattle stations and plantations were an extension of the Australian pastoral frontier. In relation to the latter frontier this discussion of violence’s contested legitimacy presents part of the wider ‘colonial dialogue’ that Banivanua Mar has examined in Queensland where voices of colonial dissent were a permanent feature that indicate ‘the very reasoned and conscious foundations of colonialism’s violence’. 4 It also intersects with histories of France’s colonial empire where renewed attention to the workings of l’indigénat has allowed ‘a reassessment of the role of violence in the practice of colonial authority’. Here too an important point is that contestation and reform were a fundamental part of its logic as well as providing ‘alibi’ and ‘rhetorical cover’ for arbitrary violence and practices. 5
The Events: The Arrest of Céu, the Grassin ‘Affaire’ and the Death of Baougane
The first of the three connected instances of violence examined here was the arrest on 9 February 1917, in the north-east coast settlement of Oué Hava, of a Kanak petit chef named Céu. 6 Ordered by gendarme Saint-Martin in his capacity as syndic (agent) for the Service of Native Affairs, the arrest followed Céu’s refusal to serve a 15-day prison sentence and pay a 100 franc fine—the maximum sentences that could be imposed under the indigénat for refusing to obey a labour requisition. Céu also had failed to pay a still earlier fine of 50 francs and had forbidden five men from his tribu from serving an eight-day prison sentence. In order to end ‘this permanent rebellion’ and ‘activities likely to have a deplorable influence among the natives of the region’, Saint-Martin had ‘resolved to arrest him to force him to submit to the punishment that he had refused to submit to voluntarily’. 7
As described in the report that Saint Martin wrote three days afterwards, the arrest was carried out by his subordinate, gendarme Traynard. Not daring to enter Céu’s tribu for fear of ‘serious incidents’, Traynard had summoned him to the nearby home and trading store of a local settler, Henri Grassin, and seized him as he set down his machete to accept a drink. In the struggle that ensued Traynard had fired his revolver over the heads of three of Céu’s retainers to prevent them from intervening. Handcuffed and with a rope tied around his neck Céu had been led away by Traynard with the help of Grassin’s adult son, Roger, a recently mobilised soldier on home leave. Saint-Martin reported that ‘It was with a real sense of relief that settlers in the centre of Tipindjé learnt of the arrest of petit chef Thiéou who was feared for his deceit and spitefulness. He is impervious to any civilisation, vindictive and aggressive, and in a word possesses all the qualities of a perfect savage. He is also fiercely opposed to the enlistment of native volunteers.’ 8
In a further report written a month later Saint-Martin justified his decision as a pre-emptive measure taken in an atmosphere of insecurity created by the compulsory mobilisation for the Great War of many of the colony’s male French citizens and the recruitment of Kanak as volunteers: he had feared that Céu might ‘give himself up to violence over the said population or that he might so incite his subjects at a time when the region’s mobilised men have rejoined their units. I hope that such an eventuality will not occur, but in the presence of a native chief with such a mentality, who considers whites to be intruders and who is imbued with the canaque nationalist principle it would be prudent to anticipate everything.’ 9
Public thanks for Céu’s arrest quickly followed. In March Henri and Roger Grassin both received ‘official recognition’ for ‘the courage and devotion which they demonstrated[…]by spontaneously coming to the assistance of the Gendarmerie during a particularly difficult and perilous arrest’. Traynard, too, received an official testimonial for his role in the arrest during which Céu had ‘put up a furious resistance’. 10 Characterised variously as a ‘savage’, a ‘war chief’ and a ‘canaque nationalist’ opposed to military recruitment, Céu was given a three-year internment sentence under l’indigénat for his ‘open rebellion against French authority’. 11
At the end of April 1917, a little more than two months after Céu’s arrest, war broke out in New Caledonia’s north following a more elaborate but much less successful attempt by the head of the Service of Native Affairs to arrest another Kanak petit chef deemed, like Céu, to be a troublemaker and obstacle to military recruiting. 12 Lasting nearly a year, the war involved on the one hand Kanak raids on isolated settlements and stations culminating in several attacks on military posts (causing fewer than 20 deaths) and in reply a series of punitive expeditions involving the practices of scorched earth conducted by French and Tahitian troops, Kanak auxiliaries and settler volunteers (resulting in at least 200 deaths).
It was seven weeks into this conflict, on 16 June, that authorities recovered the mutilated and decapitated body of Henri Grassin from nearby his ransacked and partially burnt home. Along with one of his Javanese employees, Santaviredjo, and his neighbour, Ludovic Papin, he had been killed the same day in a raid by a Kanak war party. The remains of his wife, Clémence, would be recovered nearby several weeks later. They were not the first settlers to be killed in the conflict, but their deaths, as described in Governor Repiquet’s report for June, had ‘alarmed, even terrorised the very impressionable population of the region. Living under the empire of fear, the inhabitants of the interior see rebels everywhere.’ 13 In the following weeks and months authorities stepped up the repression.
The third act of violence considered here is an obscure one that almost passed unremarked in between the various punitive expeditions sent against the ‘rebels’ in the months following the Oué-Hava attack. Writing to his spiritual superior Bishop Claude Chanrion on 28 July, Catholic priest Alphonse Rouel, a corporal serving in one of the military detachments sent in pursuit of the ‘rebels’, reported that a prisoner at the Tipindjé post near Oué Hava had been killed by soldiers, one of whom was Roger Grassin:On…July 14 the marines pushed into the river, killed with rifle shots and then hacked to pieces with axes an unfortunate canaque prisoner who was being taken to empty his slop bucket in the water under the eyes of Captain Sicard and lieutenant Carrique. Grassin’s son was one of the butchers. The only excuse for the murder is that its authors were drunk. The official version will be that the poor man was trying to escape. That’s absolutely false: I have it from eyewitnesses. 14
Another reference to this killing casts doubt on the precise date, but confirms that a man was killed while escaping. On 26 July Protestant teacher Jemès Eleicha wrote to missionary Maurice Leenhardt from Tipindjé reporting that: ‘There is a man who was in prison when we arrived here and who died today. He was killed by rifle fire near the water. He was escaping. His name is Baougane.’ 15 A subsequent letter from Rouel to Chanrion makes it clear that the incident somehow had been brought to the attention of authorities (perhaps through Chanrion). Rouel noted that counter-accusations blaming the killing on settler ‘volunteers’ rather than soldiers were unsurprising, but untrue: ‘they’re trying to cover themselves; fortunately the facts are clear as are the eyewitnesses’. The latter included ‘a young corporal named Pern’, an unnamed employee of the Ballande trading company and several others not known to Rouel. 16 About this event little more of any substance is known though as shall be seen it has not been altogether forgotten.
The interconnected acts of violence involving the arrest of Céu, the killing of the Grassins and their neighbour and finally the killing of a Kanak prisoner did not occur in isolation. They occurred in the context of heightened emotion and insecurity created by the Great War—including the mobilisation of French citizens and recruitment of Kanak for the war in Europe—and in a settler colony in which neither European nor Kanak was a stran
ger to the other’s capacity for violence. Examination of the ways in which each act was (or was not) contested shows that each can be located within a longer history and the structures of violence associated with colonial settlement.
The Arrest of Céu: Administrative Violence in Question
It cannot be said that the violence involved in Céu’s arrest was openly contested by the Kanak; colonial hegemony was such that Kanak voices of protest were seldom if ever heard unmediated. Céu though had resisted physically and Saint-Martin reported Céu’s subsequent statement explaining his fear of prison and challenging the administration’s justification for his arrest (he had refused to carry out a requisition for more labourers until those previously requisitioned had returned to their tribu). 17 While we must imagine the degrees of physical and symbolic violence experienced and perceived by the men who were held back at gunpoint and who watched their chief being led away in chains, there is no question that the circumstances of the arrest were denounced within wider Kanak circles where they created considerable apprehension. Pwädé Apégu (Poindet Apengou), another petit chef imprisoned during the wider conflict, later related the impact that the arrest had on his own elders and his relations with the gendarme in his own district. In March 1917, his elders had berated him in the following terms for his willingness to carry out the administration’s work and his misplaced confidence in French authorities:You’re not seeing things straight. You trust the whites, but you must remember what they did to Amane of Poyes [in 1908], to Moimba at Poya [in 1915] and to Thieou at Oué Hava [in 1917]. Even longer ago when the natives burnt a church near Wagap [in the 1860s] the soldiers intervened, shot some of our people and the rest disappeared. Perhaps you think that your medals will save you? You’re mistaken. The government will do with you as it did with the others. 18
Here Céu’s arrest was only the latest incident in a longer history of violence reaching back to the 1860s. That at least two of these events (the arrests of Amane and Céu) had involved deception is also salient. In March 1917, the ‘intense fear’ created by such warnings, admonitions and precedents (which may be characterised as a form of psychological violence) had been all too evident to gendarme Faure who saw it in on Pwädé’s very ‘physiognomy’ when he responded to a summons from Faure saying: ‘Tell me now if something bad is going to happen to us. If you have to arrest me then say it; not knowing what’s going to happen is making me sick.’ 19
That it was the violence of the administration and its symbolic dimensions, as much if not more than its physical dimensions, that was in question also can be seen in what Pwädé and his elders did not say: which was that his own father—a man named Céu Uniin (Thiéou Ounine)—had been the victim of a brutal assault by a settler with a notorious reputation for violence against the Kanak. The 1909 assault that left Uniin partially blinded and with the nickname ‘one-eye’ had highlighted the propensity of settlers to turn their own ‘blind eye’ to the violence perpetrated against the Kanak. A settler jury had acquitted the assailant, settler Léon Leconte, of any criminal charge. The case had been contested by the administration which made a successful civil case for damages on Uniin’s behalf and referred the outcome to the Ministry of Colonies in Paris where the Director of Political and Administrative Affairs summed up the main lesson to be drawn: ‘In my opinion this affair seems to show that acts of violence committed on natives are not considered by the jury with all the impartiality desirable.’ 20
Criticism of Céu’s arrest from within European circles—including the Protestant and Catholic missions —was even less evident. That there was no public denunciation was even more understandable given the wartime context. The strongest comment was one made by the Protestant missionary Leenhardt who, after meeting Traynard and hearing his dramatic description of the arrest, wrote to his wife that ‘The gendarme saw despair and acted as if for a maniac. It shows a gendarme’s psychology, but also a gendarme’s imagination; a professional imaginative deformation. How dangerous it is for a simple ordinary man.’ 21 As he went on to explain in the same letter, Leenhardt’s encounter with Traynard occurred shortly after he was informed by the head of the Service of Native Affairs, Alfred Fourcade, of the similar subterfuge being prepared for the arrest of another presumed troublemaker. Leenhardt had advised against the plan and had urged a more forthright approach, he wrote, but had not criticised Fourcade directly or openly because he was ‘working in the unknown’. 22 This concession is telling; in the absence of adequate knowledge about the sources of unrest amongst Kanak violence was deemed more acceptable. It was not until the 1919 trial of the ‘rebels’ arrested during the war that broke out following the failure of Fourcade’s subterfuge that his actions publicly were called into question. Nearly every European witness with an opinion on the matter (including Leenhardt) would argue that more open and direct force had been required earlier. 23
While Traynard’s arrest of Céu gave rise to no formal protest in 1917, similar actions had been much criticised over the preceding two decades. The arrest forms part of a history of administrative violence centred on the indigénat and in turn on the relationship between the administrators and gendarmes who were the agents of the Service of Native Affairs in the interior and their principal counterparts, the Kanak men designated as administrative petits chefs or grands chefs. In the late 1890s and early 1900s these relations gave rise to sharp public criticisms of administrative violence on the grounds of its arbitrary dimensions and excesses. The Catholic and Protestant missions called out the violent words and practices of individual administrators and gendarmes on a number of occasions and made use of their wider networks to bring criticism to bear on the administration. 24 Still more critical was the colonial inspectorate, which denounced the system that underpinned particular instances of violence—the indigénat. In 1902, it castigated the administration for failing to provide the Kanak with any guarantee for their property or freedom while subjecting them to an unfair tax regime and allowing them to suffer ‘a regime of imprisonment and excessive fines’ and instances of ‘serious cruelty’. 25 It singled out one administrator whose role ‘consists only of dispensing ill treatment’, and who had ‘committed veritable excesses in exercising the powers conferred on him’. In a three-month period, he had passed sentences amounting to 125 days in prison and 560 francs in fines for a population of no more than 350 adults, and in a fit of rage beat one man so badly that he was no longer able to work. 26 Similar concerns again were raised in 1907 when the inspectorate detailed widespread abuses of power and procedure in the use of the indigénat’s special infractions by which syndics were deemed to have ‘arbitrarily extended’ their power. 27 Five years later, in 1912, an inspector observed that the Head of the Service ‘is known only by the punishments that he issues’. 28
In response to such criticism the administration addressed only the ‘excesses’, denying or contesting the level of violence involved while entrenching the system. Thus a commission set up in 1899 to investigate ‘the arbitrary actions, violence and brutal language’ of an administrator and the violent threats used by two gendarmes—as denounced by the Catholic mission—conceded that an administrator indeed had kicked a chief with his foot, but argued that he had not done so in the course of his official duties and that it could not have damaged the chief’s ‘prestige’ as the chief in question had none. Two gendarmes denounced for threatening Kanak with a punitive expedition were found to have been deliberately misrepresented by their interpreters. 29 In a similar fashion an investigation into the administrator denounced by the inspectorate in 1902 accepted the administrator’s explanation that he had succumbed to ‘‘fits of impatience’’ but noted that this was ‘especially regrettable…because he was an administrator and could in this capacity ‘correct’ or punish in a legal manner any natives that he had complaints about.’ 30 Typically such individuals were removed and posted elsewhere while, as suggested in the 1902 example, the system itself was upheld.
In the case of C�
�u the nearest thing to public questioning of his arrest was a brief exchange at the 1919 trial when Saint-Martin was asked by the judge why Céu had not been referred to the judicial service for prosecution and trial following his attempt to resist arrest. This question was a challenge to legitimacy of the indigénat under which Céu instead had been punished administratively. The question prompted a lawyer for the prosecution to protest ‘against the tendency to cast all the responsibility for the revolt onto a civil servant’. The proceedings then moved on with Saint Martin offering his own view that the revolt was due to the damage caused by settler cattle rather than the actions taken by gendarmes such as himself. 31