Deep Field

by Tom Bamforth

  This ethical revolution caused the ire of Karl Marx, who was the first to see the interconnection between a newly moralising culture and massive economic change. In the context of rapid industrialisation in the nineteenth century, Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that such charitable organisations served only to oil the wheels of capitalist excess—the humanitarian impulse was more about the increasingly urgent need to maintain social stability and the economic order than it was about philanthropy. These individuals and institutions were ‘economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind’.

  In a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates (whose foundation, courtesy of Microsoft millions and Warren Buffet’s fortune, is among the largest charitable institutions in the world) remarked that he left the ‘easy’ tasks to government but thought that private organisations such as his were best placed to address the really challenging issues of our day—education, health and family planning. The foundation is best known for its investment in research into and prevention of polio and malaria, as well as its attempts to tackle the global HIV epidemic. Gates pointed out the flexibility of the funding to pursue new and innovative solutions, and cited a competition to find out which sort of condom produced the most sexual pleasure. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the more stolid donor institutions relying on taxpayer funding to invest in condom research for fear, if nothing else, of conservative political backlash. Gates may be widely lauded but his view, in which the arms of government are privatised, is a troubling one (not to mention that he might make a more substantial contribution to health and education were Microsoft to pay appropriate tax within his own country).

  The problem is essentially twofold. At a mysterious meeting of major US philanthropists, The Giving Pledge, sixty-nine of these philanthropists committed to giving away 50 per cent of their fortunes: a total estimated amount of $125 billion, more than ten times the total United Nations operating budget. No matter how much ‘good’ such wealthy individuals have done, who are they to make decisions for and on behalf of millions of others, solely on the basis of their private wealth? Also problematic is the idea that these funds can be used more effectively to address complex problems, leaving the world’s ‘easy’ issues to governments and governmental institutions such as the UN. Regardless of the success of polio vaccination programs, for example, it is extraordinarily naive, even arrogant, to assume that fundamental issues of war and peace, governance in developing countries, complex responses to climate change, the development of stable democracies and so on are the ‘simple’ tasks. The invidious nature of what Gates is proposing is that technocratic solutions to technocratically solvable problems can address fundamental questions of social, economic and political justice, while at the same time withholding funds (through tax minimisation) from government institutions that have a democratic mandate and responsibility for such challenges. What is important, if humanitarian issues are to be effectively managed in the future, is that this management occurs through democratically mandated and accountable governments whose influence and power goes well beyond the mere disbursement of cash. And this process, in our neo-conservative age, begins with education about the ideals and achievements of the United Nations and social democracies.

  In one stark example, noted by Amartya Sen, the complex problem of famine in India—which caused more than 1.5 million deaths in 1943—has not recurred in the post-independence period precisely because of the existence of a social democracy that is responsive to the needs, vulnerabilities and concerns of voters. Despite earning significantly less income per capita than their counterparts in the US, the citizens of the south Indian state of Kerala actually live longer precisely because of the maximisation, if not of wealth, then at least of opportunity as a result of successive government policies in response to the exigencies of electoral politics. It is this reform that is needed to address development and humanitarian challenges rather than the privatisation of compassion.

  AT 06:48 ON 1 OCTOBER 2009 an underwater earthquake off the coast of Samoa caused a massive and fast-moving displacement of water that, fifteen minutes later, slammed into the palm-fronded coastal villages of Southern Upolu—the tourist heart of Samoa’s main island. One hundred and forty-nine people were crushed or drowned and more the 5000 people were affected by waves that, owing to the towering cliffs overlooking the village of Lalomanu, reached up to 15 metres high.

  Footage emerged of the vast tsunami waves sweeping across the beach fronts from Western and American Samoa, smashing houses and lifting cars like children’s toys in a bathtub. The image of one of the happy isles of Oceania pounded by what was presented as a random act of unstoppable natural brutality resonated vividly with images of the 2001 Asian tsunami and hit a tourist nerve. The Samoa tsunami, as it became known, connected with a the global nexus of beach culture, cheap resorts, and holidays in the sun. In addition to loss of life and destruction of property, the tsunami was presented as a ‘coconut catastrophe’ that sent shock waves through tourist hubs from the Pacific to Thailand and the Costa del Sol.

  The island of Niuatoputapu, aka Tin Can Island, 300 kilometres from the earthquake’s epicentre and not part of Samoa but of the Kingdom of Tonga, did not belong to this nexus of almost fashionable beachside disaster locations.

  Surrounded by an almost impenetrable reef, Niuatoputapu was in the distant north of the Tongan archipelago—more than three hours’ flight away from the central island hub of Vava‘u in a specially chartered Chathams Pacific Islander. Before it sank in Tonga’s worst disaster, the ageing and unseaworthy Princess Ashika had taken over two weeks of chundrous chugging across open seas to get there. Unable to get near the island because of the reef, the Ashika had lowered passengers and supplies into smaller motorboats, which then made their way back to the island through an especially cut corridor in the reef. In this way, the island’s staples of huge vats of expired Salisbury corned beef, tuna, packet noodles, damp cardboard cylinders of stale Pringles, and assorted Arnott’s digestive and chocolate biscuits were imported.

  Despite this, the island managed to maintain a population of 800 people, clustered in small hamlets along the seafront—Hihifo, Vaipoa, Falehau and Tafahi. All were rubble by the time I arrived almost three weeks after the tsunami, sent to assess options for the ‘early recovery’ programs. The imprint of leftover normality lingered on in the abandoned furniture, the cleared paths and the rubble-strewn outline of where houses had been.

  I had arrived for the first time in Tonga almost a year before and had slowly travelled through the islands of Tongatapu, Vava‘u and Ha‘apai. The Kingdom was quite different from anywhere else I had been in the Pacific and this became immediately apparent when I landed at the airport unknowingly on the same flight as a member of the royal family. As we touched down, a military brass band dressed in red coats and brilliant white plumed pith helmets marched up and down the tarmac playing the national anthem before being left behind by the VIP’s jeep, bearing an enormous royal standard, which took off down Tongatapu’s one road surrounded by motorcycle outriders.

  It was a bizarre beginning. The local organisation I worked for, being in many senses a creature of the establishment, was linked intricately with the peculiarities of Tongan monarchic patronage. At the office, ancient staff members wandered in and out, their irrevocable positions owed to long-defunct royal command. A giant carved hat stand, which once held pride of place in the palace bedroom, stood in the central corridor of the organisation—a hindrance to all but an almost untouchable totem of regal favour.

  The obscurity and idiosyncrasy of the Tongan political system was a reflection of an extreme form of Polynesian hierarchy (also evident in chiefdom structures of Samoa and pre-colonial Hawai‘i) and the country’s unique position as th
e only Pacific nation—in a still deeply colonial region—to escape imperial subjugation. While it had been informally a British protectorate, the traditional independence of Tonga had nonetheless led to an absorption of the style and substance of British nineteenth-century politics. Tonga had the region’s first written constitution—that superimposed a Westminster system of government (along with prime minister, cabinet, legislature and judiciary) but which actually strengthened indigenous political structures by constitutionally enshrining the legal, property and political rights of the monarchy and the landed nobility. The lords of thirty politically significant families had the right to govern.

  In style, the Tongan political system also appeared odd with its insistence on traditional clothes, and elaborate nineteenth-century military uniforms netted in braid, coloured sashes and the pomp and circumstance of the British Raj, miniaturised and transported to the small Pacific island. But this too was a piece of political theatre designed to reinforce the concept of what anthropologists have called the ‘domesticated stranger king’.

  In Tonga there are no migration myths, unlike much of the rest of the region. Instead, the earliest foundation stories talk of the inhabitants of the main island, Tongatapu, as ‘small, black and descended from worms’. Other foundation stories suggested that early rulers had ‘descended from the skies’ following the union of a divine father with a Tongan mother. The fusion of these stories suggested at some stage an invading ruler had cleverly combined elements of both the myth of divine origins while also suggesting that the monarchy was an integral part of indigenous society—hence being descended from worms.

  Seen in this context, the apparent incongruity of the miniature Raj of the Pacific—of ermine-clad nobles and Sandhurst-educated, monocle-sporting kings, separated from each other and from the constitutionally enshrined ‘commoner’ class by wealth, power and even distinct dialects—began to appear marginally less unreal. These anomalous traditions had been coopted by an indigenous hierarchy seeking to retain power and influence. The Tongans had understood and adapted to the Pacific the lessons of Frederick the Great in Prussia: reform from above before you are reformed from below.

  On the final evening of my Tongan visit, I again saw the royal cavalcade—this time halted outside a small house whose entrance was guarded by brass canon. I stopped to watch and after a few minutes was rewarded as an enormous man wobbled along a red carpet at a stately pace from the house to the royal car as his guards stood to attention and saluted. He got in but the door remained open and the guards stood frozen at attention. Some minutes passed before a minute dog bounded out of the house and leapt into the car and in a second the door slammed, the outriders ripped their motorbike throttles and the cavalcade surged powerfully onto the road forcing the passing traffic onto an embankment, their majesties large and small progressing imperially home beneath the fluttering royal standard, leaving behind the roar, a tail of dust and the gentle lapping of the Pacific shore.

  My second visit to Tonga was altogether grimmer. While the world’s eyes had been fixed on Samoa, higher waves with greater force had flattened three of the four hamlets of Niuatoputapu. Many had been caught in waves up to 17 metres high and nine people had died—a catastrophic loss on an island of only 800 people. Unlike in Samoa, where some had received a tsunami warning—15 minutes till impact—there was no warning in Niua. People I spoke to said they had felt a light tremor, but that this was no different to previous tremors except that it had lasted almost ten minutes. Minutes after that the first of three increasingly large waves struck.

  I flew in an antique Douglas DC-3—described as a collection of parts flying in loose formation—to the Northern Island of Vava‘u and then transferred to a mosquito-like Islander for the three-hour journey to Niuatoputapu. On the tarmac, as we loaded up, there was a delay—to maintain balance, the eight passengers had to be reseated in order to make way for a colossal noble who by birthright and in order to distribute his weight had to be placed by himself on an even keel at the back of the plane. I was the loser in this readjustment and was crammed in at the front between the pilot and the Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet—a man named Busby—who during the flight and almost incomprehensibly above the roar of the propeller described the World Bank’s Niua reconstruction plan: 150 Californian bungalows to be constructed in neat rows at vast expense from imported brick and concrete on an inaccessible island without a port in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  The village of Hihifo was the worst hit and there was nothing left standing except the shell of someone’s lovingly constructed blue-tiled concrete bathroom—standing alone now, without a roof or attached house, overlooking the sea. The rest was rubble: bricks, concrete, and hideously twisted sheets of corrugated iron. The pulverised remains of a car sat on top of what was once a roof but had now been smashed out of recognition and lay on the ground. Through the rubble and debris a road and some paths had been cleared by a New Zealand navy unit sent up from Tongatapu. The ship was too big to land and the navy had to create a helicopter airbridge to the island in order to deliver supplies and help in the clean-up. Near the entrance to the village, a slightly battered community noticeboard still stood and, in a malapropism that had turned into an apocalyptic temptation of fate, the sign read (CLEAN):

  Community

  Leader

  Eradication

  Around

  Niuatoputapu

  Strangely, amid the wreckage of the tsunami, I suddenly felt almost at home. Far from being the shock they had once been, disasters had become an almost familiar scene—the constant accompaniment, however grim and destructive, of human settlement and construction. And in this place, so different from my own, this destruction, the entire reason for my visit, was also a point of connection. Fortunately, while the villages had been destroyed the agricultural land was at a higher altitude and remained untouched. Everyone had moved from the villages to their gardens and were living in shanties and tents. What had gone, however, were the food stocks, and the water wells near the coast had been contaminated with salt water. Beyond the digestive biscuits, stale chocolates and tinned beef at the one remaining general store, there was almost nothing to eat and very little to drink. We slept on the floor of the local school and ate one meal a day—boiled rice mixed with tinned beef and cooked over an open fire made of broken pieces of people’s former homes. In the dry heat of the day, as I walked between the villages comparing the elaborate reconstruction plans with the more practical concerns of recovery—shelter and water—a small party of children followed this strange, pale foreigner through the rubble. They clearly had taken pity on my wanderings and had each brought delicious, refreshing gifts. And so I found myself moments later standing in the sun, on my own, the proud possessor of half a dozen watermelons—extravagant gifts in a context of food and water shortage for a total stranger from a people whose island lives had been shattered only a few short weeks before.

  In the ruins of what had been the local bank branch, situated next to a twisted wreck of metal that was all that remained of the island’s satellite dish, I met the bank manager and we talked, sitting on a stray block of concrete. She had been at home but was alerted by shouts that ‘the sea is coming’ and went outside to the ground wet and pigs running around in mad confusion—clearly the result of a large wave. Getting in her van to drive down to the shore, she suddenly saw a second wave:

  surging up ashore behind the bank, and then an even larger wave beyond that a few hundred metres away. This wave was higher than the coconut trees and I felt a surge of panic and began reversing up the road. By this time, people had jumped into the back of my van, onto the roof too, and others were clinging to the sides, standing on the running board. I was keeping an eye on the larger wave all the time, which by now had lifted and was floating an entire house towards us.

  Another survivor described how he had left home early in the morning to go fishing and had felt the earthquake as he returned with his catch. Turning around,
he saw the sea surging over the reef where he had just been. He climbed a tree just in time because a second wave crashed through the village and watched helpless as bits of debris from his house floated past. Eventually the sea receded and he climbed down to find that there ‘was nothing left at all, and it was much the same for the village, nothing but wreckage, and fish flapping on the ground’.

  On the way back, we stopped at the island of Vava‘u awaiting a connecting flight back to Tongatapu. After Niuatoputapu’s dry heat, destruction, solemnity and the incredible generosity of its people, ‘normality’ in the tourist centre of Vava‘u was bizarre, and my Tongan colleague Iengi and I felt equally out of place. ‘These strange foreigners,’ Iengi muttered to me under his breath as we watch a group of international yachting families dressed up for Halloween—and it took me a second to remember that I was a foreigner too.