“Africanization” in the Pacific: Blaming Others for Disorder in the Periphery?

Abstract

-Kwame Nkrumah, First President of Ghana2 Recent crises in Oceania, especially the military coups, civil wars, and armed secession movements in ethnically-diverse Melanesia in the southwest Pacific, have inspired a new wave of criticisms of indigenous regimes and cultures by metropolitan aid donors and security experts. As outside peacekeepers withdrew from Bougainville in 2003, ending its fifteen-year secession dispute with Papua New Guinea (PNG),3 other foreign military and police forces arrived in the war-torn Solomon Islands and publicly displayed their modern weaponry.4 Australian Prime Minister John Howard, with support from New Zealand, the United Nations and the Pacific Forum, has vowed not to fail his Pacific neighbors, where he says economic collapse, government corruption, and lawlessness require remedial action.5 Ben Reilly, of the National Centre for Development Studies (NCDS) in Canberra, has said, we are today witnessing the progressive 'Africanisation' of the South Pacific region.6 French geographer Franqois Doumenge has applied that same racial label to Melanesia, which he