Lightning Meets the West Wind: The Malaita Massacre

by Roger M. Keesing, Peter Corris

Lightning Meets The West The Malaita Massacre

219 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1980

About the author

Professor Roger Martin Keesing was a linguist and anthropologist, noted for his fieldwork on the Kwaio people of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, and his writings on a wide range of topics including kinship, religion, politics, history, cognitive anthropology and language. Keesing was a major contributor to anthropology.

He was the son of Felix M. Keesing, another distinguished anthropologist with an interest in the South Pacific. Keesing studied at Stanford and Harvard and began work in 1965 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1974 he became a professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, heading the Department of Anthropology from 1976. In 1990 he moved to McGill University in Montreal.

In 1974 he wrote a famous article, one of around a hundred published over the course of his career, defining and specifying a view of culture inspired by linguistics and Marxian thinking. He also wrote several books, and is perhaps best known among students of anthropology as the author of Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective, regarded as one of the most authoritative general introductory works on the subject.[citation needed] This was based on a book originally authored by his father, and was extensively revised by Keesing over the course of many years, beginning with an updated edition of the original in 1971, and continuing with a full rewrite in 1976, revised further in 1981. Since Keesing's death this task was taken up by Dr Andrew Strathern, and the book remains popular.

In 1989, Keesing worked closely with the author to translate Jonathan Fifi'i's autobiography "From pig-theft to parliament : my life between two worlds" which chronicled his life from his poor Kwaio origins through to the Maasina Ruru movement and onto his career as a politician.

Keesing died suddenly of a heart attack at the Canadian Anthropology Society dance and reception in 1993, and his ashes were transferred to the Solomon Islands, where the families of his Kwaio associates accord him the status of an andalo or ancestral spirit.

Reviews

[Simon Mannie]

I am Malaitan and I am ashamed of my grandfather who was used by the British Colonial administrators to inflict so much pain and misery to our fellow Malaitan Kwaio men. At that time our people were used against each other by the white men as enforcers of their law. Today the so called whites with very small humane brain utilizes all known forms ranging from politics, economics, social classification and even to religion.
I do not even understand a people who looked so red call themselves white. They call me black when I am brown ....................

[Gideon Bouro]

It was exciting reading for me. I felt that there was no justice in imposing the head tax on a people that had no money to tax. It was not mentioned, but perhaps the tax was charged for the few shillings that the colonial masters paid the hard-working, over-taxed Malaitans who established the sugarcane and the various plantations in Australia, and on their return the colonial administrators exploited them further by charging the head tax. The Administration suffered ongoing revenue problems and the colonial masters hoped that taxation would infuse new energy into energy into Solomon islands and act incidentally as an incentive for recruiting more labourers.

When you look into the socio-economic structure into which where the money should come from, a flag should be raised on the spot and someone or somebody should say, "this is a wrong place to collect the money." It is comparable as light and darkness that the colonial had the money and the Malaitans have not, yet Mr. William Bell and Mr. Lillies insisted on collecting the money where their mouth should not belong. The most natural thing happened, it is just pure common sense that Mr. Bell and Mr. Lillies be killed for they put their hands in the cockatrice pit, and they got the shock of their lives.