If New Caledonia is where it is, it is neither the fault of Rousseau and Voltaire, but of Napoleon III, who, in 1863, wanted to establish a new penal colony there, soon called “La Nouvelle” to distinguish it from the Guyanese one, where mortality is too high. In the process, the emperor decided to make this territory in the middle of an area under British domination, a settlement colony, the only one with Algeria. The same year, the Saint-Etienne engineer Jules Garnier located immense resources of a new nickel ore, which would bear his name: garnierite. In 1864, the first convoy of 250 convicts aboard the frigate Iphigenia docks at Port-de-France, which will become Nouméa, after four months of crossing.
This territory (24,000 square kilometers) made up of a main island 400 kilometers long, Grande Terre, and the Loyalty Islands to the east, discovered in 1774 by the English navigator James Cook, was invested in 1853 by Rear Admiral Auguste Febvrier-Despointes, at the request of missionaries worried about the proselytizing of evangelical missions among the “natives”. The latter, the Kanaks (“human beings” in Polynesian), number 50,000. Coming from the islands of New Guinea three thousand years earlier, they are organized into “chiefdoms”. They developed sophisticated agricultural practices, based on “tarodières” (fields of taro, a food tuber) irrigated on terraces, and “billons”, mounds used to limit the effects of humidity in the cultivation of yams. . Experienced potters and sculptors, they trade with the neighboring archipelagos, Samoa, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna.
“Transported”, “relegated” and “deported”
The Prison Administration (PA) quickly became the main landowner on the island. On the 110,000 hectares that it occupies, it is building a real estate portfolio of 170 buildings: in addition to the prisons themselves, a hospital, a farm, barracks, workshops, a brickworks… The AP accommodates the prison population, distributed between “transported” (sentenced to heavy sentences of forced labor), “relegated” (vagrants, sentenced to light sentences, without forced labor, but prohibited from returning to mainland France), and finally, the “deportees”, political convicts to exile. The most famous are the 4,000 Communards, including Louise Michel and Henri Rochefort, but also the leaders of the Kabyle insurrection of Mohamed el Mokrani, in 1872. The first, amnestied in 1879 and 1880, almost all returned to the metropolis. The latter have roots and their descendants are called “Arabs”, even if they are integrated into the category of “Europeans”, who make up the population. of the island with the Kanaks and Melanesians. The “transported” who benefited from a reduced sentence for good behavior were assigned rural concessions. They will constitute the small Caledonian peasantry. At the head of approximately 5 hectares, they cultivate corn, tobacco, coffee and beans, and they own pigs and chickens, even a few cows and horses for the wealthier ones.
The influx of prisoners spread over around thirty years, between 1864 and 1897, the year the prison convoys stopped (the penal colony only ceased its activity in 1924), transporting nearly 30,000 individuals, with a majority of those sentenced to forced labor. To this prison population was added at the end of the century around 10,000 free settlers, civil servants and soldiers who remained there after their mission, but also traders and farmers, mainly from Reunion after the sugar crisis, who will retrain in the extensive cattle breeding. It is a question, explains Governor Feillet, of “closing the dirty water tap”, that of the convicts.
Land grabbing
The dispossession of Kanak lands followed the establishment of penal centers all along the west coast, from the south to the north: Nouméa and the Ducos peninsula, in the south; Foa, Bourail and Koné, in the center and north. At the turn of the 1900s, the Kanaks only occupied 7% of Grande Terre, to which must be added the Loyalty Islands, from which the settlers were excluded.
Despite their anger, the “natives” only rose up once, in June 1878, under the leadership of Chief Ataï. It is true that the repression is terrible: nearly 2,000 of them are killed, the others are moved to the east coast, poor in arable land, into reservations, similar to those of the Native Americans.
The land assigned to them becomes inalienable collective property, while the Kanaks experience private property. Their agricultural model, which is based on long fallow periods, sometimes lasting twenty years, and therefore requires vast areas, is destabilized.
Parked, constrained in their activity, they suffered, like all the “first peoples”, the ravages of diseases brought by the Europeans. Between 1850 and 1920, their population was reduced by half, to 27,000 individuals. Governor Fillet uses this demographic collapse as a pretext to once again displace populations, regroup villages and confiscate the best land. The Kanaks, who represented 96% of the total population in 1865, today constitute 41%. According to the 2019 census, New Caledonia, the only territory where ethnic statistics are authorized, Europeans are 24%, Asians and Oceanians 23%, “mixed race” 11%.
The long walk to citizenship
In 1942, upon the arrival of American soldiers in New Caledonia, a rear base in the Pacific War, the Kanaks discovered that black-skinned men could be non-commissioned officers, and more rarely officers. This gives some people ideas. In 1953, two associations of “native Caledonians” gave birth to the first Kanak political party, with an autonomist sensibility: the Caledonian Union. On this date, the former colony had become an overseas territory for seven years. The discriminations of the native code (restrictions on movement, ban on carrying weapons, payment of a poll tax, forced labor for around two weeks on behalf of the settlers or the administration, etc.) have been abolished. . But until 1957, Kanaks did not have the right to vote, reserved for a college of notables.
Universal suffrage does not exempt them from being largely excluded from the education system. The first baccalaureate dates from 1962 and schooling, primarily in technical education, was only systematized in the 1970s as part of the “Melanesian promotion” policy. This period also corresponds to a recovery in control of Paris, dictated by nuclear activities in the South Pacific and control of mines on Grande Terre. The nickel boom, one of the world’s largest reserves, further reduced the weight of the Kanak population due to the call for workers from Wallis and Futuna, Polynesia, Reunion and even Japan, but also to French people, in particular returnees from Algeria.
The rare Caledonian students present in mainland France in May 68 returned with revolutionary ideas. The Kanak Liberation Party, the first independence party, created in 1975, demands the restitution of plundered lands. In mainland France, little attention was paid to these demands until April 22, 1988. That day, between the two rounds of the presidential election, the murder of two gendarmes and the taking hostage of 27 people, then the assault on the Ouvéa cave by the gendarmerie (result: 2 soldiers and 19 independence fighters killed) means that the “Caillou” is fondly remembered by the French.
Largely independent, the Kanaks are not the majority in the population, even if they constitute the largest community. Two logics will now clash: that of a “first people” demanding their right to self-determination, and that of “Europeans”, demanding respect for majority rule.
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