6 - Enemy Friends and the Nation

Summary

Before I arrived in Solomon Islands in 2015 the national government, through its Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development (MEHRD) and Ministry of National Unity, Reconciliation and Peace (MNURP), had directed schools in Honiara to implement flag raising and lowering ceremonies each morning and afternoon (SIBC, 2014; 2015; Alu, 2015). In doing so MNURP was implementing (with help from the Solomon Islands Scouts Association and United Nations Development Programme) part of the first objective of its peace building policy: to ‘improve conflict prevention and management capacities’ (MNURP, nd, p 22). Raising the national flag and singing the anthem was one of the indicators of national pride and citizenship, the policy said. Over the course of second semester that year, MNURP conducted training sessions in the technique of flag raising and distributed 100 flags to schools in Honiara, Guadalcanal and Malaita. The national narrative that the state wanted young people to adopt was one of ‘unity in diversity’ (Hicks, 2022, p 122). That narrative also had a home in official state policy, specifically in the first learning outcome (culture promotion) of the Solomon Islands National Curriculum Statement for the entire school curriculum (MEHRD, 2012, p 23). Unity in diversity had even made it into the Grade 7 social studies textbook, which spelled out the characteristics that Solomon Islanders shared and walked students through activities intended to contrast those ways of life to those of Europeans (SICDD, 2012, p 40).

There is no real surprise to the state's effort to instil national pride around a unifying national narrative. These narratives are how states try to transmit values and ideas that bind people together, sometimes to the exclusion of others within the territory, but always in a way that legitimises the existence of the state (S. Foster and Crawford, 2006, pp 5–7). Indeed schooling might be the only time some citizens ever read a book about society and politics (their textbooks), which, moreover, students typically read as authoritative and factual accounts (Ide, Kirchheimer and Bentrovato, 2018, p 288). For a post-conflict state committed to peace, an inclusive national narrative that brought formerly warring sides together would be a chance for it to demonstrate that it had expunged the biases it might once have held.