Introduction

Summary

The southern, Weather Coast of Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, is a challenging place to run a school. The region's local name, Tasi Mauri, means ‘rough sea’, but staff and students deal with more than large ocean swells. Along most of the 145 km of coastline high rain-forested mountains rise steeply from a narrow strip of beach (Allen, 2013, pp 105–9). Rainfall can reach up to 8,000 mm a year, especially when the trade winds blow from the southeast between January and September, causing landslides and floods (Kastom Gaden Association, 2005, p 10). Cyclone season runs from January to April, and the area is prone to earthquakes. Food gardens are at risk of being washed away, and periodic food shortages leave people reliant on wild vegetables, sago palm and coconut. Transport to, from and around the Weather Coast is notoriously difficult because there are no safe places for large boats to harbour, and travel by small boats can be perilous. There were no functioning roads or airstrips when I visited in 2015. Mobile phone reception was negligible for the few individuals able to charge their phones with small solar panels.

Then there is the severity of the Weather Coast's experience of the civil conflict, which Solomon Islanders call ‘the Tension’ (1998–2003). People from the Weather Coast make up a sizeable chunk of Guadalcanal's rural Indigenous population were an a significant proportion of the Guadalcanal militancy that fought on the northern side of the island on the outskirts of the capital, Honiara. As the conflict wore on it devolved into increasingly localised conflict, on the Weather Coast and elsewhere, characterised by cycles of payback violence and revenge (Kabutaulaka, 2002b, p 28). In fact, people on the Weather Coast distinguish between the Tension itself and a Weather Coast Tension. The latter saw communities divided by fighting between factions of former militant leaders as villagers suffered cruelly in the crossfire (Allen, 2013, pp 51–3). When the fighting eventually ended and people had the chance to rebuild their lives, they found themselves in circumstances familiar to people in post-civil conflict contexts the world over: surrounded by ‘intimate enemies’ (Theidon, 2013).