Kiribati: History

Pre-20th-Century History

Spanish explorer de Quiros' hectic Pacific schedule brought him to Butaritari in 1606, and he named it Buen Viaje (Nice Trip). Archaeological evidence indicates that ancestors of the people who stood on the shore singing 'Olé olé olé' to de Quiros were Austronesians, and they'd arrived in the islands at least 2000 years earlier. Tongans and Fijians invaded some time around the 14th century AD, and intermarriage between groups gave the population a reasonably homogenous appearance by the early 19th century.

A particularly dirty piece of colonial high jinks took place on 8 April 1841, when 80 officers and enlisted men from the USS Peacock let themselves loose on Utiroa village, Tabiteuea Island. They believed the locals had killed one of their number the day before and, in the best traditions of the Seventh Cavalry, they burned 300 houses and left the community meeting house, or maneaba , 'entirely in ashes' as punishment. The 'official' figure of islander dead was only 12, but the commander, presumably pleased with his day's work, described their effort as a 'salutary lesson'. It's not clear from the record whether the islanders learned their lesson and suddenly started liking the invaders.

More Europeans started dropping by, and all the islands had made it onto European charts by 1826. From then till the 1870s British and American whalers hunting sperm whales were the most frequent visitors. There was a little give and take: some seamen deserted and spent their days dancing under coconut trees, and some of the islanders traded places for a life of scurvy, seasickness and spilled sperm whale gizzards on the high seas. Coconut oil and then copra became the main items of trade later in the century, along with 'blackbirding' - kidnapping into slavery by Peruvian, British, Australian and other slave ships. Most of the islanders spirited off were put to work in Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Hawaii and Central America.

Missionaries set up shop in the 1850s and began saving 'Gilbertese' souls by banning their naughty dances and telling them to stop fornicating and indulging in other forms of pleasure. The Americans and British were interested in the region (the Reverend Hiram Bingham was a Yankee and the first missionary to live there), but by 1917 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions agreed to withdraw in the face of successful proselytising by the London Missionary Society and aggressive land grabs by the Crown.

Modern History

In 1892 the Brits proclaimed the group a British protectorate, and established headquarters at Tarawa four years later. They annexed Banaba in 1900 after they discovered phosphate there, and proceeded to mine the trots out of the island. Because Banaba was eventually ruined (the topsoil was spread over fields in Australia and New Zealand), Banabans were moved at the end of WWII to Rabi Island in Fiji, where the main community still resides.

By early 1916 the British had legitimised their land grab of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands by the all-important Order-in-Council and by getting local chiefs to sign on the dotted line. Other islands joined the gang, including Teraina, Tabuaeran, Kiritimati (or Christmas in English, where Captain James Cook ate his steamed pudding on Christmas Day), the Tokelau Group (which went to New Zealand administrators in 1925) and Banaba. The uninhabited Phoenix Islands, two of which were administered jointly with the USA, joined the list in 1937. Other islands in present-day Kiribati were exploited by foreign companies for phosphate or coconut products, but they eventually came into the fold.

Once the Japanese let loose the seagulls of war in the Pacific, Kiribati would inevitably be drawn in. The Japanese bombed Banaba then landed on Tarawa and Butaritari shortly after they attacked Pearl Harbour, but by November 1943 the Americans had thrown them out of most of present-day Kiribati in a series of take-no-prisoners pitched battles. After Banaba was reoccupied, the Japanese were found to have massacred all but one man of the imported labour force on receiving news of the end of the war. A military tribunal later gave the death sentence to the COs. The British gave the I-Kiribati another slap in the face in 1957 and 1962 when they detonated hydrogen bombs from Kiritimati (Christmas) Island, as part of their atmospheric testing at the giddy heights of the Cold War.

Islanders were given an 'advisory' role in their own government in 1963, and granted full independence on 12 July 1979. Two months later the USA relinquished all claims made under their Guano Act of 1856 to 14 islands in the Line and Phoenix groups. The Banabans initiated a suit for compensation in the British High Court in 1975 over damage to their homeland caused by phosphate mining, claiming more than UK£7 million for back royalties. They also demanded independence from Kiribati. They were paid the grand sum of US$9.04 million in compensation, and the constitution ensures Banabans a seat in the House of Assembly and the return of land to those dispossessed by phosphate mining. But it did not offer them their independence.

Recent History

In 1999, Kiribati became a member of the United Nations. In an effort to attract tourism, one of the islands was renamed Millennium Island and vied with the Chatham Islands for the honour of being the first to greet the first dawn of the new millennium. In 2000, a UN Development Program report concluded that AIDS rates in the nation were on a par with some African nations.

In recent years five of the Phoenix Islands have been earmarked for residential development with a grant from the Asian Development Bank. The islands will be settled from overpopulated South Tarawa. Kiribati is one of a number of Pacific island-nations whose very existence is threatened by climate change and the resultant rise in sea levels. So worried is the government about the country's future that it announced its intention in 2002 to take the US to court for its refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, claiming that rising sea levels had already submerged two of its uninhabited coral reefs.

Back to top ^