Deleted member 67076
Im so ignorant of the region but nonetheless to critique, compare or otherwise give an intelligent comment; that said- this is really cool. Wish the forum had a like button so I could show my support other than vague platitudes. 
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
I did mean to comment earlier, but my phone kept eating the reply.
The Pacific islands feel, to me at least, like probably the one part of TTL that could be described as unfinished business; probably because they're going pretty much straight from pre- and proto-states to post-Westphalianism - which is probably easier in some ways, but still involves an awful lot of growing pains.
It's pretty cool to see Roviana and Malaita mature, and the dual-state Hawai'i actually working.
The Pacific islands feel, to me at least, like probably the one part of TTL that could be described as unfinished business; probably because they're going pretty much straight from pre- and proto-states to post-Westphalianism - which is probably easier in some ways, but still involves an awful lot of growing pains.
It's pretty cool to see Roviana and Malaita mature, and the dual-state Hawai'i actually working.
Finally managed to catch up with the new updates since my last visit. Phew! Congratulations on your publication, first of all!!
Reading as the first Abacar to return to Brazil celebrated festival and attended a municipal-level state dinner was one of the most powerful scenes in this series for me. I hope it was fulfilling to write as it was for me to read. The reverence for one's familial inheritance also read as very real to me, and the mountains of Hamgyong coming up at the end took what had already been powerful and made it poignant. I wonder if a Legatum Humanitatis has been set up around Baekdu-san/Changbai-shan? Portuguese might be one of more common languages to hear on the summit ITTL, along with Korean and Chinese.
*East Asia itself was awesome to read about, too. The idea of surprisingly insular home islands contrasted with the innovating periphery was a neat inversion of (OTL American?) expectations of Japan as a techno-utopian wonderland - an image that only OTL Tokyo manages to resemble, and this while still being a place where cassette tapes and fax machines are widespread. And I agree with HanEmpire about a unified Korea. Even if it's poorer than OTL, it's still the whole peninsula at roughly the same level, not one half OTL Italy or Spain and the other half OTL Haiti.
Out of curiosity, do we know what the status of minorities in the integral Han parts of *China? I honestly have no idea how real the cultural rights are that are explicitly guaranteed to minorities by the PRC, but in a world that combines more cultural conservatism with more economic and political empowerment, it seems like it could go either way...
Idle sidenote: I finished watching a 2012 movie called Gabi not too long ago, and the opening sequence (two post-Queen Min era, rival Korean bandits, slash spies, dressed as Europeans, speaking Russian, hijacking a train for... coffee beans?) was the only thing I noticed. I spent the rest of the movie thinking about the status of European culture in the typical *Korean household. But I keep thinking of the Meiji period, and all these pictures of Japanese nobles in Japanese clothing, cheek by jowl with Japanese nobles in European clothing - knowing that in the background the government was spending comparatively immense sums to retain European advisers to both. Queen Min obviously took a different path, but I wonder if the same irony will be present in *Korea. Maybe the first generation of modernizers will have its members who wholly absorbed European culture, but be remembered as retaining their essential Korean-ness? Or would it play out something like in OTL United States, where cultural conservatives acknowledge the foreign birthplace of the individual members of the Revolution, but treat modern influence from abroad as somehow insidious?
Anyway, the update on the Pacific was fantastic. I find myself wondering if college students in the US debate if the Treaty Islanders benefited from the colonial era because it spared them the Westphalian state, or if there will there be small numbers of wealthy cultural tourists being shuttled around the capital by bemused Malaitans... Honestly though, I can't be too critical, because before reading Male Rising the only thing I knew about cargo cults was that the phrase existed, and now the development of region-states in the lowlands of New Guinea and the integration of the highlands with regional markets is one of my favorite things to read about in this timeline. Of course I also love reading about West Africa, South Africa, East Africa, the Great Lakes, the Copperbelt, Turkestan, Congo, the Ottoman Union, India, the Southern Cone, the Andes, the United States, Australasia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Eastern Europe, the Artic Circle, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Lusophone world, Russia, Kamchatka, Mutapa, Madras, Sequoyah, the Caucuses...
Looking forward to the next update. In the meantime, I have an entire treasure trove of books I've managed to find - in English! - about North Asia... thank you Male Rising for making my reading list impossible.
Oh! One last thing that I want to share! I just got told an interesting tidbit of Southeastern Texas history by someone who'd grown up there: apparently socialism was a pretty strong force there in the early 1900s as company towns set up by lumber companies practically governed the region - to the point of paying employees in company scrip instead of actual US dollars, to be redeemed in company stores, etc etc. The vote for Debs got higher than 30% in some counties along the Texas-Louisiana border - and that's in OTL's 1912 election! - so I can only imagine how local politics would have developed if International Communist Bogeyman and white supremacist divide-and-conquer tactics hadn't intervened. *coughs* Okay, I'm done now, lol.
Reading as the first Abacar to return to Brazil celebrated festival and attended a municipal-level state dinner was one of the most powerful scenes in this series for me. I hope it was fulfilling to write as it was for me to read. The reverence for one's familial inheritance also read as very real to me, and the mountains of Hamgyong coming up at the end took what had already been powerful and made it poignant.
I wonder if a Legatum Humanitatis has been set up around Baekdu-san/Changbai-shan? Portuguese might be one of more common languages to hear on the summit ITTL, along with Korean and Chinese. *East Asia itself was awesome to read about, too. The idea of surprisingly insular home islands contrasted with the innovating periphery was a neat inversion of (OTL American?) expectations of Japan as a techno-utopian wonderland - an image that only OTL Tokyo manages to resemble, and this while still being a place where cassette tapes and fax machines are widespread. And I agree with HanEmpire about a unified Korea. Even if it's poorer than OTL, it's still the whole peninsula at roughly the same level, not one half OTL Italy or Spain and the other half OTL Haiti.
Out of curiosity, do we know what the status of minorities in the integral Han parts of *China? I honestly have no idea how real the cultural rights are that are explicitly guaranteed to minorities by the PRC, but in a world that combines more cultural conservatism with more economic and political empowerment, it seems like it could go either way...
Idle sidenote: I finished watching a 2012 movie called Gabi not too long ago, and the opening sequence (two post-Queen Min era, rival Korean bandits, slash spies, dressed as Europeans, speaking Russian, hijacking a train for... coffee beans?) was the only thing I noticed. I spent the rest of the movie thinking about the status of European culture in the typical *Korean household. But I keep thinking of the Meiji period, and all these pictures of Japanese nobles in Japanese clothing, cheek by jowl with Japanese nobles in European clothing - knowing that in the background the government was spending comparatively immense sums to retain European advisers to both. Queen Min obviously took a different path, but I wonder if the same irony will be present in *Korea. Maybe the first generation of modernizers will have its members who wholly absorbed European culture, but be remembered as retaining their essential Korean-ness? Or would it play out something like in OTL United States, where cultural conservatives acknowledge the foreign birthplace of the individual members of the Revolution, but treat modern influence from abroad as somehow insidious?
Anyway, the update on the Pacific was fantastic. I find myself wondering if college students in the US debate if the Treaty Islanders benefited from the colonial era because it spared them the Westphalian state, or if there will there be small numbers of wealthy cultural tourists being shuttled around the capital by bemused Malaitans...
Honestly though, I can't be too critical, because before reading Male Rising the only thing I knew about cargo cults was that the phrase existed, and now the development of region-states in the lowlands of New Guinea and the integration of the highlands with regional markets is one of my favorite things to read about in this timeline. Of course I also love reading about West Africa, South Africa, East Africa, the Great Lakes, the Copperbelt, Turkestan, Congo, the Ottoman Union, India, the Southern Cone, the Andes, the United States, Australasia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Eastern Europe, the Artic Circle, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Lusophone world, Russia, Kamchatka, Mutapa, Madras, Sequoyah, the Caucuses... Looking forward to the next update. In the meantime, I have an entire treasure trove of books I've managed to find - in English! - about North Asia... thank you Male Rising for making my reading list impossible.
Oh! One last thing that I want to share! I just got told an interesting tidbit of Southeastern Texas history by someone who'd grown up there: apparently socialism was a pretty strong force there in the early 1900s as company towns set up by lumber companies practically governed the region - to the point of paying employees in company scrip instead of actual US dollars, to be redeemed in company stores, etc etc. The vote for Debs got higher than 30% in some counties along the Texas-Louisiana border - and that's in OTL's 1912 election! - so I can only imagine how local politics would have developed if International Communist Bogeyman and white supremacist divide-and-conquer tactics hadn't intervened. *coughs* Okay, I'm done now, lol.
You're right, of course - I'd figured that a Dutch creole would develop in western New Guinea during colonial times, Tok Pisin and Unserdeutsch-style, but the period of Dutch control there ITTL was short, and a Malay-based trading language had been in use for some time. So the highland lingua franca ITTL would be part German and part Malay. I'm not sure I even want to imagine how that would work - at a guess, the vocabulary would come from both languages, the grammar would be Malay (which is about as simple as grammar gets) with some indigenous elements, and the balance of loanwords would be less Malay and more German the farther east you travel. If there could be an Italo-Arabic pidgin in the medieval Mediterranean, then a German-Malay one in New Guinea is thinkable.
Anyway, I've changed the update to replace Dutch with Malay, although a few Dutch words have probably also found their way in.
We haven't had the final East Africa update yet, but I'd tend to agree. The Pacific Islanders, more than nearly anyone else, are having modernity thrown at them all at once, and because of the hands-off policy mandated by the Pacific Treaty, they've been on their own in adapting to it. They're forming different kinds of states than what exists in the rest of the world, and trying to figure out what their version of modernity looks like, and it's by no means a finished process.
Be careful when you stop at Roviana, though - things aren't the way they used to be, but it's still an adventurous destination.
It was. Returning to the beginning as things are coming to a close is always a time for reflection, and as we'll see once more before all's said and done, Laila is returning to her roots in a number of ways.
Also, the Malê and the Afro-Brazilians who stayed behind are two branches of the same family, and in that scene, they held up a mirror to each other. The Malê found their inspiration in Islam while the Bahians have built an Afro-Korean candomble culture, and they've fought different wars and made different marriages, but many of their struggles and values are much alike.
I wonder if a Legatum Humanitatis has been set up around Baekdu-san/Changbai-shan? Portuguese might be one of more common languages to hear on the summit ITTL, along with Korean and Chinese.
That probably has happened by now - the present Korean government is nationalist, but it's open to such things. And yes, plenty of Brazilian pilgrims go there - they tend to revere "their" mountains, but also feel a connection to the ancestral ones.
I think this is one of the problems of empire. Japan ITTL faced the dilemma of building a liberal state that included many non-Japanese citizens. By the 1940s, it realized that repressing the non-Japanese cultures was wrong, but if it let them flourish, then they might spread to the home islands and the cultural patrimony might be lost. Mimura sold federalism to the parliament, in part, as a means of defending Japanese heritage, and fear of the consequences of a multicultural empire kept the home islands very insular for a while. That's changed in the past twenty years, though, and there's a lot more room for innovation and cultural blending now.
I lack the knowledge of Chinese minorities to speculate in detail, but it's probably gone both ways at various times. I suspect that the minorities have a good deal of autonomy in their homelands but face pressure to assimilate if they move to the city, and that some governments - the Ma-era one, for instance - have pushed cultural unity while others see strength in diversity.
The former, I think - the revolution was pervaded enough by Russian radicalism, and the Orthodox and *Cheondoist populations draw enough of their cultural roots from Russia, that a rejection of all foreign influence would be impossible. I'd expect that the prevailing view will be that it's possible to admire and adopt elements of Russian culture - or, for that matter, Chinese or Japanese culture - while still being essentially Korean. On the other hand, the revolution's emphasis on shamanism and classical Korean literature is a reminder that while some of the trappings may be foreign, the national soul isn't.
I find myself wondering if college students in the US debate if the Treaty Islanders benefited from the colonial era because it spared them the Westphalian state, or if there will there be small numbers of wealthy cultural tourists being shuttled around the capital by bemused Malaitans...
Probably both! I'm sure, given TTL's more ambiguous view of colonialism, that there will be many academic debates about whether other models of modernization would have been better or worse for the Melanesians. Students will also argue about whether any of the emerging Melanesian state structures might work in the West, and whether, without any experience of Westphalian statehood, they're inventing a "purer" form of post-Westphalianism. And yes, the cultural and adventure tourists will come to Melanesia just as IOTL, no doubt with much bemusement on both sides.
Looking forward to the next update. In the meantime, I have an entire treasure trove of books I've managed to find - in English! - about North Asia... thank you Male Rising for making my reading list impossible.
Any particularly good ones? I could stand to do some more reading in that area.
To some extent, that's exactly where TTL's Farmer-Labor Party came from. It isn't doctrinally socialist - American voters and parties have never been big on doctrine - but many of its policies are driven by the fact that those two bogeymen were either absent or channeled elsewhere.
Im so ignorant of the region but nonetheless to critique, compare or otherwise give an intelligent comment; that said- this is really cool. Wish the forum had a like button so I could show my support other than vague platitudes.
Thanks for the support - I really am grateful to all my readers, and the best part of writing here has always been the ongoing conversation.
For what it's worth, I've found the Facebook "like" button to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's a way to express support if one has nothing to say, but it can also be a lazy substitute for saying something. I've sometimes found it frustrating to post a work in progress on FB and get several "likes" but no criticism.
Anyway, East Africa and the Great Lakes will be next, hopefully this weekend.
The only way I can think a decent number would show up would be Jews fleeing to eastern Russia during the tougher parts of the oligarchic period (knowing Jews, not to mention Russian autocracy, we'll be heavily involved in the opposition), and eventually drifting south. There wouldn't be a lot, but there might be some Jewish-dominated townships on the Amur, and small communities in Japanese merchant cities.
Jews probably would be involved in the opposition during this period, but I'm not sure it would be the narodnik opposition: Russian Jews are primarily urban while the narodnik heartland is in the countryside, and the Tolstoyan Christianity that pervades the narodnik movement might not be a comfortable fit for Jews. I'd guess that there were more Jews in the liberal and Marxist opposition in the cities than among the narodniks that settled the Amur.
On the other hand, the narodniks did accept some influence from Belloist Islam, and it's possible that there could also have been a synergy with a "Tolstoyan" interpretation of Judaism, and Jews both IOTL and ITTL were active in anarchist politics. Some of these Jews might have ended up on the Amur, either in the narodnik settlements or (as you say) in villages of their own. For that matter, some of the liberals and Marxists might have gone to Vladivostok and the other large towns.
Maybe there's a community of a few tens of thousands in eastern Siberia today, of which a few hundred have drifted down to Manchuria, China proper, Korea and Japan. I doubt there would be enough in any one place to be culturally influential; on the other hand, I suspect that both Tolstoyan and East Asian cultures have had a profound impact on them.
Fair enough, that makes a lot of sense. It was the only way I could think to get any number of Jews into East Asia.
And yes, Tolstoyan Christianity and East Asian folk and Buddhist traditions would have a lot of influence. Combine them with the Baal Shem Tov's ideas of Chassidism, and you'd have a really fascinating faith tradition. Quasi-Shelterer shtetls on the Amur?
Sulemain
Banned
How are the Jews of the UK doing by this point?
With regards to Tolstoy, what I think of when I think of Russian Christianity is a very heirichial, conservative, state run thing. The development of an alternative in your writing was and is an interesting thing.
I use "thing" to much.
With regards to Tolstoy, what I think of when I think of Russian Christianity is a very heirichial, conservative, state run thing. The development of an alternative in your writing was and is an interesting thing.
I use "thing" to much.
I'm guessing the Imperial Party would not have been particularly nice to them, although they wouldn't be a major target. Between economic crisis and some level of persecution, those who could get out probably move to Canada, Australia and Salonika.
Super late comment being super late, here are my thoughts:
No 1: Congrats on being published, Jonathan!
No 2: If there is ever a place I want to visit now, it would be Malaita and Roviana. I would imagine building up a trading empire would do all sorts to a land and it's inhabitants, and I wonder what would their towns and cities look like ITTL. Heaven knows what would their literature be like!
No 1: Congrats on being published, Jonathan!
No 2: If there is ever a place I want to visit now, it would be Malaita and Roviana. I would imagine building up a trading empire would do all sorts to a land and it's inhabitants, and I wonder what would their towns and cities look like ITTL. Heaven knows what would their literature be like!
Well, the Pacific is a fascinating place ITTL- and it's good to see you've avoided the cliche of quiet, sunny, peaceful paradise. It's not true in our world, it wouldn't be true in this one unfortunately.
Is there any chance for an Antarctic update before the timeline comes to a close?
Is there any chance for an Antarctic update before the timeline comes to a close?
I'd originally been planning to wait until all of the present day was explored before leaving a comment, but something in the Oceania-entry made me pause. It's been mentioned before that global climate change got a kickstart ITTL as a result of earlier wide-scale industrialization in the *Third World. We've seen this in Africa and Central America...but what about the Pacific Islands? IOTL 2015, Kiribati and Tuvalu (ITTL parts of proto-states and German Micronesia) are one the verge of going completely underwater within a few decades at most, and other states (Nauru, Marshall Islands, Palau) are having similar issues. ITTL, two major states (Germany and Japan) have territories that would essentially be drowning soon, not to mention the independent islands.
As such, I'd be curious as to how big of an issue this is in the trans-Pacific organizational units, and how solutions to that might be reached (while I'd love to see German and Japanese mega-engineering on rising tide-endangered islands, I'd assume there are plans to integrating the populations into neighboring islands, if not setting up quasi-states wherever possible).
Accolades, however, are absolutely in order for the Pacific as a whole, as well as the Afro-Atlantic and Andean updates, both of which were absolutely fascinating to read. Would love to see Andreas Mwenya return as well in a narrative, if he's still alive after his PM-terms in Ndola...
As such, I'd be curious as to how big of an issue this is in the trans-Pacific organizational units, and how solutions to that might be reached (while I'd love to see German and Japanese mega-engineering on rising tide-endangered islands, I'd assume there are plans to integrating the populations into neighboring islands, if not setting up quasi-states wherever possible).
Accolades, however, are absolutely in order for the Pacific as a whole, as well as the Afro-Atlantic and Andean updates, both of which were absolutely fascinating to read. Would love to see Andreas Mwenya return as well in a narrative, if he's still alive after his PM-terms in Ndola...
And yes, Tolstoyan Christianity and East Asian folk and Buddhist traditions would have a lot of influence. Combine them with the Baal Shem Tov's ideas of Chassidism, and you'd have a really fascinating faith tradition. Quasi-Shelterer shtetls on the Amur?
I'm not sure they'd go the Shelterer route - Amish-type monasticism isn't really in the Jewish cultural DNA. On the other hand, they might develop into something like the Transbaikal church with a side order of Hasidic ecstaticism (is that a word?). I could see them becoming almost shamanistic, albeit (like the Hasidim) never calling it that.
On the other hand, Jews tend to stay where they are as long as they're not the primary targets (and not only Jews - things have to get pretty bad for most people to consider uprooting themselves as preferable). Some of them would go, but I'd bet that 90 percent of the British Jews at the start of the Imperial period would still be British at the end of it, and after that, they'd be fine. At a guess, their situation would roughly mirror OTL.
That branch of Orthodoxy is still there, but without the traditional partnership with the state, it's much weaker, somewhat like it was in the Soviet era ITTL. Also, the Tolstoyans do recognize a clergy, but beyond that, they're certainly much less hierarchical than the traditional church.
I suspect that, like many recently literate peoples, they'd borrow a lot from traditional oral literary forms. Their literature would also be affected by the sea experience that many young Solomon Islanders had during the raiding-and-trading era, and maybe even by the European showman's tricks that Hui'ehu learned during his wilderness years. The closest Western analogy might be skaldic poetry: wordplay isn't traditionally as common in Melanesian poems and songs as it was among the Norse, but manipulating words and images was part of the stock in trade for Hui'ehu and the other cargo-lords, which would give them a religious/mythical route into Malaitan (and to a lesser extent Roviana) poetry.
There would be novels too, especially once schools and foreign travel provide knowledge of that form: many of them would be retellings of legend, stories of village life or coming-of-age stories focusing on the transition from village culture to statehood, but there would also be some rousing Melville-style sea stories. Most of this, BTW, would be written in a language that is as close to German as Tok Pisin is to English, so it would be easily translatable and might become popular in Germany.
Hmmm, I think I may have an idea for this cycle's literary selection.
Architecture would probably be something like the Pacific-modern style that is exemplified IOTL by Polynesian and Melanesian parliament buildings. It would be toned down somewhat for the more utilitarian buildings such as stores or hospitals, and fancier for government buildings, schools and upscale apartments. The residential neighborhoods that aren't Pacific-modern would be traditional - the Solomons ITTL aren't much richer than IOTL, especially outside the regional capitals.
Port districts would be ugly as always, but what wouldn't be there are the blocky colonial buildings that are often found in the Pacific IOTL.
The Pacific never has been a paradise - it's that only in the imagination of Western popular culture. I'd imagine that this image will still exist ITTL, given that it goes back well into the nineteenth century, but that thanks to the Solomon Islanders, there will also be a Caribbean-esque swashbuckler stereotype.
As for Antarctica, I'm not sure there's enough going on there for a full update, but I'll try to mention it before all's said and done. It's under an international authority similar to the Nile and the other multinational watershed regions; the current controversy is whether to allow mining.
In hindsight, I should have mentioned that - I've discussed climate change in other updates, and the Pacific is one of the regions where the crisis is most acute. In the present day ITTL, there are two countervailing factors at play: climate change got an earlier start due to more widespread industrialization, but governments also started doing something about it earlier, and the lower world population also has an impact. I'd guess that the current climate is similar to OTL, with better long-term trends but still some doubt about whether the change can be held to levels where the Pacific atolls will be saved.
The Pacific Islanders who have Japanese or German citizenship have the easiest option, but many of them won't want to take it. Those in the independent atolls will face the prospect of being climate refugees, and it might add an apocalyptic element to some of the social conflict taking place there. At this point, the official position of the Consistory climate conference is "we can still save everyone," but contingency plans are probably being developed for relocation to higher ground in the Pacific or maybe Australasia, and some low-lying islands might be in the market for land where they can resettle.
And maybe we will see Mwenya again.
Literary interlude: A moving battlefield
Kazuo Manea, The Roviana Dog (Auki: New Malaita, 2003)
1959:
I knew because Tiola had marked out Horoto that morning, and I knew because it was a time of changing.
To the north, in his hall in Auki, Hui’ehu lay sick – sick unto death, they said – and the captains were gathered by his bedside to set the new order of things. There were other places where people also gathered. The captains who wanted things the old way weren’t there, and neither were those who weren’t captains but wanted to be. They’d told us that when the Big Man died this time, no one would fight for his mantle, but not everyone believed them, and all it took was one.
I’d told Wawae, but he hadn’t believed me, or maybe he thought that the risk of not being with the other captains when the spoils were handed out was a worse one than Horoto. If so, he was a fool. But he was my captain, who I was sworn to defend because he defended me, and in his house as the moon rose, I’d called a gathering of my own. I was no captain, but there were a few who followed me, and they were there with me, waiting.
I wondered if Horoto would come, but there was a movement at the gate, and there he was. He had forty men with him, with bands of shells around their foreheads and casuarina needles hung from their necks, and moonlight glinted off the machetes and rifles they carried. There was torchlight too: some of them had torches in their hands. They’d come to burn Wawae’s hall, to take his wealth – to take away the things that made him a captain, a giver of gifts.
They came through the gate, two at a time and then five and then ten, and as they did, I felt Tiola slip away from me. “Where are you going?” I wanted to whisper. “I am your captain. Your place is at my side.” I needed her strength, because I’d lost so much of my own. But she was gone, and Horoto’s men were coming in.
The first of them stopped short as he saw what loomed in front of him: a shadowy figure ten feet tall with the mouth of a shark. The women had made it of reeds, but its eyes were silver plates that reflected the torches, and it trailed vines from its hands as if it had just come from the sea.
Horoto walked up to it – slowly, slowly. I could hear what he was saying: that it was nothing, just a statue that someone had made to spook them. But his men wanted to see for themselves, as I’d known they would. Hui’ehu was dying and change was coming, and things appeared at times like that: who was to say that an adaro hadn’t really been summoned from the waters?
And when they were all gathered together around it, we opened fire.
Ten of them went down in the first second, one to my bullet: my arms were useless for many things, but I could still shoot a gun. We fired again, and more of them fell in the panic. But Horoto threw himself flat, and the others followed what they saw him do. They tracked us by the flash of our muzzles: we were well-sheltered, so more of our shots found the mark than theirs, but they outnumbered us, and the crackle of their bullets kept our heads down as they worked their way in.
One of them darted behind a low stone well, and went to his knees behind the shelter its wall provided. He had a torch in his hand, and I saw what he planned: he was going to fire the thatching of Wawae’s house and burn us out to die under their guns. I turned to fire at him, but my body moved slowly, too slowly, and he drew his arm back to fling the torch…
And then Tiola tore out his throat.
She leaped from him as she fell, and the noise she made in the darkness sounded much like an adaro’s might have. She found Horoto, jumped on him, savaged him, and she was louder than the gunfire. He fought, but she had the strength of a demon, and that night maybe she was one.
She was certainly nothing that Horoto’s men cared to fight. At another time, in the daylight, they might have, but it was night and Hui’ehu was dying and the skies and earth and sea were full of prodigies. They ran, and we let them go: without Horoto they would do no harm.
Tiola sat among the bodies and smoldering torches, and when I called, she came.
1978:
There was a saying now: native rites for native things, foreign rites for foreign things. People still did the fishing dance when the boats came back, and they went to the stone-shrines to ask the ancestors for a safe birth. For the things that came over the sea, it was different: there were the rituals Hui’ehu had made for material things, and the Bible and the Koran for things of the spirit.
The captains and the elders had argued long over which of these the new secondary school was. Children had been taught since the world was made, so teaching was a native thing, but the children here would be taught in a different way. The building had a raised foundation and its roof was a dun-colored partial pyramid that suggested a traditional house, but it was made with glass and steel from the ships as well as concrete and stone. And those who learned in the new way were changed by it, different from their parents and grandparents, so surely this kind of learning was a matter of the soul.
In the end, they’d decided it was all three, and that it was best to propitiate all the gods. The students on the green in front of the building read from the holy books first, verses about learning, and then a troop of them in hard hats came and erected a model. Finally they danced – a welcome dance – and the captains came in together bearing the shark that would be offered to consecrate the opening of a house. In my grandfather’s time, it would have been a man.
There were four captains – the Big Men of each group of villages that would send students to the school – and they took seats beside the front door as sacred ritual gave way to civic. Wawae’s son Taloboe was there, and the others from the districts to the south. And it was Taloboe’s own son Maelanga, who would be a student in the school next year, who was chosen to sing the praise song.
His voice was still high, and it rose above the assembly, above where all the people of the district were gathered, above where I sat with Tiola beside me. He praised the workers who’d built the school and the men and women who would teach there, and I heard my own name as well: the verses told how I’d fought for a school to be built in this place, and how I’d pledged money and the labor of my following to finish it when the captains had run out of funds.
Tiola growled and, startled, I stroked her head. “Quiet,” I said. “There are no enemies there – those are the men who brought gifts to my children’s weddings, and the boy who’s praising me.” She looked up at me with eyes far too old for a dog, and she started to growl again, but then it turned to a quizzical sound as if she were confused.
Maelanga’s song turned now to the captains, and the praise he lavished on them was greater than anything before. They were the builders, the gift-givers, the men who rewarded their followers’ loyalty by planning and creating a glorious future. Maelanga sang of roads built, power lines brought to the countryside, and schools, more schools.
The smell of the roasting shark-offering carried over the field now, and I waited for the naming. On the grounds of the school stood a turtle-shaped outcropping, one of the turtles that had formed this island in immemorial days, and legend said it was the ancestor of my family. Taloboe had promised to name the school for the turtle when he’d asked me for money and my followers’ labor: the naming was to be my gift, in honor of my loyalty to his father.
But Tiola was uneasy again, and when the four captains unveiled the sign that would be posted by the gate, it said “The Taloboe Secondary School.”
There was a murmur. “He wants to be admiral,” someone near me said. “With works like this, maybe he will be.”
He wanted to be admiral, and so he had made himself greater. He had done it by making me less: a man who loses a naming loses power with it. Tiola bounded forward, and might have charged him had her leash not been bound around my waist, but I calmed her. This wasn’t the kind of fight she could end as she’d ended the one at Taloboe’s father’s house. That kind of fight didn’t happen anymore: they’d told us when Hui’ehu died, and it was true.
Taloboe gave me the first portion of the shark-offering, and I put it on the ground for Tiola to eat.
2000:
Most villages are like old men. They move sometimes, but they don’t become larger: they simply grow older in history and memory, and build a foundation of stories. But in this time of new things, there are also villages like children – villages born in chaos that grow and eat. These become cities.
Auki was a child become a man. It had grown, and it had eaten. Thirty thousand people lived there now, and it stretched for miles along the coast: it had eaten my village. The old canoe-house was still there, and my house too, but the decisions were made by a council of captains rather than one, and there were paved streets where buses that had once taken German children to school brought people to work in fish-canneries and timber mills and offices.
It was morning, and I was in front of my house watching buses and fiacres pass, when Maelanga came to me. His family was very rich now, and they’d kept their following when so many of the older captains hadn’t. Maelanga was a power in both the city and the nation: he was lavish with his gifts, university-educated, a planner and an arbiter, and his father was admiral. His headband was of gold coins, and his necklaces and arm-rings were of silver as well as whalebone and shells.
“Do you speak for the people in this neighborhood?” he asked.
“Yes.” I was no captain, and I was less than I had been twenty years ago, but the people in the nearby houses still followed me and came to me with their disputes.
“Then you must tell them about the decision of the council of captains. The planning committee has chosen this location for a water treatment plant, and the neighborhood will have to be relocated. The captains of the city have set up a compensation fund, and everyone will be given apartments or land to build a house.”
For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. Tiola, her muzzle white with age, came up to me in my wheelchair – my legs were now as useless as my arms – and looked at me questioningly.
I spoke to her first, not to Maelanga. “Why didn’t you warn me about him?”
“I’m not your enemy,” Maelanga answered. “Clean water will be a blessing for everyone in the city, like the roads and the power grid and the schools. It will be a blessing for you and your children and grandchildren.”
I looked up at him much as Tiola had at me. He said he wasn’t my enemy, and he believed it, and maybe he was right. But what would happen to the stone heads of my father and grandfather? What would happen to the canoe house where I had been initiated, and my sons and grandsons after me? How would I protect my following and settle their quarrels if they were scattered to the four corners of the city?
“Maelanga,” I said, "I defended this place. I fought here for your grandfather."
“We remember that with gratitude," he said. "But we didn't have water treatment forty years ago. We looked at several sites, and this was the best one. It was a unanimous vote.”
“I can take my people to another captain,” I began, but then I understood what he’d said: if the vote had been unanimous, none of the others would fight for me. And the loss of fifteen followers would make little difference to a captain with a crew the size of Maelanga’s, even if all of them deserted him along with me.
“It will be a blessing,” I said. “For my grandchildren and their grandchildren.”
It is the last day before the construction crews arrive, and I sit on the point of land that juts out from behind the canoe house. Tiola died this morning, and with great labor I brought her out to a motorboat and buried her at sea. Maybe that is what happens to a protector who can no longer protect, and who faces the kind of enemy that dogs can’t fight. Or maybe she was just old; she had already lived far beyond her time.
Tomorrow I will live in an apartment by Auki harbor, the gift of the council of captains.
I feel I am become an ancestor already.
Kazuo Manea, The Roviana Dog (Auki: New Malaita, 2003)
There was no indigenous written literature in the Solomon Islands until well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1930s, literacy was almost unknown outside the port towns (and rare even there), and in any event, none of the language groups of the Solomons were large enough to support publishing firms.
All this changed as Roviana and Malaita consolidated their trading empires. The sea trade – and the raiding and piracy to which Solomon Island merchant crews sometimes turned when profits were low – broadened the islanders’ horizons beyond the villages where they were born, and an increasing number were educated abroad or in the new local schools. Language boundaries blurred as towns grew and people migrated, and Misprak (from German “Mischsprache”) became the lingua franca of both empires and deepened from a pidgin to a creole. The atmosphere of rapid change, increasing wealth and cultural growth inspired the first generation of Malaitans and Rovianese to write down their stories.
The first book to be published in the Solomon Islands, Songs of the Land, was released on Malaita in 1946, and predictably, it was a collection of poetry. The early literature of the Solomons drew heavily from the islands’ rich tradition of song and, especially on Malaita, from the showmanship of the cargo cults. Also, with literacy still low, it was anticipated that literary works would be read out loud at village schools and meetings, so short pieces that could be read in meter were at a premium. The dominant genre during the 1950s was something almost like the poetry of the Norse skalds: stories of love, war and travel that often glorified the deeds of local Big Men and contained puns and wordplay that are difficult to translate. Hui’ehu, the founding cargo-lord of the Malaitan empire, was the subject of several poems both during and after his lifetime, and the post-mortem epics of the 1960s and 70s show how much he had already been mythologized by that time.
Inevitably, as the Solomon Islanders became more familiar with foreign literary forms, they began to experiment with short stories and novels. The first novels, written by a new generation of formally-educated authors, began appearing in the late 1960s. Many were sea stories, set on Malaitan or Roviana ships and drawing on traditional sea myths as well as Western authors such as Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad. As the generations changed and the swashbuckling age of the Solomons sea trade receded, though, retellings of legend and stories of modern life became more prominent. The latter were coming-of-age stories for both their characters and the societies in which they lived, exploring the effects of the transition to statehood and the adaptation to modernity. These novels were also the first generation of Solomon Islands literature that contained social criticism, which became more relevant as government was formalized and cultures clashed (although earlier poetry had sometimes lampooned Big Men rather than celebrating them, and the ability to laugh at such poems was considered an essential mark of a Big Man)…
… Kazuo Manea (b. 1942) is one of the first-generation Malaitan novelists. The son of a Malaitan ship captain and the Japanese-Micronesian woman he met while trading at Pohnpei, Manea went to primary and secondary school in Auki and then attended the University of Sydney. Upon his return to Auki, he joined its burgeoning literary community, becoming one of the founders of the New Malaita Press and winning critical acclaim for his sea novel Ryoshu Maru (1968). Over time, he shifted more toward modern topics, as with The Captain from Isatabu (1984), and also to novella-length works, which were sought after by a society which, though now highly literate, still preferred to enjoy stories by hearing them read aloud around a campfire or kava bowl.
The Roviana Dog (2003) is one of Manea’s more recent works, and chronicles seventy years of Malaitan history from the viewpoint of its narrator Kwasaimanu. The viewpoint character is born in a coastal village south of Auki in the early 1920s and goes to sea with a merchant crew at the age of thirteen. In 1950, after being badly injured in a battle with Roviana pirates, he is forced to retire from the sea, taking with him the modest fortune he has accumulated as well as Tiola, a dog he adopted from a captured Roviana ship. Like the stone dog-idol for whom she was named, Tiola has the ability to detect and point out enemies.
Through his money and Tiola’s abilities, Kwasaimanu is able to gain position in his home village despite his disability, and he marries and raises a family. Tiola, who is exceptionally long-lived for a dog, becomes the family’s protector. But as Malaitan life becomes more modern, and old forms of support and enmity fade into new ones, Tiola becomes less able to tell who Kwasaimanu’s enemies really are. The following three scenes, set roughly twenty years apart, illustrate that telling friend from enemy in the new Malaita isn’t always as easy as in the old…
All this changed as Roviana and Malaita consolidated their trading empires. The sea trade – and the raiding and piracy to which Solomon Island merchant crews sometimes turned when profits were low – broadened the islanders’ horizons beyond the villages where they were born, and an increasing number were educated abroad or in the new local schools. Language boundaries blurred as towns grew and people migrated, and Misprak (from German “Mischsprache”) became the lingua franca of both empires and deepened from a pidgin to a creole. The atmosphere of rapid change, increasing wealth and cultural growth inspired the first generation of Malaitans and Rovianese to write down their stories.
The first book to be published in the Solomon Islands, Songs of the Land, was released on Malaita in 1946, and predictably, it was a collection of poetry. The early literature of the Solomons drew heavily from the islands’ rich tradition of song and, especially on Malaita, from the showmanship of the cargo cults. Also, with literacy still low, it was anticipated that literary works would be read out loud at village schools and meetings, so short pieces that could be read in meter were at a premium. The dominant genre during the 1950s was something almost like the poetry of the Norse skalds: stories of love, war and travel that often glorified the deeds of local Big Men and contained puns and wordplay that are difficult to translate. Hui’ehu, the founding cargo-lord of the Malaitan empire, was the subject of several poems both during and after his lifetime, and the post-mortem epics of the 1960s and 70s show how much he had already been mythologized by that time.
Inevitably, as the Solomon Islanders became more familiar with foreign literary forms, they began to experiment with short stories and novels. The first novels, written by a new generation of formally-educated authors, began appearing in the late 1960s. Many were sea stories, set on Malaitan or Roviana ships and drawing on traditional sea myths as well as Western authors such as Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad. As the generations changed and the swashbuckling age of the Solomons sea trade receded, though, retellings of legend and stories of modern life became more prominent. The latter were coming-of-age stories for both their characters and the societies in which they lived, exploring the effects of the transition to statehood and the adaptation to modernity. These novels were also the first generation of Solomon Islands literature that contained social criticism, which became more relevant as government was formalized and cultures clashed (although earlier poetry had sometimes lampooned Big Men rather than celebrating them, and the ability to laugh at such poems was considered an essential mark of a Big Man)…
… Kazuo Manea (b. 1942) is one of the first-generation Malaitan novelists. The son of a Malaitan ship captain and the Japanese-Micronesian woman he met while trading at Pohnpei, Manea went to primary and secondary school in Auki and then attended the University of Sydney. Upon his return to Auki, he joined its burgeoning literary community, becoming one of the founders of the New Malaita Press and winning critical acclaim for his sea novel Ryoshu Maru (1968). Over time, he shifted more toward modern topics, as with The Captain from Isatabu (1984), and also to novella-length works, which were sought after by a society which, though now highly literate, still preferred to enjoy stories by hearing them read aloud around a campfire or kava bowl.
The Roviana Dog (2003) is one of Manea’s more recent works, and chronicles seventy years of Malaitan history from the viewpoint of its narrator Kwasaimanu. The viewpoint character is born in a coastal village south of Auki in the early 1920s and goes to sea with a merchant crew at the age of thirteen. In 1950, after being badly injured in a battle with Roviana pirates, he is forced to retire from the sea, taking with him the modest fortune he has accumulated as well as Tiola, a dog he adopted from a captured Roviana ship. Like the stone dog-idol for whom she was named, Tiola has the ability to detect and point out enemies.
Through his money and Tiola’s abilities, Kwasaimanu is able to gain position in his home village despite his disability, and he marries and raises a family. Tiola, who is exceptionally long-lived for a dog, becomes the family’s protector. But as Malaitan life becomes more modern, and old forms of support and enmity fade into new ones, Tiola becomes less able to tell who Kwasaimanu’s enemies really are. The following three scenes, set roughly twenty years apart, illustrate that telling friend from enemy in the new Malaita isn’t always as easy as in the old…
*******
I knew because Tiola had marked out Horoto that morning, and I knew because it was a time of changing.
To the north, in his hall in Auki, Hui’ehu lay sick – sick unto death, they said – and the captains were gathered by his bedside to set the new order of things. There were other places where people also gathered. The captains who wanted things the old way weren’t there, and neither were those who weren’t captains but wanted to be. They’d told us that when the Big Man died this time, no one would fight for his mantle, but not everyone believed them, and all it took was one.
I’d told Wawae, but he hadn’t believed me, or maybe he thought that the risk of not being with the other captains when the spoils were handed out was a worse one than Horoto. If so, he was a fool. But he was my captain, who I was sworn to defend because he defended me, and in his house as the moon rose, I’d called a gathering of my own. I was no captain, but there were a few who followed me, and they were there with me, waiting.
I wondered if Horoto would come, but there was a movement at the gate, and there he was. He had forty men with him, with bands of shells around their foreheads and casuarina needles hung from their necks, and moonlight glinted off the machetes and rifles they carried. There was torchlight too: some of them had torches in their hands. They’d come to burn Wawae’s hall, to take his wealth – to take away the things that made him a captain, a giver of gifts.
They came through the gate, two at a time and then five and then ten, and as they did, I felt Tiola slip away from me. “Where are you going?” I wanted to whisper. “I am your captain. Your place is at my side.” I needed her strength, because I’d lost so much of my own. But she was gone, and Horoto’s men were coming in.
The first of them stopped short as he saw what loomed in front of him: a shadowy figure ten feet tall with the mouth of a shark. The women had made it of reeds, but its eyes were silver plates that reflected the torches, and it trailed vines from its hands as if it had just come from the sea.
Horoto walked up to it – slowly, slowly. I could hear what he was saying: that it was nothing, just a statue that someone had made to spook them. But his men wanted to see for themselves, as I’d known they would. Hui’ehu was dying and change was coming, and things appeared at times like that: who was to say that an adaro hadn’t really been summoned from the waters?
And when they were all gathered together around it, we opened fire.
Ten of them went down in the first second, one to my bullet: my arms were useless for many things, but I could still shoot a gun. We fired again, and more of them fell in the panic. But Horoto threw himself flat, and the others followed what they saw him do. They tracked us by the flash of our muzzles: we were well-sheltered, so more of our shots found the mark than theirs, but they outnumbered us, and the crackle of their bullets kept our heads down as they worked their way in.
One of them darted behind a low stone well, and went to his knees behind the shelter its wall provided. He had a torch in his hand, and I saw what he planned: he was going to fire the thatching of Wawae’s house and burn us out to die under their guns. I turned to fire at him, but my body moved slowly, too slowly, and he drew his arm back to fling the torch…
And then Tiola tore out his throat.
She leaped from him as she fell, and the noise she made in the darkness sounded much like an adaro’s might have. She found Horoto, jumped on him, savaged him, and she was louder than the gunfire. He fought, but she had the strength of a demon, and that night maybe she was one.
She was certainly nothing that Horoto’s men cared to fight. At another time, in the daylight, they might have, but it was night and Hui’ehu was dying and the skies and earth and sea were full of prodigies. They ran, and we let them go: without Horoto they would do no harm.
Tiola sat among the bodies and smoldering torches, and when I called, she came.
_______
1978:
There was a saying now: native rites for native things, foreign rites for foreign things. People still did the fishing dance when the boats came back, and they went to the stone-shrines to ask the ancestors for a safe birth. For the things that came over the sea, it was different: there were the rituals Hui’ehu had made for material things, and the Bible and the Koran for things of the spirit.
The captains and the elders had argued long over which of these the new secondary school was. Children had been taught since the world was made, so teaching was a native thing, but the children here would be taught in a different way. The building had a raised foundation and its roof was a dun-colored partial pyramid that suggested a traditional house, but it was made with glass and steel from the ships as well as concrete and stone. And those who learned in the new way were changed by it, different from their parents and grandparents, so surely this kind of learning was a matter of the soul.
In the end, they’d decided it was all three, and that it was best to propitiate all the gods. The students on the green in front of the building read from the holy books first, verses about learning, and then a troop of them in hard hats came and erected a model. Finally they danced – a welcome dance – and the captains came in together bearing the shark that would be offered to consecrate the opening of a house. In my grandfather’s time, it would have been a man.
There were four captains – the Big Men of each group of villages that would send students to the school – and they took seats beside the front door as sacred ritual gave way to civic. Wawae’s son Taloboe was there, and the others from the districts to the south. And it was Taloboe’s own son Maelanga, who would be a student in the school next year, who was chosen to sing the praise song.
His voice was still high, and it rose above the assembly, above where all the people of the district were gathered, above where I sat with Tiola beside me. He praised the workers who’d built the school and the men and women who would teach there, and I heard my own name as well: the verses told how I’d fought for a school to be built in this place, and how I’d pledged money and the labor of my following to finish it when the captains had run out of funds.
Tiola growled and, startled, I stroked her head. “Quiet,” I said. “There are no enemies there – those are the men who brought gifts to my children’s weddings, and the boy who’s praising me.” She looked up at me with eyes far too old for a dog, and she started to growl again, but then it turned to a quizzical sound as if she were confused.
Maelanga’s song turned now to the captains, and the praise he lavished on them was greater than anything before. They were the builders, the gift-givers, the men who rewarded their followers’ loyalty by planning and creating a glorious future. Maelanga sang of roads built, power lines brought to the countryside, and schools, more schools.
The smell of the roasting shark-offering carried over the field now, and I waited for the naming. On the grounds of the school stood a turtle-shaped outcropping, one of the turtles that had formed this island in immemorial days, and legend said it was the ancestor of my family. Taloboe had promised to name the school for the turtle when he’d asked me for money and my followers’ labor: the naming was to be my gift, in honor of my loyalty to his father.
But Tiola was uneasy again, and when the four captains unveiled the sign that would be posted by the gate, it said “The Taloboe Secondary School.”
There was a murmur. “He wants to be admiral,” someone near me said. “With works like this, maybe he will be.”
He wanted to be admiral, and so he had made himself greater. He had done it by making me less: a man who loses a naming loses power with it. Tiola bounded forward, and might have charged him had her leash not been bound around my waist, but I calmed her. This wasn’t the kind of fight she could end as she’d ended the one at Taloboe’s father’s house. That kind of fight didn’t happen anymore: they’d told us when Hui’ehu died, and it was true.
Taloboe gave me the first portion of the shark-offering, and I put it on the ground for Tiola to eat.
_______
2000:
Most villages are like old men. They move sometimes, but they don’t become larger: they simply grow older in history and memory, and build a foundation of stories. But in this time of new things, there are also villages like children – villages born in chaos that grow and eat. These become cities.
Auki was a child become a man. It had grown, and it had eaten. Thirty thousand people lived there now, and it stretched for miles along the coast: it had eaten my village. The old canoe-house was still there, and my house too, but the decisions were made by a council of captains rather than one, and there were paved streets where buses that had once taken German children to school brought people to work in fish-canneries and timber mills and offices.
It was morning, and I was in front of my house watching buses and fiacres pass, when Maelanga came to me. His family was very rich now, and they’d kept their following when so many of the older captains hadn’t. Maelanga was a power in both the city and the nation: he was lavish with his gifts, university-educated, a planner and an arbiter, and his father was admiral. His headband was of gold coins, and his necklaces and arm-rings were of silver as well as whalebone and shells.
“Do you speak for the people in this neighborhood?” he asked.
“Yes.” I was no captain, and I was less than I had been twenty years ago, but the people in the nearby houses still followed me and came to me with their disputes.
“Then you must tell them about the decision of the council of captains. The planning committee has chosen this location for a water treatment plant, and the neighborhood will have to be relocated. The captains of the city have set up a compensation fund, and everyone will be given apartments or land to build a house.”
For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. Tiola, her muzzle white with age, came up to me in my wheelchair – my legs were now as useless as my arms – and looked at me questioningly.
I spoke to her first, not to Maelanga. “Why didn’t you warn me about him?”
“I’m not your enemy,” Maelanga answered. “Clean water will be a blessing for everyone in the city, like the roads and the power grid and the schools. It will be a blessing for you and your children and grandchildren.”
I looked up at him much as Tiola had at me. He said he wasn’t my enemy, and he believed it, and maybe he was right. But what would happen to the stone heads of my father and grandfather? What would happen to the canoe house where I had been initiated, and my sons and grandsons after me? How would I protect my following and settle their quarrels if they were scattered to the four corners of the city?
“Maelanga,” I said, "I defended this place. I fought here for your grandfather."
“We remember that with gratitude," he said. "But we didn't have water treatment forty years ago. We looked at several sites, and this was the best one. It was a unanimous vote.”
“I can take my people to another captain,” I began, but then I understood what he’d said: if the vote had been unanimous, none of the others would fight for me. And the loss of fifteen followers would make little difference to a captain with a crew the size of Maelanga’s, even if all of them deserted him along with me.
“It will be a blessing,” I said. “For my grandchildren and their grandchildren.”
#
It is the last day before the construction crews arrive, and I sit on the point of land that juts out from behind the canoe house. Tiola died this morning, and with great labor I brought her out to a motorboat and buried her at sea. Maybe that is what happens to a protector who can no longer protect, and who faces the kind of enemy that dogs can’t fight. Or maybe she was just old; she had already lived far beyond her time.
Tomorrow I will live in an apartment by Auki harbor, the gift of the council of captains.
I feel I am become an ancestor already.
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That's... actually quite sad. I mean, I know that time moves on and things will change no matter what but still...
That was kind of the "author's" point. The Solomons have changed faster than nearly anyplace else ITTL - Kazembe may have gone from feudalism to high tech in an old man's lifetime, but it had prior experience with society above the tribal level - and they've been largely on their own in managing the transition. Not only that, but they've had two fundamental changes - village society to cargo-cult empire, and then to their version of modernity. We've seen how wrenching the social changes were in Kazembe during the generation after the Great War; imagine how they'd be in Malaita and Roviana.
Kwasaimanu was born in a village and grew up in a world of battle, feudal loyalty and adventure at sea, which had its own costs (as his injury shows) but was something he knew. The new world of quasi-feudal bureaucracy and state-level society isn't something he knows how to navigate easily. He's managed - in 2000, he's still a minor Big Man - and he knows that in the old days he wouldn't have had a wheelchair, but he's living in a world that is in many ways alien to him and whose rules he doesn't really understand.
In general, living standards in the Solomons are much higher than they were before Hui'ehu, and the end of endemic warfare has been an unalloyed blessing. But there have been losers along with the winners, and even many of those who've stayed afloat are feeling a sense of anomie. That sense probably isn't as bad as OTL, given that the Solomons changed from within rather than being forcibly changed from outside, but it's significant enough to be the stuff of novels.
(BTW, I hope it's clear from the description that those three scenes aren't the entire story, and that there are other sections before and between them. Some of those scenes show Kwasaiman's children and grandchildren adjusting somewhat better than he did.)
I don't know why this didn't hit me earlier, but the "Feudalism to modern tech in a man's lifetime" thing that Kazembe went through really reminds me of Japan's modernization now.
Japan's own brand of feudalism was "modern" enough that the country's feudal élites could reinvent themselves as zaibatsu with very little effort, though; Kazembe, on the other hand, was somewhat more backwards than that. Maybe even more so than Ethiopia, another former feudal country whose standard of living, in ATL's 1990s, is similar to that of Russia - a Russia that's much poorer than OTL's. Even though, to be honest, it might actually seem richer than OTL Russia to someone from our Muscovite suburbs, given the better distribution of wealth in Tolstoy's Lovecraftian patchwork of autonomous communes, ethnic republics and His Majesty Lord Novgorod the Great.
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