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The Gazelle Peninsula of East New Britain (ENB) Province has for many years been regarded as one of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG’s) most ‘developed’ regions, with the village of Matupit being seen as one of the most forward-looking Tolai villages. It was the village closest to the town of Rabaul, and by the 1970s was regarded by many as one of its suburbs. Matupit was one of the most prosperous villages in PNG, where Tolai people enjoyed a peri-urban lifestyle and, by PNG standards, a comfortable standard of living. This prosperity was paid for by wage labour in town and the cash cropping that the Tolai had successfully developed on their customary land. This paper builds on previous anthropological research that has addressed business and change in the Gazelle (T.S. Epstein 1968; A.L. Epstein 1969; Salisbury 1970; Bradley 1982; Fingleton 1985), by describing tendencies that have emerged or come to new resolutions in the resettlement and reconstruction process following the volcanic eruptions of 1994. It will examine how ongoing debates about customary land within recent economic conditions were re-framed by Tolai in the new environment that they found themselves in after the eruption. In policy debates over the reform of customary land tenure in Melanesia, definitions of ‘custom’ are often left unclear or do not cover all of the potential meanings of the word. But what even a brief overview of patterns of land disputes at Matupit demonstrates is the number of different ways that the word ‘custom’ or its Tok Pisin equivalent kastom is used at a grass-roots level, forcing us to pay attention to the uses we make of key concepts in the course of such debates.
Despite the prosperity, pressures were already developing in the time leading up to the volcanic eruption. In contrast to the situation recorded by Smith and Salisbury (1961), in which intra-Tolai land litigation was rare, by the early 1990s ENB was among the leading provinces in the country in terms of the number of registered land disputes. In particular there was a growing tension between the matrilineal landholding clan and the increasingly important nuclear family.[1] Fathers wanted to ensure that investments made on clan land passed to their children rather than to their clan nephews. Customary land came to be seen in many contexts as a problem, and people were reluctant in many cases to build new developments on it. When the ENB Provincial Government offered up five agricultural blocks for lease to individuals before the eruption in 1994, they were amazed to find that there were thousands of applicants. The problem, according to John Brown, the then Advisor to the ENB Lands Division, was that ‘people felt as if they had no rights to customary land’ (Post-Courier 12 August 1999).
Matupit, as the Tolai village with the highest population density and the most extensive economic development, suffered more than most from these problems. Many people described the eruption to me as a ‘blessing from God’, as the village was about to explode under the pressure of disputes. It is this irony that drew my attention — namely, that a disaster could be a divine intervention that would transform conflictive social relations. The disaster is said to be the main reason for the decrease in disputes, as many Matupi moved to a resettlement area at Sikut, an area of government land alienated from the Baining people during the colonial period. Around 200 Matupi families were each given blocks of around three hectares. The government is adamant that this land is not ‘customary’ land, meaning that it is to be owned by individual families, not by clans, and that each block will be inherited as property by the children of the title holder (in most cases the husband in a nuclear family unit). This position is, on the surface, supported by the majority of those Matupi who have relocated to Sikut. I was struck by the number of occasions on which Sikut residents told me that the land at Sikut was ‘better’ than Matupit land, not because it was more productive or plentiful, but because it was not ‘customary’ land. They described themselves as being ‘free’ from problems associated with customary ground. On these blocks they could work hard and pass on the benefits to their children.
However, just because the land at Sikut is not ‘customary’, this does not mean it is free from dispute. Rather, most disputes at present have a new character, causing divisions between some blockholders and those still waiting for blocks. Those waiting for blocks are housed on a small area of land euphemistically referred to as the ‘care centre’, living in shacks that have been erected out of old pieces of corrugated iron, wood, and even cardboard. People awaiting blocks have been temporarily allocated just under one hectare of land per family for gardening, but have been forbidden from planting cash crops because this land has been earmarked for future use as a centre for commercial activities and government services. The government is wary of the potentially costly and time consuming claims for compensation that would arise if cash crops had to be removed. Many blockholders have returned to Matupit and their blocks remain virgin rainforest. This has led to increasingly vocal demands for these blocks to be forfeited and given to those still waiting in the care centre.
In my experience a majority of the Sikut community supported the forfeit policy, as in theory did the Provincial Government Lands Division. Towards the end of my time in Sikut a concerted effort was made by the Resettlement Committee to get the Lands Division to authorise a mass forfeit of around 40 of the undeveloped blocks. When these undeveloped blocks were allocated to families living in the care centre, a series of stormy meetings took place at Sikut during which blockholders and their supporters living at Matupit would descend en masse. Blockholders who had been threatened with forfeit by the Resettlement Committee turned up to ‘work’ on the block for a few weeks, as a warning to the person to whom the block was to be allocated, before returning to Matupit. Many other people had hoped that the official position of the Lands Division would make this tactic impossible, but political leadership at all levels was divided. The elected Resettlement Committee was largely in favour of the forfeit policy, but they were opposed by most of the councillors, who went to the Rabaul District Government to declare the Resettlement Committee null and void. No one knew whether the Rabaul District Government or the Provincial Government’ Land Division held authority over the land, meaning that any forfeit policy was likely to be held up by several years of legal wrangling.
An additional problem was that no one had previously secured title to the Sikut blocks. Most of the blocks were allocated in early 1995, with the expectation that title would be issued to individual title holders within a year. Yet at the start of 2004, no titles had been issued because the Provincial Government and the Gazelle Restoration Authority did not have the money to complete the necessary surveys. According to the Authority, this was because World Bank regulations had consistently led to delays in funding being made available. As a result of this situation, a lawyer who was sympathetic to the forfeit policy informed a Sikut meeting, shortly before I left, that the forfeits issued by the Lands Division would not stand up in court as the initial one-year temporary titles had not been renewed. Consequently, every blockholder at Sikut, whether resident or not, is legally regarded as a squatter, remaining on government land with tacit approval. Only when title was issued would the government be able to attach conditions such as block development to the continuation of that title. In spite of this situation, the Resettlement Committee went ahead with the forfeits and started moving people on to the blocks. In my last week of fieldwork in ENB in February 2004, the inevitable fights were breaking out as the original blockholders arrived to remove the newcomers.
On the surface, the current situation at Sikut may not appear to be a dispute over custom, as both sides accept that Sikut is ‘non-customary’ land. But the debate over forfeits has inevitably become, at least in part, a debate about the role of custom in land matters. Often in debates about the appropriate use of land at Sikut the phrase ‘it’s not customary ground’ would be used as counter-claim. It was argued by supporters of the forfeits that their opponents (deliberately) failed to understand the difference between land that was given by state licence, whose continued ownership was contingent upon development of that land, and customary land that was held by clans by virtue of an inalienable right, or kakalei (Epstein 1969: 131). In these arguments the word ‘custom’ was used in an entirely negative sense as the alleged recourse of those who were too ‘lazy’ to develop their state land. The opponents of the forfeit policy did not ever claim to consider Sikut to be customary land, but some of their counter-arguments did draw on practices that most people would consider to be customary. Part of the rationale of the resettlement program was the anticipation that blocks would be developed in the bush at Sikut so that, in the event of another eruption, the displaced people of Matupit would be able to go and stay on blocks at Sikut that they had developed, or with kin who had developed blocks. This was because it was custom among the Tolai to go and stay with kin and seek assistance from them in times of need. The original distribution of Sikut blocks followed the council ward divisions of Matupit, meaning that there was a tendency for members of certain clans or people who had other close customary kinship relations to be situated near to each other. This pattern was arguably put at risk by forfeits that gave priority to residents of the care centre, and this is what prompted objections from some opponents of the forfeit who argued that breaking such patterns jeopardised customary networks of assistance in case of emergency. They argued that if forfeits were truly necessary then the blocks should be given to relatives of the original blockholders to preserve these networks. Although it is accepted that the land is not customary, according to this argument it is still important to take custom into account in the governance of this land.
This kind of argument was not just made by opponents of the forfeits. The wave of forfeits that occurred towards the end of my first fieldwork period was spearheaded by ToPirit, the chair of the Resettlement Committee. At the meeting in Sikut at which he announced that the forfeits were going ahead, Pirit raised another issue, namely the need to correct the inequity that had occurred in the case of large families, where the men had all been given blocks but their sisters had not. Later Pirit told me that the purpose of trying to ensure that sisters also received blocks was to keep clans together. In addition, he was concerned that the young men of the clan would become angry if there were no road open to them to inherit land. More important, however, was his concern to keep the clan together as a kind of social security network. He acknowledged that some people at Sikut said that the clan should become a thing of the past, and that individual families should be self-sufficient. However, he believed that this kind of ‘Western’ self-sufficiency would never be an option for most Papua New Guineans, and that even those people who had told me they would not help their nephews would still feel obliged to do so if pushed. Pirit felt that the continuation of this kind of custom was still going to be essential for years to come, and he saw tweaking the land tenure system as a means of encouraging its survival. He argued that this would ensure that people lived close to at least some members of their own clan and to other people who had been ‘fathered’ by their clan, thus ensuring that these relationships were of daily importance to them and strengthening the bonds of reciprocal assistance. Again, although the non-customary nature of the land is asserted, it is combined with a concern that the way non-customary land is administered can help to preserve at least some elements of what is considered to be customary.