Sex, love and war

A Last Secret 6

Armies and war, in a paradoxical and awkward way, are about order and control even if the consequences are death and destruction. Sex is difficult for an army modelled along British lines. Soldiers are expected not to partake, at least while on campaign.

‘Keep yourself fit,’ was the advise in army pay books the soldiers had on the atolls, ‘avoid excesses of stimulants and above all remember the very serious dangers of illicit sexual intercourse, against which you are specially warned in the interests of your future health and happiness.’

Inter-racial sexual relationships were common early in the life of colonial New Zealand, yet the country managed to develop a sexual superiority toward the Pacific that fiercely frowned upon men and women of different culture marrying or any kind of physical relationship. There were a number of strands woven together producing a ridiculous pattern that predominated in the 1930s. There was the basic notion that Anglo-Saxons were superior. Even without National Socialism offering its version of eugenics, Anglo-Saxons could not be ‘polluted’ with other races. There was a belief that the various races and tribes existed in a hierarchy of some kind. Polynesians were highly regarded, although not equal with whites. The philosophy said these other races should not be tainted with the blood of other inferior races. It was possible to see, in Sāmoa, mental gymnastics over this where mixed blood was considered good for Polynesians if one of the parents was white, but bad for whites. For New Zealand, building its Pacific empire, the big worry, home and in the islands, were Chinese. Indians never seemed a threat within New Zealand because they largely kept to themselves and numbers were small. In the 1930s there was a weird, distorted kind of debate over the way Chinese men were marrying Māori women. New Zealand was ruling Samoa between the wars and in the first month of its occupation in 1914 the military rulers sought to control sexuality. Regulations were imposed, and later passed into New Zealand law, prohibiting Chinese and Sāmoans from having sex. No such regulation existed over white-Sāmoan sex but white men were sent to Samoa were discouraged from having relationships with local women. Inter-racial marriage was considered a blight on the career of any white man. Blended children were considered inferior. Social arrangements in Sāmoa, which created a kind of apartheid (and were as formalised as apartheid in Australian ruled Nauru), were about the notion of the ruler and the ruled. There was also a structure designed not so much to halt inter-racial sex, but to frustrate any chance of it occurring in the first place. This frequently failed in Samoa.

I-Kiribati, Michael Field

In the Gilbert Islands, inter-racial sex and resultant children had never been much of an issue. Few people of any other race visited, fewer still lived there. The isolation of the Gilberts was a daunting barrier to any contact. Those foreign men that did stay tended to be hardy characters such as traders and mariners - or missionaries who came with their wives. The scattered accounts of traditional Gilbertese society suggest that they were a good deal less conservative than those that had come to rule them were. There was a tradition of wife swapping and brother's entitlements to other brother's wives that only slowly died out in the face of Christianity.