Imperialism plants the Butcher’s Apron on the Solomon Islands and Britain’s primitive methods of accumulating land and labor power spark indigenous resistance to capitalist slavery.

‘British Rule in the Solomon Islands’ by P. White from The Daily Worker. Vol. 4 No. 270. November 25, 1927.

Native Labor Conditions.

The news in the press of native risings on the Solomon Islands makes some acquaintance with native labor conditions of interest.

The Solomon Islands are a small group of islands with a total area of 11,000 square miles, situated in the southwest Pacific. The native population is 150,000 and the white 600.

The islands contain cocoanut plantations from which copra (the dried kernel, used for soap making, etc.), the principal export, is procured.

Coolies are not allowed to be imported, so that the planters are dependent upon native labor, which, however, “don’t care about work”; and even an annual tax of ten shillings per head is not always sufficient stimulus. The planters, therefore, resort to sending special recruiting agents to tour the small islands.

Schooners putting in at any of the small islands for this purpose usually signalize their arrival by rifle fire. The natives gradually gather around the landing stage, urged by curiosity. The recruiting agent, declaring the purpose of his visit, gives a vivid description of the wonderful life on the plantations and the enormous money the natives could earn, and displays the gay colored cottons, clay pipes and tobacco which he is careful to bring with him. Anyone tempted by these glowing prospects to give his consent at once receives a gay patterned “Lep-lep,” waist belt, pipe and packet of tobacco. All recruits are taken on board and the schooner goes to the next island. When the required number of natives is recruited the agent returns to the plantation. This recruiting costs the planter very dear–200 rubles per head.

Before beginning work the recruits are subjected to medical examination, reduced to a farce by the following ingenious means: those appearing to be in weaker health are not brought up for examination at all in case they should be passed as unfit for work, while the healthier ones take their places, going up several times.

Contracts with natives are usually signed for two years, with wages fluctuating from £10 to £12 per year. In addition to this each worker gets weekly rations, consisting of tea and sugar in the morning, two ship’s biscuits, one pound of rice and a half a tin of meat.

The working day lasts twelve hours with an hour off for dinner, while piece work is often practiced. They live in hastily erected primitive shelters, surrounded by their own small vegetable plots. They receive a new “Lep-lep” every month, and small portions of tobacco weekly.

The head tax, which is used as a means of forcing natives to work, was introduced only a few years ago by the British Government. From the very beginning the collection of this tax encountered native resistance, since this sum is great in proportion to their wretched wages.

A cruiser has been sent from Australia to put down the rising. Armed only with arrows and spears the natives are, of course, unable to resist the bombs, machine-guns and cannon–all the technique of modern warfare. But the fact in itself that this is the third attempt at a native rising in Pacific Ocean islands in a comparatively short time inspires the thought that all is not well in the dependencies of Great Britain.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

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