Kastom Stories And Christianity In The Solomon Islands

Author : Rita Pama Sahu
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 118 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (111 download)

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Download or read book From Scholar to Teacher written by Rita Pama Sahu and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anglican Church of Melanesia is a thriving body today, consisting of Christians from New Caledonia, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Growing up in the Anglican Church in Solomon Islands during the 1990s, I learned the stories of European missionaries, whose work through the Melanesian Mission, founded in 1849, contributed to the establishment of the Anglican Church of Melanesia. Christianity, however, within the Pacific region, is the creation of both Western and Indigenous contributions. So far, it has been more the Western contribution than the Indigenous contribution that Solomon Islanders have been aware of. My research seeks to promote the knowledge of Indigenous missionaries, that their stories may be widely known and appreciated in Solomon Islands, just like those of European missionaries. I focus on the contributions of four Solomon Islanders, scholars turned teacher missionaries; Hugo Gorovaka from Guadalcanal, Benjamin Teilo from Reef Islands, Paul Marita from Ulawa and James Uqe from Malaita. I gathered information from published works related to the Melanesian Mission, Pacific Indigenous missionaries and the Anglican Church in general, as well as extracting specific information on the four teacher missionaries from archival sources and "reading through" them, interpreting aspects of their lives that may have been implicit or latent in the archive, in order to convey something of their circumstances and understandings as they laid the foundations for the everyday Christian culture of the Solomon Islands. Michel-Rolf Trouillot (1995: 3-4) suggests that history is always characterized by discrepancies and tensions between 'what happened' and 'what is said to have happened'. Archival sources hold a lot of 'what is said to have happened', providing versions of past events or the materials upon which historians produce versions of those events. But all versions privilege some events or understandings of events over others. One can sieve through these versions in order to find out one's own sense of 'what happened', which is another version, another focus: in this case, the contributions of Indigenous missionaries. The establishment and the ongoing work of the Melanesian Mission would not have been possible without Indigenous missionaries who so often willingly gave themselves to the work of the mission. The contributions of such men and women need to be told, their stories not forgotten, and their memories honoured.