TRISTAN DA CUNHA

ANARCHY ON TRISTAN DA CUNHA

In 1937, as part of a Norwegian scientific expedition, PETER MUNCH visited Tristan Da Cunha. He was surprised to discover that the form of social organisation on the island was ANARCHY… And had been for over 100 years.

There was no government, police, money or headman/woman. Munch wrote, ‘The principles of freedom and anarchy were firmly established in the Tristan community as a social order based on the voluntary consensus of free men and women. In such a community not only is authority, control or any kind of formal or informal government considered unnecessary and undesirable but is felt to be a menace and a threat to individual rights.’

The inhabitants of Tristan were not a self-selected commune who had gone there to establish utopia. They were of all races and survivors of shipwrecks or ex-whalers who had washed up there over 100 years. That anarchy became their natural form of social organisation and persisted against all efforts of the British government to undermine it is all the more remarkable.

Andrea Repetto, an Italian who had been shipwrecked on Tristan in 1892, was one of the few Tristans who could read or write. Seizing there chance the British government addressed all communications to Andrea Repetto, ‘Head Man ‘or occasionally ‘governor’. For twenty years they never received any reply ’til the mail was discovered unopened. Repetto explained that as there was no head man or governor on the island so no one felt able to open the mail!

In astonishment a government spokesman wrote in 1903, ‘There is an extraordinary state of affairs in this civilised century that there is no form of authority and the Tristans are curiously averse to any individual being considered to have more influence than the rest.’

Munch reported there had NEVER been any crime and no fist fight in living memory.

The Tristanians were not anarchists who’d read their Bakunin – they found anarchy to be the natural form of social organisation though they would never have used the word themselves. Yet the Tristanians have proved of remarkably little interest to anarchists – maybe because we are too used to failures to recognise success!

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TRISTAN DA CUNHA NEEDS A GOVERNOR – NO IT DON’T

The Foreign Office is presently advertising the positon of ‘Governor of St. Helena and its dependencies’ – which includes Tristan da Cunha. For over 120 years, since its first settlement in the early 19th century, Tristan managed without government, money, police to maintain harmony among a multi-racial population made up mainly of people who’d been shipwrecked.

Since World War Two the British government has thought it necessary to impose a governor based in St. Helena and a policeman – despite the fact there has never been a crime reported in Tristan’s history!!

The social organisation of the Tristanians was basically ‘anarchy’ and is well described in Peter Munch’s book ‘Crisis in Utopia’ covering also the period of their enforced evacuation to Britain in the 1960s and their shock decision to return to Tristan and reject the benefits of ‘civilisation’.

I’ve always ben fascinated by Tristan since I heard about their evacuation to Hampshire where I was living in the 1960s:

TRISTAN

I used to argue about ‘anarchy’ after school down the Expresso bar in Alton High Street. Couple of cokes in their glass bottles, Andre Gide in yer jacket pocket sticking out a bit, listening to the Everly’s ‘Crying in the rain’. Well fucking cool.

‘It won’t work… Human nature ain’t like that’
I was doing alright countering this ’til the film ‘Lord of the Flies’ came out… Then I was fucked… Break into ‘don’t forget who’s taking you home and in who’s arms you’re gonna be’… Fuck it… Maybe we are all Piggy psychos after all.

On the periphery of my brain cells were strange raincoated people being shoved into army camps and dying of flu. They looked so fucking unhip on South Today as black and white cameras followed them round Fawley – looking like all kids did in the 50s with raincoats too big for them…’you’ll soon grow into it’.

They were being stuck among the Fawley oil refineries ‘cos a volcano had just ruined their island. They were passive just being shoved around, being photographed by the curious. They looked like teenagers before there were teenagers. Conformist geeks to us in our pre-Starbucks expresso bar with our winkelpickers.

‘Where do you think this is Bone? An Italian dance hall?’ Jake our headmaster had hawkeyed, spotting my banned winkelpickers one morning. Did the Tristan people know about winkelpickers I thought. Bet not.

But somehow Tristan Da Cunha meandered into my consciousness and hooked itself there ever since.

I looked it up in my old stamp album. Amazingly I had a Tristan stamp with a seagull on it. I found the dot in the South Atlantic. I became obsessed by other small dots. I mean fucking small dots – not mammoths like the Falklands, St.Helena or South Georgia but dots no one had heard of… Gough Island, Bouvet Island, King Peter Island, Heard Island, Amsterdam and St. Paul Islands… And one bigger one, Kerguelen, which seemed possibly the most desolate of the lot.

You couldn’t get facts about these dots anywhere. Nothing in Alton or the school libraries. I wrote off to the Norwegian embassy for information on their colony Bouvetoya but got nothing back. How come Norway only owned one dot in the world and the dot was about as far south as Norway was far north? How had this happened? Why didn’t anyone know?

I chanced my arm and asked Mr.Gilbert our hated geography teacher at the end of a lesson one day. By which time I was fairly pent up about the whole thing.
‘Why does Norway own Bouvet island?’ I demanded of Mr.Gilbert.
I could tell right away he’d never heard of Bouvet Island
‘Call yourself a geography teacher,’ I muttered.

Gilbert thought the whole thing was some sarky wind up and threatened to send me to the dreaded Jake. Only a week earlier I had been dispatched for writing a ‘weak and silly’ poem for an English lesson project entitled ‘Our County’:

HAMPSHIRE

‘When I lie awake at night I think of the beauties of the Isle of Wight
With a ha ha ha and a ho ho ho in Hampshire it will never snow
when I eat dinner soaked in gravy
I think of Portsmouth and the British Navy
With a ha ha ha and a ho ho ho in Hampshire it will never snow
when I see them hunt after a furry fox
I see an image of Southampton docks.
With a ha ha ha and a ho ho ho in Hampshire it will never snow’

‘PUERILE’

Miss Thomas had written across the bottom of the poem but it went down well in the Expresso bar after school with a crunching chorus line turning it into a precursor of hip-hop.

I became the maniacal watcher of SOUTH TODAY a smug local news programme I’d previously derided. Any mention of the Tristanians and my parents would be entreated to hush by imploring gestures. But the obvious questions were never answered on the program. If Lord of the Flies was true how come the Tristanians hadn’t all killed each other in some ferocious battle or clubbed to death anyone shipwrecked on their coast?

Maybe they were stopped by the police force or an army of the government? Such questions were frustratingly never raised or answered. Slowly they slipped out of the news agenda of South Today. Lord of the Flies was left unchallenged.

Two Years Later:

As I returned home after a hard afternoon’s graft blackcurrant picking, dad said there was something on the telly about the Tristan people. In truth they slipped through my mind a little.
‘They’re going back,’ said dad. ‘
‘What?’ I replied incredulously.
They were sending them back to that stinking rock? At least another stick to beat the hated Tories with. The thought that they’d go back by choice had eluded my brain’s possibilities like everyone elses’. But they had. They’d bloody only gone and given a fucking big v-sign to civilisation!

I MUSED DOWN THE EXPRESSO BAR… WHO WERE THE REBELS NOW?