The Anglo-French condominium or joint administration of the New
Hebrides formed between 1904 and 1906 against a sinister backdrop. The southwestern
Pacific islands of Melanesia had for decades attracted the attention of nineteenth-century
Church of England, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Catholic missionaries, whose
motives ranged from the genuinely enlightened to the expedient and nakedly sectarian.
At the enlightened end was a deep concern for indigenous people who were target and victims of the criminal trade in indentured labor for the cane fields of Queensland
and indeed many other places and purposes, a form of illegal serfdom that had existed since the 1860s to which successive colonial governments turned a blind eye. Annexation by Australia or by Britain was
urged upon Whitehall therefore as a way of eradicating this form of modern slavery.
At the same time it was also feared that if annexation did not take place the
islands would be turned into a French penal colony, possibly worse even than
Devil’s Island, and a further concern was obviously that the indigenous
people would inevitably become francophone and therefore Catholic. Ironically
considerable opposition to annexation came from the “White Australia” lobby,
which was sufficiently developed at this date to argue for the abolition of the
traffic in kanak labor not upon humanitarian grounds but rather for the purpose
of racial purification. Beyond this hideous rationale, the White Australia lobby
had already succeeded in persuading inter-colonial legislatures to enact impossibly
high tariffs on maize, coconuts, and other crops from the New Hebrides
so as to discourage trade with the coloured islanders, a state of affairs to which the
French gleefully responded by encouraging and extending the flow of commodities back and forth between Port
Vila and Noumea, the chief port in their thriving nickel and copper colony of New
Caledonia. According to the veteran Scottish missionary Dr. John Gibson Paton, the New
Hebridean islanders used to call themselves Queen Victoria’s children, and by
1904 were calling themselves the children of Queen Victoria’s son. No doubt
they had long been encouraged to do so by British missionaries, but he thought
annexation was in the best interests of the islanders, of the Commonwealth, and
of the Empire, and that the proposed condominium was a thoroughly bad idea. Of
course this view did not prevail in the end, and it is interesting to observe
that the condominium was at first interpreted by the Conservative opposition to the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman at
Westminster as a dangerous concession that undermined British imperial
interests everywhere, particularly in the partly French-speaking colony of Newfoundland
(not yet a part of Canada), and by the predominantly white dominions themselves
as a potentially unwelcome threat to “progressive unity” between their interests
and those of the imperial capital. Old debates can be extraordinarily
revealing, and battle-lines over long-forgotten issues not necessarily easily
comprehended. In these circumstances, and balancing these arguments against
current orthodoxies, it is hard to know whether one would have been for or
against the annexation of the New Hebrides, or indeed for or against the Anglo-French condominium.
Fortunately the issue is unlikely to arise again in this particular form, although
the Republic of Vanuatu, as the New Hebrides are now known, is seriously threatened by
the gradual but inexorable rise in sea level, so the fate of its
gentle Melanesian population may again claim the moral attention of the world.
One of the most bizarre consequences of the Entente Cordiale of 1904,
that set of friendly agreements between France and Britain mostly relating to
the two nations’ colonial possessions all over the world, and especially those that
abutted, was the establishment in 1906 of the “condominium” by which France and
Britain jointly administered the New Hebrides. That island group in the South
Pacific achieved independence in 1980 and has since been known as the Republic
of Vanuatu.
The first European encounter with the islands took place in 1605 when a Spanish expedition named them Espiritu Santo. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville “re-discovered” the locality in 1768, and Captain James Cook followed in 1774. Cook named the islands New Hebrides. The French and British showed little interest in the islands before the 1860s, and both laid claim to the New Hebrides in the 1880s, but with distinct lack of enthusiasm. The condominium effectively resolved this competition, and divided the New Hebrides into two separate
but nevertheless intermingled communities—English- and French-speaking. For most of the remainder of the twentieth century
this curious arrangement insured that there were two currencies circulating side-by-side in the same tills,
two sets of immigration procedures for bemused visitors to choose between, two
justice systems, two education systems, effectively two colonial governments, each exactly
mirroring the other, but naturally reflecting the different methods of colonial administration practiced in London and Paris. The British and French each appointed a co-equal “resident” from the Foreign Office in Whitehall and
from the Quai d’Orsay, and their staff on the ground in Port Vila emphasized dualism to the
point of farce. Every European official in one residency had an opposite number
in the other with whom he was required to consult but with whom he rarely
agreed. The condominium thus
shared jurisdiction over the postal service, for example, but
postage stamps were either British or French, and paid for with pounds sterling
or francs issued by the Banque de l’Indochine. Indigenous people could choose whether to be tried under the
British common law or the French civil law. Nationals of one country could
set up corporations under the laws of the other. In addition to these two
legal systems, a third court existed to handle cases involving traditional Melanesian
customs and usage. Further, Britain and France agreed that the judge presiding over this native
court should be appointed by the King of Spain in order that he could also decide
with impartiality certain cases in which the French and British judges’
opinions or even whole branches of law were in conflict. The origin of this otherwise inexplicable arrangement was picturesquely historical. As well, there were
two prison systems to complement the two different “national” courts. The police force was
technically unified but consisted of two co-chiefs and equal numbers of officers
wearing different uniforms. Each half strictly alternated their duties and
assignments. The Union Jack and the
Tricouleur were raised each morning in perfect synchronization, and flew
side-by-side. When one or the other had to fly at
half-mast, the other gallantly followed suit. Language was not the only barrier to
the operation of this crazy system—because all documents had to be translated
once to be understood by one side, and the response translated back again for the other. Bislama creole created further complications, although for those who could speak it Bislama did form an informal bridge
between the British and the French administrations. The condominium was further
strained by the radically different purpose each country had for being in
the New Hebrides in the first place. Britain’s colonization of these and many other islands in the South Pacific was driven
not by the Colonial Office in Whitehall, which consistently resisted their gradual annexation, but
rather by pressure placed on the imperial government through the 1870s and 1880s by Australian and New Zealand
colonists with voracious commercial ambitions, and a corresponding need to prevent them from doing too
much harm. The French, by contrast, took a much more active interest in the
region, largely to protect their much larger commercial interests in New Caledonia, and in turn
their even more profitable strategic presence in French Indo-China. We are still living with the consequences of that. During the post-war period the
rationale for the Anglo-French condominium was somewhat extended by the dirty business of
testing atomic devices in remote atolls, reefs, and islands—the anxious and increasingly paranoid quest for the
H-bomb. However, that it worked for more than seventy years, or even at all, seems
to me utterly remarkable.
