Lightning Meets the West Wind: The Malaita Massacre

William Bell, the colonial government representative on Malaita, Solomon Islands, was murdered while collecting taxes in October 1927. The party of native police with him were also massacred. Bell was an Australian, a towering figure in the pacification of the wildest island in the Pacific, and his murder by the Kwaio warrior leader Basiana was the end of a confrontation between two strong men and two opposing ways of life. Basiana and his followers feared a pervasive threat to their ancestral way of life, and decided to challenge the power of Empire by killing its most forceful representative. The Kwaio people have never recovered from the subsequent random killing of the ‘Malaitamen’ by the Australian planters and volunteers requested by the British government, who arrived on the Australian gunboat, H.M.A.S. Adelaide. In this book anthropologist Roger M. Keesing, who has spent 16 years among the Kwaio, and academic historian Peter Corris (who later became a crime fiction writer), reconstruct for the first time from both sides the events leading up to Bell’s murder and its aftermath.