Refusing To Grow Up In Melanesia Has Dire Consequences

Melanesia is caught at the cross-roads of change: of old ways and new ways. Like a tidal wave hitting our shores, the modern changes has brought with it its rubbish. But we have a choice: the good of the old ways we must keep and the bad we must let go. Similarly, the good of the new ways we must adopt and the bad discarded.

Caught at this cross-road of the new ways and the old ways is our 'youths', especially adult youths who are indecisive about growing up and urged on by modern sayings such as "growing old is compulsory but growing up is voluntary." In Melanesia, growing up has no time limits but such modern ideas propogate this confusion and gives the license and the reason not to act our age especially if you are or think that you are in the youth category.

The Melanesian youth must know our identity. Some of which are as shared by Menom A Barok.

The late Bernard Narokobi has this to say about getting to know our true self, "We [Melanesians] are not a people of no consequence. Our history grew from our own solid shores. We must always question the motives of the do-gooders and all the forces that are at work to change us" and encourages us to refuse to grow up.

If we knew our true identity and question the forces that are at work to change us, we will not refuse to grow up and we will not fall into a lot of the anti-citizenship behaviours and issues confronting us today in Melanesia.

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THE MODERN MELANESIAN YOUTH; How Our Male Youths Today Define Themselves

By Menon A Barok

The UN defines a youth as a person between the 15 & 24 years of age.

However, according to our once structured Melanesian Hausman Traditions, a male youth was a person who had not yet reached the higher conscience of morality; a person who lacked the understanding of societal compliance guidelines & the capacity towards the execution of generic responsibilities as per their social job descriptions as endorsed by cultural norms. Thus in our Melanesian version of youth, it can be a person who reached the mid childhood stage (some1 who kept following matured malemembers around), & who would be spending the rest of his adolescence life at a Hausboi to learn the trades of his next chapter of life as a MAN.

Maturity is reached after an hausman initiation ceremony when a person would understand his ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES; it is never about reaching a certain age group as not all people are socially & biologically dictated by a common timeline.

When the Hausman Initiation Tradition was replaced by the whiteman with his education system, LIBERTY was emphasized more on our youths' social development rather than RESPONSIBILITY.

With the Hausman concept dissolved, our youths today are given more freedom & rights today to express themselves. With no common platform (hausman ideology) in place to keep our male youths to be accountable to their own actions, they had develoed new terms of references as what is to be males.

Our once social & moral terms to masculinity such as respect to parents, physical hard work, family commitment, clan loyalty, are now replaced by social loafing, stubbornness & rebellion against parents, & backstabbing of clan members.

Our youths today have developed a culture where to be called a male one has to have a lot of girlfriends, involved in drunkard brawls, school cults, high use of intoxicated social remedies like marijuana & steam, & disrespectful to authorities.

These adopted values, as most youths had believed in them, have now become the Male Initiation Rites, or the passage to Manhood.

These problems are man-made. We need more Social Engineers & Moral Architects to reverse these processes & reform these ideologies before we might stumble onto a future where our youths would become the face of corruption rather than politicians.