So we can afford bullet trains but cannot pay teachers: Lessons from a South Pacific civilisation

Striking teachers demonstrate in the streets of Nakuru on September 9, 2015. Teachers have said they will not be intimidated into going back to work. PHOTO | SULEIMAN MBATIAH | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Nature has hardly provided it with anything fit for man to eat or drink and as the natives are but few and may be supposed to plant no more than sufficient for themselves, they cannot have much to spare to newcomers.”
  • For transporting the statues from the quarries where they were carved and erecting them is no mean feat even with modern technology, let alone the Easter Islanders stone-age tools.
  • From Egyptian and Mayan pyramids to Stonehenge and the Great Zimbabwe, history is replete with mysterious marvels of past civilisations that left behind no clue of how they did it and whence they went.

Thursday, March 17, 1774. “No nation will ever contend for the honour of discovery of Easter Island as there is hardly an island in this sea which affords less refreshments, and conveniences for shipping than it does.

Nature has hardly provided it with anything fit for man to eat or drink and as the natives are but few and may be supposed to plant no more than sufficient for themselves, they cannot have much to spare to newcomers.”

When Captain Cook landed on Easter Island in March 1774, he must have been surprised that it was inhabited at all. A solitary 100 square-kilometre volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific, 3,600km west of the Chilean coastline and 2,000km east of Polynesia, Easter Island is the ultimate middle of nowhere.

The inhabitants, who he recognised as Polynesians, in his estimation, did not “exceed six or seven hundred souls”.

BURIAL SITES

“Of their religion and government we can say nothing with certainty. The stupendous stone statues erected in different places along the coast are certainly no representation of any deity or places of worship, but the most probable burial places for certain tribes or families.

I saw myself a human skeleton lying in the foundation of one just covered with stones, what I call the foundation is an oblong square about 20 or 30 feet by 10 or 12 build of and faced with hewn stones of vast size, erected in so masterly a manner as sufficiently shows the ingenuity of the age in which they were built…Some pieces of carving were found amongst these people which were neither ill designed nor executed. They have no other tools than what are made of stone, bone, shells.”

The Easter Island monuments have fascinated and confounded scholars and tourists alike for three centuries. Who carved them? How were they transported and erected, and what became of the civilisation that made them? Surely, it could not be the ancestors of the few miserable Polynesian natives that Capt Cook found there.

For transporting the statues from the quarries where they were carved and erecting them is no mean feat even with modern technology, let alone the Easter Islanders stone-age tools.

Most of them are between four and six metres tall, about the height of a two-storey house — the tallest standing one is about the height of a five-floor building and weighs 75 tonnes.

The most famous attempt to solve the mystery was Thor Heyerdals “Kon-Tiki” expedition, in which he set out to prove that pyramid building Mayans could have sailed 3,000 kilometres on rafts to inhabit Easter Island.

Scholars have since established without doubt that the Polynesian Easter Island inhabitants, who call themselves the Rapa Nui, are indeed the descendants of the monument builders.

They call the statues moai and the platforms that Capt Cook described as masterfully erected are known as ahu. It is the Rapa Nui themselves who toppled the statues when their civilisation collapsed.

From Egyptian and Mayan pyramids to Stonehenge and the Great Zimbabwe, history is replete with mysterious marvels of past civilisations that left behind no clue of how they did it and whence they went. The unique thing about Easter Island statues is that the builders are still here, a pale shadow of their old civilisation.

Capt Cook was not the first European explorer to reach Easter Island. He was preceded by Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen in 1722. It is, in fact, Roggeveen who named the island Easter, and it is Roggeveen, who first posed the mystery of the statues.

First, the island was practically treeless. Yet to move the statues would have required a lot of timber and ropes. Second the inhabitants were not great seafarers. Their merchant fleet consisted of rudimentary canoes.

Yet, these poor technologically challenged people’s ancestors carved 887 massive stone statues and erected many of them miles away from the quarry where they were carved. What happened on Easter Island?

The most compelling account is that pieced together by geographer, physiologist and science populariser Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the best-selling sequel to the best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel.

The Rapa Nui settlers are estimated to have arrived on Easter Island around 900 AD. When they got there, the island was a jungle with fertile volcanic soils and some native animals and plenty of nesting sea birds.

The fishing was not good, as the island lacked coral reef — Capt Cook remarked that “the sea seems barren of fish for we could not catch any although we tried in several places”.

Easter Island is considerable further south than the tropical islands where the settlers came from and not ideal for their tropical crops, but that’s what to make do with.

They also brought with them chicken and rats — whether they took the rats purposefully or as stowaways is hard to tell.

The islanders mastered their new environment and flourished. At its peak, the population could have reached 15,000 comprising between 10 and 12 distinct communities — clans or tribes, if you like. The Polynesians were a class society, composed of chiefs and commoners.

Once the settlers prospered, the elite turned to what they have done throughout the ages — status seeking, self aggrandisement and conspicuous consumption.

It turns out that the settlers would have known how to transport and erect the huge sculptures.

The Polynesians were accomplished seafarers. They felled huge trees in the tropical jungles and made large ocean going dugout canoes (wakas) out of them.

They would then build a wooden ladder, load the canoe on it, and using ropes, slide the ladder all way to shoreline — a sort of mobile railway line. It is on such vessels that the settlers had sailed 2,000 kilometres to Easter Island.

Once the status rat race starts, there is no stopping it — you a buy big car, I buy a bigger one; a big house, I build bigger; the tallest skyscraper, I build taller. And so it was with the islanders.

The moai, which are in fact images of high-status ancestors, got grander and grander, including one still lying at the quarry that would have topped an eight-floor building, prompting Diamond to ponder: “Knowing what we know about Easter Island technology, it seems impossible that the islanders could have transported and erected it, and we have to wonder what megalomania possessed its carvers.”

At its peak, the carving and erecting of moai would have been the dominant economic activity on the island. To transport them, the islanders required a lot of timber and plenty of strong ropes, which were woven from barks of trees.

Carving was a prestigious occupation which no doubt commanded a premium wage. The whole enterprise required a lot of food. Experts estimate that the islanders would have been consuming 25 per cent more calories than if they’d been doing normal work: farming, fishing, weaving, building houses, etc.

Although the fishing was poor, the islanders’ diet consisted of a substantial amount of seafood, tuna and dolphins notably, which would have required robust boats out in the open seas to catch.

Archeological evidence shows these disappearing from the diet long before the end of the civilisation. Evidently, the islanders ran out of trees that could build seaworthy vessels. Unable to fish, they ate all the island’s native species of mammals and birds to extinction.

CHICKEN AND RATS

By the time Capt Cook arrived, the only sources of animal protein were the chicken and rats they had brought with them, of which he wrote: “Cocks and hens like ours which are small and few of them…nor did we see any quadrupeds, but rats which I believe they eat as I saw a man with some in hand which he seemed unwilling to part with.”

Why did the islanders not stop building monuments? Surely, it must have become apparent to them at some point that they were depleting their natural resources? We can’t be sure, but we can speculate.

The monument economy was controlled by the most powerful and influential people in society. Becoming a carver or other skilled craftsman in the monument industry was the surest way up the social ladder, and social status is a very powerful human motivator.

Far from challenging the building of monuments, the commoners would have been elbowing each other to get into it. Since we cannot agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we perhaps should not wonder why the Rapa Nui could not avert ecological suicide.

But even if they had, it would most likely have been too little too late. The ecological tipping point would have been reached long before the downward spiral became apparent.

They might have escaped, they would have lost their boat building and navigational knowledge having diverted all their capital resources — material and human — from seafaring to monument building. They were marooned.

The crop yields collapsed. When Cook arrived, most of the moai were strewn on the ground, deliberately toppled. The island had descended into civil war, with the tribes toppling each other’s monuments in warfare.

The islanders would not have kept economic accounts, but if they had done so the way we do, they would have registered very rapid economic growth.

Production and consumption of food would have been registering blistering growth as would have also investment in monuments, carving tools, transport equipment as well as farmland. What they would not have recorded was the consumption of natural capital — the forests.

They would not have noticed that most of their investment was going into unproductive assets.

When the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (Narc) assumed office in 2003, government revenue was only Sh200 billion. Narc hit a phenomenal Sh300 billion two years later and ran a Budget surplus. A two-trillion-shilling Budget was inconceivable.

Today, when we are collecting well over a trillion shillings, we have trouble finding Sh17 billion to pay teachers, but we did not think twice before borrowing 20 times that to build a railway next to another one.

Even after adjusting for inflation, the six-fold growth from a Sh300 billion to a Sh2 trillion Budget still works out to a three-fold increase. Over the same period, maize production has increased by a third, from 30 million to 40 million bags, barely keeping pace with population growth.

But cement production has more than kept pace, growing three-and-a-half times from less than two million to just under six million tonnes last year.

MONUMENTS

After the age of decadence, the Easter Islanders’ grand monuments gave way to little statues called moai kavakava. They depict stooping emaciated people with sunken cheeks and protruding rib cages.

The garbage heaps unearthed by archeologists include human bones cracked open, similar to the way animal bones are cracked to extract bone marrow.

The islanders’ folklore is obsessed with cannibalism. According to folklore, maximum offence was caused by taunting your adversary that “the flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth”.

David Ndii is the Managing Director of Africa Economics [email protected]