History of Kiribati: First People, British Rule and Independence | Sea Life, Islands and Oceania

KIRIBATI

Kiribati (pronounced KEER-a-boss) is an independent central Pacific nation with a socialist government whose main sources of foreign currency include copra exports and fishermen in search of bonefish and marlin. It became independent from Britain in 1979 and consists of 33 low-lying coral atolls surrounded by extensive reefs scattered over 3,860 kilometers (2,400 miles) of sea near the equator in area of almost 4 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles) of the open Pacific Ocean. The capital is Tarawa (Bairik). It was settled primarily by people from the Gilbert islands and other parts of Micronesia.

Kiribati includes 8 of the 11 Line Islands, including Kiritimati (formerly Christmas Island), as well as the Gilbert and Phoenix groups and Banaba (formerly Ocean Island). The population is nearly all Micronesian, with about half concentrated on south Tarawa. English is the official language, and Kiribati, a Micronesian language, is also spoken. Some 50 percent of the inhabitants are Roman Catholic, while 40 percent are Protestant. |~|

British navigators first visited the islands during the late 18th century. They became a British protectorate in 1892. Kiribati achieved full independence within the British Commonwealth in 1979. Phosphate mining dominated the economy until 1980, when production ended because of diminishing resources. Agriculture is now the major economic activity. The land area of Kiribati is only 717 square kilometers (277 square miles).

Kiribati Names and Identity

Official Name: Republic of Kiribati; conventional short form: Kiribati; local long form: Republic of Kiribati; local short form: Kiribati; Former name: Gilbert Islands. The name is the local pronunciation of "Gilberts," the former designation of the islands; originally named after explorer Thomas Gilbert, who mapped many of the islands in 1788. The Gilbert Islands were part of a British colony called the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. [Source: CIA World Factbook 2023]

Name of the People: noun: I-Kiribati (singular and plural); adjective: Kiribati. The people are also known as kaini Kiribati, Gilbertese and Tungaru. I-Kiribati or. "Kiribati" is a transliteration of Colony. The Kiribati name for the Gilbert Islands is Tungaru, and the archipelago's inhabitants sometimes refer to themselves as I-Tungaru.

Island of origin is an important aspect of identification that predates colonialism, and I-Kiribati differentiate themselves by birthplace. Almost all of the citizens of Kiribati have at least some I-Kiribati ancestors and have inherited land rights in the Gilbert Islands.

First People in Kiribati

Kiribati is made up of three distinct island groups: the Gilbert Islands, the Line Islands, and the Phoenix Islands. The first Austronesian voyagers arrived in the Gilbert Islands as early as 3000 B.C., but these islands were not widely settled until about A.D. 200 by Micronesians. [Source: CIA World Factbook, 2023]

About 3000 B.C. speakers of the Austronesian languages, probably from Taiwan (Formosa), mastered the art of long-distance canoe travel and spread themselves, or their languages, south to the Philippines and Melanesia and east to the islands of Micronesia. The Polynesians branched off and occupied Polynesian Triangle to the east.

Some have theorized that these people traveled first to the Philippines and Indonesia. Then they made it the coast and islands of New Guinea. After that they moved eastward towards Fiji and the Pacific islands in that area and possibly westward to Madagascar. The last place to be reached were New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island.

Dates and routes are uncertain, but they seem to have started from the Bismarck Archipelago, went east past Fiji to Samoa and Tonga about 1500 B.C.. By A.D. 100 they were in the Marquesas Islands and A.D. 300-800 in Tahiti, west of the Marquesas.

Bernd Lambert wrote in the “Encyclopedia of World Cultures”: “On linguistic and archaeological grounds, it is likely that voyagers from southern Melanesia arrived in the Gilberts long before A.D. 600, the earliest radiocarbon date obtained up to the 1990s. Kiribati language and culture show signs of borrowing from western Polynesia at some time after the islands were settled. [Source: Bernd Lambert, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Volume 2: Oceania,” edited by Terence E. Hays, 1991 |~|]

Early Inhabitants of Kiribati

The islands that make up Kiribati were settled over hundreds of years by successive waves of migrants from Micronesia, Tonga, and Fiji. Fijians and Tongans arrive during the 14th century and subsequently merge with the already established groups to form the traditional I-Kiribati Micronesian society and culture. Extensive intermarriage has produced a population reasonably homogeneous in appearance and traditions.

The Gilbert Islands were originally settled by Micronesian peoples from Southeast Asia between the A.D. 11th and 14th centuries. The early society of the Gilbert Islanders was influenced by subsequent invasions of Tongans and Fijians, who introduced Melanesian and Polynesian elements to the native Gilbertese culture. [Source: “Gale Encyclopedia of World History: Governments”, 2008 Thomson Gale]

According to their oral tradition, the Gilbert Islanders laid eyes on South America many centuries before Columbus. After a four month voyage they reputedly saw the Andes mountains and turned around and went back home, describing what they saw as "the wall at the side of the world...a wall of mountains up against the sun.”

Around 1300, Samoans and Tongans invaded the southern Gilbert Islands, bringing Polynesian cultural elements with them. Later arrivals by Fijians brought Melanesian elements to the Gilbert Islands. Extensive intermarriage between the Micronesian, Polynesian, and Melanesian people led to the creation of what would become Gilbertese cultural traditions by the time Europeans spotted the islands in the 1600s. The Phoenix Islands and Line Islands were both visited by various Melanesian and Polynesian peoples, but their isolation and lack of natural resources meant that long-term settlements were not possible and both island groups were uninhabited by the time of European contact. [Source: CIA World Factbook, 2023]

The main wave of settlers is thought to have come from Samoa in the 13th century, but Gilbertese tradition suggests that the Samoans were not early settlers. The political and social structure of all the islands except for Butaritari-Makin and Banaba was forcibly unified, possibly in the seventeenth century, when armies led by Kaitu, Beru, and Uakeia of Nikunau introduced the meetinghouse organization. [Source: Bernd Lambert, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Volume 2: Oceania,” edited by Terence E. Hays, 1991 |~|]

First Europeans in Kiribati

The islands of what is now Kiribati were first sighted by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century, but it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that Europeans made any meaningful contact there. [Source: Worldmark Encyclopedia of National Economies, 2002 The Gale Group]

The first Europeans to lay eyes on the islands were Spanish explorers who sighted Christmas Island in 1537. The English sea captain James Cook encountered the islands in 1777. In 1788 Captain Thomas Gilbert charted many of the islands, naming them after himself. Some early European explorers described the inhabitants as cannibals.

Kiribati experienced sustained European contact by the 1760s; all three island groups were named and charted by 1826. The first British settlers arrived in 1837.

Whalers and Slave Traders in the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati)

The Gilbert Islands were a favorite whaling ground, and deserting crews began to settle on the islands in the 1830s. Trading ships were calling there regularly by the 1850s, and a flourishing copra and coconut trade was established by the 1860s, as well as an illicit human traffic.

Regular contacts with Europeans and Americans began when merchant ships started sailing new routes across the Pacific. Whaling ships, coconut oil traders, and slave merchants arrived in greater numbers throughout the 1800s. The introduction of European religious customs, diseases, and weapons disrupted native life, exacerbating conflicts among the local tribes. The Europeans forced many native Gilbertese into slave labor on plantations on the larger islands. [Source: “Gale Encyclopedia of World History: Governments”, 2008 Thomson Gale]

In the late 1800s many islanders were often taken against their will to work abroad. Blackbirders sent Gilbert Islanders to Guatemala, Mexico and Peru to work in plantations and mines there. In 1869, Captain Blackett of the vessel Moaroa was chartered to acquire labourers. He bought 150 Gilbert Islanders from another blackbirding ship for £5 per head. On transferring them to Moaroa, the islanders, including another 150 already imprisoned on the vessel, rebelled killing Blackett and some of the crew. The remaining crew managed to isolate the islanders to a part of the ship and then used explosives to blow them up. Close to 200 people were killed in this incident with Moaroa still able to offload about 60 surviving labourers at Tahiti. [Source: Wikipedia]

British Colonization of the Gilbert Islands

Resident traders bought coconut oil from 1846 to the 1870s and then switched to copra, which remains Kiribati's sole agricultural export.The Office of British High Commissioner to the Western Pacific was created in 1877 to help suppress abuses by recruiting ships seeking labor for overseas service.

In 1888, Christmas, Fanning (now Tabuaeran), and Washington (now Teraina) islands were annexed by the British, and Phoenix Island was placed under their protection. In 1892, to block growing U.S. influence in the region. the Gilbert Islands became a protectorate of Great Britain and were joined with the Ellice Islands protectorate in 1916 to form the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony. In that year, Banaba, Fanning Island (Tabuaeran), Washington Island (Teraina), and the Union Islands (Tokelau) became part of the colony,

The Gilbert and Ellice Islands (the Ellice Islands are now the independent country of Tuvalu) consented to becoming British protectorate in an effort to restore order there. A handful of administrators established local native governments, and a period of stability ensued. Phosphate-rich Ocean (Banaba) Island was annexed to the protectorate in 1900 after Sir Albert Ellis's discovery of valuable phosphate deposits there.

The Gilbert and Ellice groups (including Ocean, Fanning, and Washington islands) were declared a British colony in 1916. Some Line Islands, including Kiritimati (Christmas) Atoll, were added in 1916 and 1919, with the final ones added in 1972. British control was extended to the uninhabited Phoenix group in 1937, but after the United States laid claim to Canton and Enderbury, a joint British-American administration over these islands was established because of their strategic location for aviation.

Disappearance of Amelia Earhart

On July 2, 1937, during one of the most difficult parts of her attempt to be the first the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in an airplane, the famed aviator Amelia Earhart, and her navigator Fred Noonan, disappeared in the central Pacific Ocean without a trace on their way to Howland Island after taking off from the city of Lae in Papua New Guinea.

Howland Island is an uninhabited coral island located just north of the equator in the central Pacific Ocean, about 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu. The island lies almost halfway between Hawaii and Australia and is an unorganized, unincorporated territory of the United States in the Phoenix Islands. Other Phoenix Islands are part of Kiribati.

There are some clues that Earhart may have crash landed on Nikumaroro Island, an atoll 420 miles southeast of Howland Island, in present-day Kiribati. In 1991, TIME reported that the FBI confirmed that an aluminum map case was recovered by aircraft archaeologists there. Experts at the time surmised that she may have landed on a reef, where “With temperatures up to 120ºF and no fresh water available, survival was virtually impossible,” TIME reported.

In 2015, Archaeology magazine reported: Could a piece of aluminum finally crack one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries? ...Various suggestive artifacts have turned up on uninhabited Nikumaroro Island, where Earhart and Noonan may have crash-landed. One of these items is a sheet of aluminum that some now think matches a patch that was put on Earhart’s plane during a stop in Miami. More investigation of the island is planned. [Source: Samir S. Patel Archaeology magazine, March-April 2015]

In 2018, a 12th expedition focused on Nikumaroro kicked off, backed in part by National Geographic. A forensic anthropologist believes bones found there could belong to Earhart. But other experts on Earhart believe that if she ended up there, plane parts would have been discovered by the three planes that flew over Nikumaroro and nearby islands five days after Earhart went down. [Source: Olivia B. Waxman, Time magazine, January 4, 2019]

World War II in the Gilbert Islands

Japan seized some of the northern Gilbert Islands in 1941 and occupied them and built a a 700-meter-long pier and a new airfield on the the islands of Makin and Tarawa. In 1943 the American attacked the Japanese forces there. One of the goals was seizing the airfield, which the Allies could use to island hop to Japanese-controlled Kwajalein, the world's largest atoll and the home of an important airbase

In November 1943, U.S. forces assaulted heavily fortified Japanese positions on Tarawa Atoll in the Gilberts, resulting in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Pacific campaign. The battle was the site of major US amphibious victories over entrenched Japanese garrisons and a turning point for the war in the Central Pacific. |~|

U.S. Marine Corps were at the forefront of the battle and even today Tarawa is the site of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. Marine Corps history. The Japanese were driven out but at the cost of heavy casualties on both sides. Ocean Island was liberated by the Australians in 1945.

Kiribati After World War II

Britain continued to rule the Gilbert Island after World War II. It used Kiritimati Island as a nuclear testing site.

According to the “Encyclopedia of World Cultures”: “ The phosphate mine on Banaba provided most of the colony's revenue and employment for its people from 1900 until the deposits were exhausted in the year of independence; I-Kiribati still mine phosphate on the neighboring independent island of Nauru. Since 1967, the Marine Training School has made it possible for many young men to get jobs as seamen on West German ships and to add greatly to their families' incomes through remittances. [Source: Bernd Lambert, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Volume 2: Oceania,” edited by Terence E. Hays, 1991 |~|]

Britain began expanding self-government in the islands during the 1960s. Despite a centralized colonial government, a schism developed over time between the culturally and linguistically different Gilbert and Ellice Islanders concerning jobs and other political issues. This ultimately resulted in the Ellice Islands separated from the colony in 1975 and declared their independence in 1978 to become Tuvalu in 1978. In contrast to Kiribati, Tuvalu opted for membership in the British Commonwealth.

Kiribati Becomes and Independent Nation

The Gilberts obtained internal self-government in 1977, and became an independent nation on the Gilberts, Banaba, and the Phoenix and Line Islands became the independent Republic of Kiribati on July 12, 1979,.

The first step toward independence was taken in 1967, when the Gilbert Islands were granted a House of Representatives. It gained self-rule in 1971. In 1974 residents of the Ellice Islands voted to break away from the Gilberts to form a separate colony, becoming the nation of Tuvalu in 1976. In September, 1979 the new nation of Kiribati signed a treaty of friendship with the United States (ratified by the US Senate in 1983), by which the United States relinquished its claim to the Line and Phoenix groups (including Canton, Enderbury, and Malden). |~|

In 1994, Kiribati adjusted the international date line to the east of the Line Islands, bringing all islands in the country to the same day and giving Kiribati the earliest time zone in the world. In 1999, Kiribati gained United Nations membership along with Nauru and Tonga.

Image Sources:

Text Sources: CIA World Factbook, 2023; “Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Volume 2: Oceania,” edited by Terence E. Hays, 1991, Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, BBC, CNN, and various books, websites and other publications.

Last updated September 2023