A Picture is Worth 651 Words:A Tongan Gravestone

byJohn Connell

Photograph by the author

International migration dominates thelives of people in most small island states,whether in the Caribbean, the Atlanticor the Pacific oceans. Migration has beencrucial in the Pacific island state of Tongafor half a century. Tonga, with a popula-tion of some 110,000 scattered throughfour different groups, has more ethnicTongans overseas than at home (Figure 1).Most of these have migrated to the metro-politan states on the edge of the Pacific,notably the United States, Australia andNew Zealand.

Tonga has a primarily agriculturaleconomy supplemented with a little tour-ism and fishing. But Tonga is small andvery far from markets and even in goodyears, when squash and tuna are sold toJapan, exports are dwarfed by imports.Overseas aid makes up some of the differ-ence and money sent back from migrantsoverseas, often for more than a quarter ofa century after migrating, make up muchof the remainder of the deficit.

As Tonga has increasingly modern-ized, the population has become more con-centrated on the main island Tongatapuand in the capital city Nuku’alofa (Fig-ure 2). Some 70,000 people now live onthe main island, and half of them live intown. By contrast the population of smal-ler islands where economic opportunitiesare few, has declined for many years, espe-cially in the remote Niuas group and thecentral Ha’apai chain of islands.

Migrants move overseas to improvetheir access to employment and income, somigration has been invariably accompa-nied by a flow of remittances back to kinin the islands, sometimes money andsometimes goods such as furniture, clothesand even cars. Some of these are sold inthe week-end flea market to generate a lit-tle more income for the recipients. So sub-stantial are remittance flows that in onlyone country in the world, Tajikistan, dothey make a greater contribution to the

national economy. Tonga depends on itsmigrants for sustainable development andsurvival.

Twenty years ago the Americananthropologist George Marcus describedwhat he called the ‘transnational corporation

Figure 1. This Tongan tombstone tells the story of Tongan mobility.

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of kin’: a situation where households stra-tegically sent kin to different parts of theworld, deliberately taking note of differenteconomic conditions in different destina-tions and effectively reducing risk bylocating kin in several economies and sev-eral places. In other words, familiesbehaved rather like large corporations –spreading their assets, the human capitalof their children, to diverse and profitabledestinations. Families could therefore besplit between countries and continents.

A Tongan gravestone brings this dra-matically to life, even if, ironically, indeath. ‘Ofa Moala was born on the tinyisland of Ha’ano in the Ha’apai group in1913 and died in the capital city Nuku’alo-

fa in 1997. By then, the majority of hereight children had scattered – just threeremained in Tonga, all of them in differentparts of Nuku’alofa. None were left inHa’apai. Five were overseas; two each inthe United States and Australia and one inNew Zealand. And they too had scattered.Between Perth and Sydney there arealmost four thousand kilometres andnearly as many kilometres separate Dallasand Spokane. Her transnational corpora-tion of kin is engraved on her tombstone.

While the Tongan economy may bene-fit from migration and almost everyhousehold in the country receives someremittances from overseas, there are somesocial costs. Families are divided and

though kinship ties remain close, there issomething particularly poignant about anold lady dying in Nuku’alofa with herchildren scattered across many thousandsof kilometres. A sense of loss pervades thissmall part of a Tongan graveyard.

Reference

Marcus, G.E. 1993. ‘‘Tonga’s Contempo-rary Globalizing Strategies: Tradingon Sovereignty Amidst InternationalMigration’’, in Harding, T. and B. Wal-lace, eds, Contemporary Pacific Societies.Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,pp. 21–33.

Figure 2. The Tongan island of Tongatapu and its location within the Pacific region (Cartography credit: Kevin Cary, Western KentuckyUniversity, Department of Geography and Geology).

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