The history of Kiribati

Kiribati is a nation of 32 low atolls and one raised coral island, Banaba, scattered across more than three million square kilometres of the central Pacific on both sides of the equator. Its people, the I-Kiribati, are descendants of Austronesian navigators who settled the Gilbert Islands long before Europeans arrived, and who built a society of clans, meeting houses and rival chiefdoms. Britain made the Gilberts a protectorate in 1892 and then a colony whose finances depended on stripping the phosphate from Banaba. After the battle of Tarawa in 1943 and British and American nuclear tests in the Line Islands, the colony became independent in 1979, and today its main concerns are its fragile economy and the threat that rising seas pose to islands only a few metres high.

The Gilbert Islands, which their people call Tungaru, were settled by Austronesian seafarers who probably came north from the area of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Estimates of when they arrived range from about 3000 BCE to around 1300 CE, because coral atolls preserve little archaeological evidence. Oral historians tell of an early people from the south and of later voyagers from a western land called Matang. Around 1300 a large migration from Samoa brought Polynesian clans and customs, and contacts with Tonga and Fiji added more, but frequent voyaging and intermarriage between the islands produced one people with one language. The skills of these navigators belong to the wider tradition of Pacific wayfinding.

Life on the atolls depended on coconut, pandanus, fish and babai, a giant swamp taro grown in pits dug down to the freshwater lens. Society was organised around kin groups and the maneaba, the great meeting house where each clan had its fixed sitting place. From about the fifteenth century two political systems emerged. The northern islands came under hereditary high chiefs, the uea, while the central and southern islands were governed by councils of elders, the unimwaane. Tabiteuea, whose name is said to mean "chiefs are forbidden", kept a particularly egalitarian order. Wars over land and blood feuds were common, fought with spears and swords edged with shark teeth by warriors wearing armour of thick woven coconut fibre.

The first recorded European sighting came in 1606, when the Spanish expedition of Pedro Fernandes de Queirós passed Butaritari and Makin. In 1788 the British captains Thomas Gilbert and John Marshall, sailing from New South Wales to China after delivering convicts to Botany Bay, passed through the chain, and a Russian chart later named it after Gilbert. On the far side of the modern country, James Cook came upon an uninhabited atoll on Christmas Eve 1777 and called it Christmas Island, now Kiritimati.

From the 1820s whaling ships worked the grounds along the equator, and beachcombers, castaways and traders settled on the atolls. Coconut oil and then copra became the main exports. Firearms sold by traders, and sometimes warships' guns lent to favoured chiefs, made local wars deadlier. High Chief Tembinok' of Abemama, who controlled the trade of three atolls and was described by Robert Louis Stevenson after his visit in 1889, was the last of these expansionist rulers. Between 1845 and 1895 more than 9,000 I-Kiribati were recruited, often by fraud or force in the practice known as blackbirding, to labour on plantations in Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii and further afield, and most never returned.

Christianity arrived through rival missions. Hiram Bingham II of the Boston-based American Board settled on Abaiang in 1857, the London Missionary Society worked from Samoa in the southern islands from 1870, and Catholicism was introduced on Nonouti around 1880 by two Gilbertese converts returning from Tahiti, followed by Sacred Heart missionaries in 1888. The churches became central institutions on every island.

An Anglo-German agreement of 1886 placed the Gilberts in the British sphere. In 1892 Captain Edward Davis of HMS Royalist declared a protectorate over the Gilbert Islands and the neighbouring Ellice Islands, now Tuvalu, under the Western Pacific High Commission in Fiji. In 1900 the prospector Albert Ellis found rich phosphate on Banaba, then called Ocean Island, and Britain annexed it the same year. The Pacific Phosphate Company, and from 1920 the British Phosphate Commissioners acting for Britain, Australia and New Zealand, dug out the island to fertilise farms abroad, eventually removing about nine-tenths of its surface. The Banabans received small royalties and were pressured into selling their land.

The territory became the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony in 1916, governed from Banaba, and later absorbed the Line Islands and the Phoenix Islands, where the government settled Gilbertese families from crowded atolls in the late 1930s. The early administration, notably under Resident Commissioner William Telfer Campbell, was criticised for forced labour, and colonial regulations governed village life in detail. The colony formed part of the British Empire but received little investment beyond what the phosphate trade required.

During the Second World War, forces of the Empire of Japan occupied Tarawa, Butaritari and other northern islands in December 1941, and Banaba in August 1942. On 20 November 1943 United States Marines landed on Betio islet at Tarawa, and in three days about 1,000 Americans and almost all of the roughly 4,500 Japanese and Korean defenders died. The Gilbertese suffered heavily too. On Banaba, where the Japanese had used the islanders as forced labour, troops murdered all but one of the remaining Gilbertese in August 1945, after the war had ended; a single man, Kabunare Koura, survived. Britain then resettled the surviving Banabans on Rabi Island in Fiji, bought with phosphate royalties, where most of their descendants still live.

After the war the colonial capital moved to Tarawa. In 1957 and 1958 Britain tested hydrogen bombs at Malden Island and Kiritimati, and the United States carried out a further series of atmospheric tests off Kiritimati in 1962, during the Cold War. Servicemen and local people were exposed to fallout, and veterans' claims continue.

The colony moved towards self-government in the 1960s and 1970s. The Polynesian Ellice Islanders voted in 1974 to separate, and the two administrations were divided on 1 January 1976. The Gilberts gained internal self-government in 1977, and Ieremia Tabai, aged 27, became chief minister in 1978. Kiribati became an independent republic within the Commonwealth on 12 July 1979, taking as its name the Gilbertese spelling of "Gilberts" so that it would cover the Line and Phoenix Islands as well. In the Treaty of Tarawa that year the United States gave up its claims to fourteen islands in those groups. Banabans who had campaigned to be separated and placed under Fiji were given a reserved seat in parliament and the return of mined land.

Tabai led the country until 1991. Teburoro Tito, president from 1994 to 2003, moved the International Date Line in 1995 so that the far-flung republic shared a single day, which also made the Line Islands the first inhabited land to greet the year 2000. Kiribati joined the United Nations in 1999. Under Anote Tong, president from 2003 to 2016, the country became one of the most prominent voices on climate change, warning that its atolls could become uninhabitable this century, and in 2014 it bought land on Vanua Levu in Fiji as a safeguard for food security and possible relocation.

Taneti Maamau became president in 2016. His government dropped the emphasis on "migration with dignity" in favour of development and plans to raise and reinforce the islands. In 2019 it switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China, a move criticised by Western partners and by some of his own party. In 2022 the government suspended the country's superior court judges in a dispute that became a constitutional crisis, and Kiribati briefly left the Pacific Islands Forum before rejoining in 2023. The country kept COVID-19 out until January 2022, when infections arrived on a repatriation flight. After the governing Tobwaan Kiribati Party won a large majority in the August 2024 parliamentary election, it prevented opposition members from being nominated for president, and Maamau won a third and final term on 25 October 2024 with about 55 per cent of the vote. Most of the population now lives on crowded South Tarawa, and the country depends on fishing licences, remittances and foreign aid.