They came to light on the activist scene of the 1970s and 1980s driven by the revolt of the time, but above all as actors of the Kanak identity awakening. Wives, sisters and daughters then left, not without difficulty, their invisible condition in the tribes of New Caledonia to take their place in society as a whole. “Women are ready, maybe men are not, but that’s their problem,” said ironically the leader Déwé Gorodey (1949-2022), a university graduate and independence activist.
With her, others inspired an entire generation, such as Suzanne Ouneï (1945-2016), who chained herself to the gates of the High Commission of the Republic in Nouméa, or Françoise Machoro, the respected activist.
Since then, emancipation has progressed but courage is still needed from those who testify in the documentary by Dominique Roberjot and Christine Della-Maggiora, Kanak Women, the Pioneers. These strong-willed figures must overcome sincere modesty. They also display intact respect for their “clan”, “family”, “tradition”, which represent for them both possible confinement and the basis of freedom.
“We live in the in-between”
Lucia Xewe, the first Kanak doctor in economics, today a parliamentary collaborator who we follow in her work at the Congress of New Caledonia, cannot hold back her tears. “I learned not to talk. To leave room. It was a work on me to express myself. » Monique Poma, engineer in the northern nickel factory, KNS, relates the “clash of conscience between the men of the generation of [her] parents and that of [her] brothers and sisters”. She made her brother proud the day she became an engineer, “the only one in the tribe”; but she still admits: “We live in the in-between. »
In the French Pacific territory, the 2000s were those of modernity for Kanak women. The major political agreements of Matignon in 1988 and Nouméa in 1998 built peace in the former colony and reorganized New Caledonian society. “Our children have everything within their reach, more chances of succeeding,” agrees Monique Poma’s mother. After the ethnic rebalancing between Europeans and Kanaks, it remains, here perhaps more than elsewhere, to rebalance the place of men and women, as Lisa Kibangui, family affairs judge at the Nancy judicial court, says.
The autonomous Caledonian government has played its part in the progress made: development of training for all, parity in institutions, promotion of executives, legislation authorizing abortion (twenty-five years after the Veil law). The future remains largely to be written on these subjects too, at a time when the territory’s independence and loyalist political leaders are trying to agree on a future institutional status for New Caledonia.
