The anti-nuclear movement in Tahiti
How did opposition to nuclear testing in French Polynesia grow into a strong political movement with international support? The Swedish student, Anton Öhman, found the answer in the Bengt Danielsson archive at the Kon-Tiki Museum.
Protest in Papete, led by Oscar Temaru (photo: The B. Danielsson Archive, KTM).
You can read about this in a new master's thesis by Anton Öhman: The Witness Archives. An eco-phenomenological investigation of a nuclear cultural heritage regarding the atomic bomb tests in French Polynesia (Lund University, 2018).
1,250 kilometers southeast of Tahiti there is a small coral atoll that you may not have heard of. No, it is not the Raroia reef where the Kon-Tiki fleet ran aground in 1947, but the Moruroa atoll, which lies approx. 700 km further south. Both atolls are part of the Tuamotu Islands. The Kon-Tiki expedition brought the Swedish anthropologist and author Bengt E. Danielsson to the Tuamotu Islands. After a year of anthropological fieldwork at Raroia, Danielsson settled in Tahiti and became involved in local politics.
In 1966, French authorities began testing atomic bombs at Moruroa Atoll. Bengt Danielsson participated in a growing movement protesting these tests, both locally in Tahiti and around the world. Together with his wife, Marie-Thérese, he wrote a book - Moruroa mon Amour - in 1974 about this powerful international movement which eventually forced the French government to ban the tests. In 1995, then French President Jacques Chirac decided to resume nuclear bomb testing, again inspiring local resistance and an international protest movement.
Swedish anthropologist and writer, Bengt Emmerik Danielsson (photo: The B. Danielsson Archive, KTM).
Bengt Danielsson's archive is now deposited at the Kon-Tiki Museum. In the summer of 2017, Anton Öhman received a grant to work on cataloging the documents. Öhman chose to return to the archive when he started a master's program at the MACA program (Master in Applied Cultural Analysis) at Lund University. The result is his MA thesis. The study has now been completed and is available as The Witness Archives. An ecophenomenological investigation of a nuclear cultural heritage regarding the atomic bomb tests in French Polynesia.
The thesis examines the anti-nuclear movement in Polynesia based on the movement's own documents, which are abundantly represented in Bengt Danielsson's archive. The aim of the task was to map the material and see how it can be used as cultural heritage.
Anton Öhman (Photo: A. Öhman).
Öhman's research shows how relationships within and outside the archive appear, through a systematic analysis of the documents. It makes it possible to map the themes in the archive, which refer to various forms of relationships in the local and international anti-nuclear network. The main themes are: Personal stories as testimony; Activist tactics; Local and global resistance; Scientific Struggle; and the imagery of resistance.
Memories of popular movements, exemplified by the boycott of French wines carried out in Sweden in the 80s and 90s, inspired by Bengt and Marie-Thérèse Danielsson's activism against atomic bomb tests in Polynesia, are something that can anchor the archive in the local environment. The activism had a strong popular foundation.
The witness archive, created by the Danielsson family, forms a hub for this type of popular movement and more or less organized resistance. "The Danielssons' eyes and ears were local, while at the same time they used their international network to frame the perspective and draw attention to the case. "(Excerpt from the witness archive, Öhman 2018: 10).
The activist practices mentioned in the archive and described in the documents include demonstrations, art competitions, letter campaigns, civil disobedience and direct environmental actions, such as protest cruises, lecture tours and seminar days about nuclear test explosions, documentaries, boycotts, peace prayers and testimonial texts. A large part of the archive consists of correspondence.
