Maasina Ruru movement

Record summary

Maasina Ruru was a mass movement among Solomon Islanders that combined Christian language, customary authority, organized village life and demands for indigenous self-government. Its postwar activities included meetings, ritualized organization and resistance to colonial administrative control. It matters comparatively because expectations of a transformed social order, ancestral or divine sanction and political liberation were intertwined rather than separable. The movement is well documented, but accounts differ over how uniformly millenarian its beliefs were and how much later observers imposed cargo-cult categories on a complex anticolonial project.