Kiribati

• 1. Introduction

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  Kiribati has only 811 square kilometres of land, yet its islands are scattered across such a vast stretch of the central Pacific that the country reaches into all four hemispheres. No other nation can say that. Its islands straddle both the equator and the 180th meridian, and the International Date Line swings far out to the east to go around them. Because of that bend, the easternmost islands keep UTC+14, the most advanced time zone on Earth. The country consists of 32 atolls plus one remote raised coral island called Banaba. Who first sailed to these specks of coral, and how did a British captain's name end up inside the country's own? What did colonial rule, a world war and nuclear tests leave behind? And why do Kiribati's own leaders speak openly about the day the nation might no longer exist?

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• 2. A Name Borrowed

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  In about 1820, a Russian admiral named Adam von Krusenstern and a French captain named Louis Duperrey both labelled the islands the îles Gilbert on their charts. Their maps were published in 1824 and written in French. The honour went to Thomas Gilbert, a British captain who sighted some of the islands in 1788 with captain John Marshall. The two were charting the outer passage from Port Jackson to Canton. French maps had called the northern islands the îles Mulgrave, and in the 19th century English speakers often called the southern part the Kingsmills.

  The word Kiribati is simply the Gilbertese rendering of Gilberts. In Gilbertese, the letters ti stand for an s sound, so the name is pronounced KIRR-i-bass. The people are the I-Kiribati, said ee-KIRR-i-bass. Missionary books in Gilbertese used the spelling by 1895, though only to mean the language and its speakers. Its first appearance as a dictionary entry for the native name of the country came in 1952, written down by Ernest Sabatier in his Dictionnaire gilbertin-français.

  An older indigenous name, Tungaru, is often suggested for the Gilbert Islands proper. When independence arrived, Chief Minister Sir Ieremia Tabai and his cabinet passed it over. They chose Kiribati because it sounded modern, and because it took in islands beyond the Tungaru chain, such as the Phoenix and Line Islands. Long before any chart named these atolls, however, people already lived on them, and oral historians still tell how those people arrived.

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• 3. Voyagers and Chiefs

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  Oral historians in Kiribati say the first people to reach the atolls were seafarers from Melanesia, described as dark-skinned, frizzy-haired and short. Later, according to the same lore keepers, tall and fair-skinned Austronesian seafarers came from a western place called Matang. The islands have been home to Austronesian people speaking one Oceanic language since sometime between 3000 BC and 1300 AD. That language stretches from the north all the way to Nui in the far south.

  Around AD 1300, a mass departure from Samoa added Polynesian ancestry to most Gilbertese people. The newcomers founded clans on their own Samoan traditions and slowly wove them into the clans and powers already in place. Voyagers from Tonga and Fiji also brought touches of Polynesian and Melanesian culture. Intense navigation and intermarriage between the islands blurred the differences, and a remarkable cultural sameness took hold.

  By the 15th century, two very different systems of governance had emerged. The northern islands mostly lived under chiefs, called uea. The central and southern islands were run by councils of elders, called unimwaane. Tabiteuea alone is known for keeping a traditional egalitarian society, and its name comes from Tabu-te-Uea, meaning "chiefs are forbidden".

  Elsewhere, civil war took hold. Land was the prize, and clans and chiefs fought over resources, fuelled by blood feuds that had begun months, years or even decades earlier. When Europeans arrived, they gave guns and cannon-equipped ships to some I-Kiribati leaders, who used them to devastate their enemies. Yet the usual weapons stayed shark-tooth-studded wooden spears, knives, swords, and armour of dense coconut fibre. Families kept using them because of the strong sentimental value of equipment handed down through generations. Hand-to-hand combat is still practised, though rarely discussed because of taboos, secrecy chief among them.

  The last of the dozens of expansionist chiefs of this period was Tembinok' of Abemama. Robert Louis Stevenson stayed on Abemama and wrote about the chief's character and method of rule in his book In the South Seas. Oddly, Abemama itself had historically followed the council-of-elders model of the southern islands. Meanwhile European ships had been calling at these shores for generations, and not all of them came to trade.

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• 4. Ships, Missions, Empire

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  More than 9,000 workers were sent abroad between 1845 and 1895, and most of them never returned. They were recruited through coercive practices known as blackbirding, which had lasting social, economic, political, religious and cultural effects. Other ships came by chance, on round-the-world voyages, hunting whales on the grounds called On-The-Line, or searching for a route from the south to the north Pacific. From the 1830s, the passing trade left behind European, Indian, Chinese and Samoan residents, including beachcombers, castaways, traders and missionaries.

  Dr Hiram Bingham II of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions arrived on Abaiang in 1857. On the 15th of October 1870, the Reverend Samuel James Whitmee of the London Missionary Society reached Arorae. Later that month he visited Tamana, Onotoa and Beru. Catholicism came to Nonouti around 1880 through two Gilbert islanders, Betero and Tiroi, who had become Christians in Tahiti. Three Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, Fr Joseph Leray, Fr Edward Bontemps and Brother Conrad Weber, arrived there in 1888.

  In 1886, an Anglo-German agreement divided the unclaimed central Pacific, leaving Nauru in the German sphere and Banaba, then called Ocean Island, in the British one. In 1892, Captain Edward Davis of HMS Royalist declared a British protectorate over the Gilberts and the nearby Ellice Islands. Local authorities on each island agreed to it. The resident commissioner served first on Makin from 1893 to 1895, then in Betio on Tarawa until 1908, and on Banaba until 1942. He answered to the Western Pacific High Commission in Fiji.

  Phosphate rock discovered in the soil of Banaba in 1900 changed the arithmetic. Banaba joined the protectorate that year, and the mining brought the High Commission a significant stream of revenue in taxes and duties. William Telfer Campbell, resident commissioner from 1896 to 1908, drew criticism for his legislative, judicial and administrative management, including allegations of forced labour. Arthur Mahaffy examined his conduct in a report in 1909. In 1913, an anonymous writer in The New Age newspaper described Campbell's maladministration and questioned Mahaffy's impartiality, since Mahaffy had once been a colonial official in the Gilberts. The same writer also criticised the Pacific Phosphate Company's operations on Banaba.

  Fanning Island, today called Tabuaeran, was annexed by Britain in 1888 because it lay close to Hawaii. In 1902, it became a stop on the first trans-Pacific telegraph cable, completing the All Red Line, a chain of telegraph lines circling the globe entirely within the British Empire. Palmyra Island was passed over for lacking adequate landing sites. The islands became the crown colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1916. The Northern Line Islands, including Kiritimati, joined in 1919, and the Phoenix Islands in 1937 for a Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme. The United States also brought the Northern Line and Phoenix Islands into its own territory, including Howland, Jarvis and Baker, and a territorial dispute followed.

  Sir Arthur Grimble arrived as a cadet administrative officer at Tarawa, serving there from 1913 to 1919. He became Resident Commissioner of the colony in 1926. He later described his years in the islands in two popular books, A Pattern of Islands in 1952 and Return to the Islands in 1957.

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• 5. War and Bombs

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  On the 12th of July 1940, Pan Am's American Clipper landed at Canton Island for the first time, on a flight from Honolulu to Auckland. War reached the same waters soon afterward. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan occupied Butaritari, Tarawa and other islands of the Northern Gilbert group from 1941 to 1943. Betio became an airfield and supply base. Driving the Japanese out in late 1943 produced one of the bloodiest battles in US Marine Corps history. The Marines landed in November 1943, and the fight became known as the Battle of Tarawa.

  Banaba, the colony's headquarters, suffered in a different way. It was bombed, evacuated and occupied by Japan in 1942, and it was not freed until 1945. Before that, Japanese forces massacred all but one of the Gilbertese on the island. At the end of 1945, the remaining inhabitants were brought back from Kosrae, Nauru and Tarawa. They were then moved to Rabi Island in Fiji, which the British government had acquired in 1942 for this purpose. Their descendants mostly still live there in exile. Meanwhile Funafuti held the colony's provisional headquarters from 1942 to 1946, when Tarawa took the role back.

  The late 1950s and early 1960s brought a new kind of military use. The United States and the United Kingdom used Christmas Island, now Kiritimati, for nuclear weapons testing, including hydrogen bombs. Within a few years, institutions of internal self-rule began to appear on Tarawa, from about 1967.

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• 6. Independence and Politics

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  The Ellice Islands asked in 1974 to separate from the rest of the colony, and the split took effect on the 1st of January 1976. In 1978, they became the independent state of Tuvalu. The Gilbert Islands followed on the 12th of July 1979 as the Republic of Kiribati, together with the Phoenix and Line Islands and Banaba. That September, the United States relinquished its claims to the sparsely inhabited Phoenix and Line Islands in a treaty of friendship, ratified in 1983. Gilbertese had never settled those two groups until the British authorities, and later the new republic, resettled people there. The Banaba phosphate mine was by then virtually exhausted, yet the Banabans on Rabi still hold a representative seat in Parliament.

  The constitution, promulgated on the 12th of July 1979, set up a parliamentary democratic republic. The president, called te Beretitenti, is elected directly from three or four candidates whom the legislature nominates from among its own members. A president may serve up to three four-year terms and remains a member of the assembly. The legislature is the single-chamber Maneaba ni Maungatabu. Each of the 21 inhabited islands has a council that handles daily affairs, in a manner compared to town meetings in colonial America. Political parties exist, but ad hoc opposition groups tend to gather around specific issues.

  The first elections since independence came in 1982, and a no-confidence vote forced another in 1983. In 1988, officials announced that 4,700 residents of the main island group would be resettled on less crowded islands. In September 1994, Teburoro Tito of the opposition was elected president. In 1995, Kiribati unilaterally moved the International Date Line far to the east to take in the Line Islands, so the line no longer split the country. That fulfilled one of Tito's campaign promises, and it let businesses across the territory keep the same working week. It also made Kiribati the first country to see the dawn of the third millennium, an event with value for tourism. Caroline Island was renamed Millennium Island in 1997.

  Kiribati became a full member of the United Nations in 1999, twenty years after independence. In 2002, it passed a controversial law allowing the government to shut down newspaper publishers, after the launch of the country's first successful non-government newspaper. Tito was re-elected in 2003 but removed by a no-confidence vote in March of that year and replaced by a Council of State. Anote Tong of the opposition then won in July 2003 and served three successive terms.

  Taneti Maamau took office in March 2016 as the fifth president and won a second four-year term in June 2020. He was considered pro-China. On the 20th of September 2019, Kiribati restored diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and ended them with Taiwan. Taiwan's foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said China had offered a 737 aircraft and ferries for the decision. In November 2021, the government announced it would open the world's largest marine protected area to commercial fishing. The 2022 constitutional crisis began when all five major justices of the judiciary were suspended. On the 29th of January 2023, Kiribati confirmed its intention to rejoin the Pacific Islands Forum, ending a bitter two-year leadership split. On the 9th of December 2025, it signed the High Seas Treaty, aimed at large-scale marine protected areas beyond national 200-nautical-mile zones.

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• 7. Rising Water

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  In 1999, two small uninhabited islets, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, disappeared underwater, according to the Pacific Regional Environment Programme. Apart from Banaba, the land of Kiribati is sand and reef rock islets that rise only one or two metres above the sea. At Christmas Island, the sea rose 5 cm between 1972 and 2022. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts about 50 cm of rise by 2100, which would also raise soil salination in arable areas. The Pacific decadal oscillation makes matters worse. In 2000, it switched from the El Niño pattern to the La Niña pattern, which brings more frequent and higher high tides. Perigean spring tides, often called king tides, can then flood low-lying areas. In March 2015, Cyclone Pam, a Category 5 storm that devastated Vanuatu, still brought flooding and destroyed seawalls and coastal infrastructure in Kiribati.

  A 2010 study by Paul Kench of the University of Auckland and Arthur Webb of the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission found a surprise. The three major urbanised islands, Betio, Bairiki and Nanikai, had grown by 30 percent, 16.3 percent and 12.5 percent. Those gains amounted to 36 hectares, 5.8 hectares and 0.8 hectares. The authors cautioned that they had not measured the height of the land. In their words, since land height had not changed, "these low-lying atolls remain immediately and extremely vulnerable to inundation or sea water flooding." Coral growth can lift atolls along with the sea, but only if the sea does not rise faster than the coral grows and ocean acidification does not damage the polyps.

  In June 2008, Kiribati officials asked Australia and New Zealand to accept I-Kiribati as permanent refugees. President Anote Tong said the country had reached "the point of no return." He added, "To plan for the day when you no longer have a country is indeed painful but I think we have to do that." In early 2012, the government acquired the 2,200-hectare Natoavatu Estate on Vanua Levu, the second largest island of Fiji. Reports at the time suggested a plan to evacuate the whole population. In April 2013, Tong began urging citizens to migrate, calling sea level rise "inevitable" and saying "For our people to survive, then they will have to migrate." In May 2014, his office confirmed the purchase of about 5,460 acres on Vanua Levu for 9.3 million Australian dollars. Tong called the move an "absolute necessity" if the territory were submerged. In 2014 he told The New York Times that "according to the projections, within this century, the water will be higher than the highest point in our lands".

  In 2013, a Kiribati man claimed to be a "climate change refugee" under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The New Zealand High Court found the claim untenable, and the Court of Appeal rejected it in 2014. The New Zealand Supreme Court confirmed the rulings against him. It nonetheless rejected the idea that environmental degradation from climate change could never open a pathway into the Refugee Convention.

  Kiribati has also worked through diplomacy. It belongs to the Alliance of Small Island States, established in 1990, which put forward the first draft text in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations as early as 1994. On the 10th of November 2009, Tong signed the Bandos Island declaration in the Maldives, pledging voluntary carbon neutrality alongside ten other vulnerable countries. In November 2010, Kiribati hosted the Tarawa Climate Change Conference, meant to ease fault lines among parties before the COP16 talks in Cancún.

  At home, the Kiribati Adaptation Program began in 2003 as a US$5.5 million initiative backed by the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program and the Japanese government. Australia later joined with US$1.5 million. Representatives from each inhabited atoll described the changes they had seen over the previous 20 to 40 years. Projects include better water supply management around Tarawa, mangrove replanting, stronger laws against coastal erosion and population settlement planning. Sea level rise, drought and overfishing have also caused food and water shortages, so the government is diversifying food sources.

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• 8. Life on the Atolls

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  More than 80 percent of the people farm or fish, working thin calcareous soil that holds little water. The November 2020 census counted 119,940 people, and about 90 percent live in the Gilbert Islands. South Tarawa grew from 17,921 people in 1978 to an estimated 69,710 in 2024. Densities in the Gilberts rival those of Hong Kong or Singapore, without any skyscrapers. Only about 66 percent of people have clean water, and between 54 and 57 percent smoke, the third highest rate in the world. Since Cuban doctors arrived in 2006, the infant mortality rate has fallen significantly.

  Copra and fish make up most of the country's production and exports. The Australian dollar is the domestic currency. Fishing licence fees, development aid and remittances, especially from seafarers trained at the Marine Training Centre in Betio, pay for most imports. In 1956, the colony set up a sovereign wealth fund to hold its phosphate earnings. In 2008, the Revenue Equalization Reserve Fund was valued at US$400 million. On Kiritimati, eight licensed operators hand-catch ornamental fish for export. At the end of 2005, they shipped 110,000 pet fish, with the flame angelfish as the main species.

  The word kamea for dog is one of many borrowings into Gilbertese, which is an Oceanic language. It comes from hearing European settlers say "come here" to their dogs. Other words are home-grown. A plane is wanikiba, the flying canoe, a motorbike is rebwerebwe after its noise, and shoes are kauniwae, the cow for the feet.

  Kiribati dance stands out among Pacific dances for its outstretched arms and sudden birdlike head movements. The frigate bird on the national flag echoes that style. Smiling while dancing is generally considered vulgar, because the dance began as storytelling and as a display of the skill, beauty and endurance of the dancer.

  Traditionally, the diet rested on seafood and coconuts. The national crop, bwabwai, was eaten with pork only at special celebrations. Sap from the coconut tree became te karewe, fresh daily, and a syrup called te kamaimai. Pandanus fruit became te tuae, a dried cake, and te kabubu, a flour. Rice became a daily staple after World War II. Fish is usually eaten sashimi-style with coconut sap, soy sauce or vinegar dressings, often with chillies and onions. Coconut crabs and mud crabs are traditionally given to breastfeeding mothers.

  Kiribati has competed at the Summer Olympics since 2004, when it sent three competitors. Its first Commonwealth Games medal came in 2014, when weightlifter David Katoatau won gold in the 105 kg group.

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