Michael Somare
Michael Somare took one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth to independence without a shot fired. Papua New Guinea has more than eight hundred living languages in a population that was then under three million, most of it in highland valleys that Europeans had not entered until the 1930s and that had no contact with each other. Australia administered the territory, and few people in Canberra or Port Moresby expected independence before the 1990s. He was a teacher and a radio broadcaster from the Sepik who entered the new House of Assembly in 1968, founded the Pangu Party, and pushed the timetable forward against an Australian government that was in no hurry and a settler population that did not want it at all. Self-government came in 1973 and independence in September 1975, negotiated rather than fought, and he was the first prime minister. The state he built was a genuine parliamentary democracy that has never had a successful coup, and it was held together by a constitution written locally rather than copied, with provincial governments created to answer the regionalism that a country of that composition guarantees. Its politics runs on obligation rather than party. Members are elected by wantoks - the networks of people who share a language - and are expected to return the favour in goods and cash, so parties are coalitions of individuals and governments change by floor-crossing between elections. He wrote a law restricting that after returning to office, and the courts struck much of it down. The exception was Bougainville. The copper mine at Panguna paid a large share of national revenue and left the island's landowners with the tailings and a fraction of the money, and the grievance became a civil war from 1988 that killed thousands and ended in an autonomy agreement and a referendum in 2019 in which the island voted overwhelmingly to separate. He served four separate terms as prime minister across four decades and was called the father of the nation for the whole of his later life.
- Lived: 1936 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Papua New Guinean
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
