One autumn morning, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located 600 miles east of Moresby, across the Solomon Sea. Its southern shore is just three miles from the politically independent Solomon Islands, and its people share a culture, linguistic links and dark skin tone with their Solomon neighbours. But thanks mostly to European colonisers, who drew the borders, Bougainville is the farthest-flung province of Papua New Guinea, whose lighter-toned inhabitants Bougainvilleans often call “redskins”, betraying a sense of otherness in their own country that partly explains why I am writing about them here.
I say partly because if not for the islands’ having fought a bitter, decade-long war against the Australia-backed Papua New Guinea – which remarkably they won – and demanding Papua New Guinea allow Bougainville’s independence by 2027, the story I am about to tell would likely never have happened.
In October 2023, I booked a trip to Buka to report on these developments, budgeting some days at the end to interview leaders of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG), the formal authority that expects to secure self-rule for its people. But over the previous months I had become transfixed instead by the strange tale of Noah Musingku, a Bougainvillean scam artist who had made a fortune, lost it, then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he declared himself the islands’ king. He wore crowns of brass and cowrie shells that, lest there be any ambiguity, spelled out king. An academic who has described Musingku as “Bougainville’s Bernie Madoff” wrote him off as an “irrelevance”, while a diplomatic envoy to Papua New Guinea told me he was a “fucking joke”.
