Kwaio

The Kwaio are an Oceanic-speaking people of the rugged interior of central Malaita in the Solomon Islands. Their oral tradition holds that the ancestral founders first cleared the forest twelve to twenty centuries ago; the old clearings, marked by shrines, define the lands of the clans descended from those founders.

Kwaio families lived in tiny hamlets set close together, farming taro in rotating swiddens alongside yams and plantains. Their religion centred on the power of ancestors, whose rules of taboo, called abu, were enforced through sacrifice, with the ancestral spirit La'aka held in particular awe.

Spanish explorers sighted Malaita in 1568, but the Kwaio valleys long remained beyond European reach, and the Kwaio kept to their rites more stubbornly than their coastal neighbours.