Kwaraae

The Kwaraae are an Oceanic-speaking people spread across Malaita in the Solomon Islands, whose speech is the most widely used indigenous language of the archipelago. Malaita was settled by Austronesian seafarers between five thousand and thirty-five hundred years ago, and Kwaraae oral tradition tells of a founding ancestor, some twenty generations back, who first landed on Guadalcanal and then followed a magical staff to the middle of Malaita, where he laid down the people's customs before his descendants spread to the coastal lowlands.

The Spanish expedition of Álvaro de Mendaña sighted Malaita in 1568, after which the Solomons vanished from European charts for two centuries, leaving the Kwaraae to their own clan and chiefly affairs.