In october 1927 William Bell, colonial government representative on Malaita, in the Solomon islands, was murdered, while collecting taxes, and his party of native police massacred. Bell was an Australian, a towering figure in the pacification of the wildest island in the Pacific, and his murder by the kwaio warrior leader Basania was the climax of a confrontation betwwen two trong men and two opposing ways of life, as Basiana and his followers, in the face of a pervasive threat to their ancestral way of life, resolved to challenge the power of Empire by killing its most forceful representative.