Tari's Question

Today I sat through the first part of Black Jesus Steven Tari’s trial for murder (or is it rape and murder?) He showed up with an arm in a sling and a bright red button down shirt. I was there as a ‘cult’ expert requested by the Public Solicitor to explain how Tari’s claim that his activities were ‘traditional’ might be construed as a lie.

By ‘activities’ I should say he does not specifically mean rape and murder, but the assemblage of young women as a coterie of what he called ‘flower girls’---lifting the term directly from Yali Singina’s Dabsau Movement.

First of all, Tari is from Manus originally, a Bible-school drop out who struck out as his own diety. Odd that he didn’t fashion himself after Paliau Moloat, but not surprising that, once he’d landed in Madang, he began to announce himself as the second coming of Yali.

 

The problem was that the Yali people had seen this all before, in many ridiculous guises. Virtually every year there is a new self-styled ‘cargo cult’ in Madang that invokes the name of Yali and trumpets absurd rituals to attract public scorn and eventually some institutional church willing to provide real services like an aid post and salvation.

 

Steven Tari has always been but one of a long line of pretenders to the throne. This time, however, he did make overtures to Yali’s aged widow, Mama Sugum, who was living in Amele with fellow ‘plaua meri’ of the original post-war movement.

 

After some persuasion, members of this group actually went to hear Tari speak, anxious as they were to either embrace or put this claim to rest. But it took no time for them to realize Tari was nothing but a con man, and nothing like the original Yali who inspired people across the north coast to carve their own path toward independence and cultural self-esteem.

 

Let’s also remember that Yali’s flower girls were in no was traditional. They were, in fact, a scandal, and part of the reason why his name was roundly sullied by the administration and churches of the day. Fashioned after the Sisters of the conventional churches Yali knew so well, these were Rai Coast women who lived in a dormitory-like setting and dedicated themselves to the quotidian rituals of Yalis movement, including the collection of croton leaves in glass bottles that adorned their altars—hence the flower girl title.

Following court, I drove over to visit Yali’s son James at his sister Markum’s house. Having just finished his own sentence for rape, James (like his sister) is no little anxious to clear his family name of all spurious associations, and was adamant that we discredit Tari’s claims to the Yali movement, however faint.

 

Only a couple of weeks before the brother and sister sat for a recorded interview regarding another false claimant to the Yali name, Jared Diamond. Diamond’s been trafficking on the Yali legend since his 1997 book, Guns Germs and Steel, made international reference to the Madang culture hero in its opening chapter, called ‘Yali’s Question.’ 

 

The question is said to have arisen in a 1972 chance meeting between the ornithologist-cum- soi-disant historian and the politician, when the latter asked the former, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

 

A clever literary device for a book that recasts all of human history in terms of the accidents of environment and birth, thereby (we are led to believe) vitiating any racist claims of social Darwinism or veiled ethnocentrism in modern thought. Diamond repeatedly tells his readers that racist explanations for historical inequities are  loathsome and wrong, and that modern ‘stone age’ peoples "are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples."  New Guineans, he says, are "more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is", traits which he attributes to survival of the fittest. 

 

But to make this gorgeous political correction requires Diamond to de-mystify the ‘stone age’ people and prove his fraternity amongst them. Apparently, while studying birds, he has known a few good guides, excellent chums, and established such a rapport in general with the New Guinean that a renowned politician if the age would feel comfortable asking such a raw and unguarded question in their first meeting. The Chapter ‘Yali’s Question’ is a brilliant orientalist (or in this case we might say Oceanalist)  moment: where the White Masta (because, to be sure, that is precisely what Diamond would have been in 1972) embraces the guileless and naturally intelligent native for all his charming if perverse aspirations.

 

Not surprisingly, the effect of Diamond’s book, crafted so perfectly as a response to Yali twenty five years after the fact, has been to reaffirm the comfortable noblesse oblige of western neoliberalism. If it is not the fault of New Guineans that they have been left behind, then neither is it the fault of  Anglo-Europeans that they have come so far. It’s really all about luck and timing. Nothing to do with imperialism, geopolitical imbalance, Clausewitzean foreign policy, voracious monopoly capital, any other system manipulated and piloted by man. Heaven forbid.

But racking focus back to the local, there were quite a few Westerners in New Guinea at the time of this putative meeting of minds between Yali and Diamond who themselves began to wonder about that question. Anthropologists Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington, for examples, had also met a few New Guineans by then, although this had not led them to make any public conclusions about ornithology. Instead, they were looking at more nuanced economic interplays between ‘cargo’ and custom in the East Sepik, for Deborah, and East New Britain, for Fred. After Guns Germs and Steel was published, they produced their own socioeconomic analysis of Yali’s home, Madang, after extensive fieldwork within the Ramu Sugar Plantation, and they called their book Yali’s Question (2004, Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture and History, U Chicago). In fact it was really Diamond’s answer, insofar as it refuted the simplicity of Diamond’s take on modernity, even if it never challenged the veracity of his claims about meeting Yali Singina and being asked the absurd question.

 

Time passed, and it soon became apparent that Gewertz and Errington were not alone in finding fault with Diamond. He was busily lecturing for six figures a pop on human history, repeating the Yali catechism each time, while those social scientists with more complex understandings of social change in New Guinea were gathering their own storm. To make a long story short, the evidence began to accumulate against the naturalistic claims that ground Diamond’s theories. Had he ever met Yali in fact?

 

In turns out he had not. Challenged about this, Diamond made bizarre claims that it was another Yali or a younger Yali, and not the renowned Madang leader after all. There were many yalis, he claims. But when we asked James Yali and his sister about this, they both scoffed. James was as nating in the village in 1972, and his father was infirmed at the time. So ‘Yali’s Question’ could not have referred to Yali Singina. How extraordinary. There must have been another Yali, an entirely different Yali from the man whose life has been chronicled by Peter Lawrence Elfriede Hermann and others; someone who would ask a question about cargo and inequality but not in fact be the ‘cargo cult’ leader of the time?

It seems Mr Diamond was far more embedded than any anthropologist of the age, even more than the Dabsau movement people, who say they know of no other Yali but their own.

So, in response to Diamond, I would like to suggest that Steven Tari is an excellent stand-in for his straw man Yali, the Black Jesus of myth -- Lupus in fibula---the wolf on the fable. He is far better suited to the Guns, Germs and Steel myths of history than our Yali of Sor, the man who challenged the major institutions of his age—both the church and the colonial administration—not from envy of their cargo, but from suspicions of their veracity, their self-service, their dishonesty.

And isn’t that why we suspect Diamond? And Tari?

 

My question, then, is Tari’s question: What story do I need to tell to make myself rich, beloved, and adored?

Comments

[MacLay]

Dont think Steven Tari is connected to Yali. Yali had his own intention of the Raikos Rehabiliation Shceme, he wanted his people to live a healthy living. Unfortunetly the people thought he could bring cargo goods to them. Tari had his own intention and I dont think it is connected to Yali. So Tari why calling Yali's name to cover up your bad deeds.

[Apuleius Platonicus]

What an extraordinary post! My mind has been boggled before, but I don't think it has ever been this boggled.

I happened along here while doing "research" (googling) inspired by a recent BBC story about "human sacrifice" in Uganda. That led me to looking into other media stories about (real and imagined) "human sacrifice", which led me to the story of Steven "Black Jesus" Tari.