Seventeen years ago I was briefly running the Karawari Lodge on the Karawari River in East Sepik during a lull in visitors, and the then-World Bank rep, Sir Ali Alikhani, came for a visit. Dapper and gentlemanly, this relic of the Shah’s reign in Iraq regaled me with stories about dining on sevres china with Ben Gurion, holidaymaking with the Pahlevi family, and entertaining Margaret Mead (whom he found charming).
In turn, of course, I was mesmerized by this man. But we came to an impasse of perspectives when he began to propose that Sepik art be cultivated as a craft export, perhaps for shops like Pottery Barn and Conran’s overseas. I found myself explaining to this lovely gent that these carvings and masks and gables and staffs were already part of a blue-chop market around the world, not so much the pre-Independence auction market, but the hierarchic collectors realm where objects that are presumed to be old, although cannot be verified as such, can fetch very good intermediate prices, which drives collectors to buy containers’ worth on a regular basis, to this day. It was a hard sell, because Sir Ali, I believe, found the carvings bizarre and original, but hardly collectable. Not exquisite like a Persian miniature or stylized like Indonesian woodcarving. In the end, he wrote a cheque for a water tank to a young man in the village, someone who had no bank account, and who blurted a ballpark cost off the top of his head, and who was ultimately destroyed by the burden of raising the real amount to buy and ship a tank into his remote village. ‘We believe in direct grants to small entrepreneurs,’ I was assured by Mr World Bank, who clearly saw himself as the new Grameen.
But I won’t forget his surprise at learning the Sepik handiwork was not just another forest timber product for overseas retail. He didn’t seem convinced by my arguments, but must have had this confirmed later. He might have asked 4 out of 10 European and American tourists who visit the Sepik, as elsewhere in PNG, and continue to buy these hoary souvenirs in village markets on the belief that they have a value beyond the ordinary souvenir for being culturally authentic---still largely in ‘use’ in the villages, and virtually the same as the object collected ten minutes before Independence that now fetches six figures at Sotheby’s Oceanic art auctions.
Papua New Guineans are so attuned to this market that they have mastered the explanations all tourists want to hear. Not so much the lies about this just being found in the old men’s house, or my grandfather made it, but that it is true to this village, this clan, and has a story of its own, a living significance, something entirely contemporary and yet antique---thus more than a Navajo rug, a Ming vase, or an Ibo talisman. This is an ethnographic object, carvers are saying. It is our culture now just as it was our culture hundreds of years ago. It replicates nothing dead or long ago. It is an object of sustainable value.
Now, I was watching a documentary on the business of Chinese forgeries just yesterday. I learned that the faking of Nikes and Adidas, the bootlegging of cds and watches and handbags, long ago transmuted into such a billion dollar industry that customs detectives have to let a vast majority of the manufacturers get away with it. Apparently brands that went to China in the nineties, hiring clever Engrish (or German or French) speaking reps on the ground, made a lot of money initially, only to lose it to the reps when they effected to establish their own forgery businesses. Now, despite the impotent laws against piracy and fraud, there are entire provinces of China dedicated to the industry of fakes. And this business actually represent as much as 80% of the export trade for China. There exists what one interviewee described as an entire ‘shadow value chain’ where multinational fakes are of such apparent quality that the ‘brand’ has been entirely undermined. What is a Gucci handbag these days, and why spend $2000 on something that can be imitated with some integrity for $200?
But appearances are not everything, of course, and the news has taught us just how unscrupulous the forgery industry can be, especially when it comes to powdered milk, and eggs (I learned that there are fake eggs being exported that are made from dangerous industrial chemicals), and, the most sinful of all, medicines. In PNG many of us buy the bootlegged meds from the market knowing they have been stolen or resold from government aid post supplies. But few of us are aware that Chinese fake medicines are also out there---and not just fake artimeter, or fake aspro, but fake chemotherapy drugs, and fake heart meds, and so forth.
Nor is this just wealth creation for the new China. Famously, the sharpest thing a Communist party leader ever said was Deng Xiaoping’s edict, ‘To get rich is glorious’ ---instantly anointing himself as Deng Xiaobling and giving every former CP member license to make a killing.
But the fastest way to get there has been to exploit the weak labour and human rights, and creating a slave labour force that rivals only the industrial revolution in England. Children of primary school age, elderly people, and waves and waves of young people driven from the farms to town (transforming one famous ‘fakery’ centre, Shenzhen from a small village to a metropolis of slums in barely 30 years) now work for less than $30/week and live in overcrowded unsanitary warrens, sometimes sleeping under the very machines they spend their days operating.
And as the new capital environment expands and mutates, it now exports this cheap labour force to Chinese investments overseas. Thus, in one segment of the documentary, we see police from Birmingham or somewhere else in Britain raid a small flat that appears to house thirty Chinese pornographic CD bootleggers and their very sophisticated operation that takes in millions per annum for its owners, and pays these workers (who are for immigration reasons never allowed to leave the flat) as indentured servants---that is, pays them nothing until they work off the cost of their passage.
Now this leads us to today’s PNG. Consider the proposed PMIZ for Vidar Wharf just north of Madang town, with its glowing promises of self-sustaining harmony, electricity, customs, water, and 30,000 or more Chinese workers (as stipulated by the Chinese Ex-Im bank loan that has just recently been signed by the Gabriel Kapris-led ‘Friends of Chinese Money’ social club).
Consider our medicines, our milk, our eggs, our construction businesses. Consider the integrity of our manufacturing in general, and the emergence of a cheap labour force that will barely compete with the indentured servitude of Chinese workers, and thus need to reduce their wages and benefits to compete.
Consider for a minute the best practices that do not already exist in the tuna industry, for which the PMIZ is planned: where some say 40% of the stock is illegally transshipped by poachers offshore. Where RD Tuna is already building workers’ housing within customary villages, bound to look like millionaires row when the Chinese workers start to bunk down. Where there are pre-existing sanitation and healthy and safety issues for the one plant that has been here for years. Where the efforts to stem HIV and other infectious diseases has not even gotten off the ground. Where villagers are forced to earn a non-living wage because they find it hard to exist as subsistence fishermen and women. Where all the promised spin off businesses have long ago reverted back to the Filipinos. Where non-national fishermen aboard company vessels responded to a New Ireland Fisheries Officer’s complaint regarding the netting of dolphins but pushing this man overboard to drown.
And there are other matters to consider, having to do with the very identity of PNG in the world market. What is the PNG imprimatur? What, if not authenticity? Are we facing a future of chipboard ‘rosewood’ and fool’s gold? Are we eventually going to known for PNG products made in China? Or just PNG products that might as well be made in China?
Think of that well-established market in ethnographic handicrafts. I don’t want to be around when the first Sepik carvings are stamped ‘Made in China’ and given little index cards explaining in Engrish the story of the clan and how it was born from the Septic River. (I recently glimpsed a Chinese-made PNG flag on display in the Madang police station that read ‘Papa New Guinea’).
Nor do I want to consider the parallels in PNG to the Burberry’s story covered by the documentary. Apparently the esteemed old British label which had kept the village by the same name and its 300-plus inhabitants alive for generations was failing under the cost of production until recently, when it decided to outsource the labour in China. The village has spiraled into poverty, and Kate Moss’ rebranding of the company, along with Chinese workers, have recast this signature label as the UK’s top fashion brand in the global market.
I see an Oprah home décor spin-off, in tandem with an ‘authenticity’ label like Ralph Lauren, or Pottery Barn, pitching the ubiquitous Sepik mei mask for the new global middle class. And villages like Tambanem, already suffering from the demise of Sir Peter Barter’s tourist boat, recast as the home of certain mud, nassa shell and kambang filigree pieces---like the sevre china factories, Burberry’s village shops or Venetian glass ateliers or the global mall—becoming the Lourdes of authenticity pilgrims for the next generation. But when visitors come to Tamabanam, they will not have to live in the village itself, but a simulacra of the village somewhere downriver, with a museum that loops old Mead and Bateson films, and dioramas of the incremental changes in the ‘patternware’ of Tambanam over time. And the boldest of guests will opt out of the aircon rooms for the more authentic mat and mossy netting experience, even if en suite.
And on their way to the Sepik Authenticity Zone, they will pass through what once was Madang, where hundreds of street shops hawk bilums and baskets and small plaster statues of Kalibobo lighthouse with ‘Madang’ etched in Mandarin down the side. And amidst a growing population of ‘legitimately migrated’ new shopkeepers, one will now and then be able to find an old villager with broken earlobe, standing in as the PNG version of Shenshen’s Vincent van Gogh, the most imitated artist of the Chinese forgery market. This old man, your uncle Albert, will recall the days when his work really meant something, and when polite collectors from Australia, Europe and the US ripped the people off with much greater respect.
And here and there you will still see glimpses of what is utterly, unmistakably and inimitably Papua New Guinean.
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