Nineteen years and counting in Papua New Guinea

Goodbye Bruno

Bruno Imbui passed away today. He was born to Tangandai Clan, in Yimas Village, East Sepik Province, sometime just prior to the War. The last of his generation to leave us, we want to honor his life with this acknowledgement of a long and successful life. He has worked with us on the Karawari Cave Arts Project since the beginning, and his son Edward is one of our principal team members. His daughter Maria is a local hero, as she returned from Teacher's College in the nineties to set up the only school for miles and miles around to teach all the children of the Arafundi, including the cave dwelling Penale high upriver. In a classic twist, the Board of Education finally recognized and consecrated her school at Yimas 1 only to transfer her out to a more senior position on the Keram River. So the school was abandoned.

In the eighties Bruno was an assistant to Paul Gorecki and  Rhys Jones, the first archeologists and Europeans to come visit the Karawari caves---and the first to record their stencils, in a submission to make them National Cultural Heritage. Ironically, we set out with their reports from a dozen or so caves when our own efforts to find and photograph the caves began, almost 20 years later. That was when we cavalierly thought there might be a total of 25 or 30 caves; and eight years later we now there are more than ten times this number.

Thanks for the work of Paul Gorecki in 2014, along with Jennifer Gabriel and Peter Hitchcock, as advisors to the World Heritage Committee for PNG, the entire cave art area has been included in the country's 'Tentative Listings' for World Heritage. This is a huge milestone that could never have been achieved without the work of people like Bruno, who guided Gorecki and Jones in the eighties, and gave us a trove of clan stories in the early 2000's. Below are some of Paul Gorecki's early photos of Bruno and his wife, Margaret, and more recent shots taken by Susan Salinger on a visit in 2006.

 

 Several years ago one of our Karawari Cave Arts ethnographers, Bernard Yake, recorded a few of Bruno's clan stories, and transcribed them to English. Here we offer two of them.

Bruno Imbui:

Long time ago, there lived a man and his name was Waiagara Kalanapi. The name Waiagara Kalanapi means ‘Father of the Headwater’ where Waiagara refers to father and Kalanapi is the name of the creek. The ancestor’s real name was Chambia Kalanapi. Our hausboi originated on one of my mountains called Kalapismeri. The hausboi had two names; Kalapis Yambanman and Kokop Yambanman. Tangandai is the name of my clan and the name means fence. I grew up in the hausboi before going to Yimas. Ok Kambunakon and Tat were the first couple who came to Yimas and secured the land in here. Once a son of Edma and grandson to Kambunakon and Tat, was shooting lizards around in the village with his ‘nok kining’ (bow and arrows). The boy accidently shot one of his spears (noks) into the haus tambaran or the hausboi. He then followed the spear into the hausboi and asked some of the boys who were inside that house if they had seen his nokand asked them to return it. The boy said to the boys inside, what if I see a tambaran (spirit). The boys inside told him to close his eyes when entering the house and he obeyed. As soon as he got in, the boys inside grabbed him and threaded his lips. The boy’s name is Tukwaditmeli. His mouth was threaded using the bone of a flying fox. After Tukwaditmeli’s mouth was shut, the boys took him to a thick grassland area and killed him. When he was dead, the boys chopped his body into pieces, shared them amongst themselves, wrapped the chops in the palm-leaf-stalks and brought them home. When the boys arrived, they told Tambui, Tudwakimeli’s elder sister to fetch water and prepare some dry coconuts. They told her that they brought a wild pig that they had killed at the wangai(kunai grass) close to Tamblakmali, (the former name of Yimas village).

Bernard :

Was the boy (Tukwaditmeli) killed for any reason?

 Bruno Imbui:

The boys killed him because his spear went inside the haus tambaran. It is very strict and unlawful for children, unauthorised personnel, sticks and stones to be thrown or go in there.

While the flesh was cooking in a traditional clay pot, the boys told the girl to fetch some sago from her house. But the girl told them that their house had no sago so her parents went to make some new sago. One of the old man in there insisted that she go to check their sago basket after he made some magic spells to refill the sago basket. When Tambuiwent and saw that, she came back with the sago and told the men that her parents must have tricked Tukwaditmeli and her. When everything was cooked, the men told the girl to go and bring her plate for her food to be served. When she did, they put the hand (not the whole arm) of her brother at the bottom of the plate and covered it with sago and water. When Tambui received her plate, she could not see a meat so she asked the boys, where is my meat? The boys told her to check the bottom of her plate. When she did, she saw a hand and realised from a knot on the finger made by their mother from a shoot of a sago palm for each of them. She grabbed her plate and smashed it in front of the men. She thought, what best do I do? She quickly climbed a betel nut tree and harvested some nuts and then got some mustard and put them altogether. She ran to her father’s bag and saw the traditional ointment, climbed the roof of the house and started rubbing it all over her body. In her small billum were some kina shells, so she broke them into pieces and used one of those piece to cut through her belly/abdomen, broke her legs and cut her arms. In those cut parts of her body, she fit in some bird feathers. Tambui saw that she could now be able to fly so she flew to a place called Kanukisalimio, rested for a while there and then flew to another place called Tambluminum. From there she flew to Kandamidumun, on the mountain. From that mountain, she flew to a kasten (canoe place) in Nambuwatakarai. When she arrived there, she could hear her parents talk from where they were making sago, so she changed into a baby bird, flew to them and sat on a sago leaf close to them. When Tambui’s mother saw the bird, she told her husband to get the bird so that she wanted to cook it and eat it. Her husband quickly climbed the sago tree to get the baby bird. But the bird jumped down and changed its form into human again and told them about everything that happened at home. The parents packed their things and went home; the girl flew and her parents paddled home in their canoe. Tambui arrived home early, changed her form into a human again and waited for her parents to arrive. When they arrived, the girl told her father that she had prepared everything for him to fight, like the betel nut, mustard, bow, arrows and sticks. So she told him to chew the betel nut first and then put up a fight. The father chewed the first betel nut and spit it out; he also chewed the second betel nut and did the same. While the third one was in his mouth, he grabbed his weapons, walked to the doorway of the haus tambaran and started shooting the arrows inside. When the boys inside saw the arrows flying in, they decided to escape from the house through an hole after removing the main bearer of the house that was erected from  the ground up to the ceiling. After coming out, the boys said this in their tokples, ‘wogai yebo, wakan yebo’,meaning where do we go now. The boys then decided to run away, through the grassland and arrived at Imanmeri. When they were running, one of the men from Imanmeri saw them and asked them why they were running and they told him that they had killed Tukwaditmeli and that his father wanted to kill them. When the man heard them say that, he secretly took the boys to his haus tambaran and kept them there. When night fell, he took some of the boys and left them at Wambrumas. Some of the boys changed their form and went inside some bamboos at Wambrumas to live in there. One day an Awim man went and cut the bamboos in which the boys in the bee form were living. To the man’s surprise, he saw the bees fly out and started stinging him. After that the boys changed form to be human again and they told the man that that bamboo was a home to them and he was wrong to cut it. When the man heard that, he took them to Awim, put them all in his haus tambaran and took care of them.

 

 The Legend of How Men Arrived at Yimas

 Tat, Kambunoken and Takisanblakmeli were males who lived in a cave on a hanging land. One morning the three of them came out of their stone cave and were making fire to cook. Yangaiman, a man from Imanmeri, came out that morning and saw the smoke of the fire rise on a place that just hanged on the rope. That place had the same kind of vegetation or environment as the one below. Yangaiman ran to the canoe place, got his canoe and paddled across the lake to the hanging land, searched everywhere and could not find them so he returned home. The three of them saw him first while he was paddling on the lake towards them so they ran away into the cave and shut the entrance with a stone. Yangaiman saw the same thing happen again on the hanging land one morning; smoke arose. He got his canoe and paddled to see whoever the person was, but the same thing happened. The three of them saw him and escaped into the cave and hid in there. The Imanmeri man paddled home again. In the night, Yangaiman planned to go there in the early hours of the morning while it was still dark. Before dawn, he paddled to the hanging land, hid the canoe and he himself stood on a spot where he could spy who the person was. As the day broke, Yangaiman saw the three men come out of the stone cave and he shouted to them that he had seen them already. He told them also that he went there two times to find you but you ran away and hid from me. The three men then invited him to come so they all could cook and eat together. After eating, Yangaiman told them that he wanted to join them on the hanging land. The three men agreed and showed him his piece of land to build his house and make gardens. Yangaiman returned to Imanmmeri and told his people that he was leaving them and was going to live on another land. He packed his things into the canoe and went away. He built his house and lived with them. On that hanging land where Yangaiman went to join them, they enjoyed their companion and lived happily.

One day a man by the name of Kikai saw that hanging land and cut the ropes on which the land was hanging, and the hanging land fell to the ground. When it fell, the land grew much bigger (it extended in its size). When Tat, Kambunoken, Takisanblakmeli and Yangaiman saw that the land grew big, they sent messages by shouting everywhere and invited everyone to go and stay with them because the land was so big. Upon hearing the invitation, people started to go in there from Waiagara, Kabriman and Sepik River to live there.

I think that is all I have to tell.

 Bernard :

Thank you Bruno for your time

Blame, and the winding path to restorative justice

 

Our company has recently conducted a review of one Christian charity's 'Restorative Justice' programme across Papua New Guinea. Very successful really, its actually an awareness program for remote communities---telling them their rights, their options, the possible solutions to their social and legal grievances. Everyone benefits by it. Happily, our evaluation is all positive, and beyond inserting a definition of Restorative Justice as it is supposed to be known in PNG, we sort of elide the fact that they're using the wrong name for this excellent programme.

You see, we don’t seek retributive justice here in PNG, the eye for an eye Biblical variety or the punitive civil court version either. We seek what we call Restorative Justice. That’s a term that is both legal and anthropological, and refers to a settlement for an issue or grievance that doesn’t punish the presumed culprit, and often doesn’t seek an exact culprit at all, but one that satisfies the greatest number of people and ‘restores’ peace. In theory. Living this s a nightmare of compromise for someone like myself, the westerner as grandmother/boss/NGO director.

Retributive impulses are so ingrained in me I have come to employ particular ‘glasman’ and ‘glasmeri’ (seers, who can divine a truth) with special powers of accusation. Not the old man who tells me an unknown child stole my change purse at the beach and tipped out my credit cards and license into the water. That calms my nerves for a moment but offers me absolutely no satisfaction. That is---it deflects from my immediate family and close friends, many of whom are renowned thieves and spring to mind instantly after any such incident, in preference for a more generalized resolution of doing absolutely nothing.

These are the glasmen and women who need to be paid up front ad who are so terrified of being blamed for pointing out a culprit that they always find the least actionable solution. Let peace prevail: I suspect they have so little pity for my white Missus problem that they cant take on my frustration. These are the Arbiters of Restorative Justice who never really provide satisfaction. They deflect blame, and in so doing, never resolve anything, but leave the door open for further divinations, more tweaking of the compromise ending. In the words of Mary Lou Retton, they just can't stick the dismount.

 

Im reminds me of the thousands of wives who appeal to the Village Court Officers and Village Court Magistrates across the highlands in PNG for some vindication after they’ve been raped or bashed by their husband or another male relative. As this Magistrate often happens to be another relative, none of them related to a woman married in to this suffocating patriarchal powerlessness, the settlement often comes in the form of compensation: one man hands another sorry money, a pig, some shells, maybe garden food, and they all get over it. The scene in Fitzcarraldo comes to mind when Herzog approaches a local actor who has been  submerged in mud beneath a retreating paddleboat they’ve been hoisting up a mountain, and he says to the remarkably bouyant chap sitting up in mud now: “Well get up, brush yourself off and have a little lunch.” That’s about as much satisfaction women can expect from restorative justice in the highlands here in PNG. It’s the classic Get Over It Chump situation. Buck up girl. There's no retributive justice here.

So when my little black coin purse/wallet gets stolen at the beach, or maybe at home later, or maybe in the night while Im sleeping, I can expect two things: that I will never have personal satisfaction or vindication in this, and I will never see the money again.  A semblance of optimism is kindled by the chance that someone has taken the money and thrown everything else into a bush somewhere, just near enough to be recovered. It is PNG after all, and no one knows how to use my VISAs (nothing seems to be amiss in the account online), so I'm in no rush to cancel everything.

This is where the glasman/meri comes in.

I had a friend in Port Moresby once who lost an expensive necklace gifted to her by her European father. A glasman was called and he ruminated and came back with the exact rubbish tip where it might be found on the other side of town. And there it was. This happens all the time.

 

Someone recommends a certain glasman to me this time because he was the one who knew where our stolen generator had gone last year, which reassures me, until I realize we never did get that generator back in any event. Never mind, he is from a more supernaturally charged part of the country than the first glasman, who wanted K50 for nothing (prompting a friend to charge after him for a refund). This time he takes the nylon beach bag from whence it disappeared for the night, like a talisman. And he needs bus fare, that’s all.

The next morning he’s here to say it was my daughter in law---a notorious thief. Of course, I say, that makes sense---unless you want to explain how she got to the beach or inside our house when she was miles away at the time. He walks out the back of the house and explains in more hushed tones that it is my grandson who took it, and hid it to give her later. This is interesting only insofar as it reveals how broadly the script of my family problems has spread---as this is definitely something that has happened before to feed my tambu’s card gambling habit.  These stories have impressive circulation; our glasman is someone's Uncle from the islands who lives far from town. But I nod, relieved, and offer more bus fare. 

A minute later my housegirl S comes back from walking him to the bus stop. She had the story within the story: how my grandson stole it for the granddaughter, a preteen with a long rap sheet for theft, now living with her mother in the settlement. This scenario, though, is marginally more believable.

Indeed, S is quite persuasive in arguing that this has to be the explanation. P would have given it to his sister at school, and that explains why its nowhere in the house. Its even possible that the bighearted little brother pities his exiled sister who lives in a rough hut behind the market, off the sale of betelnuts his mother manages to retain after playing cards. This works well for S too, whose son was originally fingered by the first glasman, prompting her to run to school and retrieve him only to have the glasman say, not him after all, it must’ve been another kid. So much better the needle points to one of my own kids.

Now, a caveat about S is that she has earned her position as trusted offside after years of strife and subtle sleuthing around the nefarious daughter in law, and will come to me with any issue, however small it might seem, lest I cross her for not divulging later on (which is what everyone else in my family does: they keep their truths close to their chest, never utter insinuations and only wait to say 'I knew as much but didn't want to tell you!') In some vestigial sense of western mores, I value her for the very rare quality in PNG of being able to take the blame.

The other family member who has learned about taking blame is P. I did it! he will admit, awaiting the scales of grandma's justice that always forgive a confession and remind everyone in earshot that knowing the truth is the only thing that ever really matters to me. We tell him the story we’ve concocted: I left to walk the dog after we returned from the beach, my office door was closed but not locked, the bag was within view, and he seized the opportunity to get money for his sister now living in the market, away from grandma's 3 square meals a day. P stood inches from m face as he dissolved into tears. No, he never saw the bag, he said, he didn’t take it. But he said this weakly, as his body shuddered and his head fell and we could almost feel the guilt emanating from him. The level of protest was so dismal, so unconvinced and unconvincing, it made all the more certain, and when he walked off and locked the bedroom door to wail for a long half hour, deep soulful sobs of pain like nothing else.

For fifteen minutes I sit stunned that this treasured boy could have done this. That he has so much guile. He’s my buddy, and Id never heard such painful sounds before in my life. Absolute heaving grief. I had to tell myself he was crying because Id told him we probably couldn’t take our holiday this year, with credit cards gone, and so he wouldn’t be able to ride his bike on a dirt road in Vermont, as hed been planning for months now. Thinking this steeled me somewhat, but not for long. I relented and told him through the locked door that all is well, we will move forward, I love him and forgive him. Then I walked outside and spoke to him through louvered windows, reassuring him as his cried became gulps and sniffles, that I will always love him whatever happens and we can restore our holiday somehow, I promise.

Eventually he emerged, and we hugged. This is the little boy I stole back from my daughter in law when he was 18 mos old and she was in the thrall of a gambling addiction that starved him to a bag of bones---who could only recover with small spoons of peanut butter. This is the boy who jumps up to make me tea when I ask, and the only one of my tribe who knows the importance of saying I'm sorry; it was me.

 

Only much later did I casually ask where he thinks his sister might have hidden the wallet or thrown it away. What? He asks---absolutely guileless. But I was telling the truth, he looks at me with shock and says, I never did see the wallet. I don’t know where it is!

So let me walk you through this with me. This man who barely knows us, but somehow has the backstory about who robs whom in my household, has a vision that my beloved grandson is the current thief, and that he gave this stolen item (admirably?) to his older sister (like feeding a junkie)---in a narrative that satisfies for being familiar, and yet unexpected. Because in our household everything nefarious tends to lead back to one in-law of mine, for whom we have had to take restraining order out. That is the story arc for everything in my family drama, it always finds a way back to her. Indeed, it works for P. As quickly as he sees a PMV cut off a truck on the road and mutters 'Highlander!', he will raise his eyebrows knowingly when he hears his mother's name called. What now? we seem to always ask, unconsciously perpetuating the sexist stereotypes that make domestic violence go round in PNG.

So insidious is this assumption that we can never really know, but we can always suspect---that there will never be true justice, just messages from a supernatural order that points its finger, that kids often inherit the mantle of 'bad' or 'good' as if by blood---as if they are fated to do right or wrong. Possessed, unable to control their own impulses (an argument that often serves young men well), they lose commitment to their own volition. Can't help themselves, they just did it. It's this sensibility that pervades a lot of the gang fraternitas here, and predisposes them all to mystically transformative religious experiences---being born again, finding the lord, etc---whereby they mimic the initiation processes of moving from boy to man, sinner to saint, outcast to radically conventional. None of this involves personal volition in the western sense, but has to do with having forces work upon you.

So it makes sense to P that the glasman has either seen something in him he himself did not know, or observed behavior somehow wiped from P's own memory. He believe the accusation. He has no other experience of justice at this level but this opportunistic form of Restorative Justice, wherein one kid throws up their hand for the lot. Don't make my younger brother serve time, one hardened criminal told the court in Mt Hagen years ago: I'll go back to jail in his place (for kidnap and rape).

P pretty much buys the idea of himself as a thief, and this is shocking enough for him to cry with apparent  remorse ---with a sorrow commensurate to being a black hearted raskol himself. Or so it seems to S and me, as we shrink outside the door to P's heaving cries. It pains us too, but having seen no self-defense, no sense of affront or umbrage taken, I am at least convinced that these are tears of shame and they need to be shed after all.  He may even be just sorry to be caught (the evil grandma inside me says---after all, he's been told we'll have to forfeit our holiday in the US for this).

But when I press him later, when he comes to my office carrying the kitten and looking for a rubber band, I ask him again. And he can only admit what he knows—and that’s nothing. By the afternoon he has an ice cream cone and is restored to confidence in my undying love.

Where there is no free will, there is never retributive justice. And nothing restores the way I felt before I lost my credit cards and drivers license, believe. This much I know: leave me to my naïve beliefs about little boys. 

Leonie's Baluan

 “Manus children live in a world of their own, a world from which adults are wilfully excluded, a world based upon different premises from those of adult life.” ---Margaret Mead 1953[1930], Growing Up in New Guinea. New York: Mentor Books, p55.

 

My pal Leonie is back in her village on Baluan Island, in Manus Province, a cluster of islands far north of the mainland. She’s there to make a documentary about the local slit-gong, or garamut, drums. Can I come for moral support? Yes. In a minute. From Goroka, an Air Niugini flight takes me south to the capital, then connects to bring me up across the mountain spine of the country, across to the Bismark Sea to a small island cluster just beneath Micronesia. The airport is in Los Negros, a forty minute drive to the capital of Lorengau. There are no PMVs to town when I arrive, but thankfully the hire car woman takes pity on me and takes me to town where I check in at the one hotel and walk over to the market. This is where I look for someone from Baluan who might give me a banana boat lift to their distant island. It’s a brilliant Saturday market, brimming with island foods: pineapples, mangoes, pawpaw, guavas, bananas, star fruit, pomelos, sago, taro, yams, betelnuts; fresh fish, prawns, and octopi. A live tree possum trundled in vine and banana leaves at my foot catches my eye, the most anthropomorphic of animals here in PNG, and my heart sinks--he’s looking straight at me, pleading for mercy, and I feel like a slave trader or smuggler avoiding cries of Free me!!  I could cry. But this food for many, and best sold live I imagine.

Eventually I find Nora, a friendly extrovert from Baluan who claims to be Leonie’s cousin (not that everyone on a small island isn’t everyone’s cousin) and can give me a lift to Baluan tomorrow. Nora and her husband, a big blue-black Bougainvillean named Gibson, their baby girl, plus her sister’s family with its three kids, and I, pile into Gibson’s big banana boat around a huge mound of cargo covered in a blue tarp. Gibson jumps in the lagoon for a dip before wet set off, his bald head flinging ropes of water alongside a swimming dog. Already at 8 AM it’s beginning to get hot. By midday it should be searing. It will be more than two hours across the sea to Baluan, one of the far flung of Manus’ outer islands. In the middle of the journey, over an hour from town surrounded by pitchy black seas, the skies cloud over and a light rain begins. The swells rattle us back and forth, bow to stern, and send us cresting high waves and slapping down with frightening force. Everyone covers themselves in caps and rain gear, the oldest kid, a little girl, sliding under the tarp mound, sheltered by the boat’s curved lip. One of them crawls under to make a bed on duffel bags, and the baby, a doe-eyed beauty of maybe 12 months, is cradled under her father’s head. None of them cries, not even a whimper, because they must be used to this. Like the highlands kids who uncomplainingly ride flatbeds over rocky cliffside trails, these kids are born to big seas. We roll and take in water, and the rain grows stronger making it hard to see. I’m terrified, searching for shark fins in the frothy waters and thinking about a Styrofoam esky as life preserver. But eventually the seas calm, Gibson sets a firmer course and we slice right through them as, miraculously, the sun comes out again.  

We pull up at the rocky shoreline and Nora kindly walks me inland, uphill, along a path through stilted homes, to a grassy clearing. A small timber house with a cement patio and wide roof sits in a clearing not at all unlike a weekend house on the coast of Australia somewhere. Surrounded by croton and hibiscus bushes, and fruit trees, and yet dwarfed by the dense rainforest that climbs a steep mountain just behind, this is the loveliest oasis I could have imagined. You might almost expect a waiter bearing gin and tonics. Even better, there’s Leonie on the veranda strumming a guitar with her cousin Freddie. They see me, smile, and continue.

I pressed a knife to her breast

She cried Oh my love don’t murder me

I’m not prepared for eternity

Down by the banks of the Ohio   

Baluan is a tropical idyll, not too small, and perfectly lush. It has five villages along a coral footpath that girdles the whole island. Food is everywhere: fish in the sea, fruit and nuts on the trees, rich gardens on the hills inland. Old people have only to reach out their windows for a big grapefruit-like pomelo to eat. And as if life couldn’t be better, there are hot springs pulsing from grottoes all around the shoreline, the luxury gift of a volcano called Malsu at the very center of the island. They even have public baths to enjoy them. You go down to men’s or women’s springs at dusk and dawn, where you sit behind bamboo blinds and try not to disturb the silty bottom going down. I learn this the first night, as Leonie laughs and tells me I now have to wait for the dirt to settle again. But I’m so white that I glow in the dark behind a flimsy bamboo partition.

“Sit down! You’re too white!” and I flop into the mud.

 

Growing Up

Leonie and I amble around filming everything that matters. People are home for the Christmas holidays, and one civil servant from Moresby stages a big feast, called a polpolot, to distribute money from the sale of a garamut drum. This is crucial for Leonie’s film. First, there’s a long serious Council of Chiefs meeting on the upper veranda of his home, which includes enough Pidgin with the local language for me to understand. Baluan has several lapans, or sub-chiefs, under one paramount chief. But their authority must be earned, I am told, and cannot be taken for granted. Leonie’s cousin Selan is a lapan, and there’s endless discussion over what he’s doing wrong, what he should do, what they used to do, and so forth. Inherited status has a competitive edge. Any strong individual could challenge his authority, if not the title.

We attend an all-island basketball championship party in Selan’s ground one evening, where teenage boys spend endless minutes between songs tweaking the speaker system and cassette player. It’s a big coconut-broom swept clearing bordered by crotons with frangipani and hibiscus decorations strung from ropes running around the edges. Young Beryl, Leonie’s neice, sits on a bench watching red ants carry a husk of chewed betelnut. In the hazy fluorescent pool over the dirt, all the little boys like her brother’s son Kanawi dance in pairs, while the women shuffle around in regulation modesty outfits, big t-shirts and laplaps. Older people sit in the darkness outside the hum of the light, chewing betelnut. There’s that song by the Sagothorns called “Kolwin,” then “Pindo Pando” by Reks Band: just the local pop cassettes someone happens to have, infused by static humming. Then the sound dims, and all the older boys flock to the table to check the system. They disconnect wires from the machines and talk about nothing, making everyone wait forever while the techies take over. The electric cicadas rise to fill the void and I think we might as well be dancing to them.

Leonie’s two beautiful little nieces follow her everywhere. Beryl and Stephanie, about ten and six years old, obviously worship their glamorous aunt, which is understandable because Leonie is tres chic and wears bangles on her long thin arms, expresses herself with long lacquered nails in cyclical hula-like motions, and is gobsmackingly beautiful. She once told me she’d never worn a meri blouse. These girls fetch her betelnut, run messages and deliver gifts of fish from their mother, which Leonie returns with rice and noodles. She feeds the girls, and permits them to flip through her glossy magazines at will. But the girls are easily distracted, especially Beryl, who cranes her neck for the next best thing. Off she goes now. Their flawless brown skin sparkling from a dip in the sea, their hands peeling a pomelo or a pakpak fruit, and their brilliant smiles and big clear black eyes untroubled by calendars, clocks or responsibilities, these lovelies embody the mythical idea that childhood is bliss in Manus. It is definitely a freedom they will never have again.

Leonie and I sit at her verandah stoking the Coleman lamp. Beside us sits her tall, slightly goofy and gentle Uncle Pare, in a globe of big hair. He seldom talks but always smiles. Pare is the adopted son of Paliau, Baluan’s most beloved son. Right after W.W.II, Paliau rocked the Australian administration by demanding local self-government and schools for Manus. His efforts and the teachings he espoused were called a cargo cult, one of many that erupted across the country after the War, in a pattern that emerged after the First World War. These were religio-political movements that reacted against the church and the Australian administration, sometimes involving neo-traditional ritual and wild goings on--as the administration reports had it--like orgies and human sacrifice. In essence, they were local attempts to get the good life villagers saw these foreigners enjoying—hence, they were cults for obtaining cargo. Sick of hearing different things from different white people—after the priests told them to behave this way, and the kiaps told them something else---many communities became fed up with the growing inequity between the white people and themselves. All the homiletic speech in the world couldn’t explain why containers of manufactured goods kept arriving on their shores exclusively for these visitors, not for the hosts. These people also spoke in metaphors, so that when pastors said Thy Kingdom Come, they surely understood the illusions to harvest and reward. But what magic was also secretly being employed to reap this kind of harvest? Many Melanesians believed that a secret ritual or code was being withheld from them---which is, indeed the case, as the means of production for this new cash economy were still beyond their reach, and some would say remain so today).

 Some cargo cults emulated the white man’s most quotidian behaviors, like typewriting, marching drills, listening to the radio, and running up the flag. People would carve typewriters, shotguns and radios from balsa wood and dress to resemble their overlords, forsaking customary routines as counter-productive in the new age. These rituals worked for the newcomers, they might work for us. Some set up altars, conducted rituals and rewrote the catechism for their eager and similarly frustrated followers. The Europeans reacted much the way public health officials react to homeless schizophrenics in town. They called this madness. The way the villagers conflated European concepts and feigned submission was nothing but scoundrel passive-aggression, and both the church and the colonial administration sought to ferret out the sedition beneath.

When American GI’s arrived on Manus’ main island, some of them astonishingly Black American to boot, Manusians were finally convinced that their churches and state had been lying all along. None of the instant wealth and superficial equality within the corps made sense to the restraint and passivity they had been taught for two generations or more. Across the country, not just in Manus, cult rituals redoubled, many of which sought the return of Americans, their real brothers, for final redemption after the War. Biblical stories of Ham and prodigal sons which had been folded into origin myths about brothers of different fortune, now became prophesies fulfilled. The War had revealed the truth and the people of Papua and New Guinea were not unlike other postwar colonial populations who refused to submit to false promises any longer. After the War, Paliau’s movement was replicated in neo-Independence efforts across the country, under an illusion that they could cast off their past—or rework tradition with modern routines-- and be reborn global citizens.

 

Cargo cults hailed the rise of ambitious new leaders, men (and sometimes women) who had visions, who cultivated followings that for the first time stretched horizontally across the region, well beyond the clan, parish and tribal boundaries of before. Some were more self-serving than others, like charismatics everywhere. But Paliau was certainly amongst the most intelligent. As foreigners grew less mystifying over the years, and as the vox pop changed, his brand of salvation adapted to the Manusians’ evolving aspirations. From being stridently anti-tradition, it softened to a more culturally proud and syncretic movement. It required little change, however, to shift from demonized cargo cult to a proto- independence self-help movement, which in turn grew into a political party and church that lobbied to bring local government councils and schools to Manus. Paliau’s movement is a Revenge parable for Manus, as Australians transmogrified from horror to indulgence, particularly after the public support Margaret showed Paliau after the War. He was eventually revered as a culture hero by the entire country. The educational jump-start he gave Manus produced a generation of elite civil servants just after Independence, which some in Port Moresby referred to as the Manus Mafia. Paliau is certainly one reason why Leonie can be a cosmopolite in the 1990s. She went to film school in Gororka, then Paris, and was courted by all manner of Europeans before she married a British volunteer and had his child. In another well-rounded parable, she eventually left Douglas for the thrall of a handsome educated Manus man and a romance customary undertones. Hers is a story as thrilling as Paliau’s. Today the Baluan people have made Paliau memorial of cellophane-wrapped flower bouquets on the old man’s cement grave, right next to Leonie’s house.

When Margaret Mead came back to Pere on Manus mainland in 1953, she met Paliau for the first time and experienced the transformational effects his work had had even by then on the Manus people. “They speak, she writes,

    with rapt looks on their faces, of ‘1946’with the devotion of a true revolutionary.  In 1946, the     new order began. Where did it come from? It came  p like an  arthquake, from nowhere.  Who     started it? No one, we ourselves initiated it. We decided to have a new way of life, to  throw away     every evil custom of the past and set  up our own form of life.[1]

On the far side of the grave is Paliau’s church, the Haus Hamamas—the Happiness House. Every Sunday the Win Nasin members gather in their whitest clothes to observe Paliau’s three rules: Report what you’ve done; Give Information on community events; and Ask questions about each other’s business. No secrets, is the message, everyone must communicate. Then they sing Win Nasin songs under a cross inscribed with the words: Unity, Peace, Rights, Freedom, Self. The old men wear clean laplaps and white t-shirts that say LIKE A FIRE THE 1946 PALIAU MOVEMENT, clutching woven baskets under their arms, their mouths stained betelnut red and, more often than not, a frangipani tucked behind the ear. Or they wear long ladies’ skirts from secondhand shops in Lorengau, and hug small patent leather bags, wearing big glassy drop earrings instead of the tortoise shells rings in their earlobes. And every morning these elegant and self-posessed men stride across the green in front of Leonie’s house to salute the flag over Paliau’s grave, with reverence. They are like a troupe of aging female impersonators, deadpan and war-weary.

The church sits in Mouk territory, the narrow strip of marshy ground that’s been ceded for generations to a migrant community called Titans, or Mouks. Paliau was a Mouk, and this is an important distinction. The Mouks are said to have fled their imploding Island long ago and migrated to the coasts Manus, where they exist as vaguely second class or Roma people, but renowned for their fishing skills. Their tiny stilt houses sit over the water at the end of log walkways, out beyond the pigsties and  mangroves that dot the shore.

 As Baluan’s fishing people, the Mouk trade their catch for the garden produce of their landowning hosts, who still garden the steep shoulders of the Malsu volcano. Their authority is gilded by the mysterious survival of stone cairns and walls throughout these garden hills, left behind by ancestors no one really remembers. The Titans are smaller darker people to the light-skinned ‘true’ Baluans who boast that they originate from Micronesia (which may in fact be true—Yapese people migrated here). But the Titanic national pride in their celebrated son, Paliau, has elevated the Mouks in the modern age.

Papua New Guinea writer Jaive Smare writes about Baluan on his blog ‘My Amazing Paradise’ (www.mayamazingparadise.com). “I asked the Baluans about the Mapo” he begins.

     They said the Mapo were a group of dwarf like people who lived on the island and built these     rock walls. Their ancestors apparently remember the Mapo as people who  lived in the island’s     jungles and watched the activities of the Baluans. They only  ame out when the Baluan villagers     had retired for the night. The story is that the  Mapo were hard workers. When the Baluans     cleared land for gardening or started  planting but did not finish, the next day  when they     returned, they found that to their surprise the mysterious Mapo had completed  all the work for     them. The Mapo did  everything excessively and where very hard working. According to the     Baluans, this  was not just strength of the Mapo but also a weakness. When  it came to harvesting     crops, if the Baluans harvested some bananas from their gardens, the  next day when  the arrived     at their gardens, all their bananas where harvested, even the  green ones.  They said the Mapo     over-harvested the gardens and the land. They were helpful  but  also destructive. So what     happened to the Mapo? Where they chased off the island or   did they mysteriously leave one     day? Different Baluans will tell you different stories.  But something happened.

 

 Life

 Leonie’s brother, Roy, is handsome and curly-haired with big long eye lashes. Like Leonie, he is landed Baluan, athough the distinction is more political than true after several generations of intermarriage. His wife, Heni, is Mouk, mother to Beryl, Stephanie and their brother Kanawi. Their one room stilted house sits about 50 feet offshore just down the hill from Leonie’s house, across the prickly coral island footpath. But to reach it, you must walk the long slippery garamut log from the shore, which is as much a challenge to me as one of those vine-covered logs thrown across the great Baliem valley in West Papua, which schoolchildren scamper across all day and I have only shimmed across with my teeth clenched against the deep gorge and river below.

Roy’s house is worth the effort; it’s a breezy room with a small verandah facing the sea out back where the banana boat is tied. Roy is a doting father, and his three kids are busy conducting the business of childhood in Manus. Roy sits placidly on a stool as the kids jump from the verandah to their small canoe, paddle to the log in front and repeat the routine with determination. As Margaret Mead observed over fifty years before:

     The [Manus] father treats his young children with very slight regard for differences in sex. Girls     or boys, they sleep in their father’s arms, ride on his back, beg for his pipe, and purloin betel nut     from his shoulder bag. When they are three or four, he makes then small canoes, again regardless     of sex. Neither boys nor girls wear any clothing except tiny bracelets, anklets, necklaces of dogs’     teeth, and beaded belts.[2]

 

Of the Mouk stilt houses, she writes:

    The house floors are made of strips of wood, short and smooth and evenly placed, so that there     are frequent gaps. Little children have to exercise nearly as much care as if they lived in trees     above the water…Even the pigs have become water animals. During the day they are kept fenced     up in small pens on piles, but at night they are let out and wallow and swim peacefully about in     the low water.

 

Heni is malarial and lying down as we sit around inside gossiping. Stephanie finally comes to sit with us, winded. Heni’s brother is washing his baby in a tin bowl on the verandah now, and Beryl comes up the log to the front door and asks for betelnut, which her father throws.  Then she runs through the house to tickle baby in back, pinching  her nose like a doll as she jumps into the sea. The baby cries, Roy stands up to tell Beryl to cut it out, and then Stephanie stands up to bolt out back and join her sister. They swim to the banana boat squealing and kicking, as if they’d never in their life had so much fun in this warm green water. These are the kind of kids who make me clucky.

It’s New Year’s eve and Leonie has the senseless idea of having a drinking party, with beer and precious rum. All her cousins, sisters and brothers and their kids squeeze with us onto the cement verandah, plastic cups in hand. Little Beryl and a cousin are cracking the rinds of pakpaks together; the one that breaks first loses, and the other gets to eat both lychee-like fruits. Meanwhile, little Kanawi makes flinty fireworks with an old sparkplug tied to a match to the end of a stick and hurled to the ground hard--BANG! –loud as a pop gun. The cassette player plays PNG music, Madang bands, and people sing along much of the time. The sky is purple, the coconuts are silhouetted, and we sit in a postcard of tropical dreams. I don’t remember mosquitoes, only the music and good company. At midnight one of Leonie’s brothers, Ray, walks off to strike the gong of an empty fuel tank hanging outside the Haus Hamamas. Happy 1998. The whole island can hear the peel. Then he comes back and becomes so hopelessly drunk, stumbling all over the verandah as we try to dance and calling out “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!,” so that the kids laugh uncontrollably, and Pare tries to sit him in a wicker chair. But Ray starts swinging at Pare so hard he swings himself out of the chair. Then Beryl takes Kanawi’s spark and slams it to the ground just beneath Ray’s arse, so he jumps so far he nearly falls on his head, Beryl throwing her head back in the biggest laugh of all. Ray’s fallen into a croton bush, and he tries to rise and take a swing at the air but passes out instead.

Then the fights start. One uncle picks a fight with his wife for standing in the darkness outside the party and not coming in close when he calls her. He pulls her shirt up to her chin and pushes her to the ground. She gets up and marches into Leonie’s house crying. Beryl finds a dog-eared women’s magazine under a table and flashes a close-up photo of a orangutan at her little sister, who bursts out crying, causing her mother to swipe Beryl, who also starts crying. Heni’s laughing though, and the three of them go inside and curl up on a pallet on the floor. The rest of us stay up dancing and telling stories for what seems like forever, until stragglers from another party, young boys, emerge as shadows in the darkening black beyond the verandah. They hesitate only briefly then break the illusory glass of the fluorescent lights and stand amongst us, demanding alcohol. Someone hands them cups, and Leonie and I make our way inside. They have the cassette player going long after Leonie and I have shut the door. “Tell them to go away,” I say.

“I can’t,” she says, “They’ll think I’m selfish.” So they stay on and finish the rum, a gift from Leonie’s ex-husband.

The next morning, Beryl is sitting on a wicker chair on the verandah when I go outside. But she spies her older brother Kanawi emerging from the bush behind with a couple of boys, and their shirts are full of ripe pakpak stolen from the gardens. Embarrassed to see him with kids who scrounge under other people’s trees, she yells, “Kanawi!” and he turns, smiles, and runs off with the pack. “Bikhet Mouk!” she calls out. I don’t know why I’m so enthralled with these kids, but I think they’re extraordinarily clever and  independent. They are Huck Finns, the Berstal Boys, of the tropics.

Writing home in 1928, Margaret Mead talked about these kid, who would become the basis of her 1930 book, Growing Up in New Guinea.

     It’s paradise for children. They have no work except to run errands and that involves paddling     about in the water. At low tide in the early morning they course about shooting fish with tiny      bows and arrows, dragging the water for minnows with a long piece of bark used  in imitation of a     net, or practicing just  issing each others’ feet  with a piece of  coral hurled through the                 water.[3]

 

Leonie and I are fishing with the kids in the afternoon, around the far side of the island, on a small rocky island surrounded by a wide light green skirt of coral. The water is very warm as we all stand in it to throw out lines. Dolphins surface not far away. Hornets hum from a nest in the mangrove tree behind us. Beryl, Stephanie, Kanawi, and a sweet droopy-eyes little boy named Kila whose spine must be fused because he can’t turn his neck, all strip their shorts off to dive for troicha and nautilus shells. Leonie catches one silvery seaperch after another, while I get nothing. The kids help by smashing snails found in the rock crevices which serve as bait. They make neat piles of it on the rocks, just to be obliging. Leonie throws her fish into a little pool between two rocks, and little Stephanie squats down to stroke them. She picks each one up and bites their eyes out, like jujubes, crunching down on their noses murderously. Some are left alive, though, and she takes one, a wrasse in beautiful pale blues, pinks and greens, and at the declination along the ridge of its belly she pokes her finger right through. Gooey intestines slide out, like sausages in a long sack, and expertly, she squeezes the goop out to salvage the transparent sack, leaving the fish in death thralls on a dry rock. “Stop it!” Beryl suddenly screams. “Stop it! Stop it!” she demands, coming up behind.  But Stephanie continues her dissections on a second fish. Beryl knocks the first fish back to the pool and slaps the second one from her sister’s hand.

“Asap!” she screams, using a term for second-sister. Switching from Baluan to Mouk language, her mother’s tongue, she yells (and Leonie translates): ‘Those fish are alive! You stupid girl you can’t gut the stomach of a fish where you caught it, you know that. Those fish are alive! Stop it!’ Her sister, I learn, has broken a fishing taboo.  Stephanie twists on her bare feet to look serenely over to her Aunt Leonie, clearly a master at infuriating her older sister. Leonie shrugs and calls out “Catch this,” unhooking another fish, which Beryl receives slithering into her palms. She is still aggrieved, and whines, “Stephanie is taking the guts out from the fish when she should wait!”

“Wait for what?”

“To do it somewhere else!” she says, astonished that Leonie doesn’t know why. “You can’t use the stomach of the fish for bait if you just caught it, you have to move somewhere else.” 

“You little Mouk!”  Leonie laughs. Turning to me, she says, “Must be a Mouk thing. A superstition, you know.”

But I don’t know: this kind of childhood is so far from my own, set against a volcanic island and beautiful people. Because it’s school holidays, our days are more langorous than usual, but still the self-assurance and complex society of these kids makes me wonder what I did with friends at this age. I have Our Gang memories of long afternoons, but these Baluan youngsters are a much more resourceful community than I ever knew. What I had growing up was feigned Independence---all walkie-talkies, Schwinn bikes and Good Humor trucks nothwithstanding. These kids eat anywhere, sleep anywhere, and only get a scolding if they deign to interrupt intense adult concentration. Even then, no one sulks, and nothing is taken personally.

     No child under thirteen or fourteen had any possessions except his canoe and bow and arrow,     furnished by adults. …The child does not complain…I shall never forget the picture of     eight-    year-old Nauna mending a broken penny balloon which I had given him. He would     gather the edges of the whole into a little bunch and painstakingly, laboriously, wind it about with     raffia-like grass. The hole made temporarily fast, he would inflate the balloon, which a moment     later would collapse and have to be mended again. He spent three hours at this labor of love,     never losing his temper, soberly tying up the rotten flimsy material with his sturdy grass     string.[4]

 

Death

Two nights later, Leonie, Beryl and myself are all asleep on foam pallets on the floor of Leonie’s house. The silence is solid, but for a honking toad now and then. The cicadas are faint and near the shore now, having left us hours ago. Just before sleep, at the moment when it feels you’ve now been spun off into space, we hear the sound of a drum. The tattoo of a garamut slit gong, the very subject of Leonie’s film. We have been filming the carvings and tuning of these slit gong drums for over a week now. People pay them for us, improvisationally, and also pedantically, because they are important vehicles of trade, ceremony, trade and communication.  This is the first time I’ve heard one unsolicited, at a distance. Leonie sits up straightbacked, listening closely. “It’s Sakumai. I have to go.”

Beryl stirs, and we both watch Leonie dash out to the darkness. Off toward Selan’s compound, beyond the black bush. The drum goes on for maybe ten minutes, and it’s the most solemn sound I’ve ever heard. Twenty minutes later Leonie’s back, her eyes filled with tears. Uncle Kuam is dead. Everyone’s gathering at the widow’s house and Leonie must go back to be with them. You go, I say. I’ll wake and bring the camera later. It’s no later than 4 AM. When I arrive, the old women are washing the body. The house glows by kerosene lamp, alive with the family’s moaning. Someone is wailing loudest and highest, and several old women begin to sing a slow lament in the old Baluan language. These are the  traditional mourning songs and they fill the interior to reverberate outside.  It’s a big house, built out from the original one room and verandah on tall palings, into four rooms of plywood and sheet metal, with a walkway between rooms and a blue tarp extending the thatch roof over part of the kitchen. From the sloping path outside I see stacks of tin bowls, pots and coffee mugs set to dry on a board at the kitchen window, and inside, a blackened kettle on the fire. Benson and Hedges ads are tacked to the walls with pretty mixed race girls in sunglasses. People sit crowded against the walls when I walk inside. Leonie’s there. Old women have taken off their meri blouses and are slumped on the floor wringing tea towels against their soft deflated breasts, their mouths revealing blackened teeth as they sing dirges and wail out, again and again.

Kuam lies on a carved and painted wedding bed, on legs about a foot from the floor, cushioned by a foam pallet, and covered to his chin in flowered laplaps. Bald, big-nosed, his skin is a purplish red, livid. Someone explains to me that he just sat up in bed and had a stroke (she uses the English word) in the middle of the night. I’m a complete stranger in the midst of this very private moment, but she rubs my arm and tells me to stay; she’s the widow’s sister. When I walk outside, the yard is already full of visitors. People sitting on logs and rocks and plastic chairs between the mango and rain trees. They’re all chewing buai, some rocking babies, some of them crying. More men arrive, their heads bowed, carrying axes. They set to chopping down a stand of eight betelnut trees to one side of the house, all the trees planted by the dead man himself. It’s sunrise now. Leonie’s sister Dinah explains that it’s their right to take the [alms as members of the man’s sister’s line, the same line that will receive payments at the big mortuary feast, the filo, to come. After the funeral they’ll also come raid the widow’s house of everything belonging to their Uncle. All the skinny palms come down easily, boughs full of ripe nut clusters which the men and some of their wives pull from the tangled fronds as they hit the ground. Little boys run along the trunks, wobbling and jumping off at the ends. The nut clusters are now hung at the corners of the house, inside the haus win and on the verandah, so all the visitors can have a chew. Hands disappear into baskets for stubby mustard seeds and jars of lime powder, as betelnuts are palmed around in twos and threes. I take one and split it with Beryl’s little sister Stephanie, who hands me someone’s lime and a bit of mustard seed. It’s good betelnut, not too bitter, hardly needs lime to cut the sting. It is a time when I cannot take notes, but I find a way to remember so many details.

From inside the house the widow sobs.An older man translates for me.

      Oh my sweetheart, oh my darling,

      You’ve left me now my darling, oh my darling,

      Oh my sweetheart, why did you leave us,

      Why did you leave me?

The old man and woman from the top of the volcano sit in a haus win groan and keening songs in the older Baluan language. They may be the last people to know the songs, and so they bring them to the funeral. The dead man’s brothers file past on their way to the house. There’s Ngat Selan, whose long white hair and beard, his fair skin, glasses, and brimmed hat, made him look like an Orthodox Jew come to sit shiva. His son Richard is a little touched in the head, and walks around hang-dog with an oft-lascivious smile. Very Boo Riley. Leonie and I visited this Uncle at his house, where he showed us some of the carvings that have made him renowned on Baluan, and he talked about how sorry he was Richard couldn’t learn to take over from him. Uncle Kapo follows next, with his small eyes and a big nose just like his brother Kuam’s. Then Uncle Nou, chief Sakumai’s father, more nervous and talkative than the rest, saying, “Morning, morning” to all of us. One brother can’t be moved from his house on the water, where he lives with his wife and his crossed-eyed granddaughter. Still another is in the capital.

Now one of their cousins emerges from the house, her face contorted, reaching for her baby in another woman’s arms before she hurries down the path and home. The wife of the dead man’ son stumbles out with her arm around Leonie, and they moved to sit on the verandah. Women now arrives in a long line, bringing food in tin bowls carried above their heads, covered with tea towels. Rice, sweet potato, taro, papaya,  coconut cooked rice dumplings wrapped in tiny leaf bundles. 

By mid morning ten men have gone off to dig a grave behind the village playing field. By mid afternoon they’ve abandoned it as too rocky, and are sweating under the flinty sounds of shovels at a second spot. Eventually this too is abandoned. At the house, more men are measuring, sawing and hammering a coffin from sheets of plywood. Word comes back from the dead man’s eldest son, George, in Port Moresby not to bury their father today, but to wait. He and his sister are arranging to fly in tomorrow or the next day. This means the body must go to the hospital morgue in Lorengau, on the big island. It can’t be left in the heat of the island.

All the people inside and outside Kuam’s house have nothing to do but debate this decision already made for them, because debate is the real sport on Baluan, bigger than  billiards played on homemade tables (with beautifully carved and sanded black palm pool cues). The time it’ll take the kids to get here is unreasonable, some say. And the seas are so rough they might even have to wait to bring the body to the morgue. Then George and his sister Louisa would arrive to find their father’s half-rotten corpse, mangled by bouncing on the high seas, god forbid. Besides, all the flights to and from Manus and the capital are overbooked, it’s the holidays. But a Mouk who works for Air Niugini in Moresby might find space on a cargo flight, which would mean the children and the dead man’s brother, Ngi, could all come. The body would still have to be two or three days in the morgue. Several banana boats are organized for family to take it in its coffin to Lorengau. Not today--there are whitecaps on the horizon. Probably tomorrow. Baluan is so very far from anywhere, so very hard to get to. Speedboats and shortwave radio are its strongest links to the rest of the world. It’s the sort of place where Coke bottles wash ashore from around the globe, as one did recently, idly launched seventeen years before by a young California couple from their picnic at the beach. Leonie’s father found it, had Dinah read the note, and went to pains to write a letter back from so far afield and so many years away. Then the couple wrote back, sending Leonie’s father a photo of a smiling middle aged couple surrounded by red headed children.

 

Malsu

 Leonie and walked up the volcano at the center of the island once, to meet the family that’s always lived there. The wiry handsome patriarch--the man who sings a lament at Kuam’s house---leads us to the blood stones, last signs of Baluan cannibalism, fragments of a human abattoir, where victims were butchered before being stewed in large clay pots. The real Hollywood backstory. Children, the old man tells us, were always the juiciest meat. In fact, they were often swiped from visiting trading vessels. Once a Baluan boy was stolen by nearby Pom Islanders who brought him to their lapan. He was terrified to see they were readying for a feast, but soon realized they were actually preparing for his installation, as the old lapan had no son of his own and impulsively decided to adopt the boy. Rather than eat him.

We stand at the edge of the extinct volcano, looking over into its cold uninhabited but feathery center. It’s a conical pit that reaches down below the sea floor and seems to be covered with a soft shag carpet of young palms. The old man says he’s recently been to America, on a Bahai church junket, and he met an American couple who told him there were people in Israel building an ark for the millennium. Oh, I say. No, I’m afraid I don’t know these people, I have to admit, and I probably don’t have a seat on the ark. When I ask about his kids--all thirteen--he explains with great pride which son is a doctor, which one’s a lawyer, which daughter is a teacher, where they live, and so forth.  It doesn’t surprise me that a man atop a volcano in a far flung South Sea island has fervent belief that an ark for the end days is under construction, in America. That his son is a surgeon at Goroka Base Hospital, his daughter works for the Education Department in Port Moresby, and his nephew is Minister of Culture, I did not expect. I have entered 100 years of solitude, waiting to be written by the Malsu grandchildren.

 

The New Way

 The next time I see this lovely old man and his wife is at an ‘awareness’ meeting down the coral path from Leonie’s house. In a low thatch building with benches down the long walls and a long table and chairs in the center, tens of people have gathered to hear a Baluan man, a civil servant back from Moresby for the holidays, give a talk about the problems of government today. The issue of corruption, that thing called globalization, and foreign aid. It seems to me in keeping with the Paliau ethos that someone should host and everyone politely attend such an event. The man himself, a big bear of a fellow named Sionin, has introduced himself to me already and heartily invited me to come.

I sit diagonally across from an elderly man named Sipo, an important figure in the Catholic Church I’m told. He has long open earlobes and a blue cap that falls forward to the top of his aviator sunglasses. His sulu is a long jersey wraparound skirt, and he rests one hand on a walking cane while the other clutches a betelnut basket to his chest. Everything Sionin says makes him nod with approval. An old woman next to him chews such a big wad of betelnut that she has to keep poking a finger to keep it inside. The Malsu volcano man and wife are near the far end of the bench, listening intently. On a white board against the far wall Sionin’s written:

 

PEACE AND ITS RELATED CONCEPTS

OVERVIEW--FOCUS QUESTIONS

What is peace freedom, unity and its opposites of war, conflict?

How can we overcome conflicts and achieve/realise Peace?

Why racial and other forms of prejudice and discrimination?

      attitude/perception    governments/countries religion   ethnocentrism--ethnicity

      egocentrism--egocentric   sexual (men vs women)   domestic violence child abuse!

FREEDOM--Are you free? From what? Sources of freedom MAN HIMSELF/OURSELF (MAN is the measure of all things)---Government by the people for the people--Kennedy

      constitution   justice system   human rights organisations  legislation

eg Village Courts United Nations

GOD--SPIRITUAL

That all the prophets from God including Mohammed Krishna Buddha and Jesus came to deliver “peace” message from God! (if we believe in the unity of religion and mankind).

     ‘People,’ he bellows in Pidgin, ‘we must think twice about these concepts, Freedom and Justice. The Hindus of India, for example, cut off the arms of little babies to beg for money in the streets of Bombay. Is this something you can tolerate? Because someone before mentioned the word tolerance. Can we tolerate that? The Muslims in the Middle East are performing acts of terrorism. They force women to cover themselves head to toe when they go outside, and I’ll tell you, as someone who has visited Muslim countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, these people have very different ideas about freedom than we do. Is that something we can tolerate? Because as I say this, you know there are already mosques and temples to these religions in PNG today--I’ve seen them!

‘Now all this leads us to....’ and here he lifts a piece of paper with the bold words “CORRUPTION” on top and the cartoon of a fat man with a cigar below. ‘Corruption,’ he intones, then pauses. ‘Many of you have heard this word more and more on the radio and in political talk. We are becoming a nation of corruption.’ He sets down his stack of papers. ‘Let me ask you, this Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan, some say he’s a billionaire. Why? Because he takes kickbacks. Why are all our politicians driving Pajeros and flying to Brisbane when the grassroots people like ourselves are left to pay higher school fees, and we can’t even afford rice and tinned fish? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s corruption.’

I remember a visit to my father and stepmother in their Florida retirement idyll, where they enjoy all the mod cons and lime green accents, and are in no sense back to nature, but here they have arrived after decades of dim cubicles and windowless offices working to afford this kind of simplicity, or this kind of view, with a dock. Their local club is filled with madras and Lilly Pulitzer,  and has none of these wraparound midis or drop earrings; but they strive just as anxiously as this set of seniors who were born in paradise and dream of a landline phone. In Florida it’s a new car, the next set of clubs. But both places carry on without enjoying the view.

No one responds to Sionin. Some of the older ones look to be waiting for a punch line. Sionin picks up his papers now and flips to the next one, the drawing of a beggar on one side, and a fat politician on the other.  ‘Now I read somewhere that a UN study puts us seventeenth on a list of developing countries for our quality of life. Seventeenth! Poor! We’re poorer than seventeen other developing countries! And yet we’re a nation of huge natural wealth--gold mines, oil, timber, coffee, copra. One of the wealthiest countries in the world filled with some of the poorest people. Why is it our Manus politicians haven’t brought any sort of development to Baluan? Do you see development here? Are you living like white men? No! We’re still living like bus kanaka. And our politicians--where are they? Did you see Pokawin or Marsipal at the canoe races? Did they come to your volleyball tournament? Why does one of our lapans have to chase after them like a nobody to get money for your village? You tell me.’

 

Grief

 The morning after death, a procession descends the path from Kuam’s house to two banana boats at the shore. The couple from Malsu, the old Uncles, and Leonie holding one Uncle’s arm, all look exhausted from keening and weeping thirty six hours or more. Then all the women in Kuam’s brothers’ line come. Everyone moving slowly. At the back six men, all dressed in white shirts and trousers, members of Win Nasin, come bearing the coffin on their shoulders like a small plane gliding to the airfield. People cry as the coffin bores through the crowd. Finally, the widow descends. She’s held by two women at her elbows, her head wrapped in black cloth. A few women in the crowd break into a lament, and another begins wailing (again) and pressing a tea towel to her forehead as she stares  at the sky through tears. The coffin halts by the boat, then drops by small grunts: tipping, slipping in the many palms and dipping toward the center of the boat. “Heavy,” someone says. After it’s settled, the widow, the son, Leonie and several others step in and sit down. They set off immediately across the sea for the morgue in Lorengau. Minutes later, a second boat pushes off with other mourners, secondary characters, myself included. Thus begins the next ordeal. 

We congregate at the long haus win outside Leonie’s cousin Margaret’s house in the Lorengau settlements. These are astonishingly clean and well spaced blocks for settlements, all along the beach. Anywhere else in the world they might be pricey holiday bungalows, but here they’re simple stilt houses with upturned boats and broken-down PMVs in the yards. We’re down the road from the big house where Kuam’s closer relatives and the widow are having a marathon of wailing and keening and smoking and chewing betelnut. One big crowded house of unhappiness.

Recently widowed, Margaret has her hair cut short and wears only black, but she’s warm, hospitable and keeps the kettle on for endless teas and coffees. I guess she’s not yet forty, maybe she was a young bride. In the village, a dead man’s family can come in and raid the widow’s house of anything they like, but here in town Margaret has so many things you don’t have in the village, like a toilet, two old boats on blocks, metal tables and  heavy wooden beds---a lot more cargo to be carted away by the in-laws. What may have seemed token in the village is real haulage here. For that reason, she’s turned a bookshelf to one wall and pulled a table across the door to her bedroom, blocking off her last valuables in case the in-laws drop by. Leonie tells me they’ve already ‘repossessed’ 40 hp motor, kerosene stove,  tea kettle, and even an orange tree from the front yard. Organized theft which would be ameliorated in the village but leaves a crater of debasement in town, as if to push the widow into a deeper precipice of sorrow.  Margaret’s brother Tiptip has brought a 25 kilo bag of rice, to help feed the visitors. 

At dusk, she lights mosquito coils in the haus win. People keep arriving and she wants them to know they can sleep on the wooden benches if they want. It’s after dusk when Kuam’s brother Ngi, having just flown in from the mainland capital, comes to pay respects to Margaret. She stands as he enters the doorway and reaches for his hand. They’re both crying, but silently. Ngi is dressed in a brown sulu with a camera bag strung across his chest. He looks very much like his dead brother. Behind him a tall younger man enters whom Margaret hasn’t seen and then when she does, startled, she moves aside for an embrace. He is Ngi’s son, Albert. Margaret and he are cross-cousins, closer than brother and sister in Baluan society; they are joking cousins, which makes them free to be silly and even provocative to each other as kids, and silent supporters as they grow to adulthood. They sit together on the bench under the light of a kerosene lamp, holding hands. The others in the haus win are an old neighbor woman, Margaret’s teenage son Edward, Leonie, Tiptip, a couple teenage nieces, and myself.  “The girls?” Margaret asks Albert.

Albert shakes his head, hiccuping a sob. “They’ll be all right. They went to hospital first and then we sent them Madang, to visit Elizabeth. They’ll be all right.”

“I could have stopped it!” the old man exclaims, shaking his fist. His face is compressed with anger and he flexes his bare feet up and down as they hang from the bench.

“Don’t think,” Margaret says. “You aren’t to blame. It’s the raskals who are.”

Throughout the evening they speak in both Baluan language and Pidgin, so I gather the gist of this slowly.

“Now they won’t have a proper marriage,” Albert says.  

“They’ll never forget,” the old man spits. “And it killed their grandfather. Killed him with worry....” His voice softens. “Dead from stroke.”

“He was a worrying man,” Margaret says.

“And I should die too!” Ngi cries again, head bowed.

The old neighbor woman removes the kettle from where it hangs over the fire and for the hundredth time today pours out coffees, with dry milk and heaps of sugar. She hands them to the newcomers. These men live in the capital with Albert’s daughter, and the daughter of Kuam’s son George, a girl of thirteen who’s at school there.

“George is not well,” Albert says, shaking his head. “He’s the most upset.”

The old man slides off the bench and paces the floor. “I was there,” he begins in Pidgin. “I had just come from a veteran’s meeting and for the first time in ten years I’d been given some beers and I was drunk. I came back to the house and fell asleep underneath. I couldn’t even get upstairs, and I passed out. They must have climbed the security fence and the cut through the razor wire and come down in a second. They got inside, tied up Albert and his wife in their bedroom and then went in and defiled the girls. Both of them. They took the TV, a cassette player, food, that’s it. And then they took off. And all the time I slept!” He shakes his fist. “But the police caught them down in Badili at daybreak. They got all three.” He stares at the dirt and his eyes well with tears.

      Later we walk to the big house of mourning where a meeting is going on upstairs. It’s a house only half-built, there are people all over the verandah and in the whitewashed  rooms upstairs. All the people of Kuam’s line are there sitting against the walls in one room lit by the warm glow of a kero lamp on the floor. Underneath the house everything’s darkness, except out back, behind the house, where seven or eight women sit in a small haus win around a table lit by candles and laden with tin plates of donuts, sago and coconut balls, pineapple slices, dry biscuits and rice balls cooked in coconut milk.  We climb the outside stairs to the second floor. On the verandah two little kids lie sleeping face down, and two teenage girls sit with their legs dangling through the palings, talking quietly. In the lamplit room one of Kuam’s nephews is making a speech about how much he’s contributed to the mourning, reminding everyone that he was the one who called the family in Moresby, he rang the morgue, he hired the ambulance from the landing, and found petrol for the boats. Everyone looks utterly exhausted. Another nephew now lists his contributions, his services in kind. He adds that the relatives on Baluan all wanted to  bury their uncle right away because of the heat, and they traditionally have the right to make this decision, but in this case they’ve assented to the wishes of the children and gone to these extraordinary lengths to preserve the body for them. “That’s all,” he says, “I’m finished.”

Suddenly a woman who’s been very agitated in one corner bursts out crying and pulling on her hair as she hugs her knees. She turns to the wall and wails that none of these people have the right to organize this funeral, that she alone has the right as the man’s niece on his sister’s line, and she has not been consulted at all, and they should just go and bury him without her if they want it that way, and she knew they would undermine her authority all along, even though she’s been prepared to help the children in every way. Sobs and moans as she declaims them. Twenty or more people around the room wait, looking blank. It’s almost pro forma how they react. Is she really bereft or just making primogeniture claim? No one responds. But when her fit subsides and she’s  switched to low gear, Kuam’s son George begins. He’s just come from the capital today, he points out, and wants to express his gratitude to his cousins for putting aside their obligations on this occasion and heeding the desires of their Uncle’s children, so that he and his sister, plus his cousin Albert and Uncle Ngi, could all arrive to say their last good-byes. He speaks with his eyes fixed on the empty center, as if careful not to stir strong sentiments. And yet he also looks tired and sad. Beside him sits his sister Louisa, her hair combed straight back tightly, with pretty bangles on her wrists and a gold chain around her neck. Now she speaks. She wants to acknowledge that she has been told her Uncles Sege and Sionin have made a large contribution to the cost of this funeral and in that way have made it possible for everyone to come say good-bye to her father.

I hear shuffling in the dark hallway beyond the room. There’s the widow, still hooded, slumped against a wall beside a young boy. Both of them sit listening in semi-darkness. They seem to be ghosts, as if no one but myself can see them. In this event the widow is an extra, he has no lines, and waits with the stagehand. Then he stands and walks away into compete darkness, leaving this old woman alone and noiseless. When George finishes, Leonie and her cousin Tiptip rise to leave the room, and I follow. It’s late now, past midnight. As we walk back the houses in the yards have either gone black or glow only dimly. On the beach to our right, two men sit under a mangrove tree drinking beers. I can understand the idea of time standing still, the relativity of it all. How, in a terrible calamity or loss, everything moves very slowly, days pushing on through the night hours without punctuation. The physical exhaustion makes you more sleepless still, and your body grows heavy as your thoughts numb.  Mourning, lamentation, in all its tedium.    

The next day we go to Papindo Trading and buy a bolt of white cotton, a large piece of red cotton, a can of aerosol deodorant, and two full bolts of flowered cotton. Margaret carries her hand-powered sewing machine out to the haus win where she and Leonie cut and sew a large red cross for the white cloth that will drape the coffin.

At night I have an unexpected dream of Helen, the crazy woman of Lou Island who was born before the War. They say that, as a young girl, Helen and her mother and baby brother were captured by the Japanese in Rabaul, East New Britain, where they were lined up on the beach with other prisoners and shot. But Helen and her mother fell just before the count of three. They lay with the dead bodies until night, when they slid off to the water. Swimming away, they were shot again by guards, who killed the baby. Helen and her mother got away, though, and came back across the Bismarck Sea to Lou Island, which lies just across a strait from Baluan. Helen was never right after that, even as a young woman. She never wore clothes, not even a grass skirt or a cotton wrap. No underpants. Sometimes now she wears a t-shirt and nothing else, a shocking old hag who walks about queerly. Once a tourist was trying to come ashore to Lou by powerboat when Helen appeared on the beach, naked. He pulled back and excused himself for disturbing the old woman her at her wash, but everyone on the shore just laughed and told him not to worry. Now the image of Helen’s nakedness keeps reappearing to me in all its clumsy detail. I want to know what her body looks like for some reason, and yet it’s always out of focus Sometimes I sense everyone on the shore is laughing at me, but I’m wearing clothes. Still everyone laughs, they keep on laughing. It’s me, the outsider, I’m arrived, embarrassed. Please tell me why? I want to know. That’s where the dream ends.

 

Burial

 

It’s barely dawn when we set out for Baluan again. We enter a long channel banked by mangroves that’s the passage between the main island and the smaller Los Negros island, connected overhead by a two lane bridge. There’s a truck on the grassy shoulder above, and people are handing cargo down from the truck to Gibson’s big boat, where the coffin is secured under a yellow tarp. The three boats from Lorengau pull up to wait for Gibson, and soon we all leave in procession for the long trip to Baluan. The sea is calm, but not dead calm. We pass the small volcanic islands where people come to picnic, and proceed out to the vast sea. Only Lou and Pom islands now tear a distant gray band between the sky and the water. Everywhere flying fish leap from our wake, fanning out tiny gills to soar across the glassy surface, improbable fairy acrobats like an entourage for this procession. An old man named Namalap pulls out a half-smoked bush cigar and strikes one match after another to light up. He cups his hands, turns his back and hunkers down between the mound of cargo and the side of the boat, but the wind finds him anyway. One of the young men up front takes it, bends over between his knees, sucks it alite, and hands it back to Namalap, who curls up in a depression on the tarp to enjoy his smoke. Just over half way, when Lou Island draws close enough to reveal Baluan behind it, the sea changes. Larger waves ripple loosely across the surface, then begin to cross cut each other. Choppy crests surround the boat and slowly rise and fall over bigger and bigger swells. Sometimes Roy, standing drenched in the stern, will steer into the waves to plow across them, and sometimes they come back to smash the boat sideways, rolling it almost halfway over. Water slaps up both sides of the boat, drenching everyone as we rock back and forth. We slip into a trough and are thrown sideways with great thudding force, then rise and dip with a smaller swell, only to crash into a bigger wave on the other side, water spilling in on all sides now. Gradually the spray turns to rain, and I look out to where the other boats have been swallowed by white clouds sitting on the surface of the water. I wonder if the corpse has been jerked around. The engine chokes and stops, and one of the young men scrambles to the back to help Roy lift the motor, change hoses, and pump fuel from one tank to another, as the boat rocks wildly and everyone tries a firmer grip on the sides. Slap bang, I think of the corpse against the wooden box. Leonie turns to me and her face looks mauve, like the sadness has become nausea and she might heave at any minute now. But she doesn’t.

Kuam is buried that afternoon. He is dropped into the fourth attempt at a grave, the one spot clear or coral, right before his house. A Win Nasin choir stands by the open hole and sings eight songs about Manus and Papua New Guinean Unity. One young girl sings the first line of the song on her own, as the caller, and the group responds en masse. As they sing some of them start to cry. The choir master gives a sermon with a Bible in his hand. When it ends, they shift the coffin down by long strips of red fabric into a six foot hole. Sionin stands on a boulder with his videocamera and Albert, from Moresby, stands near the grave and takes pictures with an instamatic. One of Kuam’s sons takes laplaps and a hard-hat belonging to his father and bends down to place them on the red cross of the coffin. He rises to shovel the first mound of soil, the whole gathering bursts out crying. Kuam’s brother Ngi comes up to the edge of the grave and wails, his face contorted, calling out to the brother who looked exactly like him. It’s all too sad to bear; my own nose tingles and my eyes are tearing now. Soon all the soil has been shifted into the hole. People stamp on the grave, they place wreaths of plastic flowers and strands of gladiolus on top. Afterwards, we all go home to sleep. Only the kids are left awake—Beryl, Stephanie and Kanawi all running down the rocky path throwing stones at the water.

 

Security

 

Many years later, Leonie’s brother Ray became a member of my household in Madang, and Uncle Ray to all my kids and grandchildren. A big gentle character, Ray has never been working on all cylinders, which makes him easy to con or manipulate and why, when I saw him in the market in Madang that day, I had to invite him home. That quality also made him rule-bound and honest; he could obsess over small transgressions and play the bad cop to the little kids, a quality I valued. Ray became a security guard and worked nights, which was convenient to us as he could be home all day to watch the house. We had an early audio book of Eragon, the fabulist young adult novel about dragons and princesses that is so beautifully realized because, I have since learned, it was written by a young man himself, someone home schooled in the marvels of the original Hobbit, C.S. Lewis, Frank L. Baum and Grimm fairytales. This was before Harry Potter. Ray lay in bed and listened to it right through, and listened again and again. Leonard was seven I think and they took turns living with Eragon. It may have been with him on an earpiece the night Ray’s workmates decided to rob the big company they were guarding. In the end, they ran off and left Ray holding the bag. Rattled, but resilient, he survived the court case and went to prison for a year. Prison in Madang at the time was neither awful nor benign, it involved overcrowded cells in a fairly beaucolic part of town. Similarly, the diet was little more than brown rice and tinned fish every day, more than many villagers would ask for, but monotonous to anyone for whom food is the very structure of their day. We would bring novels and pots of chicken on the weekend that the guards sometimes confiscated. Our friend the convicted rapist ex-Governor of Madang was also serving a sentence in the prison, and his circle of homeboys made the place seem like a low security stint for a mob boss, but it may have made everyone’s life easier for the time being. Ray lost over thirty pounds that year in prison,  and all the old Madang people from the old Yali movement embraced him as the prodigal son, child of Paliau, when he came back. They fattened him up nicely. It seems to me that Ray has never left the wondrous but intelligent place of Baluan childhood. He would have been the determined but not bossy one, maybe last in line but perfectly able to fend for himself.

(Contemporary photos by Jaive Smare)

---

[1] Mead 1956 New Lives for Old, London: Victor Gollanz Ltd, p 290

 [2] Mead, Margaret, 1953[1930]. Growing Up in New Guinea. New York: Mentor Books, pp.26-7.

 [3] Ibid p.:23-24

 [4] Op cit Mead 1953.

 

 

Who is really saving the rainforest?

A little known fact for those outside the conservation fields is that Norway is committed to saving the world's rainforests. Yes, that's right. Home of Munch, Ibsen, reindeer and fjords.

Norway has been committed to saving the rainforest for the past 25 years. Ever since Sting and Trudy Styler started talking about the Amazon.

This is the 25th anniversay, in fact, of the Rainforest Foundation Norway, and they've produced a document that tells us where we stand. It's worth downloading to see what's driving deforestation, how we can check it, and why the rainforests remain important for all of us.

 http://www.grida.no/news/default/6200.aspx

Amongst other things, it remind us that:

Reducing the destruction of the world’s rainforests is crucial if we are to limit global warming. About 11% of global emissions of greenhouse gases stem from deforestation. At the same time, rainforests can be severely affected by climate change. Habitat fragmentation and degradation increase the forests’ vulnerability. It is uncertain exactly how rainforests will be affected by climate change, but we know that deforestation must be reduced in order to cut emissions and reinforce the resilience of the remaining forests.

The people who live in and depend upon the rainforest are crucial to it's continued viability. Their cultural diversity is key to the biodiversity we seek to conserve. 

We are told:

Indigenous peoples are relatively few in number, approximately 370 million people and constitute about 5% of the world population. Still, their numerous ethnic groups represent the main cultural diversity of the world. The greatest number of indigenous peoples is found in the tropical forest regions.

A recent study on the correlation between areas with high biological diversity and high linguistic diversity further underscores the link between indigenous peoples and tropical rainforest. Some 70 per cent of the world’s languages are spoken in the biodiversity hotspots, mainly tropical rainforests.

Land is where collective culture is being lived and shared, and where the transfer of skills from one generation to the next takes place. Land is linked to worldview and historic references, and certain places have spiritual and religious importance. Land is intrinsically linked to worship, collective knowledge, to male/female activities, to skills linked to food harvesting and medicine collection, house building, income generation, etc.

The Karawari Cave Arts Project is indebted to the Nordic home of salmon and reindeer. As the PNG government drags its heels in cancelling the illegal SABLs they once permitted, and it reconsiders the country's financial dependence upon Rimbunan Hijau against the risk of unchecked illegal mining, we are reminded of the difference between good governance and corruption born of a Resource Curse.

 

Somehow the country of reindeer and pickled herring has kept its head above water in the recent global financial collapse, and been able to endow most of the work being done by NGOs around the world---in South America, Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania---to conserve the rainforest.

 

Because saving the rainforest means savng the guardians of the rainforest. It's really very simple. Even the Norwegians in their snowy beautiful fjords can understand that. Investing in the global future, rather than in arms, fats cars, industrial zones, zoos or theme parks.

Rather than exploiting those rainforest people for the sake of a music career, an ambitious anthropological theory about human savagery, an expensive photo exhibition, book, or filmic 'homage' to these noble savages, Norway is looking for ways to support them, on their own terms. Sponsoring indigenous research, skills transference, activism, awareness, sustainable small scale development, and in the Karawari Cave Arts case, the rock art that represents their deep heritage.

Norway is not the only country concerned about biodiversity. But they may be the only one that really does something about it.

Our project has had the support of many generous organizations. But there is a difference between sponsoring indigenous scientists as they research the biodiversity of their forest, and record the beauty of their caves, and selling a magazine with romantic images and fictional stories. Or selling something we've just found at Amazon.com, a pamphlet about these people that has absolutely no contribution from or benefit to the people themselves. It's shocking.

Heralding the return to (relatively) harmless cults in PNG

Madang hasn’t had a good run for cults recently. Mass murders, Black Jesus, all size and shapes of faux-Yali/pulp fiction behaviours have taken hold in the past few years. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a really good group sex or wooden-rifle marching band in this town. How long has it been since someone tuned into a balsa wood radio?

But this week Facebook, as always, offers us a light at the end of the ridiculo-religio tunnel. We applaud the efforts of a few East New Britian lads and Central lasses to raise the bar on this long-dormant tradition of mixing the sacred and cheerfully profane once again.

First we learned (27^th May) from policeman David Terry that the Black Ale cult had been unmasked (or in the words of his post---stumbled from the bushes) in Port Moresby, somewhere near the Murray Barracks.

Girls who had forged a society for the worship of ‘spirits’ had gotten together for a Goth jamboree in black clothes, with bottles of many kinds. What we used to call a drinking club is now, according to police, acult. As it should be. Apparently this Black Ales are responsible for plenty of unsolved crimes on the police blotter, causing the force to conclude that their rampage can only be stopped by a tented evangelical crusade. Preferably not one where Blood of Christ is served.

Perhaps Joyce Meyers can come and teach these people about righteous wardrobes and commercially Christian temperance.

And just when we thought Noah Musingku and the Kingdom of Papaala was all that was happening in the islands, we discover only yesterday that East New Britian has a few tricks up its sleeve. That's when the Loop reported (see down below) an incident somewhat unclear to this writer, but which evidently qualifies as cult behavior by including the venerable act of shoving a bar of soap up a lad’s ass.  As an anthropologist I would have to say that this act in particular represent the imitation of our colonial overlords at work (by which I mean, of course, the current sitting Members of Parliament).

Imagine the possibilities if we could find a theological bridge between these two sects?

I’m now off to raise a glass and squeeze a bar for both.

 From PNG Loop 6 June:

Taulil Ward 2 Member Patrick Kadaka has confirmed that the Malabunga Secondary School boys stoning at the school property earlier this week was cult related.

The information he received from the school administration was that the boys actions came about as a result of a female teacher’s spouse warning the boys after he received a report from another male student that a boy had approached him while he was in his dormitory saying that they would ‘sopim ass blong em’ (shove soap up his anus).

This is believed to be a cult activity currently being investigated by Keravat police, he said.

In the meantime, Mr Kadaka who is also a member of the school’s disciplinary board has warned the students not to go beyond their school boundary into Taulil and Rapitok villages.

This includes not following their day student friends to their homes nearby.

Mr Kadaka said the continuous disrespect of teachers, vandalism to school property and their lack of adhering to their school code of ethics was appalling and their actions must stop!

He said that Malabunga Secondary School has no fence around it because Taulil and Rapitok villagers take responsibility to take care of the staff and students of this fine institution that was established in 1962.

Mr Kadaka urged the students to take pride in being part of Malabunga given many of their  own people from Taulil and Rapitok including himself went through other institutions but take pride in looking after Malabunga community as their responsibility.

Students should do their part to make sure they concentrate on doing well in school as their parents sent them there to get a secondary education and set a foundation for a bright future, he said.

Mr Kadaka and three ward members from three out of the four Rapitok wards came to talk to the students on Wednesday afternoon (June 04) at the Marita Hall.

 

- See more at: http://www.pngloop.com/2014/06/06/malabunga-incident-cult-related/#sthash.s6icTBdT.xDg5pyRS.dpuf

Free speech for Papua New Guinea now ( DWU's Media Freedom Day 2 May 2014)

Thank you for asking me to speak at this important event for such a timely cause, Media Freedom. I used to teach in the PNG Studies Department here, for those who don’t know me, and I have been a longtime media producer in PNG.

First with Tikil Kuan productions in Mt Hagen, then with Tukana Media in Port Moresby and Pacific Gold Studios, where we made a lot of John Wong and Patti Doi’s music videos in the nineties.

I remember when Maggie Wilson and I asked Francesca Semoso to play a role in Stolen Moments our 1989 soap opera/drama. She was working for NBC radio, had done a few Cold Power ads, but was really famous for her part in Tukana as Lucy, the sorceress. “Media ruined my life,” she said. We could see that: people would run from her, faint at the thought of Lucy walking through town, and call her names. She lived for a time under that conflation of image and reality that was so powerful in the first years of film and TV here. BUT it did not prevent her from becoming the Autonomous Region of Bougainville’s first female parliamentarian.

Today, the Prime Minister is suing two internet commentators for libelous talk. Another Minister calls for the deportation of Paul Barker, Director of the INA. Now Thomas Webster has been fired. Whe  government gets a taste of supression, we know it's pretty hard to turn back.  Not so long ago Paul Paraka called for my deportation over a blog. In June we may have our first Cyber Crime Law in PNG. So, yes, today is indeed a very different media climate than the past. Whereas the eighties problems were perceptual, conflating the actor and role, today there is much more media and less conflation, but very little discrimination between[genres. Is a troll the same as a social commentator? We are in a battle of quality, not so much of free speech. In some ways it is still about creating the PNG voice, a  scramble up the slippery slope from the FB insults and SMS-speak. These are dangerous diversions.

These new push-backs measures can seem arbitrary though. What is taboo today and what is just illegal? It is the media’s role to tell us, and this is what I want to talk about. Journalists take the high road by using an ‘objective’ voice, as a corrective. But there is a tendency to shrink from sounding Papua New Guinean on a lot of issues, and almost to hide behind a western tone. Some stories now reflect an absurd brevity in the attempt to be professional. What we need is a long-form investigative journalism in PNG free from any restraints, including personal taboos, and ignorance. That’s what I want to talk about.

It is true that, in oral society, we abide by very different protocols. Oral societies have their own economies of knowledge, and we all of us know the danger of revealing clan information or ‘owning’ someone else’s story. This is the essence of linguistic diversity here, why some communities once had public and private dialects, or men’s and women’s speech registers. PNG is not the birthplace of a democratic distribution of knowledge, by any means, nor is it now a place where everything can be said to anyone. This is not the birthplace of a world wide web, or even Voltaire’s sentiment that, ‘I object to what you are saying but I will defend with my life your right to say it!’

Today, on the singsing grounds of Mt Hagen, an orator will enlist a very special speech register to make cheeky or insulting comments to the enemy. And they are usually tok piksa or veiled threats. ‘You are a branch of a large tree and we see your leaves dying...' Sometimes not veiled at all: 'You have insulted us by this miserly brideprice payment!' These are words called out to the public at large---to to the record, like the Hansard.  But if you used this language in ordinary conservation, you'd be asking for a fist fight.

As a result, we tend to put more constraints on our speech than necessary, and get very tetchy about language. Who amongst us hasn’t been physically or emotionally battered by someone who then turns around and says you’ve offended them with words. A creep was texting me the other day, really unspeakable stuff, and so I called him a moron. His response? ‘Why are you verbally abusing me?’

So on the one hand, we have facebook commentators calling the PM’s mother a whore, and on the other hand we’re really tetchy about rude words, and afraid to speaking out because a) you’re not entitled to that story, or b) you’re related to one of the players. It’s touchy. The result is that we’ve spent a lot of time letting public figures off the hook, giving them a free pass.

Communication Arts students dramatize the arrival of 'white men' !

 

Even the SABL Commission of inquiry has been less than assertive. David Rabie has just launched a new books about media repression in the Pacific, called Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face; Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific. From what I understand, it’s rough read; we know there are journalists in the Philippines and West Papua, for example, being kidnapped and killed for their stories. We do have excellent role models in our journalists like Patrick Matbob, Belinda Kora, Anisah Issimel, Titi Gabi at PNG Edge, and others ---and did you know Father Jan was the head of the Journalism Department in school? No small thing in Communist Poland!---I learned that on the radio recently. (thank you FM 100).

What we need is radio airtime, or an inertnet page, not owned by the government or Digicel, a cannery, or a mining company (like the sponsor of this event), where we can develop a long-form investigative journalism. Forget the news tweets, those are ridiculous.

There is an acute sense of fair play in PNG, its part of Melanesian culture---reciprocity and having a say. Painfully, tediously, every customary forum, every government and office meeting involves every single person getting their say. Then when you think it’s over someone always says ‘Emi no stret! Harim tok blo mi!’ But this is what we need to generate good stories: we need to ask, What isn’t stret?

The single most important ethos of Melanesian culture is reciprocity, giving and taking to a balance, over the long or short term. When people take and don’t give back its called negative reciprocity, and it pretty much describes late capitalist culture, Port Moresby politics, and a lot of that collegial ‘me-first’ attitude that informs development these days. Why are we letting this happen? When it is a perversion of public service ideals, we let it go, and when it seems to violate core values, we continue to let it go.

But don’t let anyone tell you this is ‘bigmanship’ in a new age. How does a politician reciprocate wheb Malaysians build him a castle? Go have a read of all the ethnographies on real bigmanship in the Friendship library here---read Ben Finney about Goroka’s first entrepreneurs---and you’ll learn that the original highlands bigmen were benefactors, philanthropists, they gave everything away and their power lay in being owed, not having it all. Even Harry Gotaha, the first real Goroka BIG man, first person anyone say use a mobile phone , would walk around barefoot.

We cannot afford to lose the freedoms we now enjoy, and those freedoms, even on social media, are beginning to give voice to the powerless, and bring those wife-beaters and child-abusers to task, thankfully. So when we talk about censorship, we have a lot to lose, and when the government gets a taste of shutting down debate, there’s no going back. Long form journalist is the best way to carve out the PNG voice, explaining the social motives of bad behavior. It is also the form that gets beyond the obvious, it pulls the curtain away from the Great and All Powerful Oz, and doesn’t throw false motives into the mix.

One of my pet peeves is that gender issues have been smothered by human rights discourse, so that we have the exact same arguments here as in Australia about sexism, the ball and chain jokes, the testosterone men and so forth. Where are the kandare and tambu relations? Where are the beliefs about female biology that underwrite so much of this violence? Gender is a crucial organizer of PNG culture and no act of male-female violence, even the burning of Kepari Leniata cannot be fully understood without explaining it. No problem gets solved by framing it in foreign jargon.

That said, the single most redeeming fact about social media has been its ability to shame the guilty parties---men who beat their wives, abuse children, exploit their power over the formerly voiceless.

 

By the same token, examine every theory that’s imported, from your curriculum to the assumptions being made by the IMF or World Bank. We borrow the capitalist critique to quickly where money may not always be the only incentive, or cause. Today, most development theory has moved beyond the ideals of monetary wealth and really talks more about self-determination and having a voice. Similarly, foreign media can arrive like a Trojan Horse. We wheel it in without thinking, and then it insidiously breaks down our cultural values. Trojen Hos emi olosem yu wokim bel kol wantaim birua blo yu, oslosem yu kisim sampla sid blong cocoa, tasol displa cocoa emi pulap long sik na sik bai kilim ologeta gaden blo yu yet bihain.

As you find a voice that is critical and true to PNG, beware the carpetbaggers of tradition, because there is an industry of them: those willing to explain graft in terms of reciprocity, saying we are a gift giving culture, and creating a smokescreen to what is really negative reciprocity. By the same token, beware an act of media ‘exposure’ does not have the wrong consequences. As they say, there is no speech free from consequences.

Once you describe a community as bloodthirsty ‘cultists’, Rai Coast madmen, without providing the historical and cultural context of these movements, which have long been described as a response to government’s lack of reciprocity---a call for church and government assistance---then you set up a kind of syllogism, and its inevitable that a developer will conclude they are all better off being relocated in favour of an oil palm project.

It’s very tricky sometimes, but the best navigational device is a deep understanding and a critical eye. And yesterday Namah himself lodged a direct accusation at the PM, for tax evasion on the sale of two generators for Port Moresby and Lae. After the SABL Report and everything else we know, isn’t this a little tame? We are ranked 144 of 177 countries in Transparency International’s 2013 Global Perceptions of Corruption Index---right there on par with Iran and Nigeria. We’re on par with Nigeria—home to the original internet scams! A place where 234 schoolgirls are currently kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists and no one seems to know what to do!

We are just slightly less corrupt, it seems, than Afghanistan, where pallets and pallets of US aid money has been dropped in the desert never to be seen again. I feel this corruption Index, almost as a reflection of local media failure, failure to control the global image of Papua New Guinea, not just in Australian papers, but the world, the newswires. We make headlines for sorcery and witch burning, but when no one provides the indigenous perspective, when we flinch at these subjects ourselves, these same stereotypes are perpetuated.

And there is good money these days in perpetuating stereotypes. Speaking in behalf of the so-called native are a few well paid generalists theorizing about the violence of New Guinea life, and calling it vestigial stone age today. Third and fourth world people around the world would scream bloody murder to have books written about them of the kind Jared Diamond is writing, based on speculation fueling the notion that today’s PNG is an evolutionary backwater.

Get out there and reclaim that territory with a strong informed and critical PNG perspective, shaking all kinds of self-censorship and pseudo objectivity, shedding everyone else’s voice but your own. Life is a riddle in PNG, and it’s yours to crack. They say Hollywood reporters need to know who is sleeping with whom; political correspondents should know who is paying whom. PNG journalists must know who is related to whom, and a little of each of the other two.

I leave you with the words of Eldridge Cleaver during the US civil rights movement. 'If you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem!'

Harim: Where are the Grassroots Global Witnesses today?

 

In June of 2013 Charmian Gooch, one of the founders of Global Witness, the corruption watchdog NGO, presented a short and blistering talk in one of the TED conferences, and that talk has since garnered her a TED Fellow Prize for 2014, justifiably.

Wanting to post the transcript to this, I started scanning some old Bob Brown cartoons as illustrations. Those cartoons deserve to take centre stage as you read Ms Gooch's seering talk, because there was a time, you may remember, when corruption was new and horrifying in PNG. Those were the days. The emphasis Brown places on newspapers ferreting out political greed and misdeeds is cautionary today. Where are those political journalists today? Why is one of the two major newspapers today owned by a logging company?

The social media is where all the real discussion goes on today. We need to raise the bar of that conversation so that really astute and well researched investigative journalism can flourish.

Here is the transcript of Charmian Gooch's 20013 Read it and weep for the familiarities, PNG.

 

When we talk about corruption, there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind.

There's the former Soviet megalomaniacs. Saparmurat Niyazov, he was one of them. Until his death in 2006, he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country rich in natural gas. Now, he really loved to issue presidential decrees. And one renamed the months of the year including after himself and his mother. He spent millions of dollars creating a bizarre personality cult, and his crowning glory was the building of a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself which stood proudly in the capital's central square and rotated to follow the sun. He was a slightly unusual guy.

And then there's that cliché, the African dictator or minister or official. There's Teodorín Obiang. So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation that has exported billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s and yet has a truly appalling human rights record. The vast majority of its people are living in really miserable poverty despite an income per capita that's on a par with that of Portugal. So Obiang junior, well, he buys himself a $30 million mansion in Malibu, California. I've been up to its front gates. I can tell you it's a magnificent spread. He bought an €18 million art collection that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a stack of fabulous sports cars, some costing a million dollars apiece -- oh, and a Gulfstream jet, too. Now get this: Until recently, he was earning an official monthly salary of less than 7,000 dollars.

And there's Dan Etete. Well, he was the former oil minister of Nigeria under President Abacha, and it just so happens he's a convicted money launderer too. We've spent a great deal of time investigating a $1 billion -- that's right, a $1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with, and what we found was pretty shocking, but more about that later.

So it's easy to think that corruption happens somewhere over there, carried out by a bunch of greedy despots and individuals up to no good in countries that we, personally, may know very little about and feel really unconnected to and unaffected by what might be going on. But does it just happen over there?

Well, at 22, I was very lucky. My first job out of university was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory. And that's how my relationship with corruption really began. In 1993, with two friends who were colleagues, Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, we set up an organization called Global Witness. Our first campaign was investigating the role of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia.

 

So a few years later, and it's now 1997, and I'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds. Perhaps you saw the film, the Hollywood film "Blood Diamond," the one with Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, some of that sprang from our work. Luanda, it was full of land mine victims who were struggling to survive on the streets and war orphans living in sewers under the streets, and a tiny, very wealthy elite who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal. And it was a slightly crazy place.

So I'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room feeling just totally overwhelmed. But it wasn't about blood diamonds. Because I'd been speaking to lots of people there who, well, they talked about a different problem: that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale and millions of oil dollars going missing. And for what was then a very small organization of just a few people, trying to even begin to think how we might tackle that was an enormous challenge. And in the years that I've been, and we've all been campaigning and investigating, I've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption on a global, massive scale possible, well it isn't just greed or the misuse of power or that nebulous phrase "weak governance." I mean, yes, it's all of those, but corruption, it's made possible by the actions of global facilitators.

So let's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier. Now, they're all people we've investigated, and they're all people who couldn't do what they do alone. Take Obiang junior. Well, he didn't end up with high-end art and luxury houses without help. He did business with global banks. A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him, one of which was used to buy the art, and American banks, well, they funneled 73 million dollars into the States, some of which was used to buy that California mansion. And he didn't do all of this in his own name either. He used shell companies. He used one to buy the property, and another, which was in somebody else's name, to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place.

And then there's Dan Etete. Well, when he was oil minister, he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars to a company that, guess what, yeah, he was the hidden owner of. Now, it was then much later traded on with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government -- now I have to be careful what I say here — to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni, two of the biggest oil companies around.

 

So the reality is, is that the engine of corruption, well, it exists far beyond the shores of countries like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan. This engine, well, it's driven by our international banking system, by the problem of anonymous shell companies, and by the secrecy that we have afforded big oil, gas and mining operations, and, most of all, by the failure of our politicians to back up their rhetoric and do something really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff.

Now let's take the banks first. Well, it's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money, but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too. For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia. Now this region, it has just five percent of its forests left intact. Five percent. So how did that happen? Well, because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years. So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite, and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry, and you can see that on YouTube, but it proved what we had long suspected, because it showed how the state's chief minister, despite his later denials, used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family. And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled the region's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere. The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process, but it earned around 130 million dollars. Now shortly after our exposé, very shortly after our exposé earlier this year, the bank announced a policy review on this. And is this progress? Maybe, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case.

And then there's the problem of anonymous shell companies. Well, we've all heard about what they are, I think, and we all know they're used quite a bit by people and companies who are trying to avoid paying their proper dues to society, also known as taxes. But what doesn't usually come to light is how shell companies are used to steal huge sums of money, transformational sums of money, from poor countries. In virtually every case of corruption that we've investigated, shell companies have appeared, and sometimes it's been impossible to find out who is really involved in the deal.

A recent study by the World Bank looked at 200 cases of corruption. It found that over 70 percent of those cases had used anonymous shell companies, totaling almost 56 billion dollars. Now many of these companies were in America or the United Kingdom, its overseas territories and Crown dependencies, and so it's not just an offshore problem, it's an on-shore one too. You see, shell companies, they're central to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites rather than ordinary citizens.

One striking recent case that we've investigated is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo sold off a series of valuable, state-owned mining assets to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. So we spoke to sources in country, trawled through company documents and other information trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal. And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies had quickly flipped many of the assets on for huge profits to major international mining companies listed in London. Now, the Africa Progress Panel, led by Kofi Annan, they've calculated that Congo may have lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals. That's almost twice the country's annual health and education budget combined. And will the people of Congo, will they ever get their money back? Well, the answer to that question, and who was really involved and what really happened, well that's going to probably remain locked away in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere unless we all do something about it.

And how about the oil, gas and mining companies? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a cliché to talk about them. Corruption in that sector, no surprise. There's corruption everywhere, so why focus on that sector? Well, because there's a lot at stake. In 2011, natural resource exports outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nineteen to one. Now that's a hell of a lot of schools and universities and hospitals and business startups, many of which haven't materialized and never will because some of that money has simply been stolen away.

Now let's go back to the oil and mining companies, and let's go back to Dan Etete and that $1 billion deal. And now forgive me, I'm going to read the next bit because it's a very live issue, and our lawyers have been through this in some detail and they want me to get it right.

Now, on the surface, the deal appeared straightforward. Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni paid the Nigerian government for the block. The Nigerian government transferred precisely the same amount, to the very dollar, to an account earmarked for a shell company whose hidden owner was Etete. Now, that's not bad going for a convicted money launderer. And here's the thing. After many months of digging around and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents, we found evidence that, in fact, Shell and Eni had known that the funds would be transferred to that shell company, and frankly, it's hard to believe they didn't know who they were really dealing with there.

Now, it just shouldn't take these sorts of efforts to find out where the money in deals like this went. I mean, these are state assets. They're supposed to be used for the benefit of the people in the country. But in some countries, citizens and journalists who are trying to expose stories like this have been harassed and arrested and some have even risked their lives to do so.

And finally, well, there are those who believe that corruption is unavoidable. It's just how some business is done. It's too complex and difficult to change. So in effect, what? We just accept it. But as a campaigner and investigator, I have a different view, because I've seen what can happen when an idea gains momentum. In the oil and mining sector, for example, there is now the beginning of a truly worldwide transparency standard that could tackle some of these problems. In 1999, when Global Witness called for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent, well, some people laughed at the extreme naiveté of that small idea. But literally hundreds of civil society groups from around the world came together to fight for transparency, and now it's fast becoming the norm and the law. Two thirds of the value of the world's oil and mining companies are now covered by transparency laws. Two thirds.

So this is change happening. This is progress. But we're not there yet, by far. Because it really isn't about corruption somewhere over there, is it? In a globalized world, corruption is a truly globalized business, and one that needs global solutions, supported and pushed by us all, as global citizens, right here.

 

 

 

 

 

Zionism, Prosperity and Redecorating Parliament House

With all this recent hysteria about redecorating the Parliament House, about something called Christian Zionism, and the need to destroy graven images, I thought I'd re-post an article I wrote  back in 2007. That's when prosperity gospel and all the televangelism erupting on our airwaves started to worry me. It was published in the DWU Rresearch Journal called Contemporary PNG Studies, which doesnt have much of an audience. So here it is again, alittle further down.

For many people, the Parliament House debate has been about the right of any one or even a committee of MPs to alter the appearance of this hsitoric building, the people's house. And then the other issue is about whether or not a pre-Christian imagery is 'ungodly' or even an inappropriate symbol for contemporary PNG.

But for me, Im actually interested in this 'Christian Zionism' that seems to have gripped Members of Parliament. What does it mean? What does it espouse? So I asked Fr Phil Gibbs, who is also an anthropologist, and he sent me some notes he'd drafted (guardedly allowing me to post them here).

This is how he describes it:

He also explained that in August of 2007 something called New Covenant Day occurred in Papua New Guinea. That was when, it appears "Prime Minister at the time Michael Somare signed a document called 'A New Covenant' on 26 August, 2007. Others who signed are Emmanuel Fave, Rev Michael Maelieau, and Rev. Robert Sanasi."

The “New Covenant” is a contract between the God of Israel, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit and the People of Papua New Guinea.It is an important component of Christian Zionism. And, acvcording to Fr Gibbs, "Christian Zionism is a form of Dispensationalism, believing that a precondition to the final battle of Amageddon is that 12,000 members of each of the twelve Hebrew tribes must return from the diaspora to Zion.  Some Christian Zionists believe that the 'in-gathering' of Jews in Israel is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus. Based on texts such as in Genesis 12:3, they hold that God promised to bless the man or nation that blesses the Chosen people (Israel). Christian Zionism promotes the belief that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and the capture of Jerusalem in 1967 were the miraculous fulfillment of God’s promises made to Abraham. The belief that Jews remain God’s chosen people leads Christian Zionists to fund the return of Jews to Palestine, including the establishment of settlements in occupied territories that should one day be ceded to Palestine – thus creating nearly impossible conditions for a two-state solution to the Middle East Peace Process.  They insist, those who oppose the imperialist project of the advocates of 'Greater Israel' (extending from Egypt to Iraq) or the Zionist occupation of Palestine are 'God's enemies', deserving to be crushed by every available means, including war."

But there's more to this than just a belief in the State of Israel. Again, Fr. Gibbs explains:

"Unfortunately the message associated with National Covenant Day seems to promote a form of prosperity gospel.  If we sign and keep the Covenant with the God of Israel (or is it the State of Israel?) God will shower us with wealth and security. And if you don’t then God might curse you....Prosperity preachers rely on the Old Testament and passages such as Deuteronomy 28:1ff “If you obeyed the voice of the Lord your God … all these blessings shall come upone you. Christians today need to study the New Testament and also to look at social situations with a critical eye.  Too easily Christianity was made to uphold capitalism of the “new right”. These new right religious movements are being used to legitimate the philosophies behind the neo-liberal policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund."

And this is where I offer you my own article on the subject, from 2007.

God’s brideprice: laissez faire religion, and the fear of being left behind in Papua New Guinea1

Nancy Sullivan

    

    But when a Man's Fancy gets astride on his Reason, when Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses, and common     Understanding,as well as common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselytehe makes, is Himself, and when     that is once compass'd, the Difficultyis not so great in bringing over others; a strong Delusion alwaysoperating     from without, as vigorously as from within.

—Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

 Everywhere you turn in Papua New Guinea (PNG) these days there are conflicting messages about money. It is not so much earned anymore, as it is prayed for, bestowed upon and ‘planted’ in Savings and Loan Societies, microcredit societies, U-Vistract, Money Rain, televangelical missions, and

even the private account of the widow of a Cote d’Ivoire Minister. A letter from the ‘Central Bank of Madrid’ tells me I have won 385,510 Euros in a Coca-Cola Promotion, which I can redeem by sending back a form with my bank details. A friend who works in fundraising for DWU has been selected and invited to a women’s conference that will be entirely free of charge once she pays for a hotel room in Switzerland.

 Then there are the church appeals. Sundays EMTV is filled with televangelical ministries insisting that money is no longer the root of all evil. The filthy lucre of yesterday is now a tool for the Lord’s mission on earth. Similarly, a New Tribes couple includes me in their regular email appeals for help purchasing vehicles, tools, computers, and household appliances for their remote highlands Mission (‘please make these financial needs a matter of prayer with us’). The meek may inherit the earth, but viral and media marketers are getting it now.

 What would Jesus buy?

 Times have changed. Some Christian web pages tell us that Jesus wasn’t poor; that his disciples never scorned wealth or comfort after all (so we need not either). External abundance can reflect spiritual abundance. ‘Health and Wealth Faith’ Pastor J. Avanzini, for one, believes that many Christians remain

poor because they’ve been taught to accept the traditional belief that Jesus was poor. It is as a result of such ‘negative conditioning’ that all their efforts to ‘worship prosperity’ fail to reap material rewards. Avanzini cites John 19:23-24 as proof that the garment that Jesus wore at His crucifixion was a ‘custom made designer garment’, the kind that kings and rich merchants wore, reminding us that the soldiers who crucified Him cast lots over the garment afterwards. (Avanzini 1996:8-9) 2

 One strain of evangelical thought now tells us the heightened pursuit of money is a sign of the end times, and that Satan is behind everything from bar codes to microchips, ATMs and cell phones. This suggests that money is still mammon, and new money-making technologies are to be avoided. Weren’t the Madrid bombs triggered by mobile phones?3  Some even say the IMF, World Bank and WTO are all Satan’s operators, and much of the dysfunctional development that is mushrooming around PNG – the empty buildings and ugly refineries sponsored by foreign aid organizations – is also evidence of the last days, and the advent of a one world government. But here’s the rub: This does not mean we should refuse money, especially if we can return wealth to the church. There is a logic to new evangelical thought that makes the eager pursuit of wealth both demonic, as a natural byproduct of end time transformations, and the root of our very salvation, perhaps even the ticket to be on board the chosen conveyance when we face the Rapture. If we hunger, work, pray and visualize for money and abundance, and then harness it as a tool for one of these ministries, we are to be welcomed to heaven rather than left behind during the final end time.

 This is an urgent message because there is a real threat that some of us will not make the cut for the Rapture. Much of the activity of new ministries seems to focus on how we might join the chosen few who get ‘beamed up.’ In the words of one Christian web page blogger, ‘[A]fter the Rapture takes place, everyone left behind will know someone who was mysteriously taken away. It could be a neighbor, a distant cousin, or a person's entire immediate family.’(Strandberg n.d) 4

 The many new evangelical ministries clustered under a Prosperity Gospel rubric take heart in biblical passages like Deuteronomy 8:18, which says, ‘God gives you the power to get wealth to establish his covenant.’ Because God wills the financial prosperity of every Christian, when and if an avowed

believer lives in poverty, he or she is simply not fulfilling God’s will. ‘You must realize that it is God’s will for you to prosper,’ says hugely popular American Pastor Kenneth Copeland (Copeland 1974:51). And what should we do with our wealth? Feed the ministries.

 A familiar face on EMTV, televangelist Joyce Meyer heads a $100 million a year ministry,  which makes her amongst the most ‘rewarded’ of God’s spokespersons. Some call these proponents part of a ‘name it and claim it'’ movement, because, as Meyer and others maintain, those who give generously to these ministries can have anything and everything they want. The most published and televised members of this movement would be E.W. Kenyon, Kenneth Hagen, Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn, Robert Tilton, Paul Crouch, Joel Osteen, Marilyn Hickey and Pat Robertson, who, on his globally popular TV show, The 700 Club, calls Prosperity Doctrine the ‘Law of Reciprocity.’ And they command enormous and powerful followings. Former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals (before being ‘outed’ by a gay prostitute who also dealt him drugs) and personal advisor to George Bush, Ted Haggart and other ‘megachurch’ pastors are all part of, if not central to, this movement. 5

These churches espouse a form of Biblical literalism of some of the most poetic of scriptural passages, most notably the Book of Revelations – which is taken as just that: revelations, or prophesies. Literalism involves an almost obsessive reading and re-reading of Revelations that reduces all hermeneutics to crystal ball visions of upcoming events. Many of these American ministries are packaged for diverse markets of today’s new media: they publish children’s books, self-help pamphlets, marital advice, and even novels. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, for example, have a series of ‘Left Behind’ novels that do a good job of fleshing out what we can expect from the Apocalypse. These need not even be read as allegorical. The series’ hero, and leader of the Tribulation Force Commandoes, is a Robert Redford look-alike and airline pilot-turned holy warrior named Rayford Steele who speaks in long-winded and preachy monologues about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse, the Wrath of the Lamb earthquake, and a treaty to be forged between Israel and the UN (Lyons 2005:np) 6

Apart from literalism, and, for some, predestination, the evangelical/charismatic churches embrace a number of ‘modern’ concepts,which appear to be informed by popular psychology. First and foremost is theconcept of Positive Confession, or The Theology of the Spoken Word (what televangelist Kenneth Hagin calls Rhematology), which is no more or less than positive thinking. The spoken word is a defence and a spiritual tool at the same time. Thus Pastor Kenneth Hagin claims not to have suffered even a headache for the past 45 years. Bad thoughts are bad for you. Think wealth and you will become wealthy. Is this related to verbal protocols in small scale societies (sensu Brennis and Myers 1984 who write about the effects of ‘hard words’ in the Pacific)? Or is it a dangerous stoicism?

 Then there are the Third Wave people, who experience miracles, have visions, speak in tongues, prophesize, predict the future, and read people’s minds. (Oddly, a common miracle seems to be filling and/or replacing bad teeth.7) They appear to be mediums for the Book of Revelations. Dan Jorgensen recounts a Charismatic mission in Telefomin where the believers acquired the power of ‘discernment’, ‘often understood as the ability to identify satanic forces at work in the spiritual realm. In [one man’s] case, this took the form of visions, - ‘like watching television’—that revealed the identity of sorcerers to him.’ (Jorgensen 2005:454).

 Those in Papua New Guinea who receive these words by downlink or mail order may not realize how confusing these churches have become even for the American public (whence most of them originate). While Ted Haggart may have President Bush’s ear, the general pitch for these Bible Belt and southwestern state megachurches is that they are beleaguered, misunderstood, fighting the good fight like so many Davids against Goliath. As one reporter observes:

 After living in the Bible Belt for more than thirty years, I've learned several things about our fundamentalist         Christian brethren: First, theirs is an embattled faith, which requires an ever evolving list of enemies to keep its         focus. It includes Satan worshipers one year, ‘secular humanists’ the next. Panic over backward masking on         phonograph records yields to fears that supermarket bar codes harbor the Mark of the Beast. Some years back,         Procter & Gamble was forced to deny widespread rumors that a moon-and-stars logo on boxes of soapsuds         symbolized corporate diabolism. More recently, purging school libraries of Harry Potter's witchcraft has         emerged as a cause. As if the real world weren't scary enough, chimerical threats must be found. It often         appears that no form of occultism is too arcane or preposterous to provoke alarm. (Lyons Op cit )

 Some apocalyptic visions are scarier than horror movies, and would give children nightmares. But other truths are soft-pedaled to appeal to a wide middle class public in the States—and they can be purchased or mail ordered as books, CDs, audiocassttes and DVDs.

 A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch outside Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about ‘how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt.’ On Sundays children played with church-distributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. (McKibben 2005:np) At the softest side of the marketing spectrum is the insinuation that most of us are already saintly. You may drive a big car and spent too much eating out, but if you save the last piece of pie for your spouse, and save to give the kids better schools, it is now time for you to stop sacrificing, to relax and indulge in a better life. Televangelist Joel Osteen says, ‘I believe God wants us to prosper.’ Osteen exhorts readers [of his 2004 book, Your Best Life Now (Warner Faith Books)] to shun negativity and develop ‘a prosperous mindset’ as a way of drawing God’s favour. He tells the story of a passenger on a cruise ship who fed himself on cheese and crackers before realizing that sumptuous meals were included. ‘Friend, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of those cheese and crackers!’ Mr Olsteen writes. ‘It’s time to step up to God’s dining table.’ Or, as he also puts it: ‘God wants you to be a winner, not a whiner.’ (Blumenthal 2006)8

 

 Naturally, it is important to contextualize these ministries, to see how they respond to the socioeconomic environment that harbors them. The prosperity pastors want Americans who drive SUVs to know that cutting back is not the best spiritual strategy (and by logical extension, not the best political one either). By investing in these expansive megachurches which have already transformed great swaths of the American southwest into theme parks and shopping malls, they can insulate themselves against the Antichrist and banish negative thinking altogether.

How does this product apply to PNG? It’s been selling off the shelves, as they say. In a country where the bulk of print media comes from the local Christian Book Store, and where one television station now brims with televangelism, all it takes is one carny with a megaphone to change the ideological map of an entire District.

 Laissez faire and unfair

More to the point, if we say the whinging unfortunates of this world are not trying to better themselves, but in fact are expressing disloyalty to God (they’re not on the programme and have only themselves to blame), is this not a new Social Darwinism? It reminds me of a wealthy American friend who (despite working very hard all her life) explained that she would never be impoverished because she ‘worships abundance.’ ‘Does that mean,’ I wanted to ask but didn’t, ‘all the untouchables of India who spend their days hammering stones into gravel actually worship poverty?’ What I really want to ask is whether Positive Confession is a political position.9

 Money wasn’t always mammon. It’s had a long and troubled relationship with Christianity. Early capitalism, in the 16th Century, actually promoted ascetic tendencies and what Max Weber famously called the Protestant ethic (1976 [1944]). Weber explains how Protestantism favoured the rational pursuit of economic gain and thus gave worldly activities a spiritual significance. A Protestant who lived spiritually, and capitalistically, was rewarded by accumulating money and could therefore follow a secular vocation with as much zeal as possible. But there was a hitch. The more austere Protestant sects forbade any method of actually using money gained through secular means. By the nineteenth century this ethic had led to a working ethic of capital accumulation, with the most successful Christian industrialists hoarding unprecedented amounts of wealth, and exhibiting record-breaking stinginess. It is not for no reason the late 19th Century titans of industry were called robber barons.

 Laissez faire conquered the old noblesse oblige. Evangelical Anglicans in early nineteenth century Britain campaigned for the Poor Law Amendment of 1834, which forbade cash donations to poor people and established the workhouse as their refuge instead. This righteousness also drove the great Irish famine of 1845-50, when evangelical Whigs argued against any artificial interventions in the market. The Irish had only themselves to blame, it was said, for depending on potatoes. Social Darwinism proved extremely effective as over one million Irish then perished.

To early evangelicals, the free market was the perfect social regulator: it rewarded good Christian behaviour and punished the unrepentant. It was logical, it was natural, and it should not be restrained. The original sin with which we are all born could be tempered by the stress of an economic life, where the labour, the sacrifice, and even the ‘faith’ of investing were all means of atonement for this sin. As one historian has remarked,

These were the people Dickens detested. The extreme among them urged mortification of the flesh and would         scold anyone who took pleasure in food, drink or good company. Moreover, they regarded poverty as part of         the divine program….[P]oor people were poor for a reason, and helping them out of poverty would endanger         their mortal souls. (Bigelow 2005:35)

 What’s ironic about all this Protestant righteousness is its constant dialectic with the Catholic Church. Cathars in 12th Century France were persecuted because their asceticism made the Catholics look bad. And six hundred years later Jonathan Swift railed against the hard-hearted excesses of the Catholic Church in Tale of the Tub. It wasn’t so long ago that anti-Papists still sickened to imagine the net worth of the Pope.

 But evangelicals were the first to seize on the modern entrepreneur as a moral icon, as, for example in the famously spendthrift American industrialists (e.g. the Rockefellers, Fords, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Astors). But the wildly unregulated markets that created these heroes also brought on the crash of1929, the Great Depression that followed, and the need for a Keynesian economics that called for market regulations. The history of economic thought in the twentieth century is a bit like the history of Christianity in the sixteenth century. Until John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, economics—at least in the English Speaking world—was completely dominated by free-market orthodoxy.

 Classical economics, wrote Keynes in 1936, ‘conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain.’ And classical economics said that the answer to almost all problems  was to let the forces of supply and demand do their job. After the Great Depression, though, when classical economic could not longer provide humane answers, Keynes played the role of Martin Luther in making heresy respectable.

 But then Keynesian economics was unsurprisingly followed by a counterreformation.Many economists were influential in bringing back classical economics, in rolling back Keynesian heresy, but none have been more famous than Milton Friedman. If Keynes was Luther, Friedman was Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. If Keynes told us money doesn’t matter, Friedman responded by saying it did, very much. (Krugman 2007:29) Friedman called for free market solutions to all social problems –education, health care, the drug trade, rent control, pollution (he is the father of pollution credits and permits). By any measure, the world in 2007 has moved a long way back in Friedman’s direction, as we have seen the most spectacular increase in economic inequality since the 1970’s. Was Friedman too sanguine about the generosity of the invisible hand? He did slip too easily into claiming that markets always work, and that only markets work. He brought individual rationalism to the field of macroeconomics.

 New Lifers, writes Pastor Ted Haggart, ‘like the benefits, risks, and maybe above all, the excitement of a free-market society.’ He believes it is time ‘to harness the forces of free-market capitalism in our ministry’ (Sharlet 2005:47). Free-market economics is a ‘truth’ Ted says he learned in his first job inprofessional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler in Eastern Europe.

 Globalization is the vehicle now for spreading his brand of Christianity. Unfortunately, he says, there are cultural and theological stumbling blocks.

 [T]he nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs,         inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t shooting people into space.         Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. …In America, the descendants of the Protestants, the         Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing. But with the         influx of people from Mexico, they don’t tend to be the ones that go to universities and become our         research- and-development people. And so in that way I see a little clash of civilization. (Ibid: 48) 10

 In a free market world, not only can everyone seek the same wealth and happiness, but everyone can now share the same Gospel written in the same language, and purchase the same reading guides and audiocassettes and bumper stickers (e.g. ‘In Case Of Rapture This Car Will Be Unmanned’). It almost seems as though the need for ‘difference’ has become …un-Christian. President of the [American] National Religious Broadcasters, Frank Wright, says: ‘Today, the calls for diversity and multiculturalism are nothing more than thinly veiled attacks on anyone willing, desirous, or compelled to proclaim Christian truths,’ he says. ‘Today, calls for tolerance are often a subterfuge, because they will tolerate just about anything except Christian truth. Today, we live in a time when the message entrusted to you is more important than ever before to reach a world desperate to know Christ. Does it strike you,’ he asks, ‘that we are the first generation in the history of the world that might see every nation, tongue, and tribe reached with the Gospel!’ (Blumenthal Op cit)

 Free markets equal free people. It’s an idea that pervades new development theory as well, and so the implicit associations between the two give it a progressive cast. Development economist Amartya Sen tells us rationality is freedom, and so development is freedom (Sen 2000, 2004); and Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto tells us the developing world is being impoverished by customary land tenure, and freeing land on an open market will liberate the world’s poor (De Soto 2000; cf. Easterly 2002). Both Sen and de Soto have been influential in World Bank, IMF and UN policy formation, and it is de Soto’s ideas that validate the World Bank’s structural adjustment attempt to register customary land in PNG, leading to riots and untold strife.

 Caveat emptor

 Global conversion has been greatly simplified by many new communications media. On the eve of the new millennium a whole raft of quick-money projects erupted across PNG, the most popular of which were Money Rain, U-Vistract, Papalain, Windfall, and Hosava. Hosava was said to be an alternative stock  exchange, Windfall was a grassroots ‘Investment and Management Company’, while most others have been based on the pyramid model which allows only the first investors to see healthy profits, after which any and all returns simply evaporate. Papalain, in Lae, was a compensation scheme targeting former employees of a forestry company; The War Carriers Association promised Australian compensation for unpaid Papua New Guinea soldiers during WWII; and the PNG Redress Association, which hit the Sepik and Madang area full force, promised Japanese Government compensation for prisoners and soldiers of the War.

 Not surprisingly, most of these schemes travelled through church networks. Papalain spread through Lutheran and Pentecostal churches; SDA churchgoers invested in the Lifetime Benefit Scheme (a pyramid—where the metallic stripe on a special credit card was supposed to enable people to draw money from a bank); and the Christian Life Centre in Port Moresby campaigned for Money Rain, which, in the words of one CLC Pastor, was ‘God’s answer to the poverty Christians were facing.’ (Cox Ibid:10-11).

 Economic anthropologist John Charles Cox has recently pointed out that there are two factors at work here. All of these schemes rely on the early success of prominent individuals, who attach their names to them. Mostly civil servants and politicians, these people have access to large amounts of cash and, in some cases, made excellent profits before returning the capital to the public coffers. Getting in early, they banked the profits as their own and could argue no harm had been done. This target population nicely overlaps with the audience for new Christian Crusades because Pentecostalism, Cox notes, is largely an urban phenomenon in PNG (to which anyone living next to public ovals in Port Moresby can attest). Those who can afford to invest in Money Rain can also buy the Christian merchandise hawked at these big tented events, and so it’s natural the two products be marketed together. It doesn’t hurt to have the public official endorsing your scheme say he or she has been Born Again, either. (Ibid:11)

 The Clerk of Parliament, who is said to have been a key contact for Money Rain with Moresby elite, invested K300,000 of public funds into the project. The PNG Secretary of Finance is alleged to have illegally transferred large amounts of money from public funds into buying land for the establishment of the new Assemblies of God Jubilee University. When 2300 people in Port Moresby were baptised during the Seventh Day Adventist crusade of Mark Finley in 2001, they were supported by a national government grant of K100,000 so that certain provinces could buy satellite equipment and receive the EMTV broadcast of the event (National 31 May 2001, 6). Minister for Lands, John Pundari, took the opportunity to welcome the crusade and declare that PNG would be richly blessed by God’s abundant grace (Post-Courier 5 July 2001, 5). A week later, Brother Andrew Simpson, now of Divine  Word University, wrote a letter to the Post-Courier describing how the ‘crusade opened with the special commendation from the Prime Minister [and soon] turned into ‘Catholic bashing’ by the presenters’ (Post-Courier 18 July 2001, 10). (Ibid).

Without doubt, however, the most successful cross-marketing campaign came at the eve of the millennium when Prime Minister Bill Skate and Treasurer Iairo Lasaro jumped aboard the Benny Hinn crusade when the famous televangelist arrived in Port Moresby. 11 Skate contributed K180,000 to the Benny Hinn Ministries and then throw the hirsute televangelist a state reception (National 19 January 1999: 1, National 15 April 1999: 3). In turn, Hinn declared, ‘The Prime Minister of this country is none other than Jesus Christ (and) I am his ambassador’ (National 3 May 1999:3, Post-Courier 8 March 1999: 4). (Gibb 2005:9-10) 12

Economic rationalism

 The anthropology of Melanesia has no shortage of cargo cults (Burridge 1960, Lattas 1998, Lawrence 1964, Gesch 1985, Strathern 1979). The analytic method has generally been to ‘rationalize’ or ‘normalize’ these sometimes bizarre behaviors in terms of the local culture and the expectations of their participants (e.g. Sullivan 2005). Nancy McDowell (2000:373) reminds us that anthropologists have long been trying to build contrast rather than similarity in their discussions of such phenomena, if only because the bas relief of difference is easier to see. In fact, she says, we need to compare these movements without ignoring their similarities to western social change, especially with regard to the distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ responses to events. Anthropologists do spend a considerable amount of time‘demonstrating that these irrational behaviours and beliefs are really parts of cultural logic foreign to us. Although we cannot quite admit that these things are rational, at least we can defuse the irrational label’ (Ibid:377). But in a world where churches lobby Wal-Mart to switch their bar codes and peddleeverything from yoga tapes to prayer candles (see fn. 4), ‘defusing’ becomes no little ironic.

 More recent studies of nationalism and identity in PNG talk about something called the bureaucratization of  consciousness in PNG (See Fife 1995, Stewart and Strathern 2000b), and employ the idea of bureaucratic mimesis as a creative act (Lattas 2006, cf. Taussig 1993). Foster, Gewertz and Errington, amongst others, have seen the internalization of certain late-modern Judaeo- Christian values as signs of increasing individualism, consumerism, nationalism and ‘rationality’ (Gewertz and Errington 1996, 1999; Foster 2002, 1993). Then there are the explorations of ‘bureacratization’ in PNG thought and popular culture (Fife 1995; Foster 2002; Cass 2000; Errington and Gewertz 1995, 1996; Hirsch 1990; Robbins 1997; MacDowell 2000).

 Messages and public exhortations that might have been written by Ayn Rand are now found everywhere from bus stops to TV in PNG: ‘Take control of your life!’ ‘Dance to your own beat!’ ‘Indulge your senses!’ ‘Earn interest on your money!’ Whereas fifty years ago none of these would have made ‘sense’ to Papua New Guineans, now they have referents in modern urban life. Today the ‘esoteric’ beliefs of pentecostal and charismatic evangelicals enter the PNG marketplace of ideas through such public media, and they arrive in the tropes of ‘rational’ neoclassical economics.

 There are still chain letters and pyramid schemes circulating (see Kulick and Stroud 1990; cf. Taussig 1993), and compensation claims for WWII service which move through rural PNG flamed by the fuel of desire. Reporters (Vulum 2006, Callick 2007) have recently thrown the kleig lights on some of the more outrageous scam artists moving through Pacific Island States capitalizing on the gullibility of newcomers to a cash economy. Some have been African Princesses, others agents of Eastern European regimes, but all of them understand the art of raised expectations in an imperfectly globalized age. But it is in keeping with the ‘fetishism’ of Biblical text that the language of pie charts and Venn diagrams has become integral to the new evangelical campaigns. 13

 A number of excellent ethnographies of PNG now write about the intersection of new rational and vangelical beliefs (e.g. Lattas 1998, Kulick 1992, Bashkow 2006, Robbins 2004a, Eves 1996). Joel Robbins tells a complex story of self-loathing and evangelism for the Urapmin of Sandaun Province (2004a); and Andrew Lattas’ work in West New Britain (1998) also talks about the feelings of neglect and low self-worth that new evangelical converts say defined their lives beforehand (see also Stewart and Strathern 2000a, 200; Schieffelin 1981). Both Jorgensen and Robbins talk about the ‘world destroying’ and ‘world-creating’ goals of evangelical Christianity (Jorgensen 2005; Robbins 2004a, 2004b), which requires converts to disavow their past and their prior identity in order to accept the new. For people familiar with the radical psychological disjuncture of initiation, the concept of being born again is not difficult, nor is it new. But being born anew historically, and revoking all that has come before, is an idea that only arrived with the first mainstream church missionaries. And it is upon that familiar sense of colonial inferiority that these new churches generate the challenge to villagers to gamble their past on a promise of the Rapture.

 Neoclassical economics looks at markets as essentially rational, treating macroeconomic institutions as rational beings. Friedman’s disdain for government regulation was its own call for faith in the free will of the individual and in capitalism. Homo economicus in Friedman’s world is driven by rational calculations about maximizing utility. But the difference in PNG is that these gambles of faith don’t just build upon given social relations, they shatter traditional bonds and insinuate that a believer’s real family is their community in Christ (See Gewertz and Errington 1996). And they make this choice look modern, and rational.

 Gifts and commodities

 Massive accumulation of wealth is certainly not the objective of this new free  market Christianity. If the cornerstone of Calvinism is saving, that of Prosperity Theology is spending. ‘Yahweh has prospered individuals by making them millionaires and even billionaires in order that the money be used to meet the needs of His people,’ Pastor Smith Wigglesworth tells us (n.d.:2) in various publications available in Madang’s Christian Bookstore. Long and thoughtful discussions of this mandate to give back are all over the web pages and blogs of ‘abundance’ and ‘prosperity’ Christians. One such blog explains Pat Robertson’s ‘Law of Reciprocity’:

The Lord didn't promise us wealth so that we could spoil and pamper ourselves with obscene amounts of         luxuries and toys. He promised that we would be rich in every way so that we could be generous on every         occasion. There's a cause and effect relationship at work here. Being made rich is for the purpose of being         generous. This is the Divine Law of Reciprocity. The Lord is generous with us and we repay Him by being         generous with others. This prompts Him to be more generous with us, allowing us to be more generous with         others, and so on. In failing to be generous, we violate the Law of Reciprocity and impede the flow of         resources. And remember, tithing is not being generous. It's meeting the minimum. (Anon 2, n.d.)

 Anthropologist Simon Coleman (2004) describes how the prosperity faith has found its way to a small town in Sweden, where the traditional ethos of living frugally has been upended by this new command to make and  generously. Referring to Marcel Mauss’ classic treatise on reciprocity, The Gift (1967[1925]), Coleman distinguishes between traditional forms of reciprocity in small scale societies, which has known returns, and upon which one can gauge risk, and the kinds of giving this new theology demands, which is free, lavish, and undirected---representing a much greater risk. A prerequisite of risk taking is that one understands the boundaries of a community, the limits of the risk, the extent of delay to anticipate between investment and return—whether that’s social, temporal or spatial. The more nebulous concept of what goes around, comes around, which explains unbounded acts of risk that might be found in Buddhist or Hindu social contexts, has no precedent in small scale societies like those in PNG, and contrasts sharply with the protestant ethic of rural Sweden. The great risk in a cash economy is giving away cash and not expecting anything in return.

 David Akin and Joel Robbins (1999) have edited a collection of essays on Melanesian currencies and how these articulate with the cash economy. Much of the emphasis of these essays is on new social relations that these introduced currencies are forging, as they do or do not follow principles of short term quid-pro-quo or delayed reciprocity that drive kula, moka and other indigenous trade systems. In their introduction (Robbins and Akins 1999:4-7), the editors explain that although local valuables look like ‘currencies’ in many ways---and anthropologists even suggested before Independence that the introduction of the cash economy had been relatively smooth and a new ‘kina’ would not be disruptive of the older currencies (viz.Counts and Counts 1970:91)---they never act like them. And the destabilizing effects of new currency have definitely been felt in these economies, where there are no indigenous counterparts for anonymous transactions.  

Where the new money undermines pre-existing systems of authority it also generated anxiety about social and political power. Suddenly traditional institutions have lost their authority, and new figures of importance arise from wage labor and the growing consumer culture. Big men back from their jobs in the capital are now given more credence in village affairs than the elderly Luluai, if only, perhaps, because they now own the best veranda for a public meeting.

 Traditional currencies never ever end in consumption---they form continual chains of transactions and social expectations. It is true of western money that people must pass it on in order to consume it; it must be converted to be ‘spent.’ The final transaction becomes the most important. All modern currencies are only important as a means of exchange---they are, by definition, exchangeability itself. By contrast, however, traditional currencies are continually creating social relations and thus remain less fluid, less ‘interchangeable’, than western ones: they keep moving and accruing density, accumulating associations with their transactors and only growing more ‘valuable’ as they slip less easily from palm to palm. People create kin by manipulating the flow of these exchange objects. These can be consumables, shells, information, dances and esoterica. Their movement sustains relationships, defines a community, and works as a constant regulator of hierarchy and authority. It’s a great deal more complex than the mere idea of ‘money is power’ that imbues in western capitalism.

 Classical neo-liberal economics is based on an equilibrium model, governed by mathematical laws that are presumed to be ‘natural’ or beyond human intervention. The market used to be a volatile beast in pre-Keynesian capitalism, but now it is a rational entity that strives for equilibrium---these are the metaphysical premises of capitalism, whether or not one agrees with them. And as such, they have no exact epistemological counterpart in Melanesia, where people constitute economic institutions more often than they ‘shape’ or constrain them. People are economics in PNG; there is no economy without sociality here.

‘Affinity fraud’

 The many Pentecostal and charismatic evangelical churches now based in,  travelling through, or reaching out to PNG are essentially in the business of creating communities. These are communities that can define themselves by their media, the books, CDs and television programs that cross-market their ideas and allow remote Papua New Guineans to remain a clansman or woman, a Morobean or Eastern Highlander, a Papua New Guinean, and now also a part of some global ‘imagined community’ (sensu Bendict Anderson (1991 [1983]). Dan Jorgensen says that an important part of the appeal of a Pentecostal crusade called Operation Joshua that came through the Telefomin area in 1992 was the invitation to join one such global community, not only as members of a church, but as descendants of the Biblical tribe of Benjamin. One of the most interesting aspects of the story he tells is how the American evangelist George Branson arrived in Telefomin fully well-read on the community and its regional importance as the birthplace of the ancestress Afek. Invoking one kind of affinity, he then offered the villagers a loftier, universal identity as one of the lost tribes of Israel. But Branson had a crucial strategy in cultivating this flock. Perhaps because he had read the work of anthropologists like Jorgensen, perhaps because it was a trusted marketing strategy, he sought out the most important ritual expert in the community, an old man named Falamsep, and proceeded to sell him Operation Joshua.

 In the words of one of the participants, they ‘pushed him and pushed him’ with a combination of directed prayer, pressure and inducements. Taking a leaf from the Deliverance Gospel, it was claimed that the spirits of the house were responsible for illnesses and deaths, hinting that Falamsep was implicated. By way of inducement, Branson was said to have given him K350, a carton of tinned beef, five chickens and a promise of a trip to America. (Jorgensen 2005 :453) 

Not surprisingly, Falamsep capitulated. He destroyed the spirit house, burnt the relics, and with other villagers, began to dig for diamonds on the sacred ground. In fact, Branson had arrived with a geologist (appropriately enough), who tested the newly cleared and sulphuric-smelling ground and suggested it might harbour a valuable (if poorly defined) ‘uranium gas.’ (Ibid:453-4).

 The lesson of Operation Joshua is that sociality is key to success. The best way to cultivate communion and inclusion, is to define the ‘other.’ Who is them and who is us? Who is sinner and who is saint? American ministries accomplish this on home soil by selling sweet talk and xenophobia in equal measures. Their outreach to developing countries seems to appeal to a fraternity of ‘disenfranchised’ fighting the global behemoths of world banking and foreign aid. It may be that viral marketing has something to learn from these Christian appeals. Despite Central Bank warnings now being run on EMTV, those ubiquitous Nigerian email scams are not that successful in PNG (although one high level civil servant did sign away K800,000 in a related scam [Cox 2006:2]). Help me, they say, rather than help us. Their long distance anonymity works against them, says Cox. One of the crucial determinants to the success of fast money schemes has been their use of faceto- face social networks; the kind of word of mouth marketing that personalizes any deal. It does matter that named individuals have signed on and can provide testimony to getting their 200% returns, but more importantly, people join these schemes in ways that reaffirm existing social boundaries and posit their overlap with international ones.

 This explains the appeal of ‘compensation claim’ forms, for example, which promise reparations or rewards on the basis of one’s professional or social identity: you are being acknowledged as a member of some wider community of consumers, believers, sufferers or victors. Pyramid and savings and loan schemes take this communitas one step farther, usually promising rewards to a beleaguered or disenfranchised minority who may otherwise be suspicious of legitimate finance institutions. The sine qua non, of course, is religious: the ‘universal’ church that offers moneymaking opportunities to their flock only. It is this kind of inclusion that lured Telefomin church goers into the charismatic Operation Joshua, which promised both the recognition of their status as one of the lost tribes of Israel (through DNA testing) but also the windfall of discovering ‘uranium oil’ under the spirit house that they were compelled to destroy (Jorgensen 2005).

 U-Vistract has had a similar appeal. Originally it was open to Bougainvilleans only, moving in Port Moresby through workplaces like Air Niugini and Bank of South Pacific, and in the North Solomons and across PNG through United Church and Pentecostal networks (Cox Op cit: 2-3, Gibbs 2005). Pentecostal pastors were even character witnesses during the trial of U-Vistract’s leader, Noah Musingku, and Deputy Senior Pastor for the Christian Life Centre in Port Moresby claimed that he was a Born Again Christian (cited by Cox Op cit:3). Pastor Bob was on the Board of U-Vistract and told Cox that many of his parishioners who benefited from the scheme then funded social programs, a new church building and even a car for the Pastor (Ibid). The CLC pastors ‘used their influence over the congregation to promote the scheme enthusiastically and preached this from the pulpit at Sunday worship. Their preaching also included denunciations of the bank of PNG and those within the church who were opposed to the schemes’ (Ibid).

 An unregistered bank, the appeal has always been to avoid national or international banks, which pulled out of Bougainville during the crisis, and in so doing opt out of the satanic hands of globalization which have already  undermined the mainline churches (Cox Ibid:13). U-Vistract was designed as a self-sufficiency scheme that could be expanded to other developing countries and eventually supplant finance institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Tragically, these ambitions got drowned in a morass of controversy surrounding Musingku’s Fijian bodyguards, and an attempt to offer the Solomon Islands Government roughly US $350 million U-Vistract dollars. UVistract’s objective, Musingku says, has been to ‘finance the end-time harvest’ Ibid:6).

 The organization is here to ensure that grassroots citizens not only accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour but also to ensure that each family has enough food to eat each day, enough money to buy clothes, enough money to pay for school fees, accommodation, transport and all other basic necessities of life (U-Vistract News, Nov 23, 2001, Vol 1, Issue 12). Cox (2006:10) reports that Noah Musingku was able to use United Church and Pentecostal Christian networks to promote U-Vistract, and three Pentecostal pastors actually gave written character witnesses for him during his contempt of court trial in 2000. Pastor Bob Lutu, Deputy Senior Pastor for the ChristianLife Centre, Waigani Praise Centre, stated in his National Court Affadavit (as cited by Cox 2006:10) that Musingku was ‘a Born Again Christian (sic)… who faithfully attends Christian Life Centre Waigani.’ Members had invested in the scheme and used this income to donate to the church, funding its social programs and the pastor’s own vehicle. ‘It has been our experience that the Church income was at a high level when members of the church were

receiving returns on their investments under the programme.’ The Christian Life Centre apparently funded a new building from U-Vistract income. Pastor Bob was on the board of U-Vistract. He and other pastors at CLC, notably Senior Pastor Charles Lapa, used their influence over the congregation to promote the scheme enthusiastically and preached this from the pulpit at Sunday worship (Ibid).

 Musingku says globalization is driven by the World Bank and other institutions in ‘the interests of the devil’ (citing Revelations 17 and Romans 12:2). U-Vistract is a godly system fighting the powers behind globalization, which has already coopted mainline churches in PNG.14 Tragically, however, this sanctification did not prevent U-Vistract from causing at least as much pain and suffering to its members than any other manifestation of globalization. People have lost life savings, and irreparably damaged those all important relationships that made U-Vistract initially successful.

 A recent editorial in The National called ‘Never again’ (The National Online, 10.2.07, http://www.thenational.com.pg/), offers an excellent eulogy to UVistract:

 THE Bougainville administrator is one of the first Papua New Guinean leaders to speak bluntly about the failed         U-Vistract money scheme. This week, Peter Tsiamalili gave a warning to the public servants under  his control.         He told them that they must remain loyal to the Autonomous Bougainville Government and not to U-Vistract.         And he was straightforward about the notorious money scam. ‘Investors in UVistract must know that their         money has disappeared for good. They were bad investments, and the illegal money scheme will not make any         payout,’ he said.… U-Vistract began as a classic pyramid scheme of financial investment and return.         …U-Vistract appeared to present an extraordinary opportunity to such people, and to those who might loosely         be labelled our country’s middle class…The first investors were receiving substantial profits on their small         investments, just as the scheme’s originator Noah Musingku had promised. It seemed everybody knew         somebody who had become rich overnight as a result of this wonderful scheme. This word of mouth publicity         was assiduously boosted by U-Vistract officials, and the ames of some senior PNG figures were bandied about         as examples of investors in the scheme. The result was inevitable. It is reasonable to say that the nation was         galvanised, and normally astute people became enmeshed in the UVistract web. Despite repeated prompting         from the media, and from economists and financial experts, who explained how such systems must ultimately         collapse, U-Vistract became a national network, with agentsreaping ever more unsuspecting citizens in a grim         harvest. As recently as last year, U-Vistract representatives were attracting hundreds of existing investors and         would-be investors to large meetings in towns such as Madang. This was despite the on-going failure of the         scheme to pay dividends to investors. It is a remarkable tribute to the charisma of Mr Musingku that he was         able, against all the odds, to maintain substantial public confidence among ordinary people despite the stark         failure of his scheme, and a seemingly endless line of broken dividend promises. The most distressing aspect         of that whole scenario was the continuing silence from our leaders. Apart from warning advertisements placed         by the Central Bank, and the occasional half-hearted alert from government sources, very little action was         either taken, or apparently contemplated…Musingku travelled overseas, visiting Singapore in order to get the         Mint there to print currency for his newly established ‘Kingdom of Papala’. He infiltrated the Solomon Islands,         and promised to rescue that unfortunate nation from its financial woes. And most savage of all, he convinced         hundreds, perhaps even thousands of crisis-weary Bougainvilleans of his ability to end their miseries and         create a glowing and prosperous future for them.

Microcredit

Here’s the problem: How can legitimate credit schemes, many of which are sponsored by well-heeled NGOs, avoid the pitfalls of these quick-money schemes while learning from their peculiar success? How does this new fusion of Christianity and anti-globalization sentiment effect development efforts inPNG? Despite the cynical view taken here of the evangelical campaigns, one of the simple lessons of these money scams seems to be that people are willing to take an economic gamble when they see it as a leap of faith with real social benefits. Sometimes it is worth the price just to be a member of the club.People gather like iron pilings around religious and development leaders across PNG when they know this will involve them in a new society, a new community of members. Whether it is the ‘imagined community’ of video/audio/text consumers for a particular crusade, or the crude receipt onereceives for signing up with a War veterans compensation scheme, these are all contemporary equivalents of local identity markers in PNG, which not long ago would involve a tattoo, haircut, dialect or shell necklace.

At the peak of these pre-millennial money schemes the Development Bulletin hosted a collection of articles dedicated to assessing the validity and longevity of the most secure of them (Vol 50, 1999). David Kavanamur and Robert Turare (1999) focused on Liklik Dinau Abitore Trust (LDAT) and the SimbuMicrocredit Scheme, which had been in operation for more than two years by then. Liklik Dinau, a prototype of the Grameen Bank Bangladesh, was founded by the UNDP in 1993 and backed by UNDP, PNGBC, AusAID, NCW, and Peace Foundation Melanesia. Operating out of the Eastern Highlands andtargeting mainly rural women, it already had a strong recovery rate (Ibid:13, cf. Bablis 1999). The Simbu Microcredit Scheme was similarly successful, and had not been introduced to barren ground: Simbu has long had a sterling reputation with its rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), whichare informal clan-based credit schemes. Most notably, the Wok Meri system in Chuave has been pooling and lending small amounts of money to entrepreneurial women since the seventies (see Sexton 1982, Warry 1987, and cf. a study of Kerowagi Secondary School with discussion of local credit schemes in Emori et al 2006).

 Management Professor Nicole Biggart (2000) writes about microfinance schemes comparatively, and says that everywhere in the developing world that they have proven successful, they have credited that success on the social relations that fuel and sustain them, which confirms the assessments of those writing about the PNG case (Bablis 1999, Cox 2006). Microfinance simply cannot be divested of its social component, or what Biggart calls their‘situational logic.’ Members are not individuated in the way bank customers or internet investors are; they enter and engage in these schemes as members of a community, sometimes church-based, sometimes not. David Kavanamur and R. Turare (1999:12) are also quick to point out that of the women’s credit schemes in PNG, many of which did not succeed, the most commendable one came from the Western Highlands where the women took good records and also hounded their clients for repayments. The lesson may be that members must follow a business plan, and the strategies for its application should be acceptable in their own community. 15

 Karen Lewin of the Lutheran Development Service describes the case of Putim na Kisim, a microfinance scheme operated by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of PNG (Lewin 2002, see also Kopunye et al 1999), by challenging a proposition of economic anthropologist Chris Gregory (1999). Gregory claims that the root crop subsistence basis of Melanesian societies makes them resistant to entrepreneurial capitalism. The fact that root crops do not store makes their economies fundamentally different from Asian rice-growing economies, where this commodity can be saved and transacted in local and international markets. While sweet potatoes provide ‘subsistence affluence,’ they do not predispose farmers to petty trading, and therefore produce relatively few indigenous entrepreneurs. Most finance in PNG, Gregory also notes, is provided by foreign aid or private expatriates (Gregory 1999:84-86).16

On the contrary, Lewin points out, traditional exchange systems are especially well-suited to the concept of savings and loans—think of pigs and brideprice, she says; and it is the very sociality of these indigenous systems that make them work.17 Putim na Kisim models build on traditional networks of obligation and reciprocity.

 The wisdom of Putim na Kisim members in finding the unit of society where the strength of obligations is such that people risk being excluded from the community if they are seen to upset the lives and harmony of others. By building a Putim na Kisim group among the same people who together will pay compensation and bride-price, fight as a clan, celebrate and worship, their obligation is as strong as to a clan member. (Op cit:96) John Charles Cox says these fast money schemes must be seen in terms of the social relations they inscribe, and for this reason it is extremely important that economists become anthropologists during the introduction of microcredit projects across PNG. Microcredit now enters an environment that is faintly phobic of international banking, where everyone knows someone still waiting for their payout from one or another scheme. Evangelical crusades have crystallized ideas about Satan and fanned fears about an imminent end time where the ‘included’ will be spared and the ‘excluded’ left behind. What is more imperative than forging national identity today is the need to join one or another of these churches, where one’s identity as a member will spare you from a gruesome fate and reward you with riches in the Lord’s name.

 

The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving

 The Asian-Melanesian rice-root crop contrast Gregory draws is interesting to debate, but it evades some of the important variations that exist within Melanesian economic systems. Along a highlands east-west axis, anthropologist D.K. Feil (1987) first elaborated the many social variations (social structure, marriage rules, gender relations, and more) that exist across a continuum of high and low intensity agriculture, population density, and varieties of ‘incremental’ exchange—that is, systems running east to west that either trade in pigs or pearlshells, and rest on different degrees of short-term profit: two pigs loaned, for example, means three pigs returned, and so forth. Anthropology is full of binary contrasts to explain socioeconomic variations in Melanesia. Highlands big men have simply been the most successful fundraisers and investors in PNG to date: their modus operandi being to subsume their clansmen’s wealth under their own ambitions and produce interlocking networks of indebtedness that can translate to political followings in a modern age. The moka of the Western Highlands perfectly articulates across the tee of Enga, as it runs west; and to the east, smaller, less subsistence rich communities tend to downplay the profit motive for a trade in equivalents that maintain peace and harmony. 

Similarly, there is another well-known continuum running from highland to lowland societies that posits wealth-based societies at one end and knowledge based societies at the other. In the first case, these systems of incremental exchange (like moka and tee) create what are called egalitarian societies, where democracy and competition beget ambitious and entrepreneurial bigmen and polities of clansmen ‘investors.’ But unlike coastal societies, these power configurations don’t endure through time; they’re made and unmade during a bigman’s lifetime. Coastal exchange is more about knowledge transaction, and the circulation of critical information over time rather than across a wide populous. This is where linguistic diversity serves the fundamentals of exchange, so that even with relatively less material wealth, people maintain relationships by transacting apples for oranges, your pots for my shells, or this ritual for that garden magic. It is also where money does not make power, where men and women inherit their titles (and the insignia of titles—like shell valuables) rather than earn then, or where initiation brings entitlement to young men rather than chutzpah (Lindstrom 1984, Harrison 1989). 

It may be evident by now that the highland-lowland distinction is one way to frame PNG culture’s vulnerability to Prosperity Theology or not. It would be easy to call lowland societies immune to the ideas of wealth and salvation, but these are also the societies where initiation and being ‘born again’ after radical disjuncture and trauma are part of the traditional culture. Hence, it doesn’t work to say new Protestant ideas can take off in the highlands whereas mainline Christian churches will hold onto the coasts.

 A common distinction is made between gift-exchange and capitalist commodity economies. Anthropologist Fred Myers (2001:6) opens an edited volume on ‘regimes of value and material culture’ with a discussion of Annette Weiner’s work in the Trobriands (1992, 1994), and how it challenged the established theories of exchange in Melanesian culture. Undoubtedly the most complex and celebrated exchange system in Melanesia is the kula, which not only stumped Malinowski but in so doing demolished the 19th Century ‘primitive economic’ straw man (1961 [1922], Weiner 1992). Long sailing expeditions, magic, mythology and ceremony accompanied the circulation of shell valuables that moved, apples for pears, in opposite directions around a ring of islands. What couldn’t be adequately explained, however, was why? There was no rational, i.e. functional, explanation for the trade and while it performed many utilitarian roles in the matrilineal societies it traversed, it had no apparent overarching purpose. Particularly problematic was the fact that no one could actually ‘own’ these constantly circulating valuables. Old and elaborately decorated, they could never be alienated from the ring, presenting kula players and their partners with the unusual paradox of ‘keeping-while-giving’ (Weiner Ibid; cf. other Massim exchange systems, e.g. Munn 198, Leip1999).

 Weiner says both Malinowski and Mauss depend too heavily on western economic theory. The whole premise of ‘self-interest’ driving the marketplace is inappropriate for systems where men (and their offspring) gain no direct returns from trading shell valuables, for example. Weiner’s says previous theories have been identified with reciprocity and equivalence, as in Sahlins (1965), and this is too great a reduction to economics. Instead giving should be related to social reproduction, politics, and the making of power relations. She opened the aperture of analysis so that exchange would be viewed beyond the moment of transaction to how things are created by such systems over time, how societies reproduce themselves and establish their social hierarchies. She coined the concept of ‘keeping-while-giving’, saying exchange is always embedded in greater and wider systems of reciprocity. Gifts are never just gifts, they always imply a return. And commodities are not just objects, either, they have their own sociality. In both commodity and gift economies there are the anomolous objects which we call hierlooms or treasures--- ‘inalienables’ for Weiner, and ‘immeubles’ for Mauss. Weiner and others, like Arjun Appadurai (1986), writing about the ‘social life of things,’ have argued for the coexistence of capital and gift ethics in both western and non-western societies. There is capitalism in the gift, he says, and vice versa.

 Writing about Fiji, anthropologist Nicholas Thomas says:

 [While] alienation, commoditization, and abstract exchange are most pronounced in capitalist economies, they         are not peculiar to those systems. Capitalism is characterised by social relations which bind worker to capitalist         in exploitative transactions, which predated capitalismhistorically and which now exist in some forms in all         societies….The transformations and contextual mutations of objects cannot be appreciatedif it is presumed         that gifts are invariably gifts and commodities invariably commodities (Thomas 1991:38-39).

 

Sociality as prosperity

Prosperity Theology is undoubtedly a good match for many local traditional ideologies in PNG. Highlands societies in particular have always understood the ethic of wealth accumulation and limited distribution. Even the idea of Positive Confession is sort of a put-up-or-shut-up argument for blindly following a bigman. Bellicose highlands communities may also understand how prosperity flocks are under siege, forever battling nay-sayers and Satan’s minions, not to mention multiculturalists, Muslims, Catholics and Mexicans. The fact that wealth-based economies in PNG have much shallower genealogical memories than do knowledge-based societies brings to mind Henry Ford famous aphorism that history is bunk. Where money reigns, no one needs a memory or a pedigree. In the highlands, utilitarian knowledge is favored over metaphysical knowledge, which completes an analogy with the protestant ethic over more ecclesiastical forms of leadership.

 It may seem to readers we have veered far off course from a critique of new quick-money scams and new gospels in PNG. But an important point to be made is that the differences between western and nonwestern economies, as between lowlands and highland, are more subtle than binary opposites can capture, and the coexistence of multiple systems in each economy should be the starting point for more detailed comparisons between these new Christian ideologies of monetarism, individuality and the imminence of an apocalypse, and the indigenous ideologies that have begun to assimilate them. PNG worldviews may be more ‘pre-adapted’ to these capitalist Christianities than we have been willing to admit. 

The common assertion that ‘gift’ economies are particularly vulnerable to corrupt forms of capitalist exchange, the palm-greasing of modern business in the Pacific, is also misleading. Proponents of new-style reciprocity in the form of kick-backs and payoffs are more often beneficiaries of this kind of corruption, as I note elsewhere in a discussion of Pacific Islands political corruption (Sullivan 2004). Whether it is dressed up as ‘Asian capitalism’, and therefore made to appear part of a proliferation of new nonwestern capitalisms, or given a Bible and a megaphone (and a weird hairdo, I might add), greed is greed. The same politicians who ‘support’ televangelists in their prayers for PNG prosperity are also the first to accept kickbacks as gifts and boast about their connections to criminal gangs. Benny Hinn, U-Vistract, Money Rain, and so many of these other schemes are excellent examples of ‘irrational’ economics. But that does not mean they appeal to ‘irrational’ or ‘pre-rational’ societies. In the end, scam artists are no more or less than that, whether the crop up within in response to rapid economic change (see Gesch 1985), or as part of free market globalization.18 Traditional societies are no more or less predisposed to aberrant behaviors, and studies that would explain away Pacific corruption in terms of indigenous exchange are no more meaningful that religious screeds that pronounce all non-Christians to be sinners.

Papua New Guineans are more likely to invest in the social relations behind these scams than their propounders will ever know. In PNG people do not invest money, they invest the social relations implicit in that transaction, and expect those relations to resonate well beyond the moment you send a money order or your bank details. People who invested in pre-Millenial schemes are still waiting for their payout, fully aware that the economic transaction has collapsed but absolutely assured that the social relationship forged will not let them down. Are Papua New Guineans naturally gullible? Do they have more faith in the unseen (the invisible hand) because they have always has magico-religious beliefs? Is this pre-rational man reaching for a faux-rational modernity? Hardly.   Papua New Guineans do not expect the anonymity of ripoffs, they are not accustomed to  being marked by con artists at random, and are waiting for some reciprocity to vindicate their investment. But in the global free market there is no accountability, only consumer culpability: no clansman at your gate, no global court of transparency for the  unconscionable. What quick-money and quick-salvation programmes effect is a gradual disillusionment of ‘community’ as it is known in PNG and in Melanesia more generally. They introduce anonymity, unaccountability, and the quid-pro-quo of transaction as strong and more rational than the sociality of exchange. The ultimate assimilation of capitalism in PNG will no doubt come when the remote villager is resigned enough to say caveat emptor—there is no one to blame but myself.

 

 Endnotes

1 I owe a many of the ideas in this paper to a discussion with John Charles Cox and his writings on microcredit in PNG.

2 I.e. the shroud of Turin is a fashion relic. This may explain the ubiquity of celebrity t shirts.

3 As one commentator observes: ‘You can log on to RaptureReady.com for a taste of how some of these believers view the world—at this writing the Rapture Index had declined three points to 152 because, despite an increase in the number of U.S. pagans, ‘Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio tags’.’ McKibben (2005:np).

4 Those left behind will also still have the internet, so blogs are being posted like the following: I realize this web page will be addressing two audiences: those of you who read this page before the rapture and those of you who read it after the rapture. My focus here will be on those who have found this page after the rapture of the Church. For anyone reading this material before the pre-trib rapture, I highly recommend that you ponder the negative consequences of being left behind and seriously consider committing your life to Jesus if you have not done so already. ‘I realize this web page will be addressing two audiences: those of

you who read this page before the rapture and those of you who read it after the rapture. (Anonymous, n.d. Oops! I guess I wasn’t ready! http://www.raptureready.com/rap49.html )

5 Elsewhere similar and sometimes more strident versions of prosperity theology are known as The Word of Life, The Prosperity Gospel, The Faith Movement, The Third Wave, New Life, Name It and Claim It Theology, Health and Wealth Doctrine, Signs and Wonders, Third Wave Evangelism, The Latter Rain Third Wave Movement, and Faith Preaching.

6 McKibben (Op Cit) writes: Other End-Timers are more interested in forcing the issue—they're convinced that the way to coax the Lord back to earth is to ‘Christianize’ our nation and then the world. Consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At church one day he listened as the pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that ‘the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.’ …The creed of Tom DeLay—of Tim LaHaye and his Left Behind books, of Pat Robertson's ‘The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today’—ripened out of the impossibly poetic imagery of the Book of Revelation.

7 C. Peter Wagner of the New Apostolic Reformation reports on an Argentine faith healer in the movement, named of Carlos Anacondia , who said that during his services, on a fairly regular basis, decayed teeth are filled and new teeth grow where there were none before. (MacArthur 1991) Is this divine supply and demand?

8 ‘He said he knew he was under a moral microscope and was uncomfortable discussing the widely publicized episode last Christmas when the Osteen family was taken off a Continental flight to Vail, Colo., after Mrs. Osteen got into an argument with a flight attendant over cleaning up spilled liquid on her first-class seat. ‘It was blown out of proportion,’ said Mr. Osteen.’ (Blumenthal 2006)

9 Some of this positive thinking has raised questions about truth in advertising for the televangelists endorse merchandise on their programs and through their web sites. Pat Robertson and the 700 Club has had its problems with truth. At one point he advertised and endorsed an energy drink that he claimed gave him strength and vitality enough to leg press 2000 lbs. (909.09 kg) This assertion is controversial, as the Florida State University record for leg press, for example, is 1335 lbs. (618.82 kg), and the person who broke the record (later an NFL player and Navy SEAL) burst the blood vessels in his eyes in his attempt. In addition, no current piece of exercise equipment could support 2,000 lbs. for Robertson to press. The energy drink was then removed.

10 This could only be a reference to the controversial text by Samuel P. Huntington, 1998, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, which argues for the basic irreconcilability of western and non-western (viz. Muslim) nations. But when this xenophobia becomes dogma in these new churches, it is often hard to discern the fears of ‘oneworld’ government and the desires for one-world government-religion-culture. A humorous profile of Pastor Tim LaHaye (Lyon 2005) explains how a Time Magazine profile had referred to him as‘Dr. LaHaye’:

…an ‘influential theologian’ (Academic titles are very big among graduates of Bob Jones University.)…the Time profile did mention LaHaye's attacks on Catholicism as a ‘false religion,’ but it soft-pedaled his zeal for the granddaddy of nutball conspiracy theories: the ‘Bavarian Illuminati.’ Believers argue that this cabal of European-Jewish bankers and secret fraternities such as Skull & Bones has stage-managed world events since the late eighteenth century. (Some contend that America was betrayed into sin when George Washington was secretly assassinated and an impostor named Dr. Adam Weishaupt assumed the presidency.) In his 2002 book The Rapture, LaHaye indignantly defended himself against a John Birch Society critic who accused him of being in cahoots with the Illuminati. To the contrary— LaHaye pronounces himself an avowed enemy of what he calls the ‘satanically-inspired, centuries-old conspiracy to use government, education, and media to destroy every vestige of Christianity within our society and establish a new world order.

11 As early as 1987 Lasaro was committed to the ‘prosperity gospel’ and proposed in Parliament that if PNG committed ‘ten percent of its budget to God… God himself will open the windows of heaven and pour out more blessings in (sic) this nation.’ This included protection from a range of troubles including natural disasters and law and order problems (Hansard 20 Nov 1987, 22-24, quoted in Gibbs 2005 np).

12 It’s doubtful whether PNG ever got a receipt for the K180,000 donation, as Benny Hinn Ministries/World Outreach Church has been roundly excoriated for its lack of transparency by such watchdog organizations as ministrywatch.com.

13 Note, for example, Kenneth Copeland Ministries’ Managing God’s Mutual Funds., and GloriaCopeland’s No deposit, No return ---whose blurb reads: ‘Many people try to withdraw faith fromtheir ‘spiritual account’ when there is nothing in the account to draw out. Learn how to make‘heavenly’ deposits so you will have a rich supply of God's Word on hand for immediate withdrawal.’ Both available on KCM website www.kcm.org

14 Ironically, Musingku later claimed his money was coming from the World Bank, prompting a denial by the Bank’s PNG Manager (Post-Courier 28 Feb 2006).

15By contrast, for example, Horan (2002) reports on a microfinance scheme in rural Tonga, where women were loaned money to produce handicrafts but instead they produced traditional fine mats, which, to Horan, represented an equally ‘rational’ strategy.

16 It should also be noted that Gregory’s ideas run counter to prevailing anthropological thinkingon Melanesian economies, which has referred to highlands systems (in particular) as ‘pre-adapted’to capitalism from the seventies forward, beginning with the classic work of Ben Finney’s (1973)on big men and business in the Eastern Highlands.

17 Cox (n.d.:5) also reminds us that relative isolation from the cash economy has meant that some communities have yet to fully grasp features of the new economy. ‘Thus, when Bablis (1999:20) reports that 90% of microfinance clients with the Liklik Dinau Abitore Trust did not understand the concept of ‘profit’, this should not be interpreted as a case of simple ignorance but as an example of a subsistence culture which has only limited engagement with the cash economy.’

18 But Prosperity Doctrine has its apostates, too. Reverend Jim Bakker, who spent five years in prison for defrauding Heritage USA investors, says he has had a change of heart about the prosperity gospel. The same man who once told his PTL coworkers that ‘God wants you to be rich,'’ now says he made a tragic mistake. ‘For years, I helped propagate an impostor, not a true gospel, but another gospel,'’ Bakker has said in his 1996 book, I Was Wrong. ‘The prosperity message did not line up with the tenor of the Scripture,'’ he said. ‘My heart was crushed to think that I led so many people astray.'’ (The prosperity gospel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, USA, Nov. 18,2003).

 

 

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Life with Bilbo Baggins: elfin ethnographic mysteries

Last week a story in the international press blew the lid off anthropology. Specifically, elfin anthropology.

http://freedomshammer.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/anthropologist-held-hostage-by-elves-for-7-years/

Yes, we learned from one C. Michael Forsyth of Reykjavik, Iceland, that Kalena Sondergaard had been found.

— Seven years after she vanished without a trace, a female anthropologist emerged from a mysterious cave where authorities believe she may have been held hostage by real-life elves!

Danish researcher Kalena Søndergaard was stark naked, covered by dust and babbling incoherently when rescuers found her outside a tiny opening in the famous Elf Rock, traditionally believed to house the underground dwelling place of mankind’s tiny cousins.

“She was crouching like an animal and spoke only in a language unrelated to any we know,” said Arnor Guðjohnsen of the National Rescue Service, which airlifted the 31-year-old survivor to a hospital by helicopter.

“The only word we could understand was ‘alfur,’ an old Icelandic word for elves. On her back were strange tattoos similar to those markings Viking explorers found on rock formations when they settled Iceland in 874, traditionally known as ‘elf writing.’ ”

DISORIENTED: Missing anthroplogist Kalena “babbled incoherently” when rescued.

Though found without a stitch of clothing, the bedraggled woman did not appear to have been sexually abused. But authorities have not ruled out the possibility that she had voluntary relations with her captors.

“Elves reputedly have an interest in human females and are known to use mind control to seduce them,” observes folklore expert Eva Bryndísarson.

 HEROES: Iceland’s elite rescue team whisked traumatized scientist back to civilization.

 

Elf writing, elf rock. Yes, you guessed it, this is all code for my work with the people of the Karawari, their caves, their cave imagery, and their sacred stone Kopau.

But truth be told, all anthropologists search for elves (alfur, goblins, maslai, little people, gnomes and hobbits of the shire). It's madated by Malinowski's ethnographic method. A little-known prerequisite to the profession. And it dates from those years between the two World Wars when the Granddaddy of modern anthropoloogy found himself alone somehow on the Islands of Love, where he set up camp next to the Paramount Chief'ss wee little house in Omarakana, Kiriwina.

That's when the penny dropped for his Polish-Hungarian polyglot: what real society puts a chief---not to mention a Paramount Chief----in a tiny little house?("You must be kidding me," he was said to have uttered).

From there of course, all the mystification and subterfuge of the trobriands slowly unraveled, and we learn from our interlocator's Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Word that beneath all the big hair and shell valuables, despite the fetching banana leaf skirts and stylish over the shoulder men's jewelry, what we we were really looking at was a society of elves. Pointy ears and all. Of course the bombshell of pulp anthropology for the era has to be Malinowski's painstakingly literal Sexual Lives of Savages (sold in brown paper wrapper). But the most demystifying of his books was and will remain the impressively pedantic Coral Gardens and their Magic, which some say out of spite for not getting laid, divulges every single garden charm, love magic and beauty spell of his hosts. He really was pissed off.

And to some extent, everyone dislikes elves.  While they may be cute and seasonally important in Western countries (Santa tolerates them), and while they seem to be experiencing a revival in children's literature and ironic greeting cards (in different guises), no one outside their closed miniature world really understands them. They remain today, as ever, an anthropological mystery.

The fact is that all other people are elves, trolls, fairies, dwarfs and otherwise-diminutive being; they speak strange tongues and believe in unbelievable forms of magic.

But our fascination with them comes from the early modern era's zeitgeist --the age of discovery, when the idea was to demystify, reveal and make transparent all things previously confounding. Like quantum physics, monopoly capital and British humour. This was the 'teens. And just as Malonowski was liting the veil, so to speak, of Trobirand pointed ears, Sir Conan Doyle was taking a break from Sherlock Holmes to announce to the world he had found proof of the reality of fairies. The Cottingly Fairies, the world's first big Photoshop hoax, became the author's unmaking of course, and he staked his reputation for keen observation on the photo evidence of something his cohort Malinowski was coming to understand through participant observation: the fact that little people are all around us. But only sometimes are they photogenic.

   

I myself continue the Doyle-Malinowski ethno-fictive legacy. My subjects are also elves.

But in my world there are also trolls, goblins, woodland spirits and sing-sing participants of many kinds.

You really never know when they will materialize.

Not surprising for the tropical rainforest.

But look closely now. Squint alittle and you might spy them yourself.

They dwell all around.

And if you speak softly, and present your provincial research authority, they may come out to greet you.

 

UNEXPLAINED: Iceland’s government protects reputed elf dwellings like this one.

 

UNEXPLAINED: the mosquito proof sleeping baskets of the Sepik shaped like elf dwellings.

Now I myself believe that some of us are better suited to recognizing these creatures. We carry a sort of Lamarckian predisposition to the small, what you might call an ethnographic empathy. Or a genetic legacy. The Ó Súileabháins themselves come from a long line of leprechauns.

The Southwesterners of Ireland have always been a queer, and somewhat short people. They like to story, wet their whistle, and live under clover. We have been called primtive, yes, and on the offshore islands, like the Blaskets, we remained untamed until the twentieth century---indeed, until roughly the same time that Malinowski found the Trobrianders and Sir Conan the Cottinglys.

    

But these rough and ruddy folk were discovered half a century earlier.

In 1843, a Mrs. D. P. Thomson, wife of a Protestant cleric on the mainland...visited the Great Blasket and and, she wrote that she “was more affected than I have the power to describe, by witnessing human nature reduced to the savage state it is among these islanders, within almost ear-shot of religious light and civilization” of local women and children crowded into the schoolroom, “chewing seaweed incessantly,” who pressed lengths of it “into their mouths with their thumbs in a most savage manner, and spat about unceremoniously at will; they touched my dress, turned me round and round to look at every separate article, laughed with admiration at my shoes and gloves, kissed and stroked my old silk gown.” After submitting to this inspection, she proceeded to speak to them of Jesus Christ.

(Robert Kanigel (2012-02-07). On an Irish Island (Kindle Locations 168-169). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.)

 

Aye na dunna tha sound familiar?

In 1907 the  Norwegian Carl Marstrander visited the Blaskets. He had been identified by his professors in Oslo as an unusually gifted student of linguistics.  “Children of nature,” he termed his island friends, or neighbors, or hosts, or objects of study, or teachers, or whatever they really were. “They are rather unstable in their mind, like a lot of Celts, and one doesn’t have to do much to make them happy.” Sadness never lingered with them, but passed “like the short summer showers in Kerry that come and go. They do not seem to think of a day after today. They do not know,” he wrote, “the slow patient work which will bear fruit in years to come. But whatever will give them profits at the moment gives them enormous energy.”

Marstrander pictured the islanders as forever joking, prone to exaggeration, inexorably drawn to “the strange and horrible.” They were “superstitious and blinded by many prejudices,” prey to demanding priests, yet quick to disregard their pastoral injunctions. One priest, angry at being ignored, cursed them, according to Marstrander, going so far as to offer prayers “that the Almighty might lead your boats into destruction on the sea.” For a few days, at least, the islanders, white with fear, forsook whiskey, gave up dancing and song. Impossible for one priest’s intemperate reproof to exact such a price? No, wrote Marstrander, “the West of Ireland still lives in the dark middle ages.”

(Robert Kanigel (2012-02-07). On an Irish Island (Kindle Locations 168-169). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.)

 

But let's return to Reykjavik for a minute. Who is to say that the young elf ethnographer isn't related to the  Norwegian Carl Marstrander, or that her host community is not otherwise known to J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, C.S. Lewis and other great mystifiers of initialed names? Who am I to say that the elves of this woman's seven years of fieldwork (do you think maybe her grant ran out?) are not somehow related to the elves and fairies of my own family tree?

C. Michael Forsyth's report  continues:

According to one folktale, a pair of brothers had a close encounter with the hidden people. The younger brother Sveinn often disappeared for days without explanation and was rumored to have learned to talk with Elves. One night, his brother Arnór went to Elf Rock in search of him. To his amazement, a secret opening in the hill appeared and Arnór saw Sveinn surrounded by knee-high, pointy-eared men who were about to initiate the mesmerized youth in a bizarre ritual. Arnór convinced his brother to escape with him. Furious at having been denied their prize, the elves chased the brothers and almost killed them...

“Kalena may have stumbled onto an entryway to their kingdom,” Dr. Kristiansen speculates. “That act of trespass may have angered the hidden people and perhaps they took her captive so she couldn’t reveal their secret doorway to other outsiders.”

 Tradition holds that elves use magic for either good or ill. They can establish a psychic link with humans, although people who engage in such contact run the risk of becoming insane. That might explain why the brainy Ph.D’s mind is scrambled.

“Kalena’s brain is Swiss cheese now. She has been through a terrible ordeal,” says Dr. Kristiansen. “We are hopeful that she will someday be able to provide a lucid account of what happened.”

 
     

Field notes: a million things I will never know

Ethnographic fieldwork is about imperceptible differences. First they must be made sensible to you before you can make sense of them in situ. But my notebooks contain long messy lists of things I will never be able to explain. The well wrought pencilled logo on the back of a young mans white dress shirt says Revaival Yuts of Daxu.  --To me, it's better than a printed logo, and not for ironic cool reasons but for the handiwork. But is it better to him?

In Karawari last month I found myself reading two things at once: The memoirs of a Blasket Islander, and the  novel in Henry James’ voice by Colm Toibon, called The Master. I was trolling for distinctions that were never made in other times and places, something Toibon is especially good at recognizing. His James character is so perceptive but completely unreflexive at the same time, representing a kind of 'otherness' that Toibon is trying to celebrate I think. Similarly, we used to believe so many things that we couldn't know to be a hoax---like the Cottingly fairies--because our eyes weren't trained to see. Sir Conan Doyle, another master  of evidentiary description, sees the fairies as absolutely real---even Elementary, Dear Watson.

The imperceptables: I see a hand drawn logo on the guy's shirt, not a silkscreen, and Conan Doyle sees fairies.  Not young girls staging a prank. But what we don't see is still out there.  The ethnographer's job, like the private eye's, and the emoirists', is to understand the filters.

'She was a strong and rugged an hearty girl,' says the 19^th c Irishman in his memoirs.Of course to the Protestant missionary quoted above, she might really have been a frightful primitive without charm at all.

What does it take to see the difference?

I have also just finished reading a true crime story of a 1930s serial murderer, a woman from Cincinatti who is considered at the time to be a femme fatale, and her presentability a great smokescreen to the police. Everyone calls her pretty, so flashy, so glam, such easy bait for the old men she killed---a regular bombshell. But then we see from one photo that she is, in my cosmopolitan twentyfirst century eyes, really as plain as can be---virtually a man in drag. What do they see? The grooming, the nails and hair were ever so important signififers back then, that to put them on was to beome beautiful I suppose.

15^th C paintings of beauty are not beautiful to us---but why? Because cultural standards of beauty change over time. Thus we see early photos of relatives taken with  adoration that just look fussy and overdone today. In Papua New Guinea,  early shots of people by FE Williams and Frank Hurley are similarly reverent, and yet many women (not all) see their ancestral counterparts as ungroomed and overexposed--primitive. 

Everywhere you go in PNG and West Papua, there is a spoken disdain for the villagers who have yet to 'change.' The arse tanget line. They might live a few yards away, and they may have produced your own grandmother, but they are visible embarrassments to modernity. Neighbours and dominant groups call them stupid, backwards and sometimes SMALL. They are related to the little people over the hill, the realm of half-human masalai of middle history.

 

  

 And when you spend the day recording the lore of the most remote of people, you begin to glean an understanding. The stories tap a realm of magical determinism that is all too easily forgotten.

Ive translated one such story of the Penale about a culture hero. Reading through, it makes more sense to me now than ever before. But I wonder if this has to do with my being steeped in my children's sem-literate world of Harry Potters and Hobbits.

 As he was approaching the cave he was following the river and found a huge white stone in the middle of the water, and he realized that this huge rock was the entrance to a ston haus [cave] under the water. So he dived in and reached the middle of the cave. There he discovered two women who had their backs joined together. Their names were Wandabis and Muguwi. They greeted him and asked for his name and then they asked him what he was after. ‘I’m hunting for flying foxes,’ he told them. The women then told him that these flying foxes were their children. They ordered him to leave that area as soon as possible as that was women’s place and men were forbidden. They told to him to look for the haus man [men’s house] in their underwater world, and they gave him directions to look for a flower in front of the haus man [another cave], which was also painted. 

 

 The way PNG kids, especially rural kids, embrace the neo-medeivalism of children's literature and film (Game of Thrones, for example)---replete with dragons and honourable gestures and kings and serfs---make me wonder about my own predispositon to these kinds of stories as a child. I always felt at home with goblins, elves and leprechauns---until a time when I was compelled to foresake them for more civilized characters.

 

In the Sepik, opacity is a sport. Evading straight answers, parsing every bit of gossip, deflecting the compromising questions ---I find myself committing the opposite. It’s my own form of heresy.  It can backfire, however. Just when the foretry team is laughing and joking with Imboin villagers, spreading big slathers of good will, I find myself turning to Lukas, who has always been a sparring partner with me, and reminding him that we know he has conflicting motives. ‘What about that gold dredger you still owe money on? You mean you’ll give up courting gold miners and ILGs now? What happened to ‘we don’t want conservation’?  I’m niggling and can’t stop. It's just wrong. Fortunately, he’s not really listening. New friends are slapping him on the back.

 

 Transparency is the novelty. Why show your cards? It’s a knowledge-as-power world, where no one has wealth, but everyone has a special song or story to keep close. Preferably in a dialect. Because differentiation is the way status is brokered, the slight differentiations between clans and families and neighbours. It begins with slander of course. The Awim and the Imboin repeatedly dissemble facts about the Meakambut, about how brutal or savage they are, what depths they go to. A story about Pasu bashing a pregnant Lydia runs through us for days, until one of our team returns from a visit to the Meakambut scoffing at the story. The day after one team treks up to Tembakopa to visit them, one of the Awim men returns home eager to report to me that all the sago we’d provisioned--20 kilos!---is gone, and they have no more food us there. Im told that the Meakambut have eaten it all, and now have absolutely nothing to eat or serve their visitors. Strange, I say. They normally eat very well. Later we learn this is another complete lie, concocted to slander their backward cousins.

Chris is in the smoky kitchen telling US stories, old saws by now but forever good for a laugh and surprise. These are morsels of extreme exotica, like rare tales of Arabian Nights, that secure his cosmopolitan status amongst all of the Karawari. They are tales from the days when he got a cornea transplant in the US, and recovered in LA with me amongst a set of film industry friends. He talks about the time a Sudanese model tried to pick him up at a party, and when we saw a TV actress we recognized. Mythic.

 

But he likes to tell his best stories with drama, acting out segments in ways that might surprise their protagonists to hear them now. Chris was nearly blind and very shy when we spent time in LA, but a decade and five children later, his raconteur skills have really been polished. There’s the story of hanging out with his good friend, a ‘very famous black American actor’ Tom, who took him to a black Barbar Shop, and for a cup of burnt coffee in Venice that Chris filled with packs and packs of sugar. How they drove in Tom’s big black Esplanade SUV along a highway one afternoon, listening to James Brown as Tom talks about stunt acting. Tom tells Chris to hold on now. Chris stands to tell the story. Tom then he breaks the vehicle so it slides into a 360 degree--on the spot. Very Van Damme. Then (Chris tells us) Tom simply presses the gas and continues on his way.

This is how legends are made.

 

 But I have arrived, in my research, at a provisional theory. The world of maslai, mudmen and cold weather elves have come to merge with leprechains, O'Neills and the blarney stone.

 

 

 

This is what corruption looks like: There are no white ribbons without bandages

Today we honour those women and men who have survived to tell their stories about domestic violence in Papua New Guinea.  Nothing says more about their strength than the photo on the cover of today's Post-Courier. These women have lost eyes, teeth, limbs,  and children to violence, but are here to tell us it has to stop.
But today I also received a message forwarded from the Medical Society of PNG that implies these victims will get little relief ion 2014. The most important triage for these women comes from health officers, aid post orderlies, village health volunteers, community health workers and anyone else who can staunch the open wound, apply the tourniquet and offer a shoulder to cry on.

This is what the message said:

Dear Sir

There have been many reports in the daily print media about suspected corruption with regards procurement by the National Department of Health for the medicines and other medical supplies required by the hospital, health centres and aid posts of the country, - including http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20120906/news02.htm “Fake drugs sold widely in PNG”. http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20070419/news02.htm “Fake drugs on the market”

http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20111010/news01.htm “Sweep team eyes Health Dept”

It seems that this year the process will be corrupt once again.  Medical supplies procurement is worth up to K100m per year, - so this is no small money we are talking about.

The story of 2014 medical supplies procurement starts on May 6^th this year when the Health Dept. put out a request through the Central Supply and Tenders Board (CSTB) for a 3 year contract for procurement of health centre (medical supply) kits by international tender with a closing date of 30.5.2013.  The tender request states that suppliers who wish to put in tenders must meet certain standards,  ie, have

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·        <!--[endif]-->International Standards Organization (ISO9001:2008)  for Quality Management System Accreditation of the Tenderer

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·        <!--[endif]-->Quality assurance covering supply chain, manufacture and delivery of medical supply kits

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·        <!--[endif]-->Certification for Good Manufacturing Process (GMP) of the medicines to be supplied and Good Distribution Practice (GDP).

The deadline for tenders was the end of May.  However, someone must have realized that the Tenderer who is renowned for giving presents to people in the government procurement system did not have ISO ‘Quality Management System Accreditation”, because at the end of May the CSTB extended the deadline for tenders submission to 20^th June.  And then on the 6^th June, the Secretary for Health announced that the requirement that tenders must have ISO Quality Management System Accreditation was removed.

On the 20^th June the CSTB had a meeting which revealed the following tenders submitted:

Company	Tender Bid (Kina)	ISO Quality Management System Accreditation ?
Sesago Ltd	111,329,916	No
Boucher & Muir Ltd	108,436,029	No
Green Limited	99,480,703	No
Borneo Pacific Pharmaceuticals Ltd	71,478,316	No
International Dispensary Association (IDA)	51,142,940	Yes
Missionpharma/City Pharmacy Limited	48,028,677	Yes

The CSTB uses a multi parameter method of evaluating tenders; the bidding price is just one of the factors taken into account.  Other factors include whether the bidding company “understands the project objectives”, “the methodology and resourcing of the bid” (ie quality medicines will be supplied) and whether the company “supports local industry”.  Information is that the CSTB has recommended to government that the K71m bid by Borneo Pacific Pharmaceuticals Ltd be accepted.  Search of the PNG Companies office reveals that this company is owned by two Malaysian businessmen.

Research published internationally shows that there have been a lot of substandard and counterfeit drugs brought into PNG in the recent past.  In 2011, Nair et al in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences reported that all samples of medicines supplied to PNG from the North China Pharmaceutical Group did not meet quality standards and one sample was clearly counterfeit (ie. a non active substance masquerading as medicine – usually starch or flour). Borneo Pacific Pharmaceuticals gets a lot of its medicines for importing to PNG from the North China Pharmaceutical Group.

A lot of money from overseas development partners assists PNG in the supply and distribution of medicines around the country.  Ausaid has supported the Dept of Health with hundreds of millions of kina over the past several years and last year sponsored the distribution of health centre kits to every health facility in the country.  This resulted in remote health facilities receiving adequate supplies of medicines for the first time in many years. Ausaid have agreed to distribute medical supplies again in 2014 as long as the tendering process for procurement is transparent and leads to the procurement of quality certified medicines.  However, if the successful bidder procures medicines from non-GMP (International Good Manufacturing Process) certified products Ausaid will withdraw its support.  Then we will be left with local ‘wantok’ distribution companies sending out low quality and possibly counterfeit medicines to our hospitals and health centres.  This will lead to the deaths of many Papua New Guineans and also much disability.  We all need say “NO”.

The Medical Society of PNG appeals to the Prime Minister to reject the recommendation from the CSTB in this case, and insist that tenders for the nation’s medicines only be accepted from ISO Quality Management System accredited companies who promise to only supply medicines from GMP accredited manufacturers.  Could the leaders of all public spirited organizations please support the Medical Society in the matter

Yours sincerely,

Professor Nakapi Tefuarani                 Professor Glen Mola

President                                                     Treasurer

cc. The Minister for Health

-- 

Professor Glen Mola FRCOG,FRANZCOG, DPH, OL

Head of Obstetrics and Gynecology, UPNG

 

Professor Mola is 0ne of the few gynecologists in PNG, specializing in medicine for the most vulnerable half of the population. He is on the front line of protecting women and knows how crucial medical care for them is in a country where mysterious deaths are attributed to witchcraft and STDs leave women infertile and abandoned by their husbands.

Professor Mola writes:

" Our only hope is that O'Neill will stop it before it is gazetted.  After all they can steal hundreds of millions from the road construction projects -- why steal K30-40m from the women and children and sick people of the country?

Unfortunately Borneo Pacific Pharmaceuticals have about K30-40m to 'spare' (ie. over the expected K10m profit one can expect for this kind of tender) to buy off almost every body in the Health Dept from the very top (probably Minister down thru Deputy Sec (Corp services)) to every single person in the Medical Supplies branch and still have plenty left over for 'profit'.  And they have done this sort of rort before so they are laughing all the way to the bank in KL."

Glen

 

 

Further tall tales from the Karawari (Part 3)

 Part 3

Laying the conservation groundwork

 

Imboin laid out a welcome for us. They were also enthusiastic participants in the training by our guest foresters to get landowners to conduct surveys of their own forests. Sometimes ‘skills transference’ is a piece of cake. They knew so much about their bush, we learned, that they might have all had advanced degrees. Conservation is an extreme posture. I know that we are propagating a kind of species xenophobia for the Karawari, species purity. But that’s the cold heart of conservation after all. Every invasive specie is an enemy. Everything not endemic is an illegal alien.

Like white supremacists, we abhor admixture (and like the one recently exposed in TV, are often surprised to find we are not ‘pure’ after all). Obviously you can take this too far, as people like to grow beans and vanilla in places it never grew before. So many species of plants and animals may have been introduced (or introduced themselves by natural migration) before an arbitrary ‘traditional’ cut off date, just as we all derive from sub Saharan Africa But there is real need to halt the tide of homogenization before the discrete identities of our biological world are lost to science. It is flora/fauna xenophobia, nothing less. All we have to do to sound politically antediluvian is substitute an ‘ethnicity’ in these conservation arguments against an invasive specie. Keep the migrants out---turn back the boat species.

But humans have tipped the balance of species homogenization. ‘Miscegenation’ and global blending has moved so quickly to habitat loss and destruction of whole geographies happens before we even know about it---worse, before these places have been studied, valued in their own right, and protected. Homogenization is rarely what it seems, it is almost never blended result,  because new species come to dominate their new environments and erase the identity of what came before. It is a form of biological colonialism if you will, the hegemony or manifest destiny of super plants and predator species.

What conservationists fear most is the Rachel Carson Silent Spring scenario, where a chemical finds its way to the water table, kills the frogs, which starves the birds, which prevents pollination of certain trees, and lays waste to the entire ecosystem. It’s not the next Kathryn Bigelow film, but more like an endless disaster miniseries, or watching Shoah in one long sitting. Just as we think about the millions of lives and intellects and creative productions lost to the European Holocaust in the forties, we can stand on mountainsides across PNG and look over plantations of oil palm, open cut gold mines, and oil exploration fields, knowing we have lost uncountable species’ contributions to science, in the name of global capital.

The bees are dying;  that’s our current nightmare. It always starts small. So yes, conservation is a battle against pernicious invaders, trying to construct impermeable barriers against the Other, whether he or she comes by boat, by chance or by the odd bit of litter. Some ecosystems are now too fragile to be left to fate, because in their fragility lies the biological clues to things we cannot even imagine, and in their destruction lies a form of evolution that is not survival of the fittest any longer, but survival of the most lucrative to humans, at the price of our global biodiversity.

Yorba agrees with my idea that we need vigilance against human and nonhuman invasions here in the Karawari. The place and its people are too easy to be coopted; too fragile. He and his colleagues who have worked in community development and conservation all across PNG are in the position to know how little it takes for one pernicious idea or one bad agricultural project to lay waste to the bush, the ideas, the very substance of a remote cultural community.. They’ve been impressed by the amount of information the Meakambut have for every tree and bush, even the young kids. Working with them on the survey was their own education, as they saw foraging people identify one leaf in five terms and then describe its various uses. Howard shakes his head and says his people in Madang don’t know anything like that anymore, it’s so sad. And so fast, this language loss.

I see why Tomi tells us so much of the Penale language is being forgotten, and quickly---no doubt because they are having to settle near the riverside to seek schools and aid posts, and because, as foragers, they are so deftly adaptive. Once the need to recall a tree name is gone, it is gone forever. The Awim are just one generation away from living in the caves, living like the Meakambut, but they’ve already lost so much taxonomic information. And that’s why fences have to be built, and languages, like stories, tree kangaroos, marmosets, fruit doves and the very cultural template of people who live off this bush, must be given a chance to survive.

I had a shock in the canoe the other day. Meakambut Jack was sitting before me when we passed a friend on the river. Suddenly he barked, and at first I couldn’t believe it was Jack barking, “Hey you fucking idiot!’---in perfect English, with an arm pump to boot. Clearly its a quick slide from first contact to just another foulmouthed villager.

 http://nancysullivan.typepad.com/my_weblog/

At this point in our journey we passed great mountains of dirty white algae drifting downsteam from last night’s storm. They seem like a million mini icebergs or alpine models; dirty bubbly bathwater, or clotted cream. And as we pass we hear the big burping sounds of rubbermouth fish beneath us, sort of bellowing calls. Or honking-bellowing really, sound bouncing off waves almost like distant buzz-saw being acoustically warped for us (Is it a warning? RH is coming!!)

Jeffrey makes a joke about how people say the Sepik is so abundant with fish they hardly need to fish at all. The fish themselves just loll about asking “Huk we?”

If we look at this area, its forest and people and caves, as a vast scientific resource, then we need to take one further step in our conservation. It’s not the gold and logs and oil that must be preserved, or passed on to a next generation, but the entire biologically diverse environment itself. It is a veritable laboratory for Papua New Guinean scientists in the future, who will explore its anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, forestry, biology, botany, mammalogy, ornithology, entomology, herpetology, and so much more.

Let’s keep it for Papua New Guineans, too, and prevent the scientific resources from being usurped and managed by foreign academics. I would sign my own death certificate I know, and I would even add a caveat that invites overseas experts to study the bush if they also trained local counterparts to do so. But this is an old idea that has never been successfully implemented. Maybe we can do that here. Drawing boundaries both physical and academic becomes all the more important in the age of open sourcing, free range education, Google maps and a global English school curriculum.

It’s a myth that democratic distribution of information benefits everyone---no less a myth than the FTO’s campaign to drop trade barriers in the developing world. The powerful win and the powerless lose, in yet another twist of capitalist evolution. The entire Sepik region is made up of knowledge based societies, cultures that exist to transact information before money. This is where knowledge is power, and amassing wealth (as in the Highlands) simply is not possible. The engine of social interaction—the musculature of all competition and hierarchy---is exclusive information—local ‘copyright.’

This is where every word and secret is parsed for its siociopolitical value. You don’t tell your secrets to the wrong clan, and you hold those special bits for an important debate. Like Nancy Jr hoarding her gossip, people hold tight to what they know, whether it comes as a legacy or a discovery. Thus conserving the vernacular taxonomies and the cultural esoterica of Sepik people is really a matter of survival. And recording that information to serve (only) a European discourse-- conducted in peer review journals and hallowed university halls ---not to mention expensive lecture circuits---is perceived to be, and therefore is in effect, theft. Science is not democratic. It’s more hierarchical than a Middle School cafeteria.

No one really shares everything, and everyone cultivates exclusivity by language, data or access to resources. Being an expert is no small thing, not in PNG, Australia, Germany, Madagascar or Bolivia. And yet PNG has too long been the subject rather than the object of scientific study. It is an illusion to think that writing a book about a people is enough to give them power. It gives them a name in another culture, and a subheading on a syllabus, even an ISBN.

But it often means little or nothing to the people in place, who face daily threats by commercial resource extractors, fringe churches, even junk food. We need to make the information about PNG more powerful TO Papua New Guineans, and stem the yearning to be ‘modern’ with the powerful force of cultural and intellectual pride. The workers we bring---Yorba Yuki, Howard Sindana, Siggy Fuaya, Frank Don, Peter Gabu---to name a few---were trained by an exceptional NGO called Bismark Ramu Group, and are committed to cultivating better judgement, critical thinking and acting, in powerless remote communities. Only this way will they ever be able to make free and informed choices about their future.

We don’t make enough social scientists, and far too few anthropologists. But when we do, ironically, it is always by cultivating special students who earn overseas scholarships where they write up the details of their own culture to earn a PhD. They rarely conduct fieldwork in their host country. And yet everyone from their host country conducts fieldwork in PNG, it seems. We need to provide the ‘field’ for that kind of research to be conducted by PNG students, preferably from PNG universities. Rather than being the subject matter for everyone else’s PhD and professorship, we need an indigenous anthropology of Papua New Guinea, and we need to do this right away. By making it easier for Papua New Guineans to gain expertise, saving precious monies on overseas ‘consultants’, we also serve the rural communities. Because it is only by making Papua New Guineans come to respect the importance of PNG culture that we will ever be able to conserve it.

Our workers show remote villagers in the Karawari their first moving images: cds about self-reliance, about environmental damage, and court battles to reclaim indigenous land. It’s compelling, no doubt about it. One morning two young men came into the kitchen and told us they hadn’t been able to sleep all night thinking about the video we’d shown them. Aren’t we fking with their brains? Is this brainwashing? Is it manipulation after all? I’m not sure I care, because being a blank slate doesn’t last long and some crank or cult or conman would be here if we weren’t.

Human tails

We’re sitting in the haus boi near the water in Awim one day when Sebi describes a skull Joshua found with him in a cave, one that didn’t seem to have the seam down the middle, so it didn’t look human. Sebi reports to us that Josh’s explanation was that this was a pre-human, one of the early homo sapiens who had a tail. “Tails?” “Tails,” Sebi says, pointing to the coccyx, everyone’s vestigial tail. ‘Humans had tails,’ he explains. Or at least that’s what Joshua told him. Josh was one of our team leaders a few years back, and a very nice DWU student of physiotherapy. He did a lot of early caving for us, and we loved him. But he also taught me never to assume any of my team members has a grasp of evolutionary biology, not to mention cultural relativism. He ended up telling the National Geographic a thoroughly fictional tale about Meakambut origin beliefs. Hearing this new ‘tail’ I shake my head and try to laugh, but I can’t. ‘Josh told you that? That’s what he told you?’ Sebi says Yes. “Em yet i tokim mi olosem.”

Sebi is no naïf.

He came with us on a donor funded trip to the World Conservation Congress in South Korea last year. He has seen the singing, vibrating heated toilets of Korea. (This goes some way toward explaining why is son wants to grow up to be a plumber). “Do you believe that?” He looks at me and shrugs, then laughs. “I dunno!” This is my chance to launch into a lecture about evolution, Biblical stories as legends, racist urban myths, and never taking Josh of all people seriously. For goodness sake, and we laugh. “Humans bin nogat tail!”

Paleodieting for the evolutionarily conscious

Coincidentally I turn on one of my NPR podcasts to find the “oh gosh” evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman talking about misconceptions of evolutionary biology. It’s not just Sebi who’s confused. People in the US are now eating something called The Paleo Diet. Lieberman does a good job debunking the idea that we are pre-adapted to a Palaeolithic and not a modern diet. Never has the human body been ‘adapted’ to any diet, not our autonomic (involuntary) nervous system, nor our hormones or digestion. There’s more Crohn’s disease and autoimmune dysfunctions of the digestive tract, like celiac disease, these days, and this is the hallmark of evolutionary ‘mismatching.’

It’s true about gluten—there’s so much more gluten in our diets today than ever before. Combined with our over-use of antibiotics, we have really become over-hygienic and virtually destroyed out immune systems. There are no more pathogens today, Lieberman explains. The immune system has nothing left to attack but itself. So there are foods for which we are better adapted, which suit our systems better. The Paleo Diet is filled with fats and fatty meats, and eliminates all cereals, legumes, milk, peanuts and grains (because it’s a pre-farming diet). But just because they ate it then doesn’t mean it was good for them. Or more to the point, good for them individually.

Because hunter-gatherers evolved to be reproductively successful, but not necessarily healthy. They died young. And farming was a boon for reproduction, but no improvement for individual health. What value did food have then, and what is its value now? A case in point would be underweight babies. Lieberman explains how in Gambia mothers were given nutritional supplements to make their babies fatter, but all it did, instead, was to space out the intervals for their babies. It made them healthier on the whole, but not reproductively more successful.

By contrast, the babies born to women in places like Lumi, in the West Sepik, are underweight because of strict prenatal dietary taboos. But this also suppresses maternal mortality, because women without medical care are much safer having smaller babies. More babies and mothers survive, even if they’re undernourished (and susceptible to other medical problems). The point is, nothing we have done in the past or can do today is perfectly ‘adapted’ to our biology. And even if we agree that not all evolutionary changes are improvements, there was never an ideal pre-modern time when our food and our bodies were perfectly coordinated.

Even today, the Penale are not too keen on gardening. Their transition from nomadic to sedentary is no small adjustment, even if farming is generally easier, more nutritionally rewarding (actually I don’t know about that last bit). It’s so unappealing, even their modern cousins the Awim remain apathetic nouveau gardeners. They’re lackadaisical about it. The Penale just prefer to hunt and fish, and for them---whatever the nutritional or political rewards---gardening is a hassle. They harvest sago, then some yam, fruits and wild berries. The Meakambut plant a bit of kaukau when needed, but prefer to process wild sago when they’re hungry. Culture---go figger. Its always mucking up that bio-evolutionary straight line.

Murderpods and mugshots

I’m slumbering to a podcast about ‘famous murders and murderers’ which is so good in so many ways: raw, poorly produced, filled with thuggish Elmore Leonard accents in telephone interviews between crime authors who avoid –at all costs-- the use of big words. My own kind of brainwash. They talk about ‘rationale’ and ‘motive’ and the ‘psychology’ of a murderer---no mention of sociopathy, neurology, or even criminology. Some occasional talk of a ‘split personality disorder’ sounds suitably dated and pulp-scientific.

These are all about serial murderers from the backwoods Texas and British Colombia, where meth and adultery and repossessed mobile homes are assumed to be sufficient triggers for a bloodbath. They talk about police praxis and the courts, obviously reading passages from their own books to explain the differences between US and Canadian procedures. The beauty is that I am no more the expert than they are, I’m their prototypical reader in fact, yearning for greater understanding. It’s the ultimate opacity of these talks (like listening to your uncles play cards in the kitchen, referring to family history before your time) that make them so good, so tantalizing. You can never really understand why the Gulf War vet murdered his pregnant girlfriend when his fiancée treated him like dirt anyway. Why did the seductress risk everything to commit that dangers sixth murder?

After two of these, my MP3 rolls on to an NPR podcast from New York, which is beautifully produced (with zippers and creaky door sound effects) about old fashioned grafters and con artists---and told by articulate stand up storytellers, moderated by the educated ebonic-inflected voice of the East Coast. A fake meditation guru to an investment banker. The New Jersey uncle posing as the arte povera naïf in his own gallery---causing a run the paintings. Here the stories are better than the facts, the story arcs as predictable as prime time sitcoms.

If only ethnography could be more like storytelling.

Latoma

We’re off to the Upper Karawari now. Pauly tells a long story on the ride from Moinene to Latoma---which is over 2 hours’ travel. I imagine an animal cartoon—Into the Wild, or Madagascar 4?---because this involves a lion, cow, giraffe, zebra, squirrel, koala bear and maybe a polar too, a kangaroo, lizard, snake and a rhinoceros. Pauly’s rendition is made more vivid for all the farts, squeaks and slaps of each character, and because he’s such a good storytelling JJ can’t even find a gap to contradict him. The climax seems to be when the zebra falls on ice and the squirrel steps up to say, “Busted!”

One evening Pauly struggled to remind me of the film about blue people were the guys goes into a bed and becomes blue and then they go into the forest…Long minutes passed in my befuddlement. Blue Man Group? “Nogat!” Fantasia?...Then it occurred to me: Avatar! Yes!, he says, That’s my favourite movie! For Pauly, of course, Avatar is cinema verite.

We are headed to Latoma, but get waylaid by Ben, the new Latoma Councillor, who has his own splinter camp downriver from the new inland village. Here he’s got a fiefdom, and shows us an enormous garden now cleared to be a soccer field, for which we are being tapped to supply the equipment. The whole settlement is so vociferous about us stopping here and not going upriver that I remember a time two years ago when we were actually ‘held up’ by Ben’s mob who demanded medical supplies. We weren’t with Dr Samiak at the time, and had to apologize for his absence of course, but we got a very clear indication of their ferocious need for medicines. There’s at least one severely disabled child living here who has never seen an aid post orderly.

Someone brings by a shy lad of 7 or 8, beautifully clear skinned, to prove tht the grille meds Dr Samiak did leave for him once, really did the trick. This time Nancy Jr applies scabies lotion to one sad and scared boy with one of those grille masks on his face. He is so skinny that I have to ask his father if he’s eating—his skin is too loose, he looks 100 years old---and the father says he is so bothered by scratching he hardly eats. They have an excellent and sturdy bamboo toilet here that is guarded by a swarm of bees who require you to moon them for a crap. You pray for constipation ---or the final extinction of all bees.

Cyril told Jacinta a story about a Yamandim man who got all dressed up for church and in the middle of the service had to leave for the toilet. Hut he broke the planks in the haus pek and fell into the gruesome hole, only to struggle out and make a dash for the river---as women laughed loudly. (It occurs to me that Sebi’s son who wants to be ‘a plumber’ may just be a local hero).

Komplein

Her we go. It's late afternoon when we sit outside with a kero lamp as Lindsay and Kentis explain their forestry work. Cicadas are so loud here and Kentis’ voice so low I have to give up. But it’s not long before the Latoma people unfurl their lists of complaints about me and my neglect of them. We hear about broken promises of fishing nets and ropes (were they promised?---or did someone send me a laundry list I ignored?)---I say: Why not a fifth element? A kit house? Maybe you’d like an Air Niugini Exec Club Membership?---but no one finds this funny.)

A baby pig takes a tumble sideways down an embankment and finally breaks the tension with Jacinta’s lovely tinkling glass laugh. Ben talks about convening a councillors meeting for the Kaiam, Bosorio, Gadio and Upper Blackwater (Mariama) people. That’s a huge population on the southwest edge of the cave project, and we should really visit them somehow. I am told that the former Councillor, Jonathan (who lives at the main village) received a bundle of second-hand clothes from our team leader Livai, but then distributed them to Yerevat and not to Ben’s village. Ben is cross now.

This is about fairness---an ethic that supersedes even politeness, and certainly takes precedence to our work recording caves, or even providing medical supplies, solar panels, water tanks and school tuitions. The clothes were not distributed equally! I am in the guilty box throughout this entire harangue, and Ben eventually elicits a promise from me (which I had already pledged, but which dramatically caps his interrogation of Lapun Missus) to pay project fees for 4 Latoma students in Angoram High School next year. He is later heard bragging about this political accomplishment to friends.

Ben further demands that I send him the money for the project fees directly, which he will deposit. What a good idea, I smirk, and no doubt completely reliable. That ain’t gonna happen, I say. He’s overplayed his hand by lack of graciousness, you see, and so now when he pushed for one more concession (as political coup de gras)---Would I but them a motor canoe to transport the students to Angoram?---I balk with sputtering annoyance. ‘Yu mas ting mi Guvna blong Ees Sepik Provens!’

We stay in a neat little bamboo house, our house in Latoma, which is more like a doll house than not, with a small open space and two back rooms (in the second of which a lame dog is hiding, next to his outboard motor) and a shelf table that holds stacks of D batteries and a cheap Chinese torch. On the floor is a sack filled with eaglewood bark. Precious items Ben assumes we will not steal. Nevertheless, in the morning he arrives with further requests: a big touch screen mobile phone, two soccer balls, nets. He has already handed me a list of the parts he needs for his motor: prop, inverter, etc.

Siggy later reminds us of the former councillor, Jonathan, who not long ago explained his development ambitions for the Sumariop (Latoma) people. He dreamed of a ‘mini hydro power’ Wankain olosem Yonki! This gives us chuckles for days.

 

Gossipmongering

But the big news I will take away from Latoma this time is a bit of gossip in the end. A woman sitting with Ben’s wife on the grass during our evening meeting blithely told me that my daughter Madonna is but a days’ walk away in a bush camp between here and her home of Mariama. She left us last year to go home and have a baby (much to our chagrin). Apparently, Im told, she’s not married after all, but alone now and looking after her daughter, although this woman pretty superciliously adds that she doesn’t know how Madonna does it, or who helps her.

Im gobsmacked. “Klostu?” I want to walk there now!

No, no, its all swamp, and too far away, she laughs, and continues with a story about how Maddona’s own brother publicly scolded her for falling pregnant while living with us in Madang—how she blew such a good opportunity and he wants nothing more to do with her. Now she has no one watching her back.

I’m amazed out the callousness of this woman’s report---for a woman, a mother herself. She’s intentionally imparted some awful news thinking I will have washed my hands of this girl and can join her in a sorority of Madonna haters. Did she not consider I might react like any worried mother? Yu tok wanem? Blong wnaem yu toksave olosem lo mi? Yu laik kirapim bikpla wori long me? Nogut yu tok olosem long pikinini meri bilong mi! Emi no kisim asua nating—i bin tupla wokim bel long em! Na husat sinfaun long bus nogat kaikai nau---? Madonna! Emi bin wok hat long Madang na nau yu laf long problem blong em??

That was my harangue. Did she think I would laugh along with her at Madonna’s predicament? Did she really think Madonna’s pregnancy was her fault alone?

But it was a harangue against all the gossip that's ever circulated about Madonna and girls like her--- someone told me the baby had died, someone else said Maddox was married, and everyone sniggers to hear the tale of a fallen woman.

But this womans gotten exactly the wrong kind of rise from me and her expression grows into surprise as I swell in defensiveness of poor albino single mother Madonna living in the swamp and having no one to help her feed her baby. As a result, at the every end of the meeting, once Ben has scored his concession from me, I am unnerved enough by the town gossip to insist that if anyone sees Madonna in the bush they should please bring her here to Latoma and look after her, where I can come and go and help her. With ultimate imperiousness and no little misogyny, Ben tells me to stop worrying ---he himself will take care of that. This is not the place to bring it up.

 But I’m still smarting next day when we walk down from the houses on the hill to the riverside and our canoe. The little grille lad is there now, wearing a shirt and shorts (which we’ve discouraged because clothes only make grille worse). I tell his father to be sure to grab some grille meds for him when the medical team comes later. Ben’s wife leans in over the embankment as we board the canoe, saying “You tell them to bring lots of grille meds! They’d better bring lots!” And I spit the dummy. ‘How can I control that? Am I God?’ Hau bai mi wokim olosem? Yu ting mi God?

I am but an old white lady with a girlish ankle.

More tales from the Karawari

 

Part 2 of 3

Awim has become the Penale frontier town. From the verandah of our house I feel a bit like brothel owner in Deadwood, pacing the limbum palm and scrutinizing the neighbourhood. Where’s the mute? Is that Richard now eight years old?

 

As befits a frontier, people are always going to and from the bush, stopping of at garden and hunting camps along the Karawari and up by their caves. I remember a vision of a woman her small son and daughter and their tethered pig, stumbling down through the river from the mountains, carrying loads of wood and  garden food on their backs, some twenty years ago when I first visited Awim. It was barely a village at that time, and the houses were so flimsy someone actually apologized to me, embarrassed, saying: We’re just learning to make houses you see. Now I look over the bamboo railing at the swept dirt below and think of the floor of the Chicago garage after the St Valentine’s Day Massacre because covered in big deep red splatterings of red---but not blood, it’s betelnut juice.

Cedric is Sebi’s second-last child, 6 now, always naked and motherless for a year now. He’s goofy, with a furrowed brow, toggling a lazy lower lip, male pattern baldness, and the boxy physique of a middle aged man. His older brother Silas, when I ask him what he’d like to do after school (he’s in 9^th grade now, home for the holidays) ---would he like to be a teacher maybe? (We need one in Awim). No, he shakes his head and says, I want to be a plumber.

Has he ever seen a flush toilet? Then I remember that Sebi returned from our glamorous trip to the World Conservation Congress in Jeju with printed pictures of the hotel's vibrating, heated, musical toilet: captired as lovingly as a pilgrim's shrine.

Obo the baby muruk is gone now. She grew to a cantankerous teenage cassowary who stole sago from everyone and fought with the dogs, so they chased her into the bush where she was caught by Imboin villagers and killed. Eaten.

Ive brought two of my five grandchildren with me this round, and the rest are just downriver at Yimas. They come in turns to us in Awim just because they’re so disruptive---and hungry. Every time I turn around someone’s asking ‘Bubu can I have a noodles?’ But Nancy Jr needs a break from carrying the baby Wilma and JJ, well JJ is that perfect age. He’s six, like Cedric, and just as goofy, pulling faces, crossing his eyes, drinking in the attention he gets now that he’s away from the pack. Ive never felt him so all over me as on this trip, and I wonder if he’s thought about this himself and wished he were an only child. So far his big accomplishment has been learning to swim and almost getting the handle of flips from the river rocks with his big bossy sister.

All the small talk produced in the course of a day here, hanging around and chewing buai, baking bread in the drum oven, speculating about unimportant things. Saying them over and over again. Tomi explained yesterday about how Penale language often uses syllogisms of a sort, so that someone will want to covey that he or she is going to the bush and will say it three times, like: I’m thinking of going to the bush, the bush is where I want to go, so I will be going to the bush. And so forth. Most of my Pidgin conversations cover the same ground. Someone says ‘I wonder when the team will come back.’ Someone else says,’ They will come.’ Another says ‘Vincent will tell us when he hears if they’re coming.’ ‘They will come,’ someone else says. ‘We’ll hear from Vincent and he will tell us.’ Someone says again: ‘ They will come.’ And so it goes.

Put two people on a palm bench in warm weather anywhere in the world and they’ll come around to this very same repartee eventually. The actually performance of consensus-making prevents everyone else from making inventive or suppositional comments, because agreement is the best form of self-censorship. It is mind numbing. I once sat in the Divine Word University staff room during a break and heard twelve people repeat platitudes to each other in the most remarkable way. In English. The sort of things your grandmother used to blather on about. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, You never really know what you have until its gone, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, This too shall pass, and Life doesn’t give you things you can’t handle... as if they were passing around bursnished wall plaques...Again and again like choral canons, preserving the customary pause between comments that prevents awkward overlaps. Everyone wound down and as they left the room and added the all-important, Have a Blessed Day.

I love that Tok Pisin accommodates this kind of gibberish production just like English, but I’d never considered local language as having the same repetitions, but Tomi’s observations make me wonder now. I tend to think people are conveying important information in vernaculars all around me, when indeed they may be saying little more than They will come. Or, Every cloud has a silver lining.

On the water

Our big canoe and 40 hp motor is the like a rock star’s motor home zooming through the Arafundi and Karawari. Everyone knows it by sound if not by sight. I like to hunker down and conform to the soft corners inside, but when we draw upriver to some of the more remote villages I sit tall and wave at everyone, pleasantly surprised when they know me enough to sing out my name or yelp for Lapun Meri! (Old lady: the great backhanded compliment of PNG).

But nothing beats zipping through these waterways, between the towering facades of forest on both sides. The big trees have creepers hanging down from them like sheets thrown over the furniture in a stately home. We’re the realtors coming to check the property while the are at the shore.

Birds cross overhead constantly, from canopy to canopy---it might be a game for them, flitting like trapeze artists across the abyss, who knows? And we bounce along the big muddy boulevard behind
cormorants who race along the surface just ahead of us.  Everything is about levels here, layers of
horizontal planes and the rising and falling of water that reveals something new every day. Hydrodynamic revelations, shifting sediment at the crook at every river bend. Here a garden hut is half submerged, there a sandbank irises from a dry spell.  Bamboo rafts might be family
homes under water. A bonsai in midstream is really the top of a great casuarina tree. As the water rises, that gap between the foliage overhang and the water surface shrinks to a tongue a groove snugness. And when the water is very high the edge of the canopy gets dragged down underwater like a bath mat slipping into the tub.

And when you look right into the rainforest on each side, it’s all a mess, just a big mess of uncombed hair after a shower, covered in creepers and lianas and teased up by sago and pandanus undergrowth. A beehive after a long night of dancing. But riding up the river is also like a Disney
studio tour through the back lots where all the scenery is stacked up against big blank walls. Big looming Dr Suessian characters loom behind. And here the silhouette of Yoda, and there a laughing duck. These palisades of vegetation are dense and accordion-like in one spot and then opened with a horizontal rain tree or a stand of pitpit grass in another, and here and there someone has abandoned the sago processing apparatus and moved on, leaving evidence of some strange cultural production like the racks and pulleys of an abandoned Pilates studio.

I notice Edward’s seven year old son, Star Brus, has a green marker tattoo down his back that says ISLAND BOY.

When you hunker down in the canoe you almost feel like a luge racing downhill, through the forest like bullet. But for most people who paddle along slowly without motor assist the experience is
more like walking through a long trellised arbour or driving slowly along a quiet rural roadway. In a slow motor canoe its like trolling through the suburbs really, passing so many barricaded lawns and big homes hiding pretty backyard gardens. There are nature strips and alleys and play houses and sheds on both sides, in the form of sago tree plots and small openings in the canopy that reveal a yam garden or a tight baret with a waiting canoe. Every place another story, every frontage of rainforest really series of habitations with stories and memories and laws of tenure and usufruct.

Along a stretch of sandbank between Yimas 2 and Yimas 1, on the western side, someone has stuck a traditional yipwon carving in the mud which for some reason our driver Albert refers to as Mr
Kongop.  In the sunshine I can spy beautiful blond hairs running down Pauly and Nancy’s deep brown backs. Pauly is telling me stories about Walter the Farting Dog and the Mankey Monster or
Wonkey Donkey, one or the other. No surprise they’re gross but funny.

Cicadas purr and clatter as the afternoon passes in Awim Village. A toddler is dragging a mouse by its tail, and it looks like it’s still alive because when an adult, one of his uncles, takes it and pretends to flick it away, the child yelps in great pain and its given back to him, still writhing away in an attempt to escape.

 

Nancy Jr gave Sandra, Sebi’s daughter, a blow up beach ball which was promptly expropriated by her older brother, but she never even whimpered as it left her hands, as if this were just the right of older brothers everywhere. In this as in so many other ways, my kids bear the marks of a slightly different upbringing, and I know with certainty that Nancy would pummel her younger brothers to a pulp were they to dare pull a beach ball from her hands.

It’s a nuance made clearer to me by a book I’m reading of Lawrence Osborne’s called The Forgiven. We’re thrown into a weekend house party with British expats in Morocco who enjoy such a well-lubricated protective membrane around themselves, their pleasures and priorities, their carnality, that it takes a tragic car accident to pierce the membrane and see the Moroccans all around them. And when they do, the most smug and xenophobic (albeit  pleasant) of them gets a rough lesson in family, tradition and largesse. 

All of that is by way of saying my kids a slightly more possessive than their peers in Awim, although primarily between themselves. Food and objects pass effortlessly between them and the Awim kids, but if I dare apportion more biscuits to Pauly than Floydy, I will never live it down. And when I teach nancy how to do my mother’s the fancy croupier car shuffle, while we play Go Fish, the exact same amount of time must be spent instructing JJ too.

Nancy reports that her brother can now swim in Yimas because his cousin chewed mushrooms and spat this on his knees and elbows, which did the trick apparently. Yes, I remember the days when mushrooms did similar tricks for me. Another cousin, she tells me, went to heaven. ‘Heaven?’ I ask, as we shuffle some more. ‘She fainted in church,’ Nancy tells me, and I’m trying to visualize this because the Yimas villagers have a new evangelical thing going these days with a lot of hell and brimstone and hands on healing. Are they snake handling? I wonder. Nancy tells me the cousin  fainted in church and went to heaven and got a present up there and came back, but she cannot talk about the present for a long time or she will die. ‘I see,’ I lie. Story or not story?

You have to ask these questions with Nancy sometimes; she’s a vivid fantasist in her spare time. (Turns out this IS a story and her father tells me no such thing ever happened). But now she says, “They took a scorpion from mummy’s back and a piece of bark from my stomach, during a healing.” OK, now this is weird. This is where the cultish aspects of Christianity articulate too well with traditional medicine and healing ceremonies and it’s hard to read whether this is some ordinary useful purge (although it would take a lot more than a scorpion to completely rid Nancy’s mother of what ails her) or some funky new belief system that involves antediluvian First Testament literalisms about arks and death to homosexuals and Papists, or what.

And while Im still mulling this over, she blithely transitions into a dream about building a very cool tree house in the Sullivan family house on Lake Champlain, which represents a kind of Tarabithia of Euro-Disney paradise to her because instead of real rainforest, malaria and spear fishing for dinner, there are hotdogs, ear buds, a tree house and not one, but five bicycles for as many sizes of kids in the garage.

  Preteen angst

This year Nancy Jr has become a Know It All. Or a Wanna Know It All, to be exact. And it isn’t curiosity that drives her, its power. In quintessentially Sepik fashion, she strives to
cultivate a knowledgeable mystique. Open source and transparency mean nothing here, where even preteens try to glean specialized information from the technical to the ethnographic to the overly personal to gain advantages in the constant warfare of family and community. She likes to correct my Pidgin, and when her cousin waves at me from the riverside and I call out her name, she
says “How do you know Claudia?” and I have to tell her (with smug pleasure) that I’m her grandmother too. She tells me about the way her Yimas aunties make palm prints with clay on their bodies when they dress for a singing, and how they make squiggles on their palms to give the print a twist, and how one of them even draws a face on her hand that’s supposed to be a crocodile...and I am always eternally impressed, even as I wonder when it will occur to her that I have lived here longer than she’s been alive. She needn’t explain PNG to me because Im white.

Then she moves on to some outrageous story about her cousin dying in church, or pulling scorpions from her mother’s back, and the line is crossed: I realize she is ticking off every kind of social and mechanical esoterica  as a means of one-upmanship. That’s when I realize: she is so ME. The lines are blurred now between her being marginally crazy like her mother or just familiarly narcissistic like her grandmother. Is it my influence after all---or am I deluded to see myself in her protean Caitlan Moran flat-footedness feminism and self confidence? All I know is that mothers who are periodically despised by their pre-adolescent daughters endure a special kind of loneliness. I’ve definitely been Nancy Jr in my past.

We bring our household customs to Awim with us, and make popcorn and play cards while the Awim kids study our peculiar habits and customs. They are the Moroccans at the gate and even as everyone calls me Mum or Grandma (Bubu), they also treat me gently, like a slightly overripe fruit. I take comfort that I have my own band of slightly overripe fruits around me like an old mah jong club in a San Francisco park. Only we’re a mah-jong club with Floydy, age 3, whose gravelly voice and lozenge like feet make him a human Hannah Barbera cartoon. And on cue, Yorba from beneath is mosquito net, where he’s resting, clicks on his mobile phone radio as it plays a tinny Indonesian song that he seems to know the words to. Then Siggy bounces across the limbum palm floor (because limbum is like living on a trampoline) saying Ah yes, this is the song about a broken heart and a soldier isn’t it? (They’ve all spillover from West Papua). It sort of makes me yearn for a
massage.

 

I dream of writing a column now for the newspaper, or maybe new PNG women’s magazine called Stella, which offers ethnographically informed insights to readers, cloaked in bromides and sometimes in-jokes. One like Margaret Mead used to write for Redbook years ago.  Lapun Meri’s Wisdom, that sort of thing.  But filled withdescriptions of the things that confound me, too, for example, the small kid in Yimas we passed today who wore a sheet of sago bark palang as a balaklava, with a perfect oval cut out for his face. What’s that about? Childhood? Exhibitionism? Terrorism perhaps.

We stopped to restock our peanut butter at Pion’s trade store, and Ambrose the recently re-elected Yimas Councillor tells me about the ongoing Sanguma fears haning over Yimas and Awim and Imboin. Apparently this is the sorcerer who took Lukas’ brother’s life last month, and Sebi’s wife Anna before that. He or she strikes in threes, they say, so everyone’s in high alert. Bonny tells a story about hanging two pieces of dried fish in a small pandanaus basket over the smoke fire overnight and finding only one, swear to god, in the morning. He figures the Sanguma comes round sniffing for food, betelnut and smokes just to scare us.

Then there’s the story from Imanmeri. This happened last week when someone came home from the gardens to find his house burnt to the ground. He went on a rampage and not only killed the chief suspect but chopped this poor man up by bushknife into six pieces: head, arms, legs and
torse, before the entire village. Imanmeri is just that far into the swamp, the story is just harrowing enough, to sound like Arafundi urban legend, but in fact the police were here a few days ago, picked him u for the cells in Angoram and now they’re rumoured to be coming back. To shoot him! Everyone says, as if they’re standing in the OK Corral.  Bonny says he was a homebrew-drinking pot-smoking ‘drug bodi’ who deserves to die. But is he that Sanguma? I ask. No no no, Bonny says. Just a drug bodi. Last week a young woman from Wombrumas drowned while she was fishing, and an Amonggabi boy went swimming at Munduku, just after we landed last week, and his body floated up downriver hours later. Never underestimate the current.

Kentish, our chief Forester, is a Gorokan with full beard, bald head, blackened betelnut teeth, and a little soul spot on his forehead where a child might have fringe. He’s scarier than a Netflix series about serial murderers, and yet my kids are more frightened of frozen wood nymphs in Narnia than they are of this buai-chewing, chain smoking, red-wig sporting highlander whose speech is almost indecipherably garbled. I swear he’s explained things over and over to me so many times I’ve given up and said, ‘Em nau, mi save” just to close down the topic. He’s telling a funny story now, though, and I can glean this much: he and a team have been stranded in the bush after a project for Chevron somewhere, with no food left but one jar of peanut butter. They’re waiting for a chopper to come fetch them and taking slow fingerfuls from the jar for hours, to stave off hunger. Finally the
big guy with the fattest finger gets shouted down by the rest for hogging portions.

The Meakambut come in by drips and drabs, to sit around and eat sago and rubbermouth fish cooked in coconut thanks to Marta’s deft hand. They’ve spent the day in training with Kentish, Lindsay, Jacinta and the rest, so they feel very smug and educated now, scientists in their own right. Indeed they are, because these are the precious informers who know more about any single plant in their bush than most other Papua New Guineans. Our precious Meakambut were barely making first contact, so to speak, five or six years ago, and now they’re here trying tinned fish and telling dirty jokes with some of our scruffiest lot, like Albert.

Later in the week, when the scientists go work with them in their bush, at the Kandamkunda camp, the ‘pastor’ Jack (and i give him inverted commas not so much because I doubt his credentials but because Im not even sure he’s self-professed as such) asks Yorba and Jacinta for help finding him a gold buyer from overseas. They’ve all been panning gold in their rivers, and searching for the best deals offered by local buyers around the Sepik. Gold is K70-75/gram when bought by the people downriver in Yimas,  K60 in Ewa territory, K90  in the provincial capital of Wewak, K95 in the town of Maprik, K120 on the city of Lea, and K200-300 in Port Moresby.

Jack tells Jacinta confidentially (Jacinta, who happens to be a beautiful young environmental scientist from Popendetta), that when he has enough cash from his gold he will buy himself an educated wife (wink wink?) so she can handle the business for him. In any event, he says, if
she finds a good buyer for him he promises to buy her a laptop computer.

“A laptop computer? Did he say that?”

“That’s what he said. A laptop computer.”

I find a bag of children’s clothes some friends in Australia have donated, and they get passed around to the Meakambut for their kids high atop Mt MacGregor. The Meakambut are so small that someone’s wife is going to wind up wearing those children’s clothes.

It may seem that Im oblivious to the dents and bends of my own impress on the Penale people. All the kids are wearing Marta’s dresses, for example, and they have schoolbooks because of us, and have gotten used to this old white missus bathing in their river. But its hard to clock my more significant effects on the village, not to mention the idiosyncratic influences. We brought Sebi to Korea, after all, and that blew his mind. We’ve shown cds to the village about Ok Tedi and other parables of environmental disaster, and these have –we know—blown their minds, so to speak.
But hearing that Jack, who had never seen a white missus or had anything more sophisticated than a Pidgin Bible before 2007, is now talking laptop computers—that blows MY mind. Its like he’s planning to sign up with Richard Branson for the next flight to Mars. 

Ratcrobats

One of Nancy’s stories involves a trip to her grandfather in the Rai Coast who performs more heroic deeds than any of his other relatives would recognize, and rats who come into their house there to nibble the kids’ toes during the night. Tas is a recurrent theme her in our Awim house, whose high vaulted ceilings hold a hive of big rats in their sago thatch. Now and again one falls down to the floor at night and can be heard scooting along the bamboo walls. Coiled rats drop like bombs on my tent at night, which is pupped below the central beam. So Nancy tells us they are gymnastic rats performing special Olympic feats in the dark, and when they fall they aim for the trampoline effect on our tents. Bucktoothed vermin mutter for a minute before reporting their “8.5” and “10” from the judge’s box.

I’m reminded of Anna Walker who visited with her travel show from the UK back in 1993, when I was temp manager of the Karawari Lodge. Dry, game and preternaturally good-looking, she and her poncy crew were terrific fun for a few days, telling stories of their royal set and Dicky Attenborough and the bizarre narcolepsy that strikes Anna whenever she’s behind heavy machinery---like her first solo as a single engine pilot. We’re drinking alot of wine and sitting in the cosy chairs late one night, me  beside Anna as she leans forward in a story, when a brick-sized bundle falls to our feet and then, without skipping a beat, scurries away as we watch. Anna turns back to me, still leaning, and asks,  “What was that?” and we both think it’s a drunken hallucination.

But really no more a delusion than the rats who used to haunt my East 2^nd St apartment years ago, terrorizing my puppy while I was away at work (hiding his toys, stealing soap, that sort of thing). I’ve come to think of them, over the years, as my mammalian totem.

Then, one night, a rat comes into my tent and I freak out. It’s late and pitch dark, so I scramble into the kids’ tent next door and hug my knees for a while before Nancy asks me what’s wrong. She
takes a headlamp and scouts for the culprit, but he hasn’t left the tent and fall asleep in a fetal position between Pauly and JJ.  

 

Moinene

Before leaving for Moinene, on the Karawari, we had heard three different stories about Mika and his failed run for Ward Councillor. How he lost and in retribution burnt houses down in Moinene; how he’d burnt our house down; how he’d moved out house from the perch with a glorious view because it was too close to the new EBC church for us smokers and buai chewers.  The last one
was true. He had taken our house down and plank by plank reconstructed it in a clearing on the other side of the village. Now it is a charming long rectangle with Ewa paintings on the outside walls (Pauly finds a coconut shell with still-wet red paint so we wonder whether the paintings are only recently and what bush telegraph told Mika we were coming this week?)

While the village is very quiet, and almost deserted (but for Philip who is sleeping, and wakes to tell me on his rickety verandah that his wife has gone to Kotkot to sort out a brideprice: their
daughter was kidnapped by her Kotkot boyfriend and now they demand compensation), there is a visiting troupe of Pagwi salesmen here with all kinds of merchandise. Actually its one very entrepreneurial and friendly middle aged woman and five of her tall handsome relatives (such is the difference between main Sepik people and these mountain folk) lounging in Mika’s house beside a small bulk store of goodies—lollipops in jars, secondhand clothes on hangrrs,
sugar, salt, noddles and the all important bales of rice. They accept gold nuggets as payment (now it really does feel like Deadwood), which they sell at a profit in Wewak. But their prices are nothing to sniff at: K8 in cash or gold for a mere 500g of sugar, a 1 kilo bag of which would seel for the same price at Poin’s trade store downriver in Yimas. Everyone is in the thrall of InterOil and firmly anchored to place eating sago and marmoset because the price of fuel is so impossible. Owning a motor canoe is like having a fleet of medallion cabs  in New York City: both the lucrative and wildly expensive.

Jacinta is a sweetheart and pops up to cook whatever she fancies for us. The kids are begging her for popcorn so they can play more Go Fish and Double Solitaire. I caught them raiding Philip's big
fecund laulau tree for its crisp clean fruit (piled into pockets and bags and t shirts like Fagen’s pickpockets), and they’ve wagered them ate cards and eaten them all away by now.

Mike tells us stories about our cave team leader, Livai, when he slept here a few months ago. Apparently he was so petrified of sorcery that Albert and Mika whispered something over his tent one night (“Diiiix--on’’ they whispered for some reason) and poor Livai bolted up in a flash, dragging the tent. Then there are more Ballcutter or paku fish stories, about how all the lovely lily pads are eaten and gone from Yimas Lakes, leaving every fish, turtle and crocodile exposed to their nets and spears for the time being.

But Albert insists they’re not fishing more, they’re just catching more---like a massive old croc that ran 56” inches around its chest (and thus too big to kill legally). It’s the current Rachel Carson disaster here, after decades of dealing with the salvinia molesta long ago dropped in to the Sepik from a missionary’s aquarium: multiplying twice its size in 11 days, the weed rapidly carpeted all the lakes and colonised all the floating debris and left villagers everywhere, especially in the Chambri Lakes, weed-locked and hungry.

So the Department of Primary Industries brought in an Amazonian weevil to eat it away, but then when they introduced this Ballcutter, yet another invasive specie, the fish promptly swallowed all the weevils and the toxic salvinia molestia came back again, in full force. At least this ecological disaster provokes good stories about kids having their testicles chomped away somewhere else along the Sepik River. There’s always a silver lining I said, pulling a platitude from my hat. It may be a boon for birth control.

The next morning Cecilia, the grandmother, comes to story with me. She takes me and the kids up to the EBC Pastor’s house (he   is coming from Chimbut) which is being build where our old house stood---this time with a proper verandah looking out over the river junction, the caves, waterfalls and mountains beyond. More desirable, more impressive than any holiday home view in a
Sotheby’s Property catalogue. 

Cecilia tells me how the presence of gold in their rivers has changes the dynamic between these communities. Their rival Chimbut (for whom, incredibly, they will
build such a glorious church residence) is now ‘throwing’ out stories about their traditional ownership of the big Susu Mountain before us and its little brother mountain to the east. But these are Cecilia’s mountains, they’re Ewa tribe land, and she knows all the stories associated with them because they involve her own father. Pointing to the top of little brother mountain she says That’s
where my father planted sago---Can you see it? (Barely). He shot a cassowary in the bush between the two mountains and when he reached the top of Susu Mountain it fell from his grasp, down across the big limestone escarpment and into a small lake at the foot of the mountain. The cassowary struggled free but left the spar in the middle of the lake, she explains, and rain causes the
water to rise and fall, the spear heaves with it, emerging from the middle of the lake to scare women who come looking for fish. And when the spear rises up, Cecilia says, its like a tsunami warning to these women because it will suck them down into the lake again when the waters fall.

I ask her about some of those caves again, and whether anyone has been back to them recently. Apparently not. The last time was after the carvings scandal in the nineties. That’s when Donald and Philip took the last of the old mortuary carvings from their caves and sold them like a string of beads for Manhattan to an Australian buyer in Wewak. This man turned a handsome profit selling them down south to Oceanic art collectors in Australia (illegally, by the way). Thus once again the Ewa rip themselves off.

It started just prior to Independence in the seventies when collectors actually asked for these old totemic carvings, which they purchased for some miserable price at the time. As a colony, it was still legal to pillage the ancient patrimony of PNG at the time, and so no laws were broken when those carvings found their way to multimillion dollar Oceanic art collections and museum installations at the Metropolitan, the Museum De Kulturen in Basil, and most famously the Jolika collection wing of San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Back in 2007 we brought photocopied plates from those exhibitions back to Moinene where all the adult men stood around in tanget grass and ratty shorts pointing at the once carved by their father, their uncle, or that man from Kotkot who married Donald’s auntie.

Ironically, as I sit typing this in my home in Madang, my phone lights up with a call from ‘Philip from Moinene.’ He wants to be sure the medical patrol will make it to Moinene in a couple of weeks
after all. To reach me, he has climbed hours to the top of a ridgetop beneath   Susu Mountain. Where he can find a network. Yes, I tell him. It’ll be there.

But the punchline is this: Cecilia tells me for the first time, as we sat on the pastor’s verandah, that after the last time their carvings were taken from the caves to be sold to a dealer, Philip himself went back, re-carved them, and put the new ones in the caves just in case another collector came calling. “Tru ya?” Absolutely true, she assures me.

As we walk back to our new house I spy a ten year old girl, she’s got grille on her arms and shoulders. But she’s just purchased a secondhand dress from the Pagwi peddlars, and now she stands like a vision from the late nineties in New York, when disco formal was a bubble
dress. Here she is, as if transported from Studio in that gold lame and white polyester bubble dress that may have been worn by Drew Barrymore a a sofa snorting coke with Mariel Hemingway.

A young boy from one of the bush camps across the river is here selling betelnut to our crew. Someone hands him a K10 mistakenly believing he can change the bill and come back. By late afternoon he hasn’t returned, and we’re off to Latoma now. So we zoom by his garden camp
across the river where a bewildered old man says the kid has gone bush, gone to a garden camp deep in the jungle. Oh well. Such is the novelty of money here we have to presume he didn’t know about owing us K6 for betelnut. The old man leads us upriver a few paces where Edward and Jeffrey climb the kid’s own betelnut trees and pick K6 worth of buai in compensation. 

 

 

Back to the Karawari Caves

Part 1: Getting there

This is the story of the latest chapter in our Karawari Cave Arts Project. Ironically, it involved absolutely no cave recording or exploring. We have grown into such a multi-headed monster that we could bring two distinct teams, and hope for a third, to the caves without enlisting our spelunking ethnographers. This time we brought a community awareness team back, some of our most valuable employees, including Howard Sindana, Siggy Fuaya, Yorba Yuki, Frank Don, and Peter Gabu.

In addition, we enlisted a special forces crack team of environmental scientists to conduct what they called a Reconnaissance Biodiversity Survey---a quick look at the flora and fauna that will allow us to plan a more elaborate study.

These guys are the wonderful Jacinta Mimigare, formerly of Partners with Melanesia, now on leave from MMJV; the terrifying Kentish Igai, Forester par excellence; fellow Forester with a friendlier face, Lindsay Sau; and finally, a social scientist, our friend Paul Hukukuhu, to collect subsistence and forest use data for the survey.

We also wanted to schedule a medical patrol for this trip, but that fell through at the last minute (and will be described later). The idea here was to bring the scientists to train the community awareness team as well as the villagers while they conducted the survey---and believe it or not, it was a big success. Not only did we learn alot about the bush in Karawari, but we learned how much people themselves know about their bush---in direct proportion to how dependent they are on it.

That is, the Awim people had lost some of the taxonomy of their trees in the single generation that they had moved to the riverside and reinvented themselves as more sedentary people. The Imboin knew alittle more, as they are even more recent settlers from the hunter-gathering past. And the still nomadic Meakambut knew everything still---down to five different uses for each leaf of a given tree.

So when Kentish Igai stood to give a farewell thank you speech and said you folks taught us as much as we taught you, he wasn’t kidding. We all shook our heads in the evenings about how rich the young forest was and how adept the Meakambut remain at living from it.

Equipped with this survey we can now take the first steps toward marking the bush surrounding the caves of the Penale, Ewa and Sumariop peoples a legal conservation zone, and then, fingers crossed, be eligible for World Heritage status. These three weeks also clarified for all of us the multiple bases of the Karawari conservation area, if and when it comes into being: The virginity and youth of the forest, which is exemplary in its fragility; the biodiversity presumed to be within this young forest, based on the presence of several specie indicators; the importance of the rainforest as a catchment for the entire Arafundi-Karawari River area, and indeed the entire Sepik floodplains---such that any disruption could be devastating for thousands of people; the cultural significance of the caves themselves, especially the origin cave/stone of the Penale people called Kopau; the rarity, fragility and importance of the Penale, Ewa and Sumariop subsistence base, as nomadic hunter-gatherers; and the archaeological and historical importance of the cave images for the story of human migration in Papua New Guinea, and indeed for the story of mankind in general.

In the course of the three weeks it also became clearer to all of us that we must secure this area not simply as a protected zone, defended against commercial resource exploitation, but also as a laboratory of PNG science---to be studied by PNG scientists first.

The idea that these caves and their bush are an important resource in their own right was driven home to us all as we walked through the bush with the landowners, all of them repositories of important information. Not unlike any other resource in PNG, the cave arts area should be conserved and made useful, should be unpeeled, so to speak, as a great archive of knowledge, to Papua New Guineans first.  Anthropology in all its forms has been largely a foreign endeavour in PNG, something others study and record for a predominantly Western discourse on humanity. But like gold and fish and timber and oil, the time has come to nationalise this database, and nationalise the PhDs, journals, books and findings we can glean from it.

Given that, it came as some surprise that after the logistics of getting all of us to our long-time base camp in Awim Village, we were greeted by a friendly young Serbian student from St Andrew’s in Scotland. He told us he was here to write an ethnography of the people; to write a book and get his PhD. He had heard of us, and our work, but clearly not been told we are also hard at work on an ethnography of the people, and that we had spent 7 years compiling it. I was shocked and none too receptive at first, to be honest. The rest of the team were aghast, some even angry, that he might be taking the same stories we had taken, and without much quid pro quo. But once we heard about his long journey to Awim, and the reasons why he wanted to work on the Arafundi River, we had to agree it sounded like a good idea.

Tomi is deeply interested in linguistic ideology and comes from an interesting Marxist/Levi-Straussian tradition, which is different from mine. He will focus on the language and produce a brilliant piece of work, no doubt. Once we had explained the possible conflicts and potential benefits to all of us, we listened to the insights he had already gleaned from a week in the village. And he became one of us.  Probably the peanut butter, rice, and the generator we ran in the evenings for our work, had a lot to do with it. My footnote on this would be that I am no little astonished at how unprepared he was by his professors before coming to the field. He’s extremely good natured and hearty, not to mention smart as a whip, so there’s no great risk for him, but I find it hard to believe he was fed so little current affairs and tok pisin beforehand.

But let me begin at the beginning.

Oct 12 I jumped on PMV in Madang with Yorba, Howard and Siggy, bound for Hagen. After about 5 hours (no, Im not kidding) spinning around for passengers, we set out for the highway. Came up in Hagen 20 hours later.  There we found Jacinta and Kentish, and within a couple of hours Paul and Lindsay had also arrived. It is a day of semi-comatose shopping for everyone. Along the road in Hagen I spy 7 or 8 year olds photographing each other with their mobile phones. They’re pulling a truck tyre along with a stick, that universal toy, and one of them whips out a mobile phone for a good shot of this. Maybe he has a blog. Maybe he’s tweeting to National Geographic, or maybe he's just getting in touch with his agent.

Fortunately Hagen's Best Buy is open all Sunday and we got a car from my friend Anna at Jubilee Rentals, so we loaded up. The next day we flew MAF to Wewak, waited for three hours (and had breakfast at the surprisingly expensive Airport Lodge), then flew on to Munduku on the Karawari.

We had sent part of our team the week earlier, by ship from Madang, PMV from Wewak and canoe from Angoram, so these guys were waiting for us when we landed at Munduku. We set out for the long ride to Awim, fully confident that our twentysomething boxes of gear and food would keep us happy for a long time to come.

Suckers. We were out of tea by the second day, and sugar by the third. I will say it here: it is absolutely impossible to provision 20 people for a three week stay in Awim without chartering a plane for it. As it was, we paid dearly for overweight and were paddling to Yimas for emergency oil and whatnots at the trade store before week two. That’s not to mention the masses of dried and fresh fish we bought again and again at Yimas 1, and tonnes of sago bought, scraped and strained by our fearless crew (a shout out to Bonny and Marta Mapat).

We had enlisted a Community Health Worker from Angoram hospital to travel to Wewak and pick up 7 boxes of meds from the provincial stores for our patrol. But apparently he was so delighted to be in Wewak he spent all the money we sent him and couldn’t catch a taxi canoe to us when he got home—although he did have a friend who would gladly charter his canoe for K3000. Thanks, said, but no. As I type, a team is setting out from Yimas to reclaim those meds now, and will take the Yimas CHW, Zakarias, who has assisted our beloved Dr Samiak on his patrols, to all the villages of the cave arts area. None of them have seen an APO for years. As elsewhere in PNG, women are dying all the time from childbirth and gynaecological complaints, which inevitably get chalked up to sorcery and make me scream at everyone that Sanguma is not from the village---Sanguma is the government that has denied you basic medical care for thirthy-something years!! But don’t get me started.

Back to the trip.  In the narrow terminal for MAF in Hagen there are families and children waiting to be beamed up to mountaintops and mission stations that once took several days, even weeks, to reach by foot. I marvel at the electronic tinkling of a new age: ringtones from the  Willam Tell Overture to Ba Ba Banana and the Playstation 4 theme. Meanwhile the passengers are marvelling at the airplanes taking off.  Sometimes change happens in such bursts that cascades of dissonance can surround you in a perfectly ordinary setting here. Kids with mobile phones, tinny sounds, trendy sneakers. And the crowd obeys my grandmother’s law of travel: wear your Sunday best (which, for her, might include kid gloves). Everyone here is dressed to the nines and snapping selfies. But hands down the most gorgeous couple is a man and woman of their seventies, who told me they were siblings. Traveling together.

From Wewak to Munduku we are flying over the Sepik Plains and all the tessellated patches of vegetation that cover it. Lush green trees fill the extinct river beds and create tendrils like wet curly hair falling over the plains. From above, the mauve and green patterns are incised by these deep green fertile lines and echoed by faint versions of older riverbeds, creeping across the land like veins on an old man’s hand.

The bush meanderings are mirrored somehow by the shadows of low hanging clouds; these glide across the flatlands in wonderfully paisley designs, almost like explosions of blue dye,  or smoke rings in the dark.   We pass islands of bush, mostly sago but also rubber and pandanus, surrounded by acres of swampland, then drier patches covered with circles like water rings on the furniture.  Subtle shifts of colour are unexpected, as the edges of these bush islands creep darker or lighter toward the swamp, and the cloud shadows match the blue-grey intensity of bushfire patches across the plains. The river itself is doing its crazy reptilian thing, sometimes looking industrial in its curves, other times freaky and Peter Max, like a vast wonderful doodle. But this is doodling on land like the way grille will doodle across a Sepik child’s skin---in patches, in swirls and separated by great flat surfaces. Here and there the design pulls focus to become pony hide or a giraffe; and across this big glassy spill the shadow of our small plane is gliding like a mercury ball.  

Day 2

The second day here Magdala gives birth to a baby boy in the bush behind her house. Kids come bouncing into our house to tell me, and when we find her, she had emerged from a tunnrl she’d fashioned of a low hedge, for privacy. Now she’s washed a bit and cut the cord. Her infant daughter is looking dazed and confused near her house, almost as if she’d been there through the birth. Nancy Jr and I bring painkillers, and later come back with a singlet and some soap for her.  In the following days she will move to a limbum palm enclosure under her own house, and after a week, follow her husband and kids into the bush for a garden camp near the Karawari River...with her very new newborn.

I caught sight of the little toddler with Prince Charles ears as he spied me from the high perch of his house. Looking forward to seeing how his head grows in. The dexterity of some kids always impresses me, especially as I trundle behind them on log bridges while they prance across on strong soles, balanced and confident, little Mary Deckers. Three kids---no more than infants---sit every day on the rickety verandah of their house, narrow, precipitously high and completely without railing; they run up and down a notched log for their ladder and compete with a dog for sitting space. But there is never an adult to mind them, and when I walk by they giggle about my yellow hair, then burst into tears.

The Arafundi villages are sometimes a brigade of naked or big-shirted bare children, the very image of Dickensian penury, and yet these kids are always happy and buoyant, and incredibly biddable. Parents cuff them, manhandle them, and shoo them away like feral dogs, but still they grow up knowing they are loved beyond measure and can eat, sleep, hug and hit whomever they want in the community. Teenagers pass toddlers on the path and sweep them up by one arm to their neck for a ride. Infants carry babies, boys throw their arms around each other.

A few years ago I travelled to Tanganimbit and ran into a kid about 11 or 12. Don’t you remember me? He asked. You came to visit my school when I was in grade 1.  Of course he remembered; and naturally, I forgot. His world is filled with people he will see again and again, and he can count on his fingers the strangers who pass through. Of course! I said, lying. I remember you!

Marta spends two days diligently making skirts and dresses for the Awim people and trying to get them to start sewing themselves. One woman actually did. The rest were happy to have Marta as their seamstress. The second day she bundled her things to the side and left a small stack of skirts to one side, which a gaggly of teenage girls promptly stole. For a few days the entire village is wearing crisp new cotton jumping fish frocks.  After that they quickly begin to look decades old, and tattered.

It’s great to see Donald here, a far cry from the boy we found seven years ago. Since then he was ‘gifted’ to us by his schizophrenic mother (who has since died), spent time living with Freddy and his wife (until Freddy died from drinking home brew one New Year’s Eve), bounced a bit from Imboin to Awim, and now he’s all grown up, healthy, happy and as sweet as ever. He still hasn’t developed an adult voice, so he sounds very fey and sing-songy, especially by comparison with three year old Floydy, whose already acquired a  whiskey throated growl. But years ago, when Donald looked ten at most, we discovered in his clinic book that he was in fact 18 years old. That would make him 25 now, and he’s begun to show facial hair, so his voice may drop yet. His days are spent fishing and acting as the all-around au pair to mothers with nursing babies. Every time I see him he’s cradling another one like his own.

The day is made more eventful by Tony, who is hosting Tomi the student in the house behind ours. He graces us with a good old fashioned harangue of a kros, and works himself up to waving around a bushknife in the face of my Yimas workers. It is an old Yimas-Awim rivalry that’s been rekindled during the recent by-elections.

Apparently Tony had bagged up a small fortune in betelnut and was taking them to the airfield to be sent by the TNT aircraft to Hagen. He had a Hagen buyer who would pay well enough to make his bounty worth K2500. Buai is three for ten toea in the Sepik, and one kina per nut in Hagen. It is said this Hagen buyer wanted to take them to Porgera, where he could fetch K5 for each, providing him no small profit. The people who live across from the Karawari Lodge are Kundiman, and they have been recurrent enemies of the Yimas for years now, involving jealousies over work at the lodge itself.

When Tony brought his betelenut to the airfield up from Yimas, he was somehow tricked by Kundiman people who told him to hide because Yimas folks were out to attack him. (Hey, this is all I know; clearly there are layers and layers to the story). He dropped his bags and ran back to his canoe to paddle home. Now he says the Yimas had it out for him, and they effectively took his betelnut from him----he needs to be compensated. In fact, it would suit him, we learn, if our team, NSA, paid him all the money we are expecting to pay our workers. That would be fine. But as his rant gains momentum and no one challenges him (as is custom), Tony gets a better idea and he storms out to the river and takes our company 40 hp motor from our canoe, and carries it back furiously to his house.  There’s a back story about bribery and votes and evidently alot more.

Tony is careful not to lash out at me directly, although he vents a bit about how I must be making money off his paintings (which I sent to Barry Craig at the South Australia Museum, who paid for them).  But it’s not worth contesting, as this is a full blown drama of his own script. I have paid his children’s school fees, brought solar panels, water tanks, health patrols, etc to Awim for years, and do not get money for this work at all. But he says something about broken promises---a buzz word for aggrieved villagers everywhere. Part of the lexicon of development work here. It sounds very much like something from someone else's playbook.

And of course he says all this while insisting again and again how much he respects lapun meri and everything she’s done, which is sort of like baring your teeth and hiding a knife while saying Have A Good Day (or, as you say in PNG, Have A Blessed Day). The good thing is that the harangue peaks, and then subsides. The motor stays in his house until the next morning, when steam has dissipated and lots of talking has clarified the problem, or at least the trigger: Kundiman people tricked him to set up the Yimas, that’s certain, everyone says. Indeed, in classic PNG style, people one by one yell facetiously at Tony the next morning that he should never take the word of Kundiman people when they talk about Yimas, he must refer to the Yimas himself (it’s his fault).

A good hard rain washes this all down in the night, as the dry riverbeds swells and rises up to the top of its embankments. But just before it goes dark, after the yelling is done, a series of hornbill pairs streak across the village overhead, sounding like bellows blowing at a dying fire.

To be continued, tomorrow ad passim: we visit Kandamkunda, Tembakopa, Moinene and Ratoma.

The Faustian Contract between BHP and PNG

Why does the PM say he wants BHP out of Ok Tedi?

 

Is BHP still in control of PNGSDP? It seems to be. Follow out logic here. For those of us
familiar with running the paper trails and company searches for RH subsidiaries, this is a pretty transparent chain of command, and it leads right to BHP Billiton’s Board room.

 Remember the BHP settlement in 2001, following those long Ok Tedi cases against the
company?  BHP gave USD $500 million worth of shares in the mine to the PNG Government, when Sir Mekere Morauta was Prime Minister. That was all the shares it had in Ok Tedi, and it was their compensation for the gross and unprecedented level of damage the had caused the Western
Province people. That was their bail-out, and the means by which they would
step away from the mine.

 Or so we thought. The idea at the time was that the PNG Sustainable Development Program,
would own and control all of the PNG Government’s shares in Ok Tedi for the
purpose of implementing development in the deeply scarred Western Province, and
the country at large.

Papua New Guinea was unclaimed by any European powers in 1876 when a speck of gold was found at  the highest point of D'Albertis' exploration  on the Ok Tedi River. By 1884, at the express recommendation of Australian miners, Britain had established a protectorate over Papua.

One hundred years later, in 1984, the Australian mining company BHP had secured the mining lease for Ok Tedi mine.

Twenty years later it acknowledged responsibility for the single largest environmental disaster in the global history of mining. In compensation, they promised establish a trust for the impacted communities, and to leave this trust in the hands of Papua New Guinea. Ten years since, we find it has not.

So why did Peter O’Neill Peter recently say on Radio Australia that BHP Billiton needs
to give back control of PNGSDP to PNG? 

(See http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/program/pacific-beat/png-pm-calls-on-bhp-billiton-to-hand-back-control-of-pngsdp/1035460)

 How does the PNG Government NOT control PNGSDP and OK Tedi ? BHP’s continued control is
the largest con in PNG history.

 After killing one of the world’s most important rivers and subjecting hundreds of thousands of Western Province peoples to continuing environmental impacts, the company pledged to give back its shares in a form of penance. But with the cynicism of an older, colonial age, they never did this, and instead kept control of those ‘development’ funds for its own ends.

 

They never left Ok Tedi. The biggest con in PNG history has been effected by BHP.

 

In 2001, BHP Billiton did gift all its shares to the PNG Government.  It also
“suggested” to the PNG Government through then-PM, Sir Mekere Morauta, that the
PNG Sustainable Development Program Ltd be set up, so that it:

 

• 
  As a corporate entity, could hold and control all the
  shares in OK Tedi
• 
  Would receive 75% of the dividends from OK Tedi
• 
  Would be registered in Singapore and the dividends
  invested in Singapore, allowing the  PNGSDP would bring back the interest for development
  programs for Western Province and PNG.
• 
  And PNG would thereby right the wrongs left by BHP
  Billiton.

 

So BHP and its lawyers went about setting up the structures and drafting the relevant
agreements.  BHP then told the PNG Government that to start up the fund in Singapore – so that interest is readily available and PNGSDP can sustain itself from the beginning–  there would be no need for any start-up capital from PNG itself.  BHP LOANED PNGSDP USD$120 Million for the fund in Singapore.

  And when someone gives a loan – they give terms to secure that loan. The terms BHP gave were
that UNTIL the loan was 100% paid back, BHP would nominate 4 of the 7 directors on the PNGSDP Board.  BHP would retain a majority on the PNGSDP Board.

 Since its inception 12 years ago, PNGSDP has been controlled by BHP through its Board, with Ross Garnaut at the helm. And as PNGSDP is in control of the OK Tedi shares – the OK Tedi Board is made up of 4 Australians and 1 Papua New Guinean, BHP also controls OK Tedi.

 BHP has never left PNG.

 

There is now USD$1 Billion in the fund in Singapore BUT still the loan hasn’t been paid back – and won’t be for many years yet DESPITE the fact PNGSDP could repay the loan tomorrow in full and not even blink.

 Why doesn’t PNGSDP pay it back ? Because the BHP controlled Board wants BHP to remain in control for as long as OK Tedi operates, and as long as the other mines near Ok Tedi operate.  Highlands Pacific, for example, has new gold and copper mine 25km away from OK Tedi: at Frieda
River.

 Ross Garnaut has just been appointed to the Board of Highlands Pacific?  Why? Because
PNGSDP has bought a huge chunk of shares in Highlands Pacific which entitles them to a Board seat.

 Consider the obvious advantages to Frieda if Highlands Pacific could strike a deal with OTML to send all its tailings down the Fly River rather than the Frieda and Sepik Rivers? They could sell them to OTML whereby acquiring the legal indemnity OTML now enjoys from the 2001 agreement: the freedom from any possible litigation by OTML CMCA signatories.

 So...instead of paying BHP back the loan and allowing 100% control back to PNG and its people – PNGSDP under Ross Garnaut has bought Highlands Pacific shares.

The Faustian contract PNG was forced to sign back in 2001, by continuing the mine destruction
for the economic well-being of the country, is not just a tragedy. It is an
expanding tragedy.

 What does investing in Highlands Pacific have to do with providing sustainable development programs for the Western Province and the rest of PNG? That US 1$ Billion still sits in Singapore, and Western Province has recently been declared to have the worst human development indices in PNG. It’s ‘compensation’ for loss of a birthright and a stable, healthy future has been expanded investment in more mines.

 

IN 2010 PNGSDP brought $40 million of the Singapore fund back to PNG to fulfil its program mandate. But they spent $10 million on their own administration, and a further $1.5 million on Board fees. Where do these monies wind up? Back in Australia, with BHP Billiton-appointed Board Members, their colleagues and families.

 Instead of working toward real development goals for Western province people by building schools, hospitals, roads, water supplies, better sanitation and small business opportunities, PNGSDP has now committed USD$400 Million from the fund to a project in Daru.

 They are building a deep sea port and copper smelter in Daru.

 According to affidavit material filed by PNGSDP recently, US $40 million has ALREADY been
spent on the FEASIBILITY STUDY for this project. A feasibility study costing US$40 million. How many aid posts, college degrees, roads, small business loans could have resulted from $40 million dollars? How many PNG consultants would have liked to have conducted the study? We can only imagine.

 The rest of the money will be spent on $178 Million worth of DREDGING for the port – as
it needs to be much deeper to permit access to large ships for transporting the copper from the smelter.

 But why build a copper smelter in Daru? Is this a sound investment for the PNG people? If you had an investment advisor managing your multi-million dollar investment portfolio—would this be the best possible investment?

 Copper smelters are both financially and environmentally expensive. As a Daru villager, and one of the most negatively impacted groups by OTML’s devastation of the Fly River, would you choose to build a copper smelter? Daru is desperately in need if basic infrastructure, basic sanitation and water supply; it needs locally owned fisheries projects, schools, and most of all state of the art health care for children and adults still presenting illnesses from the polluted river.

 But BHP knows the cost of copper smelters all too well. They own the Olympic Dam Copper
Smelter in Roxby Downs, South Australia. It has been so expensive and environmentally destructive that business reports say BHP needs to build another one, elsewhere. The Olympic Dam mine uses 35 million litres of Great Artesian Basin water each day, making it the largest industrial user of underground water in the southern hemisphere. Contaminated water is passed through a series of sealed ponds where it evaporates. Reports tell us, however, that this is having a major negative effect on rare and endangered flora and fauna of nearby mound springs, which are drying out as a result of the water draw-down rate. The mound springs are the only permanent source of water in the arid interior of South Australia and a delicate yet intricate ecological balance has been established. They are a refuge for rare and endemic species including plants, fish, hydrobiids, isopods, amphipods and ostracods, many of which are now threatened by mining operations.

 

But more importantly, poor market returns for the refined copper, uranium oxide and gold
and silver co-products of Olympic Dam have now forced BHP to shut it down.  In August of this year it was reported that BHP had to sack up to 140 staff from its Olympic Dam expansion team. BHP Chief Executive Marius Kloppers said this was due to the slowdown in China and the fall in mineral prices. The decision was announced on the same day the company announced a full-year net profit of $14.7 billion, a 34.8 per cent drop on last year.

 To justify expenditures for the Dam expansion of around $30 billion, Olympic Dam can’t be just left to the whims of the market. The giant Anglo Group has already shied away from investment in the Mine because of fears that uranium would remain in the copper concentrates, and the acid leaching of these would be too hard to manage if the concentrate were transported.

 Others say that BHP needs to erect another smelter, as the Olympic Dam is too expensive. BHP must devise a solution. If Olympic Dam is deferred then it is likely BHP has not found a solution somewhere. Like Daru.

 For whom is the Copper Smelter and Deep Sea Port being constructed in Daru? BHP Billiton.

 Now that Ok Tedi plans to continue mining for another 7 years, and now that it has invested in the new Highlands Pacific mine at Frieda; now that Ross Garnaut has left the Chair of PNGSDP for the Chair of Highlands Pacific; now that BHP has installed Sir Mekere Morauta in Garnaut’s place, as a golden retirement package in exchange for Morauta’s support in passing the Bill that allowed BHP to ‘step back’ from PNG---- the control BHP has over these monies is even more entrenched.  At this point, there has been only one Papua New Guinean on the PNGSDP Board, Rex Paki. His power if nullified by the On the Board of PNGSDP, there is one Papua New Guinean, Rex
Paki, who cannot do anything in the face of BHP’s 4 appointed Directors, including Morauta now.

 "Naturally, with such an accumulation of wealth in a poor country, it's very tempting for political figures to think of better ways of using it right now rather than putting it into long-term development," Professor Garnaut said recently. We assume ‘political figures’ refers to the
democratically elected representatives of PNG. We assume he is saying no government of PNG (a “poor country”) will ever know how to invest these funds in its own behalf.

During grievance time in Parliament 2 November 2012, PM Peter O’Neill read the above quote aloud to great alarm from the MPs present. Some called out for Garnaut to be deported.

 

We have to ask again: What has PNGSDP done in 12 years?  Has the river been cleaned? Have Western Province people been ‘developed’? Garnaut tells us now, with no irony whatsoever, "I think Ok Tedi is the main single reason why PNG has in the last five years had some fiscal freedom."

This is either the most cynical of statements or the most oblique admission of Garnaut’s own fiscal freedom in the last five years.  Perpetuating the myth that all Papua New Guineans are corrupt and all Australians are ethical, sneering at critics by asserting disastrous professional experience over genuine concerns, BHP is hiding in clear sight. Shape shifting Board Members, installing expensive mechanisms and six-figure salaries, and lavishly publicizing the Program’s comparatively
meagre investments in the people of Western Province.

BHP has constructed in PNGSDP the biggest pyramid scheme PNG has ever
seen. Forget the small scams run by church and cult leaders around PNG; forget the dubious investment schemes thrown up every day in towns across PNG. We have a winner of the biggest scam in PNG history: the illusion created by BHP that PNG benefits directly from and will forever need PNGSDP.

New tuna flavour widely available in Pacific: Day Glow

You know all those new varieties of Dolly tuna found on our shelves in PNG today? You know---rather than the light meat or albacore you find on Australia's supermarket shelves, we now have tuna loaf, and tuna with tinned peas and curry tuna, and all manner of 'luncheon' treats (including, some would say, both Male and Female Condom falvours).

Well, thanks to Fukishima in Japan, our choices now just got wider.

This one is radiated!

Apparently all aross the Pacific our tuna has been fed a daily diet of Fukishima radiation for the past two years, and we can now enjoy, with absolute confidence, the flavour benefits of this innovation.

Everyone gets the new taste sensation. But perhaps none as directly or in such concentrated form as Papua Nnew Guinea!

Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters.

The utility pumps out some 400 metric tons a day of groundwater flowing from the hills above the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the basements of the destroyed buildings, which mixes with highly irradiated water that is used to cool the reactors in a stable state below 100 degrees Celsius.

Tepco is trying to prevent groundwater from reaching the plant by building a “bypass” but recent spikes of radioactive elements in sea water has prompted the utility to reverse months of denials and finally admit that tainted water is reaching the sea.

Tepco said on Friday that a cumulative 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium had probably leaked into the sea since the disaster. The company said this was within legal limits.

Tritium is far less harmful than cesium and strontium, which have also been released from the plant. Tepco is scheduled to test strontium levels next.

Tepco said in late June that it had detected the highly toxic strontium-90, a by-product of nuclear fission that can cause bone cancer if ingested, at levels 30 times the permitted rate.

The substances, which were released by the meltdowns of reactors at the plant in the aftermath of the huge tsunami of March 2011, were not absorbed by soil and have made their way into underground water.

Subsoil water usually flows out to sea, meaning these two substances could normally make their way into the ocean, possibly affecting marine life and ultimately impacting humans who eat sea creatures.

Samples taken on Monday showed levels of possibly cancer-causing caesium-134 were more than 90 times higher than they were on Friday, at 9000 becquerels per litre, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) revealed.

Levels of caesium-137 stood at 18 000 becquerels per litre, 86 times higher than at the end of last week, the utility said.

“We still don’t know why the level of radiation surged, but we are continuing efforts to avert further expansion of contamination,” a Tepco spokesperson stated.

Moreover the human body absorbs iodine and caesium readily. “Essentially all the iodine or caesium inhaled or swallowed crosses into the blood,” says Keith Baverstock, former head of radiation protection for the World Health Organization’s European office, who has studied Chernobyl’s health effects.

Iodine is rapidly absorbed by the thyroid, and leaves only as it decays radioactively, with a half-life of eight days. Caesium is absorbed by muscles, where its half-life of 30 years means that it remains until it is excreted by the body. It takes between 10 and 100 days to excrete half of what has been consumed.

 

Now we don't want to pull say told ya so, but it was only weeks ago when media reported no real taste of this new flavour sensation:

Radioactive Water From Fukushima Is Systematically Poisoning The Entire Pacific Ocean

By Michael Snyder, on August 5th, 2013

Published on Saturday, June 15, 2013 by Common Dreams  

Fishy Accounts of Health Risks from Poison Fukushima Tuna

by John LaForge

On June 4th, 2013, London-based news source the Guardian reported, “Fukushima tuna safe to eat – study.” The day before, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Scientists to eaters: Don’t freak out over Fukushima fish.” The San Diego Union-Tribune was emphatic: “Tuna Pose No Risk after Nuke Disaster,” and online, “Fukushima seafood radiation risk nil, study says.” The BBC ran with, “Fukushima tuna pose little health risk.” And CNN declared, “Fukushima tuna study finds minuscule health risks.”

So which is it? Does that sushi or canned tuna pose a minuscule risk, just a little one, or is it safe? The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a report online May 30, 2013 that garnered these vastly disparate headlines. The NAS team studied measurements of cesium-137 and cesium-134 in Bluefin tuna caught off the California coast. The cesium was dumped or leaked as liquids into and deposited as gaseous fallout on the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima’s three catastrophic reactor meltdowns. The poisoned tuna swam 5,000 miles to our West Coast.

It is clear from the report that the Union-Tribune and the Guardian grossly “mis-headlined” the NAS’s findings. The tuna had an estimated 7.7 nano-sieverts [the sievert is a standard measure of the biological impacts of radiation] per 7-ounce serving. Since no radiation exposure of any kind is “safe,” headlines writers declaring the risk is “nil” and the tuna “safe” had not done the slightest bit of digging.

A simple internet search of agency web sites illustrates the fact that every US government agency that regulates radiation exposures, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Energy, Transportation and Health and Human Services Departments and the National Academy of Sciences itself, agrees that there is “no safe dose.” The National Council on Radiation Protection says, “[E]very increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.” In addition to noting that “radiation is a carcinogen,” the American Nuclear Society warns, “It may also cause other adverse health effects, including genetic defects in the children of exposed parents or mental retardation in the children of mothers exposed during pregnancy.”

 

There is an effect scale. If a nuclear blast occurs in front of your face it wipes the body off the map in milliseconds. If it occurs a suburb or two away the body takes a few days to die. Further away and the body suffers for a longer period of time before it packs it in. Often due to cancer. Further away again and fatigue, digestive upsets and disorders, lethargy, depression and so on are less severe but just as debilitating on a body. The principle is, the more radiation the body receives in a shorter period of time, the less it survives.

Fortunately for us, the opposite also holds true. The less radiation the body receives OR THE MORE THE BODY IS ABLE TO GET RID OF RADIOACTIVE PARTICLES, the less damaging effect the radiation has on the survival of the body.

Please consult a medical practitioner to determine the best course of action for you to take with regards to your body. Of course most of them don’t have a clue of how to handle radiation exposure, but if enough people ask, it will be profitable for them to spend the time to learn about it and advise you correctly.

Here is a list of points to take up with your primary health care practitioner or a specialist.

1. Filter fluoride out of your drinking water. Fluoride prevents the body from taking in iodine. Adequate Iodine intake is essential for a healthy thyroid gland. The thyroid is a key player in the immune system of the body.

2. Get your iodine level checked. If deficient, take some iodine in your water. Most people are deficient in it. Per this article (and many others) “In Germany on Wednesday, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection held a news conference that described the threat from the Japanese plume as trifling and said there was no need for people to take iodine tablets. The pills can prevent poisoning from the atmospheric release of iodine-131, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear plants.”

But on the plus side: Think Day Glow!

The next big food sensation, may be radiated snacks. After all, we already have day-glow rabbits:

and mice:

and jellies:

And, for goodness sake, even condoms:

Which, are, by the way, very useful for night fishing, and already receive our Fukishima Flipper Day Glo seal of approval:

 

The Mining Advisory Council sends us a letter

This is noncommittal, as you will note (and alittle snitty about my threat to embark on an international campaign---Done, by the way, MRA)---but it is very very good news in the end. We know that the MRA are meeting with the Natioal Museum and Art Gallery next week for further clarification of their appeal to halt the license, and that is another excellent sign that grassroots projects can and do make a difference. We thank everyone involved in signing the petittions, expressing their support, and contacting the MRA directly about the Karawari Caves and the need to protect them. Please rake a look at the Facebook page for Karawari Cave Arts to find more images, updates, and videos from the Namata meeting where we explained the petition and the campaign to the landowners at risk.

First, find below the letter I wrote, with the note from Philip Samar saying 'Toger, let's send someone to check this place out' (no small endeavour, let me tell you):

And these are the letters also attached in their email to me, filed as 'other correspondence.'  Thanks to those people who took the time to write letters, substantial letters, in protest against Pristine #18's ELA 2008: Stephen Corry of Survival International, linguist Darja Hoenigman who workes with the neighbouring Kanjimei community, and my dear friend the NYC activist Brad Taylor. These three perspectives, representing a renowned rainforest campaigner, a humanitarian based in the USA, and a Slovenian scholar and stakeholder who explicitly describes some of the reasons why this license should not be permitted (please read them all) reflect the breadth  of our support in this effort. We are so grateful.