The Ragged Edge of the World (9 page)

The history as told by Teddy weaves elements of the Christian creation story with local tribal creation myths, with some plate tectonics thrown in for good measure. Keep in mind that Teddy was the resident Catholic presence on the island. Both Christian and aboriginal elements are background to the story. For instance, his account seamlessly shifts from the description of the island as a physical place to a personification of the island and has that unidentified “he” reacting to having his balls stung by insects by moving back to the ocean. What struck me about the whole episode was how unselfconsciously he wove these Christian and animistic elements together. It seemed as though Teddy felt no contradiction or conflict in integrating these two wildly different belief systems. I'm not sure which belief system will win out on Manam Island in the end, but at least in 1990 the spirits seemed to be holding their own.

From Manam we headed toward the Sepik River. As we made our stately way toward its mouth, I discussed further with Barter the uneasy bargain that tourism represents. Barter makes no apologies, pointing out that the number one priority of almost every village in New Guinea is to attract more tourism. At that point he was bringing about 7,000 tourists a year up the Sepik, and in a typical twelve-day itinerary, they would spend about 40,000 kina on artifacts.

As we entered the mouth of the river, I noticed that we had slowed to a crawl—and also that arrayed along either side of the boats were natives in dugout canoes. What I was witnessing was a variant of a scam I also encountered in Africa.

As Barter explained it, natives would position the boats so that they would be swamped if the
Sepik Explorer
came through at any speed. The grift was to then claim compensation, something that was all the rage then in New Guinea. Indeed, trumped-up claims against expatriates and the government for compensation probably ranked as a major source of income for those villages in contact with outsiders. Barter slowed his boats way down, but even so, natives who had spent their entire lives handling dugouts suddenly became all thumbs and would tip over, setting the stage for ludicrously large claims for compensation. If someone actually died, potential claims reached Lotto-like proportions. Barter told me of one enterprising headman who had precariously positioned his aged grandmother in a canoe, apparently with the hope he might make the mother of all compensation claims and rid himself of an expensive liability at the same time.

Barter had had it with this scam, and met with headmen from the surrounding villages and threatened to take his boats off the river unless they got this extortion racket under control. He also said that Michael Somare, then the prime minister, had backed him on this, suggesting that pulling Barter's boats was probably the only way to make the villagers desist.

While Barter gets irritated with nuisance compensation suits, he has built his life in New Guinea and asserts that he is sensitive to the vulnerabilities of native cultures. For instance, he notes that he won't visit certain villages unless his tourists are willing to spend an entire day there, because to do otherwise would be taken as an insult by their hosts.

He is also a bemused student of the deep resilience of New Guinean culture. He notes that the same natives who carve shields and masks for tourists will also produce works for sacred houses that they would never sell, or even show to tourists. Moreover, they adapt. Carvers noticed that tourists prefer flat to rounded storyboards, so they started making them flat. Others reduced the size of carvings so that they could fit in luggage. Christian imagery may be included on shields ostensibly decorated for ancestor worship. During World War II, Trobriand Islanders started incorporating pornographic images in response to the taste of GIs, a practice that has continued in different parts of Papua New Guinea to this day.

Conversations with Peter Barter turned out to be the most interesting part of the trip up the Sepik. While his boats are quite comfortable, traveling on a tourist boat, no matter how sensitive its operators are to the local indigenous people, invariably sets up a wall between you and the culture you've come to see. Encounters with the natives in such circumstances feel like staged affairs, and it's naïve to expect that the locals you meet in these circumstances will look past your wallet. I greatly enjoyed meeting Peter Barter, but I did not feel I was encountering New Guinea.

Back in Madang I immediately set about tracking down Saem Majnep. Diminutive in stature, Majnep is a member of the Kalem clan of the Kaironk Valley in the highlands, but he embodies the hope that New Guinea might come to terms with the modern world without abandoning the knowledge and culture that held its clans together for thousands of years. He was a student at a missionary school in the late 1950s when he was hired as a translator by the distinguished ornithologist Ralph Bulmer. Though he was studying evangelism in school, he spent his free time out in the forest with his relatives and friends learning about the habits of birds, the uses of plants and all the incunabula of a hunter-gatherer life.

“Unprepossessing” doesn't begin to describe how Majnep appeared at first glance, but he grew in stature almost from the first word. He was serious, but he had a ready smile and he radiated quiet dignity.

His story underscores a simple but profoundly important aspect of the worldwide loss of indigenous knowledge: that the toxin of cultural amnesia is often introduced as normally and benignly as sending children away to school. “If you stay in your village,” he said, “it is easy to pick up this learning [about plants and animals] because it is all around you, but when people go to Madang, they lose it very quickly.”

Bulmer picked up on Majnep's local knowledge and realized that he had found something more than a translator in the young man. He began interviewing him about the feeding and breeding habits of the birds he had come to study. Bulmer appreciated that the practical ecological knowledge of Majnep and other villagers could save him an enormous amount of time. Majnep said that at first other villagers resisted telling Bulmer their stories, but soon came to regard him as honest. Ultimately Bulmer gave Majnep credit in many of his monographs on the birds of New Guinea, and Majnep published a few in his own name.

As beneficial as this collaboration was for Bulmer, it was ultimately far more important to Majnep and the other villagers. Missionaries had tended to dismiss the traditional knowledge of the Kalem people as mere superstition, but here was a distinguished scientist from New Zealand who sought out their learning. This was an eye-opening experience for the whole village, and it had a profound effect on young Majnep.

For the first time he felt that his traditional culture had value. He began noticing the ways in which people used that practical knowledge in their daily lives, where the knowledge was being used, and where it was being lost. For instance, he noted that even though many of the young were ashamed of what they regarded as the backwardness of their parents, almost everyone still relied on traditional medicines and felt some ambivalence about going to a clinic if they were sick.

He also noted that a lot of critical knowledge was simply slipping away. Culturally illiterate young people no longer knew which trees made the best house posts or firewood, and would make themselves sick by burning what he called poison oak or by burning mango wood.

Majnep grew up as an eyewitness to the ways in which a traditional society can gradually become unglued. He saw the delicate equilibrium of slash-and-burn agriculture fall out of balance as populations grew, and people forgot proper procedures for rotations, converting forests to grassland and reducing the casuarinas, whose wood was used as firewood and whose sap was converted to gum.

He was also sophisticated enough to recognize that traditional beliefs can make people unwitting conservationists. One of the most powerful tools protecting the forest is the aforementioned
maselai
—the belief that the spirits of the ancestors inhabits certain trees, and if those trees are cut down, all manner of woes will be visited on the perpetrator. Majnep said that
maselai
still exerted a strong hold on the people of Kaironk. Even some of the more enlightened missionaries—Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran—recognized that
maselai
helped preserve the forest.

By the time I met him, Majnep had become something of an evangelist himself, and was spending a lot of time on the radio, broadcasting his message in pidgin to whoever among New Guinea's hundreds of cultures cared to listen. His message: “All I can do is try to help save the knowledge of my own culture. If you want to save yours, record it. If you want to lose it, it's your choice.”

Saem Majnep could reach out to other cultures in part because of the works of another very good man, an American named Frank Mihalic. During his more than fifty years in New Guinea, Mihalic served as a living antidote to the narrow-minded fundamentalist missionaries who demonized traditional beliefs. Trained in the Catholic order Verbi Divini (Divine Word), Mihalic saw his role as a helper of the people, and if that meant recognizing that traditional beliefs were the glue that held their cultures together, he was ready to make that compromise. I caught up with him at the Communication Arts Department of the Divine Word University in Madang. With its louvered windows and simple concrete structures, the university had a sleepy, tropical feel. Mihalic was dressed casually in a short-sleeved, lightweight cotton shirt. He began our conversation by stressing the importance of establishing a grammar for pidgin.

“Pidgin was the first unifying factor of this country,” he asserted flatly. “It's now spoken by 1.5 million people—half the population. Once you had pidgin, then through the radio, you could jump barriers and get this country to a state where someone could fly anywhere and be understood.”

Linguistically, a pidgin is a trade language—one that stands as a bridge between two languages. There are about 170 pidgins in the world. Tok Pisin, the New Guinean pidgin, draws about 80 percent of its words from English; Swahili, the best-known African pidgin, draws most of its words from Arabic.

Mihalic first codified the New Guinea grammar in 1957, setting it on a path to becoming a language. He also started a pidgin newspaper called
Wantok
(One-talk), a pidgin word referring to individuals who speak the same language. For a priest, he showed unexpected flair as a newspaper entrepreneur. Knowing, for instance, that many villagers used newspaper to roll their smokes, he took pains to choose newsprint that had the best properties as cigarette paper, burning slowly and producing a white ash. In a communication with the Society of the Divine Word, he even joked about printing an exhortation on the front page: “Please read this newspaper before you smoke it.”

Once a pidgin comes to be spoken as a first language, it achieves creole status. When I interviewed Mihalic, pidgin was the first language for about 40,000 New Guinean children. The process of gravitating to a single tongue is organic and probably inevitable in the evolution of Papua New Guinea as a nation, but each child who begins speaking with either pidgin or English means one less child learning one of New Guinea's 800 indigenous languages.

Languages die as silently as traditional knowledge. As kids go off to the city, schooling and business are conducted in English or pidgin, until one day the last native speaker of a given tongue passes away, and while he or she may leave dozens of descendants, a critical part of their culture has died. In many cases, traditional knowledge
is
the language—think of the many Inuit words for snow, or the subtle differences in Polynesian words for ocean water. Worldwide it's inevitable that at least half the languages now spoken will soon die out, primarily because they do not exist in written form, and the young have turned to English or Spanish or other dominant tongues.