The Ragged Edge of the World (7 page)

Talk to almost any anthropologist who has worked in New Guinea, and you will hear similar anecdotes about backfired attempts to contradict cargo beliefs. One researcher became alarmed at a nascent cargo cult near Garoka, the gateway to the highlands, and took one of the village elders to see a hydroelectric dam, hoping to enlist his help in defusing the cult. Instead, the sight of the immense structure instantly converted the elder into a full-blown believer in cargo, as he was convinced that no humans could build something that big.

Other such attempts produced unintended and amusing results. This was the case when, as the story goes, an expatriate took two village bigmen up in a small plane to prove to them that it was nothing more than a machine. The pair were riveted by the experience and looked down with great interest as they flew over neighboring villages. After they landed they asked the pilot if the windows opened. When the pilot said yes, they asked whether they could go up again and fly the same route. Delighted that he was making progress, the pilot agreed. Once they were aloft, however, and flying over the neighboring village with the window open and the air blowing by, the men took out rocks they had brought with them and began throwing them down. The two natives might have reserved judgment on whether humans or ancestors produced airplanes, but they immediately grasped their military potential.

At first blush Yali and other cargo believers looked like consumers, but they lacked (or were blessed not to have) the critical parts. Traditional tribal culture had no concept of growth; the people saw no connection between expending effort and improving their material well-being. Indeed, in most tribes families didn't have to work any harder than the lazy Europeans, since an hour and a half's work a day was sufficient to secure a living (which makes one wonder about the putative lure of cargo cults being the release from toil).

Cargo ingeniously offered the Stone Age mentality a type of immunity to the most disorienting aspects of encounters with modernity. To a small degree, it allowed tribal peoples to eat their cake and have it also, since they didn't have to sacrifice their worldview to get access to some portion of Western goods. Indeed, the widespread notion that whites had tricked natives out of cargo that was rightfully theirs offered a perfect justification for stealing (not that most tribes needed any justification for stealing from someone who was not a one-talk). Consequently, crime was and is rampant in New Guinea. Port Moresby's murder rate is twenty-three times that of London, and in 2004 the
Economist
's Intelligence Unit rated Port Moresby the most dangerous city on the planet—quite a feat when you consider that it was up against places like Baghdad.

The special flavor of Port Moresby became obvious when I first arrived in 1976. I found lodging with an Australian/Canadian expatriate couple. Over dinner they told me horror stories of the hazards of the city, including the experience of their previous guests, two travel-hardened women backpackers. The pair had declined an offer of a guest room and gone to camp instead on the beach. Both were raped within three hours of pitching their tent. Then and now, only the intrepid venture out at night, and the expatriate community was rife with cautionary tales of rapes, robberies and assaults.

The perpetrators of most of these acts were abandoned children and adolescents who had migrated to the cities. Many of them adroitly adapted to a life of crime, redirecting hunting and stalking skills they had learned in the mountains. (One expatriate told me of waking up one night to discover a young Papuan crouched silently on the nightstand next to his bed.) Dubbed “rascals,” a deceptively endearing tag, gangs of these marauding outcasts and rebels-without-a-cause spread terror through Port Moresby. As one Papuan put it to me, “The influx of young into the cities is a sure indication that the elders are losing control over their sons and daughters.”

Since World War II modernity has been coming at Papuans from all angles. Mining companies spread money around and hire the educated young, unintentionally creating a rift between young managers who have cash and their elders who control the land. In the 1960s colonial governors tended to be appointed from previous postings in Africa, where the conventional wisdom was to discourage tribalism in order to encourage national identity. Missionaries have a mixed record. Some of the fundamentalist Protestant sects have been the most assiduous demonizers of traditional practices and beliefs, but others, notably Catholics from the Divine Word order, have recognized the importance of cultural traditions to individual and village identity and have worked to link traditional culture with national pride.

There is a comic side to these collisions at the ragged edge of the world. On that first trip I flew up to Enga in the highlands. Enga, home to the Mount Hagen festival, was the last province to be contacted by Europeans. (Although he never talked much about it, my father was one of those first Europeans to enter the province, having served as a medical corpsman in World War II.) One evening I went to the local theater, which was showing Stanley Kubrick's
Barry Lyndon,
starring Ryan O'Neal as an eighteenth-century Irish adventurer and swordsman. Scattered among the audience were a number of Papuans in grass skirts, all of whom understood the plot perfectly, as it dealt with honor, betrayal and fighting skills. Later I learned that the theater had adopted a policy requiring natives to check their own weapons before entering, because some would become so caught up in the films that they would take sides and hurl spears at the screen.

Thanks to some friends who had worked in New Guinea in various UN programs, I had some contacts in the country. Thomas Unwin, the resident representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) station in New Guinea, gave me an introduction to John Haugie, the minister of cultural affairs, who in turn wrote a letter to the provincial commissioner, noting that my journalistic visit had his official approval and support. This introduction magically opened doors, the most important of which was that of Chief Inspector Leo Debessa, the provincial police commander of Western Highlands province. Debessa was typical of the professionals I encountered in New Guinea: strong, well trained, and sensitive to the complexities of dealing with clans and tribes—perhaps because he professed himself only one step removed from the Stone Age ways of his family.

At the time of my visit, 4,000 Europeans were living in Mount Hagen, the provincial capital of Western Highlands. Debessa told me that in the previous year there had been 1,000 reported breaking and enterings. Since the majority of Europeans were there with their families, it was safe to assume that virtually every European had suffered a burglary or worse.

Chief Debessa was somewhat resigned to the persistence of such crimes. Since the theme of most cargo cults was that Europeans had come to possess their riches through trickery, theft was in effect a form of repossession, and that meme was far more widespread than the details of any particular cargo cult. Debessa was more worried about a rise in actual assaults, particularly that the unsophisticated tribesmen would get ideas from the violent films that were often shown in the theater, and that showcased the firepower of modern weapons.

Tribal warfare posed another headache for the chief. He was sensitive to the fact that the village bigmen achieved their rank through skills in war, and he needed their cooperation and the respect for traditional law to maintain order. At the same time he wanted to quell these wars, which could flare up over an issue as minor as an intemperate remark and disrupt regions intermittently for years. (As one weary expatriate remarked to me with considerable understatement, “People here are incredibly short-tempered.”)

Once Debessa became comfortable with the idea that I was not in New Guinea to ridicule his country's backward ways, he began to offer me opportunities to accompany his men and associates on missions. Toward the end of my stay, he invited me to join a force from the elite Police Mobile Unit to try to stop a tribal war in Gumine between clans of the Yuri and Koksam tribes on one side and the Golin on the other. The battle had been raging on and off since 1973. I jumped at the chance. For one thing I was interested to see firsthand whether the natives still forswore modern weapons in their tribal conflicts. If that proscription was ever abandoned, the death toll in these conflicts would quickly rise to Congolese proportions.

I shouldn't have been so quick to accept the invitation, however, as the trip gave new meaning to the saying “It's not the destination, but the journey.” Thirty-odd years later, that particular journey still stands as the most terrifying I've ever taken.

My driver was Group Commander Loki, a rail-thin but extremely rugged-looking leader of the elite force. As we headed out, he brought me up to date on both the conflict and the wearisome trials of being the first responders to violence in a country where men must prove themselves through fighting. In Bougainville he had had to deal with petrol bombs; in the coastal areas, slingshots; and in the highlands, bows and arrows. He said that the clans had guns and axes, but still hewed to traditional arms (except for using axes to chop up bodies of their victims—more about that later).

The most recent flare-up in the ongoing war to which we were heading had begun in June as the result of an argument over a woman. Loki resignedly noted that all wars trace back to disputes over land, women (either an insulting bride price or a rape), accidents, or pigs, or to some perceived insult. The regional police had been able to stop the June fighting, which had since been resumed. I tried to take notes as Loki talked, but my concentration was constantly interrupted by moments of sheer terror.

No road has clung to any mountain with less certainty than the narrow dirt track I drove with the Police Mobile Unit. While New Guinea lacks dangerous animals, it more than makes up for this omission through geography. With its huge, craggy mountains, unnavigable crashing rivers, and vertigo-inspiring ravines, the interior is treacherous in the extreme. In the 1970s many of the airports were “one-approach,” meaning that if you blew the landing, there was no room to turn around, and you didn't get a second chance. Evidence of wrecks suggested that the stakes were similar on the backcountry roads.

This particular road consisted of an almost imperceptible indentation into a massive, supersteep mountain slope. Every few miles the track was partially cut by erosion or landslides, and peering out, I'd look thousands of feet down into bottomless canyons. One wants to put one's trust in the competence of the authorities, but my faith was sorely tested as the commander hurtled along these slick and treacherous passages at about 55 miles an hour, slowing down to about 30 at obstacles. After a couple of nearspinouts, I opted to hold my door of the Land Cruiser open, reasoning that when we went over the side, I would jump out and take my chances.

After safely arriving in Gumine, we went to the local counselor's house, where the magistrate (Loki's brother-in-law) brought us up to date. The fighters had gotten word that the Police Mobile Unit was coming and had melted into the bush. The patrol officer told us that he had settled the argument that had caused the latest incident, and while the counselor went outside to call (futilely) for the warriors to give themselves up, the troops entertained themselves by playing volleyball.

Given the gruesome toll of local conflicts around the world in recent years, a village skirmish in New Guinea might seem relatively harmless and innocent in retrospect, yet the details were anything but. The magistrate told us that six people had been killed in this go-round: One was beheaded, another was cut in half (postmortem), while a third was cut into so many pieces that Loki had to reassemble the body as if it were a jigsaw puzzle.

Such physical violence amounts to an extreme form of trash talk. The warriors disfigure the bodies of their victims and flaunt the parts in order to incite the other side to fight—in this case, taking the head they had cut off and driving a stick through the neck and out the eye, and then displaying the macabre tableau prominently.

Despite such gory specifics, the actual body count in these wars tends to be very low. For instance, a total of twenty-three people had been killed in this conflict, which had been going on for three years at the time of my visit in 1976. The mortality rate is even more remarkable when we consider the natives' extraordinary skill with bows and arrows—a typical hunter can shoot a bird out of the air. The difference might be that warfare is a hot-blooded affair, while hunting is done with calm and patience. It's possible, even likely, that natives get so fired up during warfare that it literally spoils their aim.

This, in fact, was the implication of an anthropologist's report to the administrator of Enga Province that I saw during that trip. The scientist, who was trying to explain why one native had murdered another from a neighboring village on a runway, noted that when a native encounters someone from a rival clan with whom he has an unresolved grudge, he will want to kill his enemy on the spot. She used the word “salivate” to describe the urgency of this desire to kill.