Authors: Norman Lewis
1990
T
HE DANIS OF IRIAN
Jaya, tall, graceful and athletic Melanesians remotely related to the Aborigines of Australia, are remarkable among the so-called primitives for their steadfast and successful resistance to the civilising pressure of our times. They rank amongst the world’s most sophisticated cultivators of the soil, employing horticultural techniques of their own devising only to be found in the most advanced countries of the West. In this way they provide themselves both with an ample diet and an abundance of leisure. They are notable for their hospitality and good humour and are irrepressibly polygamist. Despite the chill of the night in the highlands in which they live, they wear as little as possible. Bare-breasted Dani women retain the original revelatory grass skirts of the South Seas. Their menfolk, ignoring disapproval from any source, go about their affairs naked except for a penis gourd. This solitary article of apparel, sometimes as much as three feet in length, decorated in various ways, and even dangling a tassel at its tip, serves a utilitarian as well as sartorial purpose, being used to carry items such as small change, a cowrie-shell bracelet too valuable for everyday wear or the inevitable ballpoint pen.
It was June 1938 when visitors from the outside world first sighted the Baliem Valley of the Danis from a plane carrying an expedition led by an American explorer, Richard Archbold, in a flight over the vast, unmapped spaces of Dutch New Guinea. Suddenly the densely forested mountains opened up to disclose a sparkling, and seemingly densely populated landscape. Almost all New Guinea remained solidly embedded in the Stone Age, and Archbold and his companions, who assumed that nothing much had changed here for 10,000 years, were astonished by the precise geometrical lay-out of the fields they looked down upon and a complex irrigation system equalling anything of the kind to be found elsewhere in modern times.
An overland expedition that followed to investigate what was spoken of as a Lost World ran into difficulties. Apart from scientifically minded explorers, it included a contingent of Dutch police, and, for some unexplained reason, thirty convicts. Their reception was enthusiastic, but a problem arose when the newcomers attempted to depart. It has been suggested that the involved protocol of Dani hospitality was responsible for the hold-up. The matter was promptly settled by shooting two of the tribesmen, after which no attempt was made to delay the expedition further. Decisive action of this kind was the norm in the New Guinea of those days.
A year later, the first missionaries who made their way to the scene seem to have been a mild enough collection. The eastern half of New Guinea, then in British hands, suffered from a massive influx of evangelists, most of whom had carved out exclusive spheres of influence and were at loggerheads with each other. In the western half, which was to become Irian Jaya, the scandal and dismay at the happenings in the east led to a religious pact by which the Catholics took over the northern half of the newly occupied area, and the Protestants the south.
Baliem fell to the Catholic Dutch, who advanced the cause of salvation in a sympathetic and even indulgent fashion. The good fathers administered injections, handed out malaria pills, put up with polygamy and penis gourds, turned a blind eye to occasional outbursts of ritual warfare and drank schnapps. There were frequent handouts of such useful things as cough-drops, mittens and walking sticks, all of them joyfully accepted by their flock, who expected no less.
The Cargo Cult, originating in early contacts between tribes and the first white traders, had been slowly spreading through much of the Far East. It assumed that all the desirable objects offered by traders were of supernatural provenance, to be found in abundance in the other world, and readily available if the right religious ceremonies were performed. Perhaps for this reason the Danis enthusiastically repeated the formulae their pastors required of them, and flocked to the mission church, in which they spent as much time as they could, in the belief that beneficial influences could be absorbed through the seats of the chairs.
It was a happy state of affairs that continued until the post-war period, to be abruptly terminated by the arrival of a legion of air-borne evangelists, recruited largely in the American Mid-West, and headed by a Texan, Lloyd Van Stone, who claimed that he had received ‘a mandate from Heaven’ to invade the Baliem and bring the Danis to God. Van Stone said that he found Catholicism as practised by the villagers to be unrecognisable as Christianity, and the latest techniques of business promotion went into action in support of a fundamentalist New Deal. The trickle of benefits swelled into a flood, with lavish offerings of salt—the most valued Dani commodity—steel axes and iron tools of all descriptions. A slight change in the formula learned from the Catholic fathers was all that the evangelists at first demanded. Danis switched to Protestantism on the spot, ‘witnessing for Christ’ in their ecstatic thousands. Don Richardson, a fundamentalist missionary who was there at the time, describes in his book the joyousness of Van Stone’s reception. ‘Thousands of stone-age people. Singing, dancing and thronging! And asking what must we do to welcome the message you bring?’
The answer was instantly provided. They were to scour the valleys, destroy the ritual houses which were central to village life and bring in for destruction the ‘fetiches’ they contained. In February 1960 thousands of these, consisting of ancestral figures, carved and decorated shields, paddles, household embellishments and articles of many kinds, were put to the flames. Among them, undoubtedly—as in other areas where such holocausts were carried out—great works of art were lost. The Dani ‘sacred objects’ were consumed in a pyre stated to have been 200 yards long, a yard high and two feet wide, and thus in a single evening perished the art of the Dani people. One might ask how a handful of whites could so easily have imposed their will upon the numerous warlike and intelligent tribespeople who confronted them, and Richardson unhesitatingly and with evident relish describes how the thing worked.
The missionaries had delved deeply into Papuan legend and, examining the origins of the Cargo Cult, hit upon the widely held tribal belief that the powerful and generous white visitors of the past were none other than their own reincarnated ancestors. These had been changed into whites by death, thereafter returning invested with the authority of the other world. It was immediately recognised as a credence that could be put to invaluable use, especially when the evangelists were in the process of spreading from the Baliem into remote, hardly accessible valleys.
It had been decided that in each valley an airstrip should be built for the use of the planes bringing in supplies and affording emergency protection. Unfortunately, the building of such strips often involved the destruction of Papuan villages and the gardens constructed over the centuries that supported them. However, nothing was allowed to impede the harvest of souls, and the ticklish negotiations involved in such projects were put in the charge of Stanley Dale and Bruno De Leeuw, two missionary specialists in this particular field.
Don Richardson shows the pair in action. They had gone with five Dani converts to the remote valley of Ninia, peopled by close relations of the Danis, the Yalis. Previous research had been made into their history and beliefs, and now, employing once again the device which had proved so successful in the past, Dale and De Leeuw presented themselves as reincarnations of the Yalis’ legendary ancestors Marik and Kugwarak. This the Yalis accepted, but a query arose over the five black members of the party. It was easily explained away. They, too, the missionaries assured them, were tribal ancestors, whose misfortune it had been to die upon the mountains and as a result no ritual burial had been given them, and this had prevented their reincarnation as whites.
The missionaries explained what was proposed while the Yalis listened in stunned silence. De Leeuw appears to have suffered a moment of self-questioning, evoking an appeal for divine guidance which Richardson faithfully quotes. ‘“Lord, you knew,” Bruno prayed, “when you created this valley that this conflict of interest would arise. You could have provided a slope for the airstrip somewhere else…since you didn’t, this conflict of interests must be part of your plan. Perhaps you intended to work through it.”’
The response must have been reassuring, for an immediate start was made in the demolition of houses and gardens. The village water-hole was filled in, and its sacred stones used to patch a wall. ‘Stan, Bruno, and the five Danis,’ Richardson writes, ‘found the Yalis’ stone-hewn boards to be of excellent quality and promptly used them to begin new and larger dwellings for their own need…’
A down-payment had been offered in salt; final settlement in axes and cowrie shells was to be made after the gardens had been cleared away. For this work—to take some months—the labour of several hundred Yalis would be required, but suddenly the Yalis would have none of it, and withdrew in silence to watch while the missionaries pitched into the work which imported labour would have to finish.
And with this a too frequent imposture began to wear thin. The next year Dale and De Leeuw were intercepted in the act of measuring out another intended strip, and after attempting to frighten off the Yalis by bombarding them with thunderflashes, they were attacked and killed, and eaten. In reprisals undertaken with police co-operation several Yalis lost their lives. Total war in the valleys broke out when an epidemic of flu—previously unknown in Irian Jaya—was blamed by the tribespeople on the missionaries, and there were attempts to evict them from their stations.
Robert Mitton, an Australian geologist working in the area, describes some of these events in
The Lost World of Irian Jaya.
Once, when a missionary plane came under attack and the pilot took off with arrows hitting the plane, ‘it then proceeded to dive-bomb the attackers while Kujit (the local missionary-in-chief) held them at bay with a shotgun. At the same time there was an attack at Anguruk which resulted in eight attackers being shot. It will be interesting to see what happens next.’
What, in fact, happened was the massacre at Nipson in May 1974. As Mitton puts it, ‘the locals had had enough of the Good Word, burned down the missionary’s house and ate his Biak preacher and twelve of his assistants. Fortunately for them the missionaries (including Kujit) were in the United States on leave.’ Under subsequent interrogation, one of the attackers stressed that this cannibalistic spree had nothing to do with a taste for human flesh, being no more than the ultimate expression of vengeance.
In Baliem, sixteen years later, the atmosphere was one of genial and productive calm. This fifty-mile-long valley must offer an almost unique example of a Stone-Age people who, having tried what the West has to offer, has resolutely and happily turned away, re-immersing itself with evident relief in the timeless past. Whatever the attempts made to force the Danis to put on clothes, to become wage-earners and consumers living in hygienic villages, they have preferred a neolithic environment, continuing to live in the closest contact with the soil in hearty family groups occupying a vast amount of space, where there is no shortage of food, leisure and entertainment. About one-third of the 100,000 Danis are nominally Catholics, who go to church whenever they can to sing splendid hymns of local manufacture and enjoy contact with the invigorating seats. Once every five years the good fathers look in the other direction when the Danis pay their respects to Nompae, principal spirit ancestor, with spectacular feasting.
Ritual warfare remains the principal stumbling block to progress as defined by those insisting that ultimately in this world we should all be the same. These periodical blood-lettings, it has been suggested, are a by-product of too much leisure. But a more generally held opinion sees them as a carefully regulated solution to the problem of adjusting population to resources. Whatever their cause, the Danis have evolved in a climate of recurrent small-scale wars, and enforced abstention from such bellicosity produces withdrawal symptoms in the tribe, comparable to those of drug addiction in an individual.
Small, clandestine flare-ups occur occasionally, it is said, that are even promoted by tourists prepared to pay big money for spectacular photography. Real battles, too, in the theatrical style of the past, happen once in a while. I was able to find a young Dani, Namek, with a few words of English, who had taken part in one of these and was proud to have been wounded in the knee. He explained that a piece of uncultivable land had been set aside by two clans, purely to provide, as required, the pretext for battle. In the spring of 1990 when my friend, a clan member who had been living for fifteen years in another part of the country, had received what amounted to a call-up to defend the disputed territory against invasion, this, emotionally, he had been unable to resist. Hardly pausing to say goodbye to his family, he grabbed a spear and set off for the scene of action, determined to be in time for the ritual challenges and first discharge of arrows.
Normally in such conflicts combatants do their best to avoid killing each other by spearing their opponents in the rear when they turn to run. This time something went wrong and there were a number of deaths, involving both sides in costly reconciliation feasts and burdensome and protracted funeral rites. Namek took me to the place of battle, a barren hillside beside which, at that moment, two women passed in solemn perambulation. One appeared to be in her twenties, and as a sign of mourning her face and body were coated with dried yellow clay. Her brother, Namek said, had been killed in the battle, and she would remain in mourning for a year. The older woman, her constant companion, was required to ward off the evil spirits that fed on grief. In the old days, one or two of this girl’s fingers would have been chopped off. The women had raised a great protest, he said, at the introduction of a law forbidding such amputations.
At Kulageima, Namek’s present home, I met the ‘big man’ of the village, who had contributed handsomely to the dedication of a new church in the vicinity by the provision of a large number of pigs, each one to be dispatched by his son, a proficient archer, with a single arrow through the heart. He was a man infused with the dignity of power: a conservative with correctly blackened forehead, an ancient cowrie necklace, white cockatoo feathers curving down from behind ears cropped of their lobes in token of some old bereavement, and a penis gourd of modest length and without decoration. Despite the extreme restraint practised by Danis in sexual matters, the chief had twenty wives and forty-two children. His principal wife, smoking a cheroot, came into view, a pretty woman some thirty years his junior, who had dressed herself for the church fiesta in possibly the only T-shirt to be seen in the Baliem, bearing a vulgar inscription in French.