- ‘La Fumee du Metal’: The health impacts of contact *

The 21,000 Yanomami who live in some 360 widely scattered settlements in the forested mountains and hills between Venezuela and Brazil were largely uncontacted by westerners until the middle of the 20th century. In their myths, the Yanomami recall a far distant time when they lived alongside a big river, ‘before we were chased up into the highlands’ but by the time their existence is first recorded, in the mid-18th century, they were already well established in the Parima hills between the Rio Branco and the Upper Orinoco.

Contact with the outside world has been driven by a number of different forces. Once the Yanomami discovered the value of metal goods, probably towards the end of the 19th century, they began to trade with (and raid) neighbouring indigenous groups to acquire machetes and axes, cloth and cooking pots. Metal tools reduced the labour of cutting down trees for construction and farming by about 10 times and made many other tasks much easier. Their agriculture intensified, their numbers increased and they began to move out from the highlands, north, south, east and west, pushed by their own expanding numbers and drawn downriver by opportunities for trade. At the same time, explorers, anthropologists and frontier commissions marched to the headwaters of these rivers to make these areas known to ‘science’ and mark the boundaries of expanding nation states. The Yanomami gained a reputation for fiercely defending themselves against intruders but this did not dissuade the adventurers. In the 1920s, British explorer Hamilton-Rice cradled a Thomson sub-machine gun in his arms, while being paddled to the headwaters of the Uraricoera and back.

Commencing in the 1950s, Protestant and Catholic priests established remote mission posts to bring knowledge of Christ to the Yanomami. Later, projects of nation-building led to roads being carved through the forests and proposals for the building of large dams. Above all, discoveries of gold and cassiterite led to massive invasions by small-scale placer miners (garimpeiros), driven there by their own poverty and opportunities of wealth.

Of course, like all human groups, the Yanomami were not disease-free in the past. Medical anthropologists presume they have long harboured minor viral infections like Herpes, Epstein-Barr, Cytomegalovirus, and Hepatitis. Tetanus was also prevalent in the soils and some non-venereal treponeme infections were probably endemic. Arboviruses, maintained in animal populations in the forests, were also present. Leishmaniasis, transmitted by sandfly, and yellow fever, which also infects monkeys, are also thought to have been present as the indigenous people show considerable resistance to these diseases. In short, the pre-contact situations were not a medical paradise but what diseases there were, were prevalent at low levels and rarely fatal.

Contact with the outside world, however, has exacted a terrible toll from the Yanomami. Already by the early 1900s, the northern Yanomami began suffering repeated epidemics of introduced diseases on the Uraricoera. In the 1960s, diamond miners invaded the Yanam (Eastern Yanomami) areas on the Upper Paragua in Venezuela and Uraricaa in Brazil, leading to massive mortalities. Late in the 1960s, workers brought in from the Rio Negro in order to expand the missions and build airstrips, infected the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco with measles. The infection swept through the settlements, carried further upstream by frightened people fleeing outbreaks downriver. Fevers, aches and weakness prostrated whole villages, leaving the infected people lying prone in their hammocks, unable to go hunting, too weak to gather crops from their gardens, eventually too demoralised even to collect firewood or drinking water from nearby streams. Cold, hungry and weakened by disease the Yanomami fell easy prey to other illnesses. Respiratory tract infections brought on pneumonias, fevers, further weakness and mass deaths. Some villages lost as much as a third of their numbers in a single epidemic and repeated scourges of influenzas, polio, whooping cough, rubella, chicken-pox and the longer term degeneration brought on by tuberculosis, led to some groups being completely wiped out.

During the road building programme in Brazil, which involved the construction of a road through the southern edge of Yanomam (Southern Yanomami) territory, these repeated epidemics reduced local Yanomami numbers by up to 90%. The shattered survivors adopted a road-side existence begging from passing vehicles. Lay-by encounters with lorry drivers and construction crews then brought previously unknown venereal diseases into the villages, the gonorrhoea, in turn, making numerous women infertile and so slowing the people’s recovery to the population losses.

In the 1970s, Sanema (Northern Yanomami) from the Upper Caura began travelling downriver to work in the diamond mines on the middle Paragua and returned bearing a deadly haul of diseases. Epidemics led to massive losses and the abandonment of the once populous Catholic mission at Kanadakuni. By the 1980s, some 25% of the Sanema of the Caura were carrying tuberculosis, leading to a demoralising and constant loss of numbers to the deadly disease.

During the 1980s, the mass invasion of the Brazilian Yanomami’s territories by as many as 50,000 miners, led to further problems for even the most isolated groups. The miners not only trekked in across the forested hills, where rivers were unnavigable, they also flew in to mission airstrips using light planes. New airstrips were hacked from the jungles, in previously unpenetrated areas. As well as frequent viral epidemics and more problems with venereal diseases, the Yanomami also contracted all three forms of malaria brought in by miners – Plasmodium vivax, P. ovale and, the most deadly, P. falciparum. Volunteer medical teams, who came in to help counter this devastation, estimate that the Brazilian Yanomami, as a whole, lost some 15-20% of their numbers to the illnesses brought in by the miners.

These tragedies have, obviously, had more than medical impacts on the Yanomami. The trauma of mass deaths has scarred several generations and upset age-old concepts about existence, disease, curing and death. Customarily, Yanomami used to see most illnesses as the consequences of eating hunted game, while most deaths were seen as the result of shamans from distant villages sending spells over long distances or lurking in nearby forests to blow poisonous dusts over unsuspecting passers by. Mass deaths were previously unknown but, on several occasions, led isolated villages to assume they were under spiritual attack from neighbouring communities prompting them to undertake retaliatory raids to avenge themselves on the presumed killers.

However, it was not long before the Yanomami realised that the terrible epidemics they endured were consequences of their contacts with ‘whites’. Among the Brazilian Yanomam (Southern Yanomami), the belief grew that diseases were the ‘smoke of steel’, an odour of death that came from the boxes in which metal goods were stored, an exhalation in the very breath of their sinister white visitors, an enfeebling and sickening smoke like the exhausts of their aeroplane engines.

“Once the smoke was amongst us it made us die. We had fever. Our skins started to peal. It was terrifying. The elders demanded ‘what have we done to make them kill us?’ and they urged us, younger ones, who wanted to take revenge, ‘don’t go to avenge yourselves on the whites… Don’t go’ they insisted ‘don’t go and shoot them with arrows, for they are gunmen, and they will attack us with their rifles’.”*

As the epidemics continued some of the elder Yanomami urged a retreat to the headwaters to avoid further contact but diseases followed them even into the highlands brought in to the missions by government officials and Yanomami patients returning from hospitals, leading to a belief that the whites were insatiable cannibals feeding on Yanomami spirits.

If we can look beyond our own scientific explanations of the cause of sickness and death, we can see that the Yanomami’s diagnoses of the medical calamity they were enduring were close to the truth. They identified with acuity the rapacity of the civilization that was engulfing them heedless of the consequences of the intrusion.

In recent years concerted efforts have been made by missionaries, anthropologists, NGOs, government agencies and, increasingly, by the Yanomami themselves to bring medical assistance to the area and halt uncontrolled access to the region. In the 1990s, some 8.5 million hectares of the Upper Orinoco in Venezuela, were declared a Biosphere Reserve and, in Brazil, another 9.9 million hectares were designated an Indigenous ‘Park’. The Venezuelan government is now considering recognising a further 3.6 million hectares in the Upper Caura as an indigenous ‘habitat’. Whereas in Venezuela, medical programmes remain limited (despite lavish funding of the Biosphere Reserve by the European Union and World Bank), in Brazil a concerted campaign of inoculation and primary health care, coupled with measures to expel miners from the region, has led to improvements.

The Yanomami experience teaches many lessons, one of the most obvious being that uncontrolled contact can have terrible consequences for previously isolated groups. In the Yanomami case, contact with the outside world was being sought by the indigenous people themselves, but one-sided penetration schemes which gave little consideration for the medical effects hugely exacerbated what would anyway have been a demoralising and perilous encounter. In the 19th century and earlier, it may have been possible to plead ignorance of the likely results of such contact. We now know, beyond any doubt, that enforced contact with isolated indigenous groups in Amazonia is bound to lead to massive loss of life.

By: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: marcus@forestpeoples.org

* The title and quote is from Bruce Albert, (1988, La Fumee du metal: histoire et representation du contact chez les Yanomami (Brazil) L’Homme (106-107): XXVIII (2-3) :87-119). For detailed information on the current situation of the Brazilian Yanomami see http://www.proyanomami.org.br

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- Central Africa: Nowhere to go; land loss and cultural degradation. The Twa of the Great Lakes

The indigenous Twa ‘Pygmy’ people of the Great Lakes region of central Africa are originally a mountain-dwelling hunter-gatherer people, inhabiting the high altitude forests around Lakes Kivu, Albert and Tanganyika – areas that have now become part of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The current Twa population is estimated at between 82,000 and 126,000 people.

The Twa are widely thought to be the prior inhabitants of the forests in the Great Lakes region. The evidence for this includes historical accounts and research as well as the Twas’ own accounts of their origins, which emphasis that the Twa are ‘from here’ whilst the oral histories of neighbouring ethnic groups tell of their arrival from elsewhere through wars, migration and conquest. Local rituals also symbolically affirm the role of the Twa as the first occupants of the land. For example, Twa did, and still do, play a crucial role in the enthronement ceremonies of the customary non-indigenous landowners, the Tutsi kings and chiefs (Mwamis), symbolically ‘licensing’ the land to the incoming ruler. Twa were also indispensable for the annual royal hunting rituals affirming the Mwami’s mystical authority over the land and its fertility. Indeed, the stem –twa is a Bantu term used throughout sub-Saharan Africa for different groups of people of very low status, referring in almost every case to hunter-gatherers and former hunter-gatherers who are recognised as the prior inhabitants of the area, including ‘Pygmy’ people and ‘Bushmen’.

The Twa, like other African forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers, have had contacts with neighbouring farming groups for many centuries, based around reciprocal exchange relationships in which forest products were bartered for starchy foods, metal tools and other products such as salt. For many centuries, the Twa were probably able (as many other African indigenous forest peoples still do) to retreat at will into the forests, and so could control to a large degree the nature and extent of their contacts with the outside world. However, as the forests began to be cleared, the Twa were increasingly forced into contact with farmers and herders, and became caught up in unfavourable trade and labour relationships, in which the scope for negotiation became more and more constrained.

Deforestation in the Great Lakes region started several centuries ago, with the arrival of farmers and herding peoples who began clearing forests for agriculture and pasture. Much of the region lay outside the main slaving routes, and population density increased as other people sought refuge there. Forested areas receded as agriculture expanded on the rich volcanic soils. During the early and middle parts of the 20th century populations increased rapidly, resulting in some of the highest rural population densities in Africa, for example 800 people/sq km in the volcanic region of north-west Rwanda. By the 1980s much of all the available land, apart from areas reserved for wildlife conservation and environmental protection, was under cultivation, particularly in Rwanda and Burundi. Pressures on the forests intensified through production of export crops: half the forests around the volcanoes in the north of Rwanda were cleared for pyrethrum plantations in the 1960s, and areas around Rwanda’s Nyungwe forest were cleared for tea estates. Quinine and coffee production in eastern DRC also reduced forest cover. During the 20th century Rwanda’s forest area was reduced from 30% of the land area to the present 7%; Burundi’s natural forest cover decreased from 6% to 2% of the land area between 1976 and 1997.

As the forests were cleared, the areas left for the Twas’ hunting and gathering activities decreased, heralding a period during which the Twa became progressively more and more landless and their traditional forest-based culture, including their religion and rituals and (according to some sources) their language, was eroded. In several areas the Twa sought to maintain control over their lands through armed defence, for example, the exploits of the renowned Twa Basebya at the end of the 19th century in what is now south-western Uganda. In the Bushivu highlands of eastern DRC Twa also fought long and bloody wars with agricultural peoples attempting to clear Twa forest lands for farms – fighting continued until around 1918. The impact of deforestation on the culture of the Twa was noted by early missionaries, such as Van den Biesen who commented on the future of the Twa of Burundi in 1897: ‘When these forests have been destroyed for whatever reason, our Batwa will not be able to continue their traditional life.’

As forests were cleared, some Twa groups adopted alternative livelihoods based on crafts (pottery, basketry, metalworking) or attached themselves to powerful and rich individuals, thus becoming singers, dancers, messengers, guards, warriors and hunters for kings and princes; others became clients of local landowners. In some cases these services were rewarded with gifts of cattle or land, but most Twa remained without any locally recognised rights to lands.

Other groups of Twa were able to continue using the remaining forest for subsistence activities and trading of forest products, such as skins, vines, essential oils, honey, poles and game, with neighbouring farming communities, and to hunt animals such as elephant, colobus monkeys, wild pig and leopard, selected portions of which were given to local chiefs and sub-chiefs as tribute. These offerings might be repaid in heads of cattle.

The designation of conservation areas, which began in the colonial period, initially did not have much impact on the hunting and gathering activities of the Twa – and was probably beneficial to them in protecting the forests from being cleared by farmers. By the 1960s and 70s however, regulations based on the prevailing conservation ideology, prohibiting human habitation and restricting traditional use rights in protected areas, began to be enforced more vigorously. During the 1970s and 80s Twa were involuntarily resettled out of the Volcano National Park and Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda and the Kahuzi-Biega National Park and Virunga National Park in eastern DRC, in some cases by means of armed force. Twa in the Bwindi and Mgahinga forests of Uganda were officially evicted in the 1960s but only finally excluded from using the forests in 1991 when they were gazetted as national parks. No compensation was provided for the displaced Twa, either in cash or as alternative lands. In the Kahuzi-Biega eviction compensation was paid to the local Bantu landholders, but none of this reached the Twa who were not considered to have rights to the land.

The case of the Gishwati forest in Rwanda is another notorious case of expropriation of Twa lands. The last forest-dwelling Twa in Rwanda, the Impunyu, were cleared from the Gishwati forest in the 1980s and 90s to make way for World Bank-financed forestry plantation and dairy projects. These projects were intended to protect the natural forest, but they had the opposite effect: by 1994 two-thirds of the original forest had been converted to pasture, almost all of which was allocated to friends and relations of the President. The World Bank itself concluded that the project had failed, and the treatment of indigenous peoples had been ‘highly unsatisfactory’. Since then refugees have been settled in the remaining forest, resulting in its total destruction, but the Gishwati Twa are still largely landless.

Twa communities throughout the Great Lakes region have been deprived of lands without due legal process, in violation of constitutional provisions and international norms that require resettled communities to be adequately compensated. Some Twa were able to acquire small plots of land, mostly through gifts from royalty and chiefs in times gone by. But since colonial times there has been virtually no land distribution to the Twa: in Rwanda for example, in 1995, 84% of landed Twa were still living on land originally given to them by the Mwamis. A few Twa communities have received land through government schemes in Rwanda and Burundi, and through private purchase by a conservation trust fund and private benefactors in Uganda. Some communities have secured use rights from local landowners in DRC by paying the fees prescribed under Bantu customary law.

However, recent socio-economic surveys show that the land situation of the Twa remains extremely serious. In both Rwanda and Burundi lack of farm land is 3.5 times more common among Twa households than non-Twa. In Rwanda 43% of Twa households lack farm land, in Burundi it is 53%. Of the Twa who do have agricultural land, the sizes of fields are much smaller, and usually of poorer quality than the non-Twa population. In Uganda up to 40% of Batwa households do not even have land on which to build a hut.

The pressure on land in the Great Lakes region continues to intensify with population growth, and the return of refugees who need to be resettled. In DRC, there are still areas of forest (although under the control of traditional land holders) accessible to some of the Twa communities, but in Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, landless Twa have no-where left to go. They remain transient squatters constantly looking for somewhere they can lodge until they are moved on.

“These people who let us stay on their land, they call on us to cultivate. If we refuse they say ‘Move away, we no longer want you.’ We are not settled here, because other local people are pressing the landowners saying ‘What do you need Twa for?’ and at any time we may have to shift and settle elsewhere. If the owners are sympathetic, they move us to another bit of land, which we fertilise for them by living on it. The landlords don’t let us put up toilets because they don’t want anything permanent on their land, or holes which could be a problem for cultivation later. But if they catch us defecating in the fields, they are angry. My daughter was caught and was forced to remove the faeces with her hands”. (Middle-aged Twa woman, Nyakabande/Kisoro, Uganda, May 2003)

A large proportion of the Twa are now three or more generations removed from the forest-based livelihoods that underpinned their traditional society and culture, and have lost much of their traditional forest-related knowledge and customary practices. The older generation regards the hunter-gatherer epoch as a golden era when families could easily feed themselves and life was easy. These days, most Twa people eke out a living from marginal subsistence strategies such as casual wage labour on other peoples’ farms, carrying loads, making pottery and other crafts, singing and dancing at festivities and begging. In terms of housing, education, health and incomes, they are one of the poorest groups in a region that is already very poor. They have received very little government assistance to help them manage the difficult adjustment to life outside the forest.

The loss of a forest-based way of life seems to be associated with social and cultural changes. Originally the Twa enjoyed a certain status as forest specialists, involved in reciprocal relationships with farmers, supplying them with useful forest products from an environment that farmers did not understand, or even feared. This was reinforced by their role as hunters and trophy-bearers to the kings. As the Twa lost their forests and became an impoverished group on the fringes of society, they were increasingly regarded as pariahs, and discrimination and prejudice against them intensified. This took the form of negative stereotyping, enforced segregation and denial of their rights; Twa communities suffered high levels of abuse and physical violence from neighbouring groups, including cases of rape and murder. Caught between the vanishing forest world, and settled agrarian society where it was made clear they did not belong, the Twa came to feel irrelevant, unvalued and excluded - a ‘forgotten people’ – and acutely aware of their deprivation. Many Twa communities are highly stressed through unremitting, severe poverty, prejudice and conflicts from their neighbours and internal frictions between households, as well as the devastating impacts of the frequent and ongoing wars in the region, in which Twa have often been targeted by armed belligerents of all sides.

Traditionally, forest-based “Pygmy” peoples have egalitarian and fluid social institutions, in which no-one has authority over the others, and resources are fairly distributed among group members. Women access forest resources in their own right and not as a consequence of their relationship with men. Twa societies are still relatively egalitarian, with women playing a prominent role in community decision-making. However, as the Twa have settled and taken up farming, they are absorbing the patriarchal norms of neighbouring farming groups, including polygamy and tenure systems in which men own the land and women can only obtain use rights via their husbands.

Women are now the main economic providers in many Twa families, as well as continuing to be the main carers of children and older people. They generally can decide how to spend the money they have earned. However, where men have cleared farm land, their initial high investment of labour tends to make them feel entitled to control the spending of money earned by the crop, despite the fact that women did the planting, weeding and harvesting. The increased reliance on farming among the Twa may therefore reduce the economic independence of Twa women. Many Twa women also have to contend with domestic violence and family neglect as a result of Twa men’s alcohol abuse. Alcoholism occurs in many indigenous communities that are facing cultural collapse, and where men are no longer able to carry out their traditional roles as hunters and respected provider for the family.

Faced with the loss of their ancestral forest lands, and the need to find a means of survival under changed circumstances, Twa in the Great Lakes region have expressed a range of different aspirations. Particularly among communities living near forest areas from which their forefathers were expelled, the Twa want to have secure access and use rights to forests, and to maintain their close links with the forest, but not all wish to resume the hunter-gatherer way of life. Communities near national parks want a larger share of the revenues from tourism. Throughout the region, Twa also want to have their own land for farming as part of their mix of survival strategies.

To press their claims, Twa communities are having to organise themselves in new ways and develop new forms of representative institutions, that can advocate and negotiate effectively with government structures and influential agencies. The new Twa NGOs and community-based associations, and their support groups in the region, are campaigning for governments to develop specific policies to address the particular disadvantages that the Twa face as a result of their ethic identity. In the absence of laws and policies addressing land rights of indigenous peoples, Twa organisations are calling for affirmative action in land allocation for Twa and recognition by governments of the immense historical injustice through which Twa were deprived of their forest lands and traditional means of livelihood, forcing them into severe poverty.

The Twa want to be respected and valued as members of society, and to freely enjoy their human rights and have equal access to services like other people. In the process of surviving as a forest people driven from their forests, and adapting to the harsh social and physical environment they now find themselves in, some groups and individuals want to retain their cultural distinctiveness; others want to integrate with mainstream society. It is their right to freely choose how they wish to relate to and participate in national society and to make their own choices about their future.

By: Dorothy Jackson, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: djackson@gn.apc.org

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- India: Settling Down and Out; the sedentarisation of the Malapantaram in Kerala

The Malapantaram are a nomadic community numbering about 2000 people who live in the high forests of the Ghat Mountains of south India. Early writers described them as “wild jungle people” and as “wandering hillmen of sorts”, and tended to see them as social isolates, as a survival of some pristine forest culture. But from earliest times the Malapantaram have a history of contact and intercourse with surrounding caste communities of the plains and have been a part of a wider mercantile economy, and are still primarily collectors of important forest products such as sandalwood, ginger, cardamom, dammar resin, honey and various medicinal plants. The Malapantaram thus combine subsistence food gathering, especially of yams, the hunting of small game – monkey, squirrel, hornbills, chevrotain deer – by means of muzzle loaders or the help of dogs, and the collection of what is termed locally as “minor forest produce”. During the main honey season, March to May, honey collecting becomes their primary economic activity.

The majority of the Malapantaram are nomadic forest people, spending most of their life living in forest encampments occupied by one to four families. These encampments consist of two to four leaf shelters, made from palm fronds or the leaves of wild plantains. These camps are temporary; people reside in a particular locality only for about a week, before moving elsewhere.

The Malapantaram see themselves and are described by outsiders as kattumanushyar – “forest people” – for they closely identify with the forest, which is not only a source of livelihood, but also an environment where they can sustain a degree of cultural autonomy and social independence. They thus tend to live and constantly move at the margins of the forest, enabling them to engage easily in market transactions – usually involving a kind of contractual barter – while at the same time being able to avoid the control, harassment and disparagement – even violence – which they generally experience from government officials, traders and local peasant communities. The forest for the Malapantaram is thus not only a home: it is a place where they can always retreat to avoid the imposition of outsiders.

With the establishment of colonial rule and the Travancore state, the forested hills of the Ghats became forest reserves under the jurisdiction of the forest department. In 1911 rules were drawn up for the “Treatment and Management of Hillmen” and these stipulated that tribal people like the Malapantaram were to be under the control of the forestry department and to be located in permanent settlements. The Malapantaram were thus seen as essentially “wards” of the forestry department and denied any land rights – the forests being seen as essentially belonging to the state. After independence the Malapantaram came under the jurisdiction of the Harijan Welfare Department, and efforts have been made to promote the welfare of the community through the establishment of schools and health centres, and through efforts to “settle” them and induce them to adopt agriculture. As elsewhere, a “nomadic” life style and a foraging existence was derogated by the state officials, and efforts to “uplift” the Malapantaram have centred on the establishment of “settlements” – it was described as a “colonization scheme” – and its primary aim was to transform the Malapantaram economy into one of permanent agriculture. The scheme proved to be a singular failure, for the land allotted to the Malapantaram was largely taken over by local traders from a nearby village. It seems that the Malapantaram were extremely reluctant to take up agriculture, and thus sever the links that bind them to the forest – the environment with which they so powerfully identify and know is their only really safe haven.

By: Brian Morris, Goldsmith College, E-mail: brianmo@onetel.net.uk

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- First Contact in Papua New Guinea: A clash of world views

When Australians took control, at the end of the first world war, of the German colony of New Guinea, under a mandate from the League of Nations to protect the native peoples, it was thought that New Guinea had only a sparse population, mostly along the coast. The mountainous interior, it was believed, was a virtually empty and impenetrable jumble of rain-soaked hills. However, it is now clear that the highland valleys of New Guinea have long been among the most densely settled agricultural areas in the world.

The highland valleys of Papua New Guinea were first contacted by Australians in the 1930s and were found to be inhabited by over a million people, made up of several hundred different ethnic groups, who had been growing their vegetable staples and raising their pigs in the fertile upland soils for over nine thousand years. Although these peoples traded, through many intermediaries, with the coast, the highlanders were equally unaware of what lay beyond their territories. As highlander Gerigl Gande recalled in the 1980s: ‘we only knew the people who lived immediately around us. For example the Naugla, they were our enemies and we couldn’t go past them. So we knew nothing of what was beyond. We thought no one existed apart from ourselves and our enemies.’ The mutual astonishment and incomprehension of these two cultures, when they first met, was almost complete.

Australian officials and miners only became aware of these populated highlands in 1930, when the adventurer, Michael Leahy, first marched up into the hills from the east coast, in search of gold. The Mandated Territory was viewed by Australians as a business proposition, the local men were referred to as ‘boys’ and the isolated groups in the interior pejoratively called ‘bush kanakas’ in pidgin. The indigenous peoples were widely considered treacherous, bloodthirsty savages, remnants of an inferior race doomed to extinction. As one settler noted ‘the natives of this Territory are mean-souled, thieving rotters, and education only gives them added cunning’.

The miners pushed deep into the interior, travelling light and living off the land. They demanded food from the native people, paid for with metal tools and prized sea-shells, to keep their expeditions on the move. In their haste to get to the goldfield they dreamed of, they sparked confusion and conflicts. When warriors barred their path with arrows and threats, rather than return to the coast, the miners used guns to deadly effect to blast a path through to their goals. Sure that their technological superiority was, equally, evidence of their moral supremacy, it never occurred to the miners that what they were doing was wrong, much less that the local people might have their own reasons and interests for choosing to develop their interactions differently.

The gulf of incomprehension was wide on both sides. Trying to make sense of these strangely apparelled, pale skinned visitors, the highlanders, for the large part, assumed that they were ancestral spirits, either returning lost relatives coming from the east where the dead were thought to dwell or else ambiguous, even evil, mythic beings from the heavens. Recalls Gopu Ataiamelahu of Gama Village near Goroka: ‘I asked myself, who are these people? They must be somebody from the heavens. Have they come to kill us or what? We wondered if this could be the end of us and it gave us a feeling of sorrow. We said, “we must not touch them”. We were terribly frightened’. Remembers another: ‘They smelt so differently, these strange people. We thought it would kill us, so we covered our noses with the leaves from a special bush that grows near cucumbers. It had a particularly nice smell and it covered up theirs’.

Once it became widely known that the strange beings carried untold wealth with them, many communities wanted their visitors to stay with them and not carry on through to the lands of their rivals and enemies. Misunderstandings were almost inevitable. A typical conflict occurred in 1933, as the miners accompanied by a colonial officer, tried to push through to Mount Hagen. Ndika Nikints recalls the situation.

“The Yamka and Kuklika and all the people around us were making a lot of noise, shouting and calling out war cries. They were saying they wanted to take everything from the white men. Some people snatched things from the carriers, like tins and trade goods. Then Kiap Taylor [the colonial officer] broke this thing he was carrying and before we knew anything we heard it crack. Everything happened at once. Everyone was pissing and shitting themselves in terror. Mother! Father! I was horrified. I wanted to run away… the muskets got the people – their stomachs came out, their heads came off. Three men were killed and one was wounded… I said ‘Oh, Mother!’ but that didn’t help. I breathed deeply, but that didn’t help. I was really desperate. Why did I come here? I should never have come. We thought it was lightning that was eating people up. What was this strange thing, something that had come down from the sky to eat us up? What’s happening? What’s happening?”

This pattern of mutual incomprehension leading to violence and terror was to be repeated over and over again whenever the colonial officers and miners felt obliged to push through previously uncontacted areas to reach their self-ordained objectives. Another well-documented case comes from later in the 1930s when a colonial patrol, aimed at making a reconnaissance up the Strickland River and through the highlands north of Lake Kutubu, pushed through the lands of six different and previously uncontacted peoples. Carrying only enough supplies for one month’s travel, for a journey that in the end took them more than five, they were soon obliged to trade with the local communities, who sought to avoid all contact with the strangers.

Coming first into the lands of the Etoro people, the patrol emerged suddenly from the forests into full view of one community. ‘We jumped with surprise’ recounts one elder ‘No one had seen anything like this before or knew what it was. When we saw the clothes of the strangers, we thought they were like people you see in a dream: “these must be spirit people coming openly, in plain sight” ’. When these spirits approached them, the Etoro were even more dismayed and the more insistent the spirits were in offering gifts the more alarmed the Etoro became. The Etoro were convinced that if they accepted any gifts they would then be obligated to the unknown world of the spirits, thus bringing together two realms that should remain separate, lest the world become unmade and everybody die. Shortly after, in a confused encounter, one of the Etoro was shot and killed, confirming the Etoro in their view about who these beings were.

Further along the trail that they followed, the patrol came upon taboo signs, clear indications that the local people did not want the strangers to pass. The patrol pushed on regardless and, coming upon an old woman, pressed her with gifts of beads. When she returned to her own people, who were hiding in the forest, and showed them the gifts they were thrown into even greater dismay, imagining that the whole world would collapse to its origin point if the world of humans and spirits was not kept apart. Their consternation was even greater when they returned to their huts and found gifts of cloth, axes and machetes hanging from the rafters. Unsure what might happen if they touched them they were left hanging there. ‘What are these things? Why don’t you take them down?’ asked a visitor from a nearly village. ‘We are afraid. Who knows where these things are from. Perhaps they are from the Origin Time’.

The further on the patrol went the more often it had to resort to violence to secure food. In one encounter with the Wola, the patrol found itself in a narrow defile and fighting broke out after further miscommunication and cultural incomprehension. The devastating rifle fire and close quarter shooting with service revolvers killed and wounded over fourteen Wola. Recalls Leda: ‘They shot my cross-cousin Huruwumb, and I went to see him. You could see his liver exposed. They kept sending me to fetch water for him to drink because he was thirsty. Back and forth, I kept going to fetch water for him. He lived in agony for three days. On the fourth day he died.’ One of the Wola women, Tensgay, remembers other gruesome wounds:

“Kal Aenknais had his thighs and lower torso smashed. Completely pulverised here and here. He kept groaning ‘Oh! Ah!’. I saw him. He died later. Wounded in the guts he was. His intestines were punctured. When he was given water to drink, to cool him off, it came spurting out of the holes in his body. Then there was Obil. His eyes were blown clean out of his head. When they landed on the path they wriggled around and around for ages. He died too. And then there was that poor blighter – aah – whose entrails were shot out. His intestines and stomach were blasted right out of his body…”

After the massacre, the white officers sent the coastal police men to get food from the village. Coming on the village hut they found the women and children cowering inside. Tengsay recalls the scene:

“We were terrified… They tore open the door of our house and demanded everything. Puliym’s mother released the pigs one at a time and drove them out of the door to them waiting outside…They tore off the front of the house, attacked it with axes and bushknives… They took the pigs one at a time and shot them outside. After they killed them they singed off the bristles over a fire made from the wood torn from our house. Then they butchered them ready to carry off… After they had killed and prepared the pigs they turned on us. We didn’t see well what was going on. We were cowering inside. They returned and stood there [about three metres away] and fired their guns into the house. They shot Hiyt Ibiziym, Bat Maemuw, my sister, Ndin, Maeniy and me. That’s six of us… We were so frightened that we were all dizzy and faint… We slumped in a sort of stupefied state. Who was there to bandage our wounds with moss and levaes?… we just slumped indoors. We didn’t think anything. All we felt was terror and dizziness. I was sort of senseless… Well, they didn’t rape any women. That was done by later patrols, when they not only stole our pigs but our women too, and broke into our houses and smashed up our possessions, like our bows and things. They even excreted in our fireplaces”.

The task of the colonial authorities in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, as commanded by the League of Nations, was to protect the native peoples. Accordingly, the highlands were declared a ‘controlled area’ into which access was only allowed to those with permits. There were strict regulations, on paper, about what those with permits could do if they entered the controlled area. They must not enter native villages; not allow their carriers (coastal porters) to trade with the local people without supervision; and ensure that all campsites were provided with pit latrines to avoid contamination of local waters. Arms were only to be used as a last resort, in self defense. However, not only did the colonial power lack the resources and manpower to control access effectively, they also wanted to encourage economic development in the interior. Permits to enter the ‘controlled areas’ were thus issued to miners, and the local officials were themselves in two minds about the appropriateness of the regulations.

Many of the colonials were, however, clear in their minds that, if there was to be ‘development’, the way of life of the native people would have to change. As one editorial in the “Rabaul Times” on 25 September 1936 noted:

“One of the greatest contributing factors to the unsatisfactory services rendered by native labourers in this country is their economic independence. For it must not be forgotten that every native is a landed proprietor, and nature has endowed New Guinea with a prolific soil, which provides adequate sustenance for a minimum of labour. Dismissal from employment, if he fails to carry out his duties, holds no terrors for the New Guinean native. It is the shadow of the sack, hovering over the white employee, which urges him to render service. Unless and until our natives reach such a stage of development that they must work to obtain sustenance or a livelihood, they will never make suitable indentured labour for the average white resident”.

From this point of view, the enforced contacts and integration of the highlanders into the modern world, were necessary steps to achieve a kind of ‘development’. A certain amount of bloodshed could then be justified as an inevitable part of the process of social change. Perhaps, if those in the outside world hadn’t been in such a hurry and could better appreciate that people in other worlds have different priorities and beliefs, things might have been different.

By: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: marcus@forestpeoples.org