Development: The view of an ex-colonial masta
22 July 2012
JOHN FOWKE
ONE HAS TO AGREE WITH MARTYN NAMORONG. Of course, yaws and other disfiguring skin disease are not life-threatening, although endemic until the invention of penicillin and the increasing frequency of Administration patrols to even the most isolated areas of Papua New Guinea’s population.
Therefore eradication was popular even though it was not realised in those days that this was an element of the cultural genocide. The same cannot be said about Malaria and TB, which responded to drugs like camoquine and streptomycin, but it may be that the resurgence in these two killers among others is the inchoate expression of an underlying desire for separation from foreign-origin dominance within traditional culture.
An unconscious aversion to the cultural genocide Martyn writes of, rather than the result of cynical political disregard of need, and dishonesty and laziness within the massive and demonstrably dysfunctional PNG public service.
And a stone axe, as studies have shown, takes about five times as long to fell a tree than a steel axe. This devious, perhaps even demonic insertion of startling practical utility into the traditional culture has released men from a major and almost constant preoccupation with felling, splitting and shaping big trees which in pre-invasion times was a main task only slightly more time-consuming than, as once put by the late invader of the Highlands, Jim Taylor, “soldiers in a constant state of readiness for war”.
Once these imperatives eased after the gradual spread of steel and the brutally-imposed Pax Britannica, men found that their days spread pleasantly before them with only occasional need to exercise their old trades.
As custom dictated, almost all the planting, weeding, harvesting, collecting and carrying of firewood and water, and the bearing and care of children as well as the feeding and care of family pigs, remained the role of women. It remains the exclusive domain of women today.
Now men were possessed by the introduced and devilish seduction of gambling, of ready-made tobacco and later of alcohol. All of which they adopted as keenly as they had once maintained their wood-chopping and man-killing skills.
This has resulted in the sight, as one drives from Lae to Porgera or Tari through lands supporting the largest mass of people in the country, of many crowds, each of hundreds of idlers, loafing at the roadside, seven days of the week.
All appear aimless and relaxed except those who are drunk or involved in betting on darts or cards. What is striking is the small number of women present in these crowds.
Women are still to be seen walking away from home every day when it isn’t raining, bearing spades and empty bilums, herding small children and pigs, on their way to commence work at producing the large volumes of life-giving products with which to fill the bilums and the bundles borne upon their heads on the homeward journey.
Again accompanied by their retinue of pigs and children, they will commence upon return late in the day to light the fires and begin cooking the evening meal. Later, before sleep claims them, they will work quietly at making a new bilum or in knitting a stylish possum-fur-wool cap for the man of the house to parade in down at the roadside market where the dart-boards go up early every morning. A can of beer for a bulls-eye.
The invading Australians were indeed the sharp end of the penetration of the mercantile western world. But what they brought was not all destabilising and bad. It was in fact, the real world which they brought, even though not an ideal world.
They brought the moral, ethical, scientific, religious and mercantile reality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And they introduced this with a hell of a rush into a society which had lately been that of my ancestors (I am of English, Scottish and Scandinavian heritage) a scant 2,000 years ago - just a flash in the evolution of mankind as a species within this everchanging planetary environment, but a huge leap in change and in time to take for the people of this land.
Some 25 years ago I sat together with the manager of a small tourist lodge located in an isolated spot in the Highlands. This manager was a local, but a local who had attended high school and UPNG and had travelled to Hawaii to do a course in hotel management, in addition to travel in Australia.
It was late, and we were sharing a beer. At our feet, near the fire, sat the elderly night-watchman clad in a ragged tee-shirt and what we commonly call asgras. This old fellow was also nursing a stubby. We had called him in from the cold outside, which at some 6,000 feet above sea level was quite intense.
My friend the manager and I were talking about our life as young boys, and I had just told him of delivering newspapers for four shillings a week after school at the age of nine or ten. My friend responded by telling of the job he had hated most as a young boy.
It seemed that in the hamlets up here on the ridge, in the late 1950s, there had been no steel tools. The people had no means of earning the money to purchase these wonderful, sharp implements. So, whenever my friend’s father needed to cut and split and shape a tree for a garden-fence or a new house, the young lad was sent to his mothers brother’s village at the bottom of the mountain.
Here there was occasional work at a small government station and at a mission, and people had acquired some of the goods of the outside world. My friend, clad of course in asgras only, would be greeted as he neared the bottom of the mountain with a chorus of “Hey, here comes the bushkanaka!” “Going to get the axe again? Be careful, it will cut you!” and so-on and so-on, verbal thrusts launched by small boys wearing little laplaps some held up by cheap plastic belts, and even here and there a shirt. My friend still remembered this with a residue of embarrassment, but he could see the funny side too.
At that time I had reason to talk to some of the elderly women who, as youngsters, had been offered by their husbands to the men of the first foreign expedition to arrive at what is now Mt Hagen. This was the expedition of 1933 led by Jim Taylor and Mick Leahy.
My interpreter was the grand-daughter of one of the women. Married and in her late twenties, she was a customer-service officer at one of the banks in Mt Hagen; high school educated, computer literate and fully at ease in the modern world. At one point in her narrative, Granny started to cry. When I asked why, my interpreter said to me:
“Poor Granny is crying because she remembers how hard all her own female relatives, her mother, her grandmother and her aunties, had to work before the Kundi came (Kundi, meaning ‘red’ is the word the Melpa-speaking people use to describe Europeans).
“Granny says her husband and the other men shared out some of the salt and steel things the Kundi and their black companions gave, keeping the axes and knives and pearl-shell for themselves.
“Granny says she and her sister both were given steel spades, and they couldn’t believe (“they got up no good”) the surprise of how smooth to use and how sharp the new tools were. And she says she always cries when she thinks of her ancestors who had to do the same work using just digging-sticks and sharpened bamboo for knives.”
At the same time Granny got her spade, the people of Mt Hagen saw their first wheel. It was hanging off the undercarriage of the first aeroplane to land on the newly-prepared airstrip near the camp of the Kundi.
Martyn Namorong would be justified in sensing a tiny note of sarcasm in my words, and may console himself in the knowledge that sarcasm like cynicism is the resort of the unintelligent and intemperate.
But believe me, I and others like me do genuinely see in Martyn Namorong the sort of person who will be an essential part of any real agency of change in Papua New Guinea. Change which we sincerely hope may emerge when the people learn in August that all they can expect from their "democratically elected leadership" is simply more of the same.
There will be massive dissatisfaction; but will custom-driven reticence in speaking out or acting without the approval of the clan muffle this to a low murmur of grumbling?
Standout leadership means risk-taking, but the prize of a fairer, more transparent and more satisfying life for all is worth it.
I would like your help, Martyn, in critiquing a piece I am preparing entitled “PNG Paramount Legislative Assembly: a Melanesian structure for the reform of PNG’s parliamentary system.”
When I’ve finished the draft I’ll send it to you and to others including Sir Barry Holloway and Garry Juffa for appraisal.
It will be a format for elder statesmen chosen by the Local Level Governments to oversee the parliament, and for closer ties between the LLGs and parliament.
In other words, a structure for real people-power as against the present hegemony of the parties. I shall look forward to analysis with rigour, and surgery where you see the need. Maybe you will write a response?
Martyn, today it has been announced by researchers that ours will be the last generation to die of cancer. PNG is part of this, like it or not, good, bad or indifferent.
An opinion: Development or what do our people really want?
We say that what our people want is development. But are we providing a convenient title to argue a process and an end which is a natural desire of all human societies, traditional and modern; to move towards a better state of existence within the bounds of their own cultural identity?
By Martyn Namorong's analogy it made common sense that we should obtain a steel axe when our fathers saw the use of it.
This may not in itself have created an inferiority complex because in their context a better axe was a necessity for survival.
What may have created the inferiority complex and perpetuates it today was an inability to understand and appreciate the changes and therefore be prepared for the impact to human society and our cultural lifestyles.
The point of conflict is not technology per se, and what we assume to be ‘development’, but how we have made use of technology in the natural progress that all society’s experience, and which we in our modern intellect may wrongly call development.
In the axe trading fiasco the resulting unacknowledged changes that the use of such a technology created were not anticipated, although it seemed only logical that a better tool was needed to make chopping up trees a little easier.
The steel axe was an advance in our technology, a development, which was very relevant, in the traditional intellect, to how we lived our lives.
But eventually village men found themselves with more time on their hands and quite likely no idea what to do with it.
Perhaps at the time no one appreciated what might happen to our cultural ways when this simple but very useful tool, the steel axe, came into the hands of village men and thus freed up time which was now spent in idleness that we were, culturally at least, unprepared for.
Questioning now if such changes or associated modern interferences into traditional society are indeed perpetuated by the white-folk, who traded us firstly steel axes, will essentially lead us backwards.
And I think that if given a choice today, our ancestors would still go for the steel axe, so let’s not regress.
The best use we can make of history is to see how and where the mistakes were made in the past so that we can plan to minimize our own mistakes in the future. Now is the right time to decide.
Today we are still trading for ‘better’ technologies that improve our lives but we should now be able to understand and appreciate what those simple changes in technology of any kind (or development as we like to call the process) can do to our culture and the way we want to live our lives.
The challenge we face is having, for the most part, dishonorable leaders who take the power of decision making away from the people for their own greedy benefits.
The problem with many of PNG’s political leaders is that they assumed that they should dictate how we live our lives, how we develop and progress as a society.
We allowed them to do this, by the Western forms of government that we had been taught and indeed that our forefathers had accepted by default.
The self aggrandizement of the position of leader at the sacrifice of the community did not happen to such an extreme in our traditional societies, where the leaders were also bound by customary laws. Not so today.
Political leaders should be a reflection of the values of society which gives them mandate and right to rule and not vice versa.
The characteristics of democracy also existed in our traditional egalitarian tribal systems and perhaps it was not too farfetched to believe that those ideals could be sustained and transmogrified into a new political model.
So what our people want, and what we would term development, is that which allows our culture to continue to take its natural course of history, albeit with external influences/technologies/ideas that our society also finds acceptable and/or beneficial for all: Utopia?
Posted by: Michael Dom | 23 July 2012 at 12:38 PM
Martyn might be interested to read this provocative hindsight essay by Jared Diamond, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
Jared spent a deal of time in PNG studying, amongst other things, the birdlife. No doubt (like many others who have been fortunate enough to experience life in PNG) it coloured his views on the two edged sword that is progress and development.
Ever since (according to our tradition) those angels shut us out of our earthly paradise (a.k.a. the golden age or as they say in PNG, gut taim bipo) mankind has been bemoaning its fate (a.k.a. the frowned upon, "weeping for Tammuz") and looking for answers.
According to some, the solution to this dilemma was outlined by another famous historical figure who advocated things like respect for friends and enemies alike, putting others first and moderating our appetites.
But it is a hard row to hoe and we still figure that there is a Utopian solution (that doesn't require any personal effort or restraint) that will put us back in that paradise that we were so rudely shut out of on that worst day we ever had.
Posted by: Michael Lorenz | 23 July 2012 at 12:18 PM
Mr Fowke obviously did not read this paragraph of my article
"Let me clarify one thing. I understand that a stone axe is inferior as an effective tool for chopping trees. Thus, acquiring metal axes is development. And as soon as a people feel the need to acquire metal axes, an economic and power relationship develops where one party is superior to another."
To clarify myself I also added:
"People and cultures that want development are disempowered societies with an inferiority complex generated by another culture that dominates them.
"People and cultures that want Independence and national sovereignty, are an empowered class of citizens in control of their national economy and political processes. Indeed the need for national sovereignty and self reliance comes out of a strong sense of pride about one’s culture and identity.
"The need for development comes out of being told by another culture that you're inferior- you're primitive therefore you need development."
The corruption, laziness of public servants, destructive mining and logging practices, Illegal immigration by Asians, etc...
Are symptoms of this expectation that outsiders will solve PNGs problem. The problems PNG faces, and there are many, are rooted in this dynamic between superior culture v inferior culture.
People expect foreign investment, aid, etc to solve problems, yet they havent because it doesn't address what lies at the root of all our problems.
On a different note, TB was introduced by colonisers of the religious kind. Tell the people of South Fly it isn't an issue.
I look forward to receiving a copy of John Fowke's paper on government. May I suggest he looks at it as 'an attempt to create something totally outside the current model'.
The reason a lot of good ideas fail is because they try to work within a model of development that is fundamentally flawed.
Posted by: Martyn Namorong | 22 July 2012 at 09:51 AM