Papua New Guinea
The most diverse nation on earth, where a thousand cultures and eight hundred languages share a handful of deep Melanesian forces: the wantok, the clan, the big-man, and the pig. The complete guide, the forces first.
Papua New Guinea is a Melanesian country on the eastern half of the great island of New Guinea and its surrounding isles, home to around ten million people and to more distinct languages, some eight hundred and more, than any other nation on earth. There is no single Papua New Guinean culture but a thousand of them, each clan and language its own world, and yet across that vast variety run a few shared Melanesian forces: the wantok, the bond of those who share a tongue; clan land held from the ancestors; the self-made big-man who leads by giving; and the pig, the shell, and the great exchanges by which wealth, marriage, and peace are made. The famous sing-sing, where clans gather in feathered splendour, and the carved spirit houses of the Sepik are among the richest art in the world, and Christianity now reaches nearly everyone, laid over an older world of ancestors and spirits that has not gone away.
The land of a thousand tongues
The first thing to know about Papua New Guinea is that it is not one people but many, more peoples in one country than anywhere else on earth. Some eight hundred and more distinct languages are spoken across the land, perhaps a tenth of all the languages in the world, and each is the mark of a separate community with its own customs, its own art, and its own sense of itself. There are several thousand of these communities, most numbering only a few hundred souls, and the country holds among the most varied populations on the planet.
The cause is the land itself. New Guinea is a country of high mountains, deep and narrow valleys, dense rainforest, great rivers, and scattered islands, and that broken terrain shut its peoples off from one another for thousands of years, each valley and each stretch of coast going its own way until neighbours a few hours' walk apart could not understand a word the other spoke. So complete was the separation that some groups, when the outside world finally reached the highland valleys in the twentieth century, had not known that the people over the next ridge existed.
Out of this came a country built not of a single nation but of clans and tribes. The clan, the group that traces itself to a common ancestor, is the body to which a person truly belongs, and where larger tribes exist they are best seen as federations of clans, kin groups felt to be brothers descended from one founding father. There were no kings or kingdoms over the whole land, no single people with one ruler and one law, but a vast mosaic of small, proud, self-governing communities. To understand Papua New Guinea is to hold this fact first: that the words culture and custom here mean a thousand different things, and that what follows describes forces shared widely across that variety, not a single way belonging to all.
The wantok, the clan, and the land
In a land of so many tongues, the tongue one speaks is the deepest mark of who one is, and from it comes the central bond of Papua New Guinean life, the wantok. The word is from Tok Pisin, the country's shared speech, and means one talk: a person's wantoks are those who speak their language, who are therefore held to be kin and to share a common ancestry, and to whom one owes loyalty and help. The wantok is the safety net of a society that long had no other. A young man from the highlands who comes to the city knowing no one will seek out a wantok, someone of his own language, and from that bond may receive food, shelter, and an introduction to work, not by any contract but because shared speech means shared obligation.
This bond is felt as one of the strongest duties a person has, and it does not weaken with distance or wealth. Those who prosper are looked to by their many wantoks for support and find it hard to refuse, so that the obligation that shelters the weak also presses heavily on the strong, and in the modern country it shades easily into favouritism, the giving of jobs and public goods to one's own people. Much of the difficulty of building an impartial state over so many clans turns on this bond, which holds the kin group together far more firmly than any loyalty to the nation.
Beneath the wantok lies the land, and in Papua New Guinea the land belongs to the clan. Almost all the country's ground, the great majority of it, is held not by individuals or the state but by clans and lineages under custom, tied to the ancestors who first held it and passed down within the group, in some areas through the father's line and in others through the mother's. A person's ples, their home place, is the ground of their clan, the root of their identity and the seat of their belonging, and to be of a place and a people is the first fact of a Papua New Guinean life.
The big-man and the exchange
Across most of Papua New Guinea a leader is not born to his place but makes it, and he makes it by giving. The Melanesian leader is the big-man, a man who holds no inherited title and no formal office but rises by his own effort, by gathering wealth and giving it away, by skill in speech and persuasion, and by binding others to him through what he provides. He cannot command; he must convince, negotiate, and build alliances, and his standing lasts only as long as he can go on giving. This is leadership won and held by personal force, the same self-made authority found among the peoples of the Solomon Islands and across Melanesia.
In the highlands this giving rose to a height found nowhere else, in the great ceremonial exchanges. Among the Melpa around Mount Hagen it is called the moka and among the Enga the tee, and it is a vast cycle of competitive gift-giving between clans, in which a man who has received a gift repays it later with more than he was given, and by that excess gains prestige and places his rival in his debt. The chief gifts are pigs and the prized pearl shells, and now money, trucks, and cattle as well, gathered over years of patient effort and given away in a single great display before the assembled people. To repay exactly is merely to settle a debt; to add to it is to win honour, and to keep the relationship alive, for a debt fully paid ends the bond between two men.
The famous accounts of a single great moka tell of hundreds of pigs, with cassowaries, cattle, and cash besides, given away at once. In this the big-man trades real wealth for renown, and the whole clan labours toward his triumph, the men managing the exchange and the speeches while the women raise the pigs that are its substance. The exchange does more than make leaders; it channels the fierce rivalry between clans into a contest of generosity rather than only of war, binding old enemies in a long relation of giving that holds the peace as surely as it raises up the big-man.
Pigs, shells, and the payback
The wealth that moves through Papua New Guinean life is, above all, the pig. The pig is food, treasure, and sacred valuable at once, raised with care by the women, counted as the true measure of a family's and a clan's standing, and given, exchanged, and slaughtered at every great occasion; the periodic pig festivals of the highlands, where hundreds or thousands of beasts are killed and their meat shared out in a single charged event, are the supreme display of this. Beside the pig stand the shell valuables, the pearl shells that were carried up from the coast and prized in the highlands as the highest currency, mounted, reddened with ochre, and counted out ceremonially, and now joined and often replaced by money.
This wealth makes marriages. A Papua New Guinean marriage is sealed by bride price, a payment of pigs, shells, and now cash carried from the groom's clan to the bride's, which honours the bride's family and recompenses them for the loss of her labour and her children to another group. Bride price is no mere formality but a true alliance between two clans, often large and carefully negotiated, and through it the kin groups of a region are tied to one another across the generations.
The same wealth answers wrongs. In the Melanesian way, a death, an injury, or a serious offence sets up a debt that must be paid, and the obligation to answer it, the payback, lies at the heart of the old justice. A wrong may be settled by a compensation payment, pigs and shells and money given to the aggrieved clan to wipe out the injury and restore the peace, and such payments, like the funeral and the exchange, bind the clans together. But where the debt is not paid or not accepted, the answer is the other kind of payback, the retribution of fighting between clans, and the tribal warfare that this obligation can ignite has long been a feature of highland life, the harder for being waged now with modern weapons. Wealth in Papua New Guinea is thus the means of marriage and the means of peace, the pig and the shell standing between the clans and the spear.
The sing-sing and the bilas
The most dazzling expression of Papua New Guinean culture is the sing-sing, the great gathering at which clans and villages come together to dance, to sing, and to show themselves to one another in full ceremonial array. A sing-sing may mark a feast, a marriage, a payment, or simply the meeting of many groups, and at the largest of them, the shows of the highlands, scores of clans assemble, each performing its own dances and songs in its own finery, a spectacle of colour and sound found nowhere else.
The splendour lies in the bilas, the ceremonial adornment, and the people of Papua New Guinea are among the great decorators of the human body. A dancer may wear a towering headdress of feathers, the plumes of birds of paradise and the cassowary, prized and handed down and worn only on the greatest days; the face and body are painted in bold designs with pigments of clay, charcoal, and plant oils; and shells, leaves, furs, and woven ornaments complete the array, each clan's style its own and instantly known. To put on the bilas is to put on the identity and the glory of one's group, and to display its wealth, its strength, and its beauty before all.
The sing-sing is not performance for its own sake but the showing of who a people are. The dances tell the stories and carry the spirits of the clan, the great drums and the massed voices sound across the ground, and the gathering binds the scattered groups in a shared display even as each strives to outshine the rest. In a country of a thousand separate peoples, the sing-sing is the moment when that variety becomes visible all at once, every clan in its own feathers and paint, and it has become, in the highland shows that draw the whole nation and the world, the very image of Papua New Guinea to itself and to others.
The spirit house
Along the great Sepik River in the north lies one of the world's richest traditions of art and spirit, centred on the haus tambaran, the spirit house. The name is Tok Pisin for a house of the ancestors, and it is the largest and most sacred building of the village, a soaring structure of carved posts and painted gables that stands at the centre of the community. It is the men's house, the seat of clan affairs and of ritual, where the men gather, debate, and once prepared for war, and where the sacred carvings, masks, and flutes that hold the ancestral spirits are kept; it is closed to women and to the uninitiated, and its mysteries are the deepest possessions of the men who share it.
The art of the Sepik is famous through the world. The carvers shape ancestors, spirits, and the creatures of the river, the crocodile above all, in wood, and adorn their work with shell, paint, and fibre, holding that these forms are both beautiful and alive with the power of the beings they show. The painted faces of the spirits line the walls of the houses, the great slit drum, the garamut, sounds the voice of the house across the water, and carved masks bring the ancestors among the living in dance. The carving of the Sepik, with the masks of New Ireland and New Britain, is counted among the masterworks of the art of the Pacific.
The spirit house is also the place where boys are made men. In the old way, and still in places today, the youths of a clan are secluded in or about the haus tambaran for weeks or months, taught the lore, the genealogies, and the sacred knowledge of their people, and brought through the ordeals that mark their passage into manhood. The most striking of these is the rite of the crocodile peoples of the Sepik, who cut the skin of the initiate in rows until it heals into raised marks like the hide of the crocodile, so that the young man carries on his body forever the sign of the ancestor and of his entry into the full life of the clan.
Faith: church, ancestors, sorcery
Papua New Guinea is today a strongly Christian country, the faith carried into even remote valleys by missionaries over the past century and now professed by nearly the whole people across many churches, Catholic, Lutheran, and a wide range of other Protestant and evangelical bodies. The church is woven deeply into modern life, its worship, its singing, and its calendar shaping the village week, and Christianity sits at the centre of how most Papua New Guineans now understand the world and themselves.
Yet the older world of the spirits was never wholly displaced, and it lives on beneath and alongside the church. Across the country the ancestors and a host of spirits are felt to be present and powerful, able to bless or to harm, to be honoured, consulted, and kept at peace, and much that happens in life is understood to have a cause in that unseen world as much as in the visible one. The carved spirit, the sacred place, and the power of the ancestor remain real to many even as they worship in the church on Sunday, the two understandings of the world held together rather than one having driven out the other.
The darkest part of this older belief is the fear of sorcery, called sanguma in Tok Pisin, the conviction that certain people can bring sickness, misfortune, and death by hidden, malevolent power. When a death or a calamity comes without clear cause, suspicion may fall on a supposed sorcerer, and the accused, very often a woman and frequently among the weakest in a community, can face terrible violence at the hands of those seeking to answer the loss. Such sorcery-related violence remains a grave and much-condemned problem in parts of the country, one the government, the churches, and many Papua New Guineans themselves work against, and it stands as a hard reminder that the spirit world of the old life is, for many, not a memory but a living and sometimes fearful reality.
The village and its courtesies
For all the wealth of ceremony, most Papua New Guineans live quiet rural lives, for the country is among the most rural on earth and the great majority of its people dwell in villages and hamlets and feed themselves from their gardens. In the highlands the staple is the sweet potato, the kaukau, grown in neat mounded gardens and fed also to the pigs; in the lowlands and along the rivers it is sago, taro, yam, and banana, with fish and the food of the forest. Daily life turns on the extended family and the clan, the work of the gardens and the pigs shared among kin, and a person lives within the wide net of relation that the wantok describes.
Some courtesies run widely across this varied land. The chewing of betel nut, the buai, is a near-universal pleasure and a gesture of sharing and welcome, offered and accepted among friends and stained red on the smile of half the country. The visitor to a village comes as a guest into a place held under custom and does well to seek the leave of its people and its leaders before entering, the more so where a men's house, a sacred site, or a tabu ground is concerned, places not to be entered or photographed without leave. Warmth, humour, and an easy friendliness are widely remarked as marks of the Papua New Guinean character, offered readily to the stranger who comes with respect.
Binding this diversity together is Tok Pisin, the shared speech that grew up so that the country's hundreds of peoples could understand one another. It is no one clan's language but the common tongue of the markets, the roads, the radio, and the towns, the medium in which a highlander and an islander can meet, and it carries, in its own words like wantok and bilas and haus tambaran, much of the shared life that has grown over the old division. To travel in Papua New Guinea is to pass from one people and one language to the next, and to find Tok Pisin, the gardens, the pigs, and the courtesies of the clan the threads that run through them all.
The nation
Papua New Guinea is a country of around ten million people, by far the most populous in the Pacific islands, holding the eastern half of the great island of New Guinea and a scatter of islands beyond it, among them New Britain, New Ireland, Manus, and Bougainville. The western half of the island is part of Indonesia. The land is vast and broken, its three regions of highlands, mainland coast, and islands each a world of its own, and most of its people, more than in almost any other nation, live in the countryside rather than the towns. The capital is Port Moresby, on the southern coast. No one of the eight hundred tongues could serve for all, and so the country carries on in Tok Pisin, in English, and in Hiri Motu, the three speeches it holds in common.
The modern nation is young and was assembled from the outside. The north fell to Germany and the south to Britain in the nineteenth century, both passed to Australian rule, and the two halves were governed together as one territory until, in 1975, Papua New Guinea became an independent state under its first leader, Michael Somare. Independence left it the hard task of making one nation out of a thousand peoples, and that task has not been easy: the island of Bougainville, aggrieved over a great copper mine and proud of its own distinct identity, fought a long and bloody war of secession from the late nineteen-eighties, which cost many thousands of lives before peace was made, and whose people have since voted overwhelmingly for independence, a question still being settled.
The country is rich and poor at once. Beneath its ground and seas lie gold, copper, gas, oil, timber, and fish in great abundance, and these resources earn the nation much; yet most Papua New Guineans live by their gardens far from that wealth, the towns struggle with crime and with the strains of people drawn from many clans, and the benefits of the land's riches have been slow to reach the village. Through all of it the deep order described in this guide endures: the wantok and the clan, the big-man and the exchange, the pig, the sing-sing, and the spirit house, carried by the most diverse people on earth into the uncertain life of a single modern state.