The Mafulu: Mountain People of British New Guinea

by Robert Wood Williamson

Villages and Their Emone and Houses.

The Mafulu villages are generally situated on narrow plateaux or ridges, sloping down on each side; but the plateaux are not usually so narrow, nor the slopes so steep, as are those of the Kuni district, and the villages themselves are not generally so narrow, as the contour of the country does not involve these conditions to the same extent. Also the Mafulu villages are on the lower ridges only, and not on the high mountains; but the actual elevations above sea-level of these lower ridges are, I think, generally higher than those of the top ridges of the Kuni. Plate [54] shows the position and surroundings of the village of Salube (community of Auga), and is a good representative example, except that the plate does not show any open grassland.

The villages are, or were, protected with stockades and with pits outside the stockades, and sometimes with platforms on trees near the stockade boundaries, from which platforms the inhabitants can shoot and hurl stones upon an enemy climbing up the slope. The stockade is made of timber, is about 15 to 25 feet high, and is generally constructed in three or more parallel rows or lines, each of the lines having openings, but the openings never being opposite to one another. These protections have now, however, been largely, though not entirely, discontinued.[1] It is, or was, also the practice, when expecting an attack, to put into the ground in the approaches to the village calthrop-like arrow-headed objects, with their points projecting upwards.

The average size of the villages is small compared with that of the large villages of Mekeo, some of them having only six or eight houses, though many villages have thirty houses, and some of them have fifty or sixty or more. The houses and emone are much smaller than those of Mekeo, and much ruder and simpler in construction and they have no carving or other decoration. There are no communal houses.

The houses are ranged in two parallel rows along the side of the ridge, with an open village space between them, the space being considerably longer than it is broad, and more or less irregular in shape. The houses are generally built with their door-openings facing inwards towards the village enclosure.

At one end of the village, and facing down the open space, is the chief’s or sub-chief’s emone. These are, like the Roro marea and the Mekeo ufu, used, not only in connection with ceremonies, but also as living houses for men, especially unmarried men, and for the accommodation of visitors to the village. There are probably also in the village the emone of one or more of the notables before mentioned, of which one will be at the other end of the village and any others will be among the houses at the side of, and facing into, the village enclosure. There are not often more than three emone, true or otherwise, in one village.

You of course do not find the surrounding palm groves of Mekeo and the coast; nor do you generally see the waste space behind the houses, or the ring of garden plots outside the waste space, the position of the village on its ridge being usually hardly adapted to the latter. You may, however, often find garden plots very near to the village. Each family has its own house, and, except as regards the emone and their use, there are no separate houses for men or women, or for any class of them.

The Mafulu emone is an oblong building, erected on piles of very varying height, the interior floor being anything from 3 to 15 feet above the ground. In size also it varies very much, but generally it is internally about 12 to 15 feet long from front to back, and about 8 to 12 feet in width. The roof, which is thatched with long, rather broad leaves, is constructed on the ridge and gable principle, with the gable ends facing the front and the back, and the roof sloping on both sides in convex curves from the ridge downwards. Remarkable and specially distinctive features of the building are the thatched roof appendages projecting from the tops of the two gable ends (front and back), the forms of which appendages are somewhat like a hood or the convex fan-shaped semicircular roof of an apse, and in construction are sometimes made as rounded overhanging continuations of the upper part of the roof, and sometimes as independent additions, not continuous with, and not forming parts of, the actual roof. In front of the building, but not at the back, is a platform at a level about a foot below that of the inner floor, extending the whole length of the front of the building, and projecting forwards to a distance of from 2 to 5 feet. The approach from the ground to this platform in the case of a high-built emone is a rudely constructed ladder, but when the building is only low and near the ground it is generally merely a rough sloping piece of tree trunk, or even only a stump. The two gable ends are enclosed with walls made of horizontal tree branches, two or three of which are, at both the front and rear ends of the building, discontinued for a short distance in the centre, so as to leave openings. These openings are, say, 2 feet or more above the level of the front outside platform, and 1 foot or more above that of the inside floor, and are usually very small; so that, in entering or leaving the building, you have to step up to, or even climb, and wriggle yourself through the opening, and then step down on the other side. Inside the building you find the centre of the floor space occupied by a longitudinal fireplace, about 2 feet broad, extending from front to back of the building; and the floors on each side of this fireplace slope upwards somewhat from the visible level of the fire-place towards the sides of the building. The fireplace part of the interior is, in fact, dropped to a level below that of the adjoining floors, so as to form a long trough, which is filled up with soil upon which the fire can burn; and it is the visible top level of this soil covering which is practically flush with the inside lower level of the adjacent upward-sloping floors. Some distance below the roof there is usually an open ceiling of reeds, used for the purpose of storing and drying fruits and other things, and especially, as will be seen hereafter, for drying fruit required in the preparation for the big feast.