Pygmies & Papuans: The Stone Age To-day in Dutch New Guinea

by A. F. R. Wollaston

Many of them carry in their bags a small Jew’s harp, made of a thin piece of bamboo, from which they extract faint music that is pleasing to their ears. Two men possessed instruments of a more original design: these were made of pieces of polished bone fitting together in such a way that when one was turned round over the other it produced peculiarly discordant squeaks, which were highly appreciated by the player.

Wamberi Merbiri or Wamberimi, the village of the Tapiro which was visited by different members of our party on three separate occasions, is situated on the lower slopes of Mount Tapiro, the mountain nearest to Parimau, at about 1800 feet above the sea. It is in fact within a stone’s throw of that large clearing which Rawling and I had reached with so much difficulty, but when approached by the track used by the people themselves it is an easy walk of two or three hours from the Kapare River.

The track climbs by a steep almost knife-edged ridge densely covered with forest to the rounded shoulder of the hill where the village lies. The first sign of the village is a flimsy fence of tall poles, which bars the track and extends for a short distance on either side of it. Passing through a narrow opening in the fence you come to a cleared space occupied by three or four houses. A couple of hundred yards beyond these and separated from them by a small gully, which is bridged by an enormous fallen tree, is a second group of six houses, constituting the village of Wamberi Merbiri.

The houses are scattered about over three or four acres of steeply sloping ground, from which most of the trees have been cleared. Between the houses the ground has been levelled in three places to form almost level terraces, measuring about fifteen by five yards, completely cleared of vegetation and covered with small stones. These terraces are held up on the lower side by logs and stumps of trees, and the labour of making them by people whose only tools are stone axes and pieces of wood is difficult to imagine; they are used, so far as we could understand, for dances and other ceremonies.

WAMBERI-MERBIRI, THE VILLAGE OF THE TAPIRO PYGMIES.

HOUSES OF THE PYGMIES

The houses are greatly superior to those of the Mimika Papuans, from which they differ in every respect. They are built on piles, which raise the floor of the house from four to ten feet above the ground according to the steepness of the slope underneath. The walls are made of long laths of split wood with big sheets of bark fastened on to the outside. The roof is a fairly steep pitched angular structure of split wood covered with over-lapping leaves of the Fan-palm. The floor is made like the walls and covered with large sheets of bark; in the middle of the floor is a square sunken box filled with sand or earth in which a fire is kept burning, and over the fire hanging from the roof is a simple rack, on which wood is placed to dry. The house consists of one nearly square compartment, measuring about ten feet in each direction. The way of entering is by a steep ladder made of two posts tied closely together, which leads to a narrow platform or balcony in front of the front wall of the house. There are no notches on the posts, but the lashings of rattan, which tie them together, answer the purpose of steps or rungs for the feet. As well as in the excellence of their houses, the Tapiro show another point of superiority over the neighbouring Papuans in their habit of using a common retiring place at the edge of a small stream.

There was an old man in the village, bald and white-bearded, and horribly disfigured by disease,[19] who appeared to be unquestionably the headman of the place. He sat in one of the huts all day and shouted shrilly to the other men who were constantly going in and out to speak to him, and I think it was due to him that we were never allowed to see the women. We were particularly anxious to see some of the women of the tribe, and we offered them large rewards of knives and axes merely for the sight of them. The other men were willing enough to produce the women, and several times they were on the point of fetching them, but were always prevented by the old man. Finally we had a personal interview with him, and held out three bright axes, which made his one eye glisten with greed, but he still remained obdurate.