Head-hunters, black, white, and brown

by Alfred C. Haddon

The annual death-dance first took place, at which men with leafy masks and bodies covered with the yellow sprouting leaves of the coco-palm danced with bow and arrow, and mimicked in their gait and attitudes persons recently deceased. The women, who sat a long way off, recognised the individuals who were personified, and with tears and lamentations called out, “That’s my husband!” “Oh, my son!” according to their relationship with the deceased.

Women, too, have spirits that live after death, but, as that sex is by universal consent tabooed from performing sacred ceremonies, they could not personate deceased women; so men performed that office clad in a woman’s petticoat, and carried brooms in their hand, their faces being hidden with the customary head-dress of leaves.

It was a remarkable fact that these people appear to have noticed that hilarity is a natural reaction at funerals, and this was provided for in the person of a sort of masked buffoon, the danilkau, who “played the fool” behind the back of some of the more serious performers.

The adoption of the lads into their respective clans took place immediately after the death-dances. So far as I could gather, there were not such important ceremonies on this occasion as in the case of the Malu cult of Murray Island. I believe that masks were not employed at this time.

The only initiation ceremony, if such it can be called, that I could hear of was the chastising or torturing of the lads, more particularly the bad ones, in the kwod. The good boys were let off very easily, but a naughty one might be speared in the hollow of the knee by a stick armed with the spine of a sting-ray, or scraped with the rough, spiny skin of a ray, or be beaten about the ears and elsewhere with the nests of green ants, who bite ferociously, or chastised with wasps’ nests. So far as we could learn, neither here nor in Murray Island was the bull-roarer employed at the initiation ceremonies. Here it was swung in connection with turtle ceremonies; it was also useful in making garden produce grow, but it was not used to make wind or rain.

Fig. 13.

Drawing by Gizu of a danilkau, the buffoon of the funeral ceremonies. He wore a leafy head-dress, in which is inserted a long feathered filament; on his chest are two crossed shoulder-belts and a shell ornament; a fringed belt is round his waist, from which depends in front an empty coconut water-vessel; his legs are provided with ornamental bands.

The kernge, or lads to be initiated, were grouped on the further side of the koi siboi. They remained in the kwod for several days, during which time they are instructed by their uncles (mothers’ brothers only) in the moral code and customs of the community.