Boy.—“A bit of a broken bottle.”
Missionary.—“Did it hurt?”
Boy.—“Only a little.”
The letters were not well formed, but there was no doubt about them, and I wondered if the elder brother thought the younger so thick-headed that there was a doubt about his getting the letters inside and so made sure that he should have them outside. Be that as it may, there the letters were till the hair grew again.
As a rule there is no fuss when a little Papuan comes into the world, but occasionally his arrival is celebrated with quite royal pomp and pageantry, and the women of his tribe have their turn at wearing the family finery, and going in for a big dance. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to come across one of these celebrations at Maiva.
Some sixty women with wonderful feather head-dresses, gay as the brightest feathers of tropical birds could make them, and wearing all kinds of shell ornaments, took part. The central square of the village had been carpeted with cocoanut fronds to keep down the dust, and provide a stage. Down this came the women in two parties, chanting, swinging their grass skirts, and waving in front of them branches of vividly coloured crotons. At the end where we were standing, the two parties turned right and left, and then formed figures something like the spokes of a wheel, and each revolving round the group in the centre, worked their way back to the other end of the village.
In small parties the women went to the house where the new baby was, and he was brought out and presented to them. Bowing themselves away backwards from him they swept the ground with the branches they had in their hands, chanting all the time, and, so it seemed to me, trying to sweep the child’s pathway into life clean. (That is just what the missionary tries to do from the time the child is old enough to come to school.)
Another interesting feature was the by-play of four old women, each of whom carried something that would be used by the child when he grew up. One with nets represented hunting and fishing. One, with digging sticks, told of the time when he would have to take his part in the planting. What the third was I have forgotten, but of the fourth there could be no doubt. Her bow and arrows and stone club, and the ornament she carried in her mouth to make her look savage, all told of war. Right and left she pretended to shoot the onlookers, and at times it seemed as though she would let an arrow slip from the string and so start real trouble.
As a baby the little Papuan receives unlimited attention from both father and mother. One’s ideas of the savage have to be modified when big men are seen carrying their young children about and fondling them as tenderly as any white parent could do.
This fondness is, however, carried to excess, and starts the child on the wrong path. He is allowed to please himself from his very earliest days. If you ask a father why his child did something that was sure to result in injury to himself, or trouble to others, the only reply you will get is, “Ia sibona” or “Ia ura.” Both mean much the same, though in the first case the expression puts it that it was the child’s own action, while in the second case there is the direct statement that the child wished to do it. The father does not interfere with the child’s action, or thwart its wishes, and so arises one of the greatest defects in the Papuan character, and most serious obstacles in the way of progress. Of obedience the Papuan knows nothing, unless there is a big stick, or a heavy hand, or the fear of the sorcerer, at the back of the command.