Toys and Games.
The Mafulu children have neither dolls nor other toys, and do not make cat’s-cradles. The young boys amuse themselves with small bows and arrows and spears, which they make themselves. One common sport is for the boys, armed with their spears, to stand in a row and for another boy to roll in front of them a ball, made out of the root of a banana tree, with its many rootlets intertwined, and for the boys to try to hit it with their spears as it passes them. A similar game is played in Mekeo and on the coast; but there the ball is often made out of the outer fibre of a cocoanut. Small boys and girls amuse themselves with glissading down the steep grassy slopes. There is also a sort of fighting game for boys, in which young men sometimes join. A number of them divide themselves into two opposing groups, all armed with little darts, made of reeds on which a few leaves are left at the head ends; and these two groups mutually attack each other, advancing and retreating, according to the fortunes of the fight. Boys, and men also, play at tug-of-war, using long canes for ropes; and boys and girls have swings, constructed either by looping two flexible rope-like tree stems together at the bottom, or with a single rope, with a loop at the bottom, in which to place their feet. But there are no racing or jumping or gymnastic games, and no group or singing children’s games.
[1] I would point out, however, that the Inawae clan is part of, and is probably largely representative of, the original Inawae ngopu group of the great Biofa tribe of Mekeo, and that this Inawae group is rather widely scattered over Mekeo (see Seligmann’s Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 321 and pp. 369 to 372); so that the information obtained is probably not really of a merely local character.
[2] Sir W. Macgregor, in describing (Ann. Rep., June, 1890, p. 47) the movements and actions of the Kiwai (Fly river mouth) natives prior to a canoe attack by them upon him, says: “The canoes darted hither and thither, as if performing a circus dance or a Highland reel, and all these movements were accompanied by the chant of a paean that sounded as if composed to imitate the cooing—soft, plaintive, and melodious—of the pigeons of their native forests”; and he refers to the performance as a “canoe choral dance.” It was, of course, not a dance in the sense in which I am dealing with the subject here; but the apparently imitative character of the singing is perhaps worth noticing in connection with this dancing question. See also the description (Country Life, March 4, 1911) by Mr. Walter Goodfellow, the leader of the recent expedition into Dutch New Guinea, of the dancing and accompanying singing of the Mimika natives whom he met there, and his suggestion that the final calls of these songs were derived from that of the greater paradise bird. Mr. Goodfellow has since told me with reference to these Mimika songs that he was forcibly struck by the resemblance of the termination of most of the songs to the common cry of the greater bird of paradise, and said: “They finished with the same abrupt note, repeated three times (like the birds).” Dr. Haddon has been good enough to lend me the manuscript of his notes on the dances performed in the islands of Torres Straits, which will probably have appeared in Vol. IV. of the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits before this book is published. Here again I find interesting records of imitative dancing. One dance imitates the swimming movements of the large lizard (Varanus), another is an imitation of the movements of a crab, another imitates those of a pigeon, and another those of a pelican. At a dance which I witnessed in the Roro village of Seria a party from Delena danced the “Cassowary” dance; and Father Egedi says it is certainly so called because its movements are in some way an imitation of those of the cassowary.
Counting, Currency and Trade
Counting.
Mafulu counting is accomplished by the use of two numerals (one and two) and of the word “another” and of their hands and feet[1]; and with these materials they have phraseology for counting up to twenty as follows:—
1 = Fida (one).