A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

******

I was surprised to find that Dilava, Deva Deva and Mafulu ran over 90 per cent infections. This upset all my previous convictions, but when I stopped to consider it, this was not so remarkable. One carrier, coming in from the outside world, could easily infect a village, for these settlements were perched on narrow ridges not over twenty feet wide. In Okaka, for example, there was barely elbow room and no attempt at sanitation. Here, when the natives left home, they must all follow the same trail. They lived like animals, and like animals they died.

If I were a sentimentalist I would think of Father Fastre with a smile and a tear. He was the giant priest who presided over Popolo Mission; he was all brawn, with the great red beard of a bush frontiersman. Sometimes a fey look would come into his eyes; for here is tremendous loneliness for a white man, which neither work nor prayer can quite banish from a mind that consorts with spirits and grows more morbid year by year. But Father Fastre had a sense of humor which saved him, I hope.

When he first talked to me he braced his big shoulders against the guest house porch and told me about the sacred G-string. The G-string is not only a stingily concealing garment; in these mountains it is the mark of a “true man.” With it he is respected, a tribesman in good standing; without it he is a pariah—he isn’t properly dressed, that’s all. With Biblical simplicity they say of the G-string wearer, “He is a true man and belongs to the true people.”

Now Father Fastre and a colleague were the first white men to penetrate this Kuni country, and they were great curiosities because they came in their priestly robes, to impress their faith upon the savages. At Deva Deva they were shown to a native house which was about as private as a goldfish bowl; they were no sooner in it than the dwarfish Kunis came crowding in, gibbering and peering at the strangers in the long skirts. After a spell of whispering one of them stole up behind the priest, who had just leaned over to tie his shoelace. Slyly the little savage lifted Father Fastre’s robe, and went suddenly across the room, propelled by the Frenchman’s big fist. The situation was tense. The onlookers were all armed killers. A dread silence fell. Then the crowd burst into a gale of laughter.

“They were trying to find out if I was a man,” Father Fastre grinned.

One afternoon he told me to take a good look at an approaching native. “A few years ago he brought his little boy to our school and we dressed him up for mass in clean European clothes. His father saw him and flew into a frenzy. ‘I want to take him home,’ he said, ‘he’s not properly dressed.’ When I asked what was indecent about a nice white shirt and trousers the man gasped, ‘But where’s his G-string?’ and made a terrible scene. He wasn’t going to let neighbors say that his son wasn’t of the True People.”

The Mafulu folk divide the world into three parts, Missionaries, Belitan (British) and True People. Up here crocodiles have been killed at an altitude of 5,000 feet and the natives “know their name.” True People have an annoying way of high-hatting unfamiliar things. They merely say “We do not know its name.” They have a name for salt, which is ama. Once they ate it the way native traders from the coast palmed it off on them, mixed with sand. When white salt came they “did not know its name”—but brine hunger got the better of them and they learned to love it. In their gardens mere women are not allowed to plant yams because these are “true gardens,” and women are considered too dirty either to plant or eat the precious vegetable. They are permitted to plant taro, but yam work and yam eating are for True Men. It’s all very confusing, and as ridiculous as some of our civilized conventions.

Ahuia was never quite the man of the world among these stranger tribes. Father Fastre’s jolly Mondos were piling lumber, down below Popolo. The first night we stopped there Ahuia and Quai came creeping up to my door. “Taubada,” they whimpered, “we scared, we like sleep along you.” With no further explanation they curled up on the floor and slept the velvet sleep of the native.

When I asked Father Fastre about this he laughed. “My Mondo boys acted the same way last night. They wouldn’t come within a mile of your boys. You know why that is, don’t you? Witchcraft. They ‘do not know the name’ of strange people, and keep away from them for fear they’ll cast some evil spell.”