A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

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I have told how native medical students reacted to my lectures on magic. Vakatawa, however, thought that the old-time religion was losing ground; that the N.M.P.’s as well as the native pastors were drifting away from it. The pastors, for instance, had learned to keep a little iodine and a few simple home remedies around the house and were going to the N.M.P. for medical treatment. But many of these native Christian teachers still saw the witch doctor first, and only got around to the scientifically trained practitioners when the old way didn’t seem to work. However, the Native Medical Practitioner with his better education and better methods is getting about, and modern medicine is slowly commencing to take its place in Fijian lives.

What Pitt-Rivers said in defense of the witch doctors is certainly true of the influence they still exert. The old tribal habit of killing strangers because they had “salt water in their eyes” probably dates back to sorcerers who noticed that epidemics followed visitors. Let’s say this for the primitive medicine man. He had his own kit of remedies, many of them effective—probably herbs, massage and hydrotherapeutic treatments. He knew about fractures and their care; even today you rarely find there a deformity following a fracture, yet in native life there are many cracked and broken bones.

The witch doctor still bolsters the old moral code. Vakatawa has seen a witch woman tell a sick girl that the gods had cursed her for loose living. The girl was weak with dysentery and confessed that she had cohabited with more than twenty youngsters. The witch said, “Tell everything or you will die.” But the poor child died with the last sin unconfessed. Here was a recorded failure in magic in a district where Vakatawa had his hands full; the inhabitants were going to the witch doctor and the medical doctor at the same time. If the patient recovered the magician was praised; if he died the physician was blamed.

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Who is the god of gods to whom the Fijian secretly prays for harm to his enemies? Maybe he is Dengei, most powerful of their evil pantheon—yet who is to say, when there are so many? Several of them appear as great sharks, making mischief, bearing ill tidings. There are the two siren goddesses, Yalewamatagi, who lure handsome young men to sin with them, then leave them dead in the bush. Daucina, an oversexed man-god, is the dread of young girls who wander by night. Death often follows his brutal ravishing.

During the gold rush on Viti Levu in 1932 many natives were afraid to go into the mines. Wasn’t it known to all magicians that Tui Mateinagata, the Snake-bodied One who hides in gold, was lurking in a cave at Tavua, and that his seven heads of gold and silver would destroy all trespassers? And the witch doctors whispered that the veins would soon play out, for Tui Mateinagata knows how to hide his treasure. There’s the old crab-goddess, too, whose bite is poison; but it is to Dengei, lord of origins and of evil, that the magicians fondly turn. He too is a great serpent, and frequents the caves of Nakauvandra in the north. His magic made and populated Fiji. The god admired two eggs in the nest of the kitu bird, and decided to hatch them himself; the issue was a boy and a girl, whom he separated for five years by the trunk of a giant tree. One day they peeped around the tree and said, “Great Dengei has hatched us that we may people the land.” Dengei, complimented, produced growing things for food, flowers for adornment, fire for cooking. The first humans would have been immortal, but they disobeyed their god and were punished with sickness and death.

Another story of origins is not so flattering to the Fijian who, according to the tale, was born before all others. But he acted wickedly and his skin darkened, so he received little clothing. The people of Tonga,—Polynesians, by the way,—were not so naughty with Dengei, who rationed out clothes to them which kept their skins much lighter. The white man was the great beneficiary. He was born last, behaved like a perfect gentleman, and Dengei rewarded him with so much to wear that his complexion became the beau ideal.

The Polynesians of Tonga say that the gods held a meeting and decided to create humanity. They baked three figures of clay. The first to come out didn’t seem to have baked long enough; he was disagreeably white and looked half-raw. The second was a Tongan, a beautiful olive-brown, and the gods admired him so much that they forgot the third figure until a voice from the oven cried, “I am burning!” Sure enough, the poor fellow was roasted nearly black; so they sent him west and he became a Fijian.

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