The colonial era known in the pidgin language as “Taim Bilong Masta” ended nearly two decades ago, but Papuan tribes still believe they deserve a share of the goodies flown in by the white man’s metal birds.
Foreign oil and mining companies that fly supplies into these remote highlands have become reluctant rich uncles for tribe members who speared and sometimes ate their enemies until a generation ago. Today’s warriors use arrows, guns and threats to press demands for more handouts.
Chevron Oil Co. already has spent $3 million for such things as schools, medical aid posts and sports facilities for the natives. This month it completed a $50 million access road. The company employs a 35-member social service staff-a group larger than its drillers and engineers.
Each month Chevron staffers deliver checks for land rights to the grass huts of the headmen of 49 tribal clans.
“If we didn’t spend this money we’d be out of business,” says Chevron’s manager, Chris Angus. “We don’t like it. We are an oil company and our business is not playing government. But since there are no public services around our wells, everyone comes to us.”
Foreign oil and gold-mining companies are the successors to the Australian colonialism that ended in 1975. They provide nearly all of the $1.1 billion revenue for this country of 4 million people. They also have inherited the demands for alms from the 730 tribes who occupy a country a little bit bigger than California.
The firms must deal with the 1990s version of cargo cults.
A few decades ago, tens of thousands of nearly naked tribesmen lined the airstrips, convinced that the white man’s planes brought gifts from the celestial spirit world of their ancestors.
Some tribal chiefs even built landing tracks with offices attached in which their warriors shoveled mock documents back and forth, certain that by imitating the white man’s habits they would lure the fat-bellied planes and their wares.
The cults were born during World War II when tribesmen in the steep forested valleys – cut off from the rest of the world for centuries – first saw Allied planes drop supplies into their jungles. Later they watched the aircraft of their Australian colonial masters disgorge seemingly endless goods from the sky.
But when the whites kept the goods for themselves, irate cult leaders, who had been converted to Christianity by missionaries, suggested that the newcomers had torn out the first page of the Bible, that part of Genesis which said God was a Papuan.
Diplomats and officials in Port Moresby, the capital 250 miles to the south, admit that politicians, witch doctors and shamans still use the cults to intimidate foreign investors and obtain better deals for mining and logging rights.
A fence now surrounds the mountain-ringed Goroka airport where cultists once lingered by the runway in the belief that the ancestors were sending them supplies. “They were never disappointed when the planes carried nothing for them. They would simply say, `Perhaps tomorrow,’ ” recalled James Branga, a vocational instructor who stood among them.
But astute tribal youths don’t want to wait for the miracle.
Historian Maclaren Hiari says cargo cults today take several forms. People in his home province still believe in the Yeli Wan cult. They believe that if they adore a concrete peg driven into the ground on a mountaintop by their ancestors, they planes will come.
“Shamans have told people to take food to the graves of their relatives in the belief that if they fed them they will sent cargos. There was a cult recently when a young guy convinced his village that through sexual orgies with young girls the ancestors could be stimulated into sending goods. The poor girls were lured into men’s huts and locked up for weeks,” Hiari recounts.
What has survived is the firm belief that white men have acquired their wealth and their machines from a secret spirit world.
The new generation is impatient for its share.
They want their share of white wealth.
Just north of Lake Kutubu in the southern highlands, Chevron has pumped 130,000 barrels of crude a day since last summer, providing one-third of Papua New Guinea’s revenue and half of its tax payments.
Yet each day more than a hundred natives come to ask for “benefits” which may range from money to cures to free flights to a capital that cannot be reached by road. Some of the demands are coupled with threats.
“Basically they would all like a satellite dish and a four-wheel drive, but we draw the line,” says Angus.
But his company is vulnerable. It has a 150-mile underground pipeline running to the terminal in the Gulf of Papua and a $1 billion investment that surpasses the total of U.S. investments in India.
Chevron is not alone. Farther north in the highlands, the lucrative Porgera Gold Mine run by Placer Niugini employs a staff of 75 “community workers” to keep the natives happy. It too has a billion-dollar investment to protect.
“It’s strange when a mining company has to do marriage counseling, organize sports tournaments, teach basketball techniques and show tribesmen how to cultivate new crops and teach them pidgin English,” said general manager Vic Botts. “We came here as engineers and find ourselves in social services.”
Placer has built a $5 million hospital and spent $6 million on roads, bridges, schools, water supplies and generators for a surrounding population of 230,000 people. These are budgeted expenses for a gold mine which is among the world’s top four. Papua New Guinea is the world’s sixth largest gold producer.
The companies moan but make good profits. Their apparent generosity has a logical explanation: fear of a disaster like the one in 1989 when secessionists started a civil war on the copper-rich eastern island of Bouganville.
That conflict has since caused the death of hundreds and has maimed thousands. It blew up after both the government in Port Moresby and the Australian operators of the copper mine ignored fresh claims over land ownership and demands for a fairer compensation.
The mine has been closed for the last four years and Bougainville, off limits to visitors, has become an impoverished island under siege by Papuan soldiers fighting a guerrilla war against the left-wing Bougainville Revolutionary Army.
“Nobody wants this to happen again,” said Botts, who agrees that Papua New Guinea has a growing law-and-order problem. He says the country’s educated youths are angry and resentful that they can’t find jobs. “It’s the same problem as in Los Angeles,” he said.
Papua New Guinea is perhaps the most expensive country in the Pacific Rim. The costs of food, air fares and hotel rooms easily outstrip those of the U.S. and Australia. Fear of crime has prompted nearly every expatriate to live behind razor-wire fences charged with high-voltage electricity.
With labor costs high and any attempt at manufacturing futile since it can not compete on Asia’s cheap labor market, the cargo cults may remain the only way to extract more handouts from a white race that-so the local shamans say-keeps the formula of its wealth a well-guarded secret.
