J K McCarthy in his Patrol into Yesterday
stated that "the Kukukuku tribes had a deserved reputation as the
most bloodthirsty and vicious in New Guinea." And this description
of them was still valid when I lived among the Kukukuku in the early
1970's. Sinclair in The Outside Man said the Kukukuku "roamed
a vast domain of windswept mountains and open grass valleys from the
Papuan Gulf to the Morobe gold fields, so totally dreaded by their
neighbours, that the very appearance of a raiding party of the
little men.... was sufficient to panic entire districts." And he was
right.
In the centre of the heartland of Kukukuku
country, was the Government station of Menyamya. The station
straddled the hub of a four spoked wheel, a crossroads for
pedestrian traffic spilling out of each of four river valley systems
which converged there, on the grassy river flats. It was the
frontier of four traditionally hostile groups; a place of suspicion,
where tempers flared, and people clashed in periodic outbursts of
violence. And although not one Kukukuku ever attacked any of my
patrols or ever raised a finger in anger against me, they treated
each other with the utmost savagery and brutality.
The Kukukuku had the most amazing value system.
For although life to them was cheap, property was sacred. For
example, one brother might kill another over a simple dispute
relating to which of them should go and fetch the firewood. Yet, at
the same time that this dispute was in progress there would be
stacked along the road beside their house, a heap of government
shovels, picks, axes and other road making equipment which neither
of them would ever dream of stealing. In fact, the Kukukuku often
left their own personal items of value beside a road for safe
keeping. The theory was that as it was a Government road, nobody
would steal from the Government, so the safest place to leave
anything of value was beside a road.
In fact, at one time, the lock on the Government
store broke, and I never got around to replacing it for about six
months. In the meantime, the door banged open and shut in the high
winds of Menyamya, revealing all our prison rations and road tools
and a hundred other items of value. The Kukukuku could have crept
into the store one night and stolen the lot, yet nothing was ever
taken. Finally I was goaded into fixing the lock because I thought
the auditors might have taken a dim view of my unsecured assets.
But like charity, which begins at home, so does
violence among the Kukukuku. A Kukukuku girl tempts fate, simply by
getting married, and doubly tempts it if she becomes a co-wife. The
probability of a Kukukuku girl passing through life without ever
being stabbed, beaten or grievously injured, either by a co-wife,
somebody else’s wife, or her own husband, is nil. There is no
chivalry among the Kukukuku.
So if they did this to their own loved ones, in
their own families, you can imagine how they treated strangers.
Violence to the Kukukuku was part of life.
Menyamya was the only station I was ever on where
the police were relatively ineffective outside the station
boundaries. They were terrified of the Kukukuku, and for good
reason. The Kukukuku tactics of surprise, ambush, and arson were
easy for the Kukukuku to arrange, and almost impossible for the
police to prevent.
Even when pursued, the Kukukuku could easily
evade the police by bounding up and down the grassy slopes like
mountain goats, and they could hide in their mountain grasslands
simply by curling up inside their bark cloaks, like a turtle. In
totally open country, with no trees around for miles, half a dozen
Kukukuku could be huddled in their bark cloaks nearby, and you would
never know.
Unless you were also a Kukukuku, that is, and I
very soon learned how to administer law and order in the high
grasslands of Menyamya. Working on the principle of setting a thief
to catch a thief, I achieved some remarkable results. On one
occasion the police in Lae were searching for a particular Kukukuku
wanted for a brutal murder there. He fled back to Menyamya, thinking
that in the remote wilderness which he called home, he would be safe
from arrest.
And he would have been, if I had used traditional
police methods to search for him, because he simply would have
outsmarted us, and outmanoeuvred us.
So I called in one of the Tultuls and asked him
did he know this man. Yes, said the Tultul, but nobody knows where
he is. I opened the safe and put $20 on my desk.
"You can have that, if you bring him to me." I
said.
"OK," he said, "We’ll go and kill him, and bring
him back here tomorrow." He said it without hesitation, believing
that I was sending him out on a typical Kukukuku raid which,
according to their custom, only had one intended consequence, and
that was the death of the person sought.
"No," I said, "If you bring him back dead, I
won’t pay. You must bring him in alive, totally unharmed." The
Tultul looked at me as if I had gone insane.
"Alive?" he queried, "Why? It’s easier to bring
him back dead."
"I know it is," I said patiently, "just take him
prisoner."
"Prisoner?" the Tultul asked, unable to believe
his ears, " We don’t take prisoners, Kiap. You know that. We kill
our enemies."
"I know that," I said, trying to reason with his
Kukukuku logic. "But he is not your enemy or my enemy. He is wanted
by the police in Lae, and we need to deliver him there alive."
"OK, Kiap," the Tultul said, with total disbelief
in the strange ways of the Government, "We’ll bring him in alive."
And they did.
And he was not the only Kukukuku I paid to keep
alive. During the national elections, we had to take photographs of
our candidates, so that they would be easily recognised by the
voters. I sent word for all the candidates to come to Menyamya to be
photographed, and they all came, except one. And as the deadline
drew near for the printing of the ballot papers with the photographs
thereon, the Chief Electoral Officer was frantic. He called me twice
a day from Moresby, asking for the photograph of the last candidate.
Knowing this candidate must have received my
urgent messages, I could not understand why he did not come to
Menyamya for his photograph. At the same time, I was curious at the
continual presence of six Kukukuku warriors observing the station
from the height of a grassy knoll, across the river, beside the road
to Wau. I did not see any connection until one day two of the
warriors visited my office. They were fierce looking little men,
grass skirted, bark cloaked, each with a bone through his nose and a
stone club in his belt.
"We thought we better tell you, Kiap," one said,
"you can stop waiting for that candidate, because he won’t be coming
in."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because he stole my wife, and he knows I will
kill him." And in a few quick words he told me that they had been
staking out the entrance to the station, waiting for the candidate
to come. But the candidate you see, who was also a Kukukuku, knew
that they were waiting for him. So, for as long as they laid in wait
for him, I would not get my photograph.
It was pointless trying to tell a Kukukuku not to
kill anyone, on the grounds that murder is wrong, sinful, or
unlawful. The missionaries had been doing that for years, with no
success. For the Kukukuku, murder was an ordinary consequence of
their ordinary violent life. But they would listen to reason.
"I can see we both have a problem," I told the
warriors. "You want to kill him and I want to photograph him, and
for as long as he knows you are waiting for him, he won’t be either
photographed or killed." They nodded in agreement. I tried my
Kukukuku logic again by suggesting that we work together to solve
this problem. But how can we solve it together they asked.
Simple, I said, if you go away long enough to let
him come into the station, I will photograph him here, and you can
kill him when he leaves. Good idea, they agreed, and they rejoined
their comrades on the hill to convey this news.
Next day, the warriors were nowhere to be seen,
and the frightened candidate scurried into Menyamya where I took his
photograph, one day before the deadline.
The Chief Electoral Officer was relieved, and
that drama was now over.
But of course I still had the other problem, of
how to keep the candidate alive. The warriors were still out of
sight but I knew they were lurking in the grass somewhere, just off
the station, waiting for the candidate to leave. The candidate of
course also knew that.
So I called him into my office and told him of
the deal I had made with the warriors on the hill. He thanked me for
helping him to have the photograph taken in time, then asked
nervously how he could now leave the station alive. "We’ll make
another deal with them," I said.
I mounted my horse and rode off the station along
the road to Wau. I stopped near the grassy knoll and waited...and
waited...and waited. After I had been there about an hour, three
Kukukuku heads popped up out of the grass nearby. "Well, Kiap," one
said, "we heard you have taken the photograph. When will he be
leaving the station?"
"I have another problem," I told them. "If you
kill the candidate, it will annul the election in this electorate,
and we will be forced to have a by-election for Menyamya after the
main election has been finalised. Can we make some arrangement to
let him live, at least until after the election?" They talked about
this for a while in their own language, then suddenly, the aggrieved
husband said, "Six dollars."
"Six dollars?" I confirmed, "to let him live
until after the election?" And they nodded in agreement.
Don’t laugh, because it was not funny. It was
deadly serious. Remember that for the Kukukuku, life is cheap. So if
they don’t care about killing people, it is just as cheap for the
Kukukuku to save a life as it is to take one.
I happened to have some money in my pocket at the
time, and I counted out six dollars. Still astride my horse, I
passed it over to the nearest warrior. Then it was their turn to
have a problem. "We don’t want you to pay, Kiap," they said,
"we want him to pay."
"He will pay me," I said, "before he leaves the
station." And he did.
And I watched from my office window, as he took
the longest half mile walk in his life, as he passed the grassy
knoll where he knew that they were lurking. It was all part of their
cunning strategy you see. He knew it would have been easy for them
to kill him, and for him it would then have all been over quickly.
But to let him live, was to let him suffer, for he would never know
when that swift blow from the stone club would come. And for them,
it was the best six dollars they ever had.
They let him live, long after the election, and
years later in Port Moresby he thanked me for saving his life with
six dollars. But even then, he was not to know in the windswept
grasslands of Menyamya where his life was just as cheap as anyone
else’s, when death would come swiftly from a single blow of a
Kukukuku stone club.
A Kukukuku stone club is one of my most cherished
possessions, a souvenir of how cheap life there really was. I was
sitting at my desk at Menyamya one day, looking out the window
towards the Papuan border, when two Kukukuku warriors approached
each other on the footpath outside my office. They were in
traditional dress - bark cloak, grass skirt, and stone club. And as
they passed each other on the footpath, one said something to the
other, then, as quick as a flash, whipped out his stone club from
his belt and smashed the other’s skull like an eggshell.
As the dead man dropped to the footpath, police
on duty at the office rushed at the assailant and arrested him.
Moments later, they brought him into my office, together with the
blood stained club.
With two Chimbu policemen towering above him, one
on either side, each holding him by one arm, this fierce little man
stared defiantly at me. No doubt he was taking comfort from the
certain fact that if this incident had occurred off the station, no
number of policemen ever would have caught him. For out there in his
mountain domain he would have bounded up the slopes like a mountain
goat, never to be seen again. But here, on the station, isolated
from the protection of his windswept grasslands, he was powerless
before the law. Powerless, but unafraid.
As there were so many witnesses to this incident,
I did not bother to caution him. Instead, I only sought a reason.
"We all saw that," I said to the Kukukuku
warrior, "why did you do it?"
"Well, Kiap," he said in Pidgin, in words to this
effect "I don’t really know him, but I said hello to him as he
passed. When he didn’t reply, I thought maybe he did not hear me, or
maybe he did hear me but did not reply because he might belong to a
clan which is a traditional enemy of mine. If that had been the
case, he might have tried to kill me. So I killed him first."
"You mean you didn’t know if he really would have
killed you?" I asked.
"I didn’t know," he said, "but I couldn’t take
the risk. So I killed him before he could have killed me."
You see, it was not a case of kill or be
killed, it was a case of kill lest you might be
killed. It was the Kukukuku basic philosophy of survival, and I
had just witnessed life at the edge, Kukukuku style.
"You’ll go to jail for this," I told him gently.
"I will," he agreed, "but I will live, and he has
died, and it could have been the other way around."
And it could have been. But neither he, nor you
and I will ever know, and for a Kukukuku, it doesn’t matter anyway.
But in the land where life was cheap, property
was sacred. That stone club of course became a court exhibit, and
after the court was over, I wanted to keep it as a souvenir, but I
did not want that Kukukuku to think that I had stolen his club. So
the day before he was due to be taken to the Corrective Institution
at Lae to serve out his sentence, I called him into my office and
showed him the club.
"This is your club," I said to him, "and I should
give it back to you when your sentence is finished. But I will be
leaving Menyamya soon, on transfer to Wabag, and I won’t be here
when you come back. In any case," I added, "I would like to take
your club with me, as a souvenir of Menyamya. If I can buy it, I
will leave the money here in a bank account for you when you return.
Will you sell it to me?"
"No," he said, and momentarily I was
disappointed, until he continued, "I will give it to you, Kiap." And
then he added, "you might need it some day."
And he was right, because it was that club which
inspired this story.
And that club hangs on the wall beside me as I type this page, a
lasting memory of the Kukukuku, and the windswept grasslands where
they lived; where living was harsh, and life was cheap, in some of
the most magnificent mountain scenery in the world.
