Visitants (23 page)

‘Boitoku?’ he said.
‘Ku sasop’.
He is the VC, he talks for the Government.’

‘Yes, but,’ I said, ‘he talks first of all for Dipapa.’

By then the painted men were all together once more in their lines. Their torches were like a path in the middle of the path. Their conches sounded again, and their howls. They began to run.

‘To Olumata,’ I said. ‘Why will they go to Olumata?’

But Benoni did not answer, and when I looked at him he was gazing after the lights going away from us, and the Wayouyo people and Olumata people falling in behind. He was gazing at the crowd that was trotting and running after the painted men, and biting his lip until I felt the pain.

‘Benoni,’ I said to him, ‘what is it?’

‘He will destroy it,’ Benoni said.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Tell me, what will happen?’

‘So that I may not have it,’ he said, shaking his head, as if he had grown very tired. ‘He will destroy everything.’

When we came into Olumata, Saliba and I, long after all the others had arrived there, the fires were just beginning.

But before the flames showed, we heard the noise. Pigs were screaming. They were being hacked to death with bushknives. Chickens were screaming. Boys were wringing their necks. Women and children were screaming, standing outside their houses, watching the fires spread slowly along the damp thatch.

Men with knives were running everywhere. Not only the painted men, but the Wayouyo boys, and many of the Olumata men too. Olumata men were setting fires, cutting down their own fruit-trees, laughing and shouting. Like the painted men, they were shouting: ‘They will come!’ Only the mothers with their children, and the old women who had been dragged from their houses, were crying out and weeping and twisting their hands in front of their eyes.

And Boitoku, the old VC, painted like a skull, the white of his face growing redder as the fires spread, moved among them, telling a story.

There is every reason to believe that the myth-basis of the movement has existed on the island for a very long time. Since my first visit, a year ago, I have been aware of the circulation of stories and traditions apparently influenced by or connected with some millennial cult which may have flourished here during the war years, when Mr MacDonnell was evacuated to Australia, or which may have been introduced (as myths pure and simple) from some area such as Kaga, where there has been an actual outbreak of ‘Vailala madness’ or cargo-cult. I now think that the connection with Kaga has been proved, though I no longer feel certain of the physical reality of the vanished Kaga ‘King’, TAUDOGA.

According to KALETA, an Olumata woman, BOITOKU went among the people who had refused to join in the destruction of their village, telling a ‘story’ intended in part as an explanation of the events they were witnessing. As she told it to me, the story went like this:

‘I will narrate. I will speak of TAUDOGA.

‘A long time ago, TAUDOGA said this. He said: “I am a native, you are natives, the Dimdims are the same as natives. In the olden days our ancestors and their ancestors came here together in two flying-machines. They crashed at Odakuna. So the survivors went into a cave. Oh, their hunger, having nothing to eat. Some died, others ate them. Then they saw that they could never leave the island. So they came up out of the ground and made their villages. They came up, they looked for village-land, they settled, one man after another. They settled the land all the way, as far as the coasts of Dimdim.”

‘TAUDOGA also said this: “So you see, the Dimdims went to Dimdim. But later they became envious. They said: It is our wish to return to Kailuana, to take away the land from the natives.”

‘And TAUDOGA said this: “This year war will break out. After three years, war will be ended, and I will go away.” And that year war with the people of Yapan broke out, and after three years TAUDOGA went away. Nobody can say if he died truly, he went away, that is all.

‘But I am here to tell you this. He will come again. And today, in Wayouyo, we can hear his voice.’

I shouted over the women’s heads: ‘This is gammon, Boitoku. Who is this Taudoga? Where did you hear his voice? Through Misa Makadoneli’s wireless,
ki
?’

But Boitoku just looked at me with his painted face. That old man who used to be like my father to me when I was small, he just looked at me, and I knew from his eyes in their charcoal hollows what my uncle had it in his mind to do.

‘You will come to Wayouyo,’ he called to all the people. ‘You will hear the voice of Taudoga. Dipapa has said.’

And then he went away, towards the entrance to the village, where all the other men were gathering; and one by one the women wandered after, many still crying, talking of something precious that was gone, a pot that the men had broken, or a young pig that they had chopped up and thrown away, or the yam-harvest sizzling under the burning thatch.

So in the end Saliba and I were left alone, at the centre of the circle of fire, with blood and fallen fruit-trees on the ground around us.

‘Salib’,’ I said.

‘I am afraid,’ she said. ‘Beni, I am afraid for you.’

All the village was deep in smoke. The smoke drifted between us, red, and the fires showed in the tears on her skin.

‘Do not be afraid,’ I said. I reached out my arm to touch her shoulders, and then was holding her against my chest. She was crying, and I felt her mouth moving on my skin. My desire was very great, because my fear was great. ‘I will be strong, Salib’,’ I said. ‘O, all will be well.’

I did not want to go back to Wayouyo, I was so happy. I said: ‘Let us go to Rotten Wood, we will tell Misa Makadoneli, he will talk through the wireless to the Dimdims.’ But Benoni said: ‘The Dimdims cannot settle this. This is work for me. Because soon, very soon, Salib’, I shall command the villages.’

Again we were on the path to Wayouyo, and on the high point of the path I saw for the second time the lights by the stones, and a long way off a glow in the sky.

‘It is madness,’ I said. ‘The people have gone mad. There will be famine.’

Now Obomatu is burning,’ Benoni said. ‘They have destroyed two villages. There is only Wayouyo left, and Rotten Wood.’

Then I felt afraid for Misa Makadoneli, and for Naibusi, who had kept his house safe with magic when Dipapa wanted to destroy it, in the Dimdim war. But Benoni was not in a mood to speak, and so I said nothing.

As we came into the boundaries of Wayouyo the mad people were returning from Obomatu. They were running wild through all the parts of the village, whooping and leaping, shouting of the star-machine. Some of them were Obomatu men, still bleeding from the fighting when they had tried to defend their village. But now they too were calling out about the star-people, like the Olumata men, who had helped destroy their own groves and houses, and then had gone to Obomatu and burned that too.

The women who followed them were weeping, and could not understand. They trailed behind the excited men with their children and their old people, crying out and sobbing because of all the things that were gone.

Boitoku ran among them, urging them on. He wanted them to go to where the church was, to hear some talk, some news. Dipapa was there, he said, and would speak to them. And they would hear something else, he said, yes, a thing never heard before. They would hear the talk of Taudoga, a man from the stars, who would come soon, when the world turned over, with cargo.

The church at Wayouyo plays a rather mysterious role in the life of the community. The Methodist Mission on Osiwa Island was established in 1870, and at some time during that decade missionaries visited Kailuana and supervised the building of a church on the site of the present structure. It has been enlarged and rebuilt several times. For about twenty years a Polynesian or Osiwan catechist was in residence. Mr MacDonnell, when he arrived in 1908, immediately established hostile relations with the white missionaries on Osiwa, and his views seem to have spread to the Kailuana villages. The life of the native catechists became increasingly difficult, and after the 1914–18 War no more were sent to the island.

In the years since, however, singing and some form of worship has taken place in the building, often under the direction of someone who could be called, in a general way, a religious leader. BOITOKU, who is the garden magician of a section of Wayouyo, has recently played this part. So, at some time or other, has DIPAPA. What they do during these ceremonies, apart from singing an eerie local version of ‘Daisy, Daisy’, I have not been able to discover. It probably contains an element of Christianity, but certainly they acknowledge no debt to the Bible. There may be a clue in the fact that they claim ‘Daisy, Daisy’ as an invention of their ancestors.

But the church was not the focus of this outbreak. As was known to the main actors in the cult, the ‘painted men’, the centre of activities was the group of stones called Ukula’osi. It is only through the stones that one can explain the suddenness of the hysteria which took hold of the ‘painted men’.

On October 29th a rumour went through the villages that a space-ship had taken away three men living on the island of Budibudi, where they guarded DIPAPA’s betelnut plantation. This seems to have been interpreted (by DIPAPA first, I should say, and later by METUSELA and BOITOKU) as a hopeful sign, a sign that the visitants needed more information about Wayouyo and had taken the men aboard as guides.

When asked why they should connect the stones with the space-ship, all the men implicated said that they had heard of the connection from BENONI, who had heard it from me. I shall have to return to this, obviously.

On October 30th BOITOKU (acting for DIPAPA, I suspect) spread the ‘talk’ through the group which became the hard core of the ‘painted men’. There were perhaps twenty, perhaps, forty of these, all men over 35, and all unfriendly to BENONI. Every one of them would have been familiar with the tradition attached to the stones: that if they were moved, a great wind would destroy the villages, that there would be famine, and that all the people would go mad.

Under the direction of METUSELA (I believe), these men went to the stones at Ukula’osi and moved them.

I consider this sufficient to explain the hysteria. They had expected to be destroyed instantly by a wind, and were not. They had expected to go mad, and in a sense did. They had accepted the possibility of a famine and were easily persuaded to set about creating one.

The stones, which formed a roughly oval pattern, were rearranged in a circle. The ground inside the circle was picked clean of weeds and pebbles, and swept ritually by a magician (presumably BOITOKU), in preparation for the space-craft which was to use it as a landmark.

Later they set about constructing a shed or warehouse for the cargo from the craft. Work continued on this throughout the next three days and nights.

When the violence began on the night of October 31st, it was the ‘painted men’, in their almost intoxicated state, who spearheaded it. But they were very quickly joined by the majority of males in all three villages of Kailuana. I do not believe that this reaction had, at that stage, anything in particular to do with the ‘star-machine’. I believe that myths and traditions of the ‘cargo’ type are part of their experience, of their memory. But I may be wrong. I admit that I have good reason to doubt my own judgement on a number of matters.

After the burning of Obomatu, all returned to Wayouyo, where preparations had been made in and around the church for the next revelation. From this moment it becomes clear that the mind behind the destruction was that of the old chief, DIPAPA.

In the clearing they had lighted a fire. It was the children who were feeding it at first, the small boys, running in out of the dark with bundles of wood and throwing them at the flames so that the sparks puffed upwards. Then they cheered and pushed each other about, full of excitement, but not knowing why or what to do.

All the time men and women were passing them by, going to join the crowd that pressed about the church. They were packed in front of it so thick that you could not see in, and at the sides the walls were bending under the weight of the taller men, who jostled each other to get a sight, over the top of the walls, of the things and the people inside. Their shoulders shone with the firelight and their faces shone with the torches they were staring towards. They would turn back and call and beckon to one another, their faces hot and moved like boys watching a fight.

Through the bodies came a quick, loud, confusing music, that was made, you knew, by people not listening to one another, but hearing only themselves; their own finger-drums, their own panpipes, or moaning to themselves the very old songs whose words nobody understands. It was a sound like I had never heard before, of very hungry, very lonely people. Now and again there was the sound of a conch, hollow and low.

I left Saliba to push my way through the men by the walls, to look in over their shoulders. In front of me, in the middle of the church, my uncle was sitting on a carved stool. The side of his head was towards me, the side with the tattered ear-lobe. He stared over the heads of the crowd at the glow of the fire, making munching movements sometimes with his lips, and twisting his fingers together round the top of an ebony walking-stick carved with the leaves and tendrils of yam-vines.

At each side of him, in two lines, the painted men sat cross-legged on the floor. They had driven their torches into the soft ground and the flames swayed in front of their faces. They were my uncle’s men, all of them, none of them young and none of them friends of mine. Like him, they stared ahead of them, drumming or piping or droning their songs, each one quiet, but together loud and vague like the sea.