The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  16

  A Short Walk in East Kwaio

  Every considerable village or settlement is sure to have some one who can control the weather and the waves, some one who knows how to treat sickness, some one who can work mischief with various charms.

  —R. H. CODRINGTON, The Melanesians

  It was not easy to reach the heathens in East Kwaio. The road across Malaita’s mountainous spine was more like a mud luge track than a road. Descents were easy. Ascents were a problem. The bishop’s truck sank like a hippo in the red clay at the bottom of each hill, and I climbed out and pushed along with Tony and Thomas and the dozen-odd hitchhikers we had collected en route. Derrick would stomp on the gas, the tires would fling great gobs of doughlike mud at our faces, and the truck would lurch from rut to rut, groaning more emphatically with every new bluff. Finally, it refused to advance any farther.

  The boys were outraged and shamed at the thought of my carrying on alone, but they felt better after they had cajoled one of the hitchhikers into guiding me to the coast and carrying my gas jug. (I had brought along five gallons of fuel because there was none left on the east side of Malaita. Without fuel, it would be a long paddle down the coast to the Adventist mission at Atoifi.)

  “Oh, no,” I told the hitcher weakly. “No, yu no kari petrol blong mi,” and then I handed the jug to him. He glared at me and strode off with it. I scurried behind. An hour later, he dumped the jug on the road, accepted a month’s wages for his effort, and disappeared on a side trail. Then I was alone. I balanced the gas jug on my shoulders above my backpack and carried on. The overcast sky began to lose its late-afternoon glow. The mud stuck to the soles of my sandals until they were as heavy as ski boots. I slipped, swore, pulled off the sandals, and trudged on. Tall grass grew like an endless hedge down the middle of the track. I walked through the end of twilight, expecting to see lights around each new bend, but there were no lights, and no sounds other than the rustling of the forest. I pulled out my headlamp and walked into the night. I cursed the road and the disappearing hitchhiker and islanders in general for going to war instead of keeping up their roads. I cursed myself for not simply waiting a week and catching the supply plane to the Atoifi mission.

  Sometime in the middle of the night I saw a faint glow in the forest. I followed it until it became a lamp in the window of a plywood shack. A sign outside the shack announced: Peace Monitoring Council. That was good. The PMC had been formed to encourage militants to give up their guns. Three people answered the door when I knocked: a grandfather, a thickish woman, and a quivering young man. It was too dark to see their faces, but I knew they were good people because they made me a hot cup of tea and offered me a bed and a mosquito net for the night. What a coincidence, they told me when they heard my destination: they would be taking a canoe down to the Atoifi mission in the morning.

  The young man, whose name was Patrick, announced he would tell me a funny story from the time of ethnic tension. Once upon a time, Patrick had worked with his best friend, Chris, at the Shell Oil station in Honiara. When the tension began, Patrick joined the Malaita Eagle Force, but Chris joined the Guadalcanal side, the Isatabu Freedom Movement. That was a real scream, said Patrick, because the Eagles had machine guns while the poor IFM boys had to make do with machetes and homemade pipe guns. Patrick insisted that he and his friends had killed at least sixty-eight Guale boys in Marau, thirty-eight in Kakabona, and twenty-five more in Kombule. He met his best friend again after the fighting was finished. “Chris said to me, ‘Hey, if you had seen me at the battle of Alligator Creek, would you have shot me?’ I told him, of course I would. And it would have been easy, because I had my SR-88, my machine gun, and Chris had to make do with his homemade pipe gun and his prayers! Ha!”

  “Prayers?”

  “Yes, they were all begging their ancestors to protect them from us. It didn’t work. How could magic work against our machine guns?”

  “So you guys didn’t try using magic?”

  “Some of the Eagles did. An old man once came to our bunker with a powerful black stone from Choiseul. He said it would stop the IFM’s guns from firing. That didn’t work, so we decided to pray to God instead. We prayed every morning before our battles.”

  “Surely God wouldn’t help you kill people!”

  “I know, I know,” Patrick said, barely able to contain his laughter. “We didn’t ask Him to help us win. We said, ‘God, we know you are against what we are doing here, but please can you wash us with the blood of Jesus Christ? Can you make us clean again?’”

  “Asking for forgiveness even before you sinned,” I said. “That’s cheating.”

  “I know, it’s crazy, isn’t it? Funi tumas!”

  Morning came, or something like morning. A deep gray glow crept beneath the belly of the overcast sky. It was not bright enough to penetrate the forest along the trail or to transform the oily black hue of the cove we reached after an hour’s walk. The sun never did appear in East Kwaio. When I look back and try to remember scenes from the next few days, the mountains, the people, the mission, the machetes…all these things return to me in a muddy twilight of charcoal, rotting mahogany, and leaden shadows. It was like moving through Atlantis, a world made heavy and cut off from the truth of things by a hundred fathoms of murky jade.

  The peace monitors had arranged for a kanu, which was not a canoe but a fiberglass skiff. We slid out through the mangroves and headed south across still water, skirting the inside of a long barrier reef. East of the reef, there was nothing; we were tracing the rough edge of the world. A storm billowed like a sail under the gray roof of the sky, then swept over us. The sea exploded with raindrops. I hid under my windbreaker and watched the shore. As we droned south, the mountains grew taller and pushed out through the coastal plain so that eventually they thrust directly from the edge of the mangroves. Their slopes were not pristine: the jungle was cut and torn like a mangy scalp, a patchwork of cultivated fields, burned patches, and bare red earth.

  My great-grandfather was captivated and drawn to these mountains when he sailed along the Malaitan coast in 1892. “I could discern columns of smoke rising here and there in the recesses of the valleys. I pictured the rivers running down from the folded hills, and thought how cool the air must feel far up there above the heated plains by the shore. No white man had ever penetrated these recesses: that was the wonderful thought.”

  There may have been a grave beauty to the place, but what I felt was an immense hostility, as though the bush itself was urging me to keep my distance. I was not sure if this feeling came from the moment itself or from the history I had read, because the first white men to actually penetrate these hills brought with them a legacy worse than death.

  The Kwaio version of this history would have been forgotten outside the bush had survivors not passed the details on to Roger Keesing, an anthropologist who lived among them in the 1960s. Before he died in 1993, Keesing and historian Peter Corris wrote down this story of Malaita’s last stand against empire. I carried it with me. Lightning Meets the West Wind charted the collision that would define Kwaio culture for a century.

  In the old days, wrote Keesing, the Kwaio hills were ruled not by chiefs but by ramo, warrior leaders whose power and wealth lay in their ability to collect and distribute blood money. The ramo were frequently assassins, quite willing to commit murder in order to exact vengeance on wrongdoers, to enforce the rigid codes of Kwaio conduct, or simply to collect bounty. They were generous givers of feasts and sacrifices to the ancestors, and therefore favored by the spirits. The most powerful ramo of all was Basiana, a warm and constant family man who also happened to have executed a score of people. He killed adulterers and thieves. He killed when he was insulted. He killed a cousin because the man had wrongly eaten part of a sacrificial pig. Basiana was proud, stubborn, and ruthless, and he surrounded himself with warriors armed with Snider rifles. The ancestors favored him.

  Kwaio life under the ramo was not especially peaceful, but the p
eople’s good relationship with the ancestors brought certainty and contentment. All this began to change in the 1920s, when the colonial government demanded a yearly head tax—in pounds sterling, no less—from all able-bodied men. Since islanders were still trading in shell money and pigs, the tax forced them to work on white plantations, which was exactly why it had been introduced. The ramo saw this as a direct challenge to their rule.

  The man charged with collecting the tax was the British district officer William Bell, a tough bastard with a hot temper. Bell had spent years trying to pacify the Malaitan warlords. Those who would not give up their violent ways were caught and hanged. Like Basiana, Bell was proud, stubborn, and ruthless. Like Basiana, he surrounded himself with armed men, though his were a constabulary of Christian converts. And like Basiana, he was thought to positively reek with mana. Bell and Basiana knew each other’s reputations. They were destined for a confrontation.

  Basiana watched as his neighbors to the north and the west were subjugated. He watched them forsake their ancestors in favor of the white man’s god. As Bell’s power and notoriety grew, the coastal Christians taunted the Kwaio ramo. Missa Bello will make women of you all, they said.

  In 1927 word drifted down the coast that Bell was coming to Sinalagu Harbor to demand not just the head tax but all the rifles in Kwaio. This was too much to ask. Not only were rifles sacred (Basiana’s had been consecrated to a warrior ancestor), but Bell had armed the coastal headmen who were loyal to him. The loss of their rifles would render the Kwaio ramo impotent and would mean the end of their sovereignty. Basiana called his fellow ramo together and made his case for an attack on Bell. Those who had traveled into the white man’s world begged him not to do it. “The white people aren’t the same,” warned a man who had once been interned in the colonial prison. “If we kill them, our homeland will be finished. No child will be left, no woman will be left. They’ll destroy everything.” Basiana would not be denied his last stand. He reminded the ramo of the strength of their ancestors. Weapons were gathered, and priests killed dozens of pigs to enlist the ancestors’ support.

  Word of the impending attack tumbled down the mountainsides. When Bell arrived in Sinalagu Harbor, his coastal allies warned him to stay on his ship. Just shoot the bushmen on sight, suggested his Malaitan constables. Ignoring them, Bell went ashore, arranged the constables in and around his tax house, sat down behind a table at the front of the building, and opened his ledgers. A long line of warriors carrying rifles, clubs, spears, bows, and arrows appeared on the mountainside above. Basiana’s men numbered at least two hundred. They screamed fearfully, but everyone knew that only two or three of their rifles were actually capable of firing, while Bell had a modern arsenal of two dozen rifles and two revolvers.

  The warriors formed a line in front of Bell’s table. Basiana concealed his rifle between his arm and his torso. He worked his way forward, surrounded by his kinsmen. Bell looked up from his scroll just in time to see Basiana raise his rifle butt with both hands and bring it down toward his head as though he was chopping wood. The district officer’s skull exploded. His body went limp. Then the Kwaio warriors swarmed, cutting down Bell’s party with a hail of spear, knife, and ax blows. Within minutes, Bell’s assistant and thirteen loyal constables were dead. The clearing was strewn with blood, guts, and limbs. Only two of the attackers were killed. It was a glorious victory for Basiana. It was also his last.

  Enemies both white and black salivated at the chance to exact revenge on the Kwaio. Hundreds of Malaitans volunteered to help avenge Bell and the dead policemen. Dozens of white planters and traders came forward, too. Within two weeks, an Australian warship steamed into Sinalagu Harbor. A punitive expedition of 50 sailors, 50 native police, 25 white volunteers, and 120 native carriers marched into the Kwaio hills. Villages were torched. Pigs were shot. Chemical defoliant was sprayed onto vegetable gardens. After six weeks the Australian navals retreated to Sydney, leaving the native police—most were Kwara’ae, the Kwaio’s bitterest enemies—to administer justice. Now the Kwaio apocalypse began in earnest.

  The native police used their new authority and firepower to exact vengeance for grievances going back generations. Dozens of Kwaio were shot. The female relatives of Bell’s killers were gang-raped. Some police hacked off the hands and feet of the dead, piled them on the corpses, then called out tauntingly to the victims’ ancestors. Sacrificial stones were defiled. Ancestral relics and drums were smashed and burned. Skulls were taken from shrines and thrown into women’s menstruation huts. This humiliation of Kwaio ancestors was the most devastating crime of all. Everyone knew that angry ancestors punished only their own descendants.

  Basiana surrendered and was hanged with five of his allies. More than sixty other Kwaio were shot or hacked to death, and thirty died of dysentery in jail. But half a century later, Roger Keesing’s informants put the death toll in the hundreds, because after the destruction of their shrines, the Kwaio were effectively abandoned by their ancestors for generations. Sacrifices stopped working. People fell ill. Taro stopped growing. Hundreds of people starved.

  The apocalypse was both physical and metaphysical. The mountains still exuded sadness and hostility. No wonder I felt something like anger sweeping down from amid the sheets of hot rain.

  The Seventh-day Adventist mission appeared on a bluff above the ocean, its tin roofs glistening like broken glass in the dull light. We tied up to a pier made from a heap of coral rock and hiked up toward the mission and its hospital. The Adventist compound was a jarringly ordered collection of offices, verandas, and hedgerows in complete discord with the tangle of vines and gardens that cradled it. A generator thrummed somewhere out of sight. A line of children in white shirts filed out of a cement-block church.

  The screen door of a bungalow swung open, and a white woman emerged, her white dress billowing around her ankles. “Come in! Come in! Your lunch is ready,” she bellowed.

  I obeyed, and the door slammed shut behind me. The Adventists had been expecting me: I had radioed before leaving Auki, hoping to track down an Australian reputed to have strong connections with the Kwaio. This was not him. This was Geri Gaines, wife of one of the volunteer doctors at the mission hospital. I was transfixed by her. Her face was flushed with the heat. She was tall and broad, and so were her good intentions. We held hands as Geri said grace. Lunch was a hallucination from daytime television. Squeezable bottles of ketchup and processed cheese formed the centerpiece. Geri presented a great mound of Kraft Dinner, which filled the room with an electric orange glow. Then came a plate of chocolate chip cookies. It was heaven.

  “We’re here for three months—you don’t think we’re gonna eat yams the whole time, do you?” Geri said, squeezing a glistening slug of cheese onto her plate. “I had our food flown in all the way from El Aye!”

  I told Geri I wanted to head into the Kwaio bush. She reached for my wrist and shook her head sadly.

  “The pagans,” she said. “Such a shame. Those poor people are so close to the mission, but they reef-yoos to change. They reef-yoos to progress. And do you know why? They are too scared of their devil-devils, that’s why.” Anyway, it wasn’t a good time to go see the pagans, Geri said. Better to stay at the mission. There would be eight hours of worship tomorrow, it being Saturday.

  “But why is it a bad time to see the pagans?” I asked.

  “Lordy, where do I start?” said Geri. “First, they’ve got a dead devil priest to deal with up there. Then there’s the Italian mess—”

  “Italians?”

  “They were fools, as far as I could see. They had it coming to them. And, oh look, here’s our David.”

  David MacLaren looked as though he had been plucked from a Queensland cattle station: all scruffy beard, crow’s feet, and sharp blue eyes. He quivered with nervous dingo energy. He glanced at our Kraft Dinner and gave me a knowing wink. Then he closed his eyes and said a whispered grace.

  David was my connection. He had been popping in and out
of East Kwaio country for a decade, first to work as chief pathologist at the hospital, then as part of a touring open-heart surgery team, and now to study the place as part of his master’s thesis in public health.

  The Adventists ran the only proper hospital on Malaita, David said, but they had a problem. They offered medical services for two Solomon dollars (about the price of two coconuts), but the bush Kwaio still could not afford to set foot in the place. Why? Everything about the hospital—its architecture, its procedures, its toilets, its staff—violated Kwaio kastom.

  Some examples: the hospital was a two-story building, but the ancestors forbade Kwaio men to walk under any structure where women had walked. Men’s rooms happened to share the same roof as the maternity ward; this was an outrage, as a Kwaio man should never enter a women’s delivery house. The hospital toilets were impressively hygienic, but they were also under that same roof; asking a Kwaio to sleep in such a building was like asking him to sleep inside an outhouse. Then there was the issue of bodily fluids: the Kwaio knew that sink water, which contained human saliva, mingled with toilet water somewhere in the hospital’s drains. Fluid from one’s mouth could not be mixed with shit-shit. No way. If a Kwaio entered such a sacrilegious building, he would insult the ancestors so much that they would withdraw their magic protection: gardens would fail, misfortune would spread through his village, sickness and disease would follow. He would have to sacrifice a dozen or more pigs to placate the dead. A hospital visit could cost a decade of accumulated wealth, not to mention future favors.