Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Nearly a week later, the men found a native who could count to ten in English, and the next day, another who managed to convey that there was a settlement called “Tawmillie” only a few miles ahead. The river by now had braided into many channels, the whole current several hundred yards across.

  At 11 AM the following day, in early July, the exhausted party suddenly came in sight of “a large frame building and several sheds, with new lumber all about.” “Tawmillie” resolved itself into the native’s attempt to pronounce “sawmill.” From the building emerged a white man covered in sawdust. His name was Charles McKinnon, and he was astonished to learn about the journey the newly arrived team had completed.

  “What is the name of this river we have come down?” was one of the first questions I asked.

  “The Purari,” answered McKinnon. “You must have struck it a little south of the Papuan border. It’s supposed to rise somewhere in that neighborhood.”

  Leahy detailed the party’s wanderings over the last few weeks. “Then the map is all cockeyed, and you’ve found a new river,” said McKinnon. “Come on in and have some civilized food for a change.”

  An easy four-mile hike finally brought the whole team to the settlement of Port Romilly on the southern coast, where the Purari flows into the Gulf of Papua.

  Leahy and Dwyer and their porters had completed an epic journey, making the first recorded traverse of New Guinea at its widest extent. Had the leaders and porters alike not been so good at living off the land, it is entirely possible the whole team might have perished. Hoping only for gold, Leahy and Dwyer had made the accidental discovery of a vast highland population of natives who until 1930 thought they were the only human beings in the world. Yet to Leahy and Dwyer, the voyage had been a failure, since they had found not a single stream bearing commercially viable traces of gold.

  Despite the dramatic if understated account of the expedition that Leahy would publish in The Land That Time Forgot in 1937, his pioneering journey has been relegated to a historical footnote. In Gavin Souter’s excellent chronicle of exploration in the world’s second largest island, New Guinea: The Last Unknown, the monumental traverse accomplished by Leahy, Dwyer, and their fifteen Waria teammates occupies less than a page.

  We who were born too late . . . Do we envy the luck of Leahy and Dwyer, who stumbled upon an unknown civilization? Do we wish we could have marched toward Tenochtitlan with Cortés?

  As mentioned above, one of my adolescent fantasies was to be part of an expedition that made first contact with natives somewhere in an unexplored corner of the globe. As a pipe dream, that was not in the league with my desire to find a blank on the map—to reach the summit of a nameless mountain, to traverse an unknown desert. But in my ongoing scheme of a future life as an explorer, why not combine the two? Be the first to trade sign language with a tribe of people who had never seen humans with white skin, as I steered my course, in Kipling’s words, toward “something lost behind the ranges”?

  I doubt that many boys and girls growing up in the twenty-first century share the fantasy that was so real to me as an adolescent. (My role in that imagined scenario, of course, was a heroic one. I would have been the captain who persuaded Cortés to spare Moctezuma. In another daydream, an airplane on which I was a passenger crashed in the mountains, and I hiked solo out to the nearest road to summon the rescuers.)

  Yet a hunger for the exotic stirs even the most jaded city dweller today. On a magazine assignment in the 1990s, I sailed aboard a cruise ship that embarked from the southern tip of South America on a three-week tour of the Antarctic peninsula. My fellow passengers, nearly all Americans in their sixties and seventies, had internalized the travel company’s promise that they were launched on “the adventure of a lifetime.” The exotica they trained their telephoto lenses on day after day turned out to be penguins rather than natives, but the fact that the strutting birds somehow resembled clumsy humans wearing tuxedos, and that my companions had never before seen a penguin outside of a zoo, fueled a yen not all that different from the dream of first contact.

  Certain peoples living on the margins of mainstream society serve today as exemplars of “primitive” tribes that have resisted acculturation. Think of the Hopi in Arizona, the Inuit in Greenland, the Sherpas in Nepal. No lifeway in the world more neatly fills the niche of the “exotic” and the “unspoiled” than the Maasai of East Africa.

  In 1982, on another magazine assignment, I joined a group run by a commercial adventure travel company touring the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater in northern Tanzania. The great draw for the clients, of course, was wildlife. The trip was, inevitably, billed as a safari, though the game we brought home was not lions hunted with guns but giraffes and wildebeest apprehended with long lenses. Several of the travelers had life lists of animals to tick off. Peter, our guide, told me how a client on a previous safari had complained that the whole trip was a waste of time because the company had failed to scare up a leopard, the most elusive of Serengeti beasts.

  During our tour, for an “add-on” charge of four dollars a head, we spent an afternoon visiting a Maasai village. Inside the thorn fence that delineates the settlement, the four-foot-high dwellings in which the natives lived were clustered. Each enkaji is made of a framework of branches plastered over with cow dung. We were invited to crawl inside one of these hovels, then sit on the dirt floor as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. The smell, the closeness of women and goats lounging on straw pallets, the strange intimacy of the place seemed to overwhelm my companions, who were only too eager to escape. When our host, Samwell, offered us fresh milk in a calabash cleansed with cow urine, no one drank.

  Ouside the enkaji, the clients tried to take photos of the “warriors,” clad in red calico shukas, leaning on their spears, but the Maasai demanded a small fee for each snapshot. Later that day I overheard the patriarch of a family of four in our group lecture his fifteen-year-old son on the principles of bargaining with natives. His dicta included “Size up your opponent” and “Stand on your maximum.”

  My good friend Judi Wineland, cofounder of Thomson Safaris, runs package tours in Tanzania and many other countries. Back in 1978, she founded Overseas Adventure Travel, the first American outfit to bring clients to the Serengeti. Born with an itch to explore, Judi had taught high school anthropology before starting her company. She hoped to pass on to her clientele her passion for travel to exotic places. In the early 1990s, Judi led a group of American women to Tanzania on an idealistic if short-lived effort to experience the Maasai way of life firsthand.

  “The idea,” she says, “was to do all the things Maasai women have to do in their daily life. So we gathered firewood from far beyond the village, and fetched water, and even milked their cows. It’s incredibly hard work. I wanted the group to build an enkaji. It went fine as we tied the poles together to make the skeletal structure. But then we had to collect the cow poop and smear it onto the framework.

  “None of the women except me would touch the cow dung. I was gobsmacked.

  “Then I asked the women to spend the night in the enkaji. They couldn’t do it. They all went back to our tented camp. I decided to go ahead and sleep Maasai-style. It was very dark inside, and hotter than hell, with a fire going. There were other women sleeping in my bed, and baby cows inside, pooping and dropping all night. I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t breathe. I tried to lie with my mouth near one of the smoke holes poked in the walls. It was pretty intense.”

  Judi’s experiment, needless to say, went nowhere. Yet still today, Thomson Safaris clients interact with the Maasai during their tours of Tanzania. “But it’s really hard for tourists to buy into true cultural relativism,” she says. “We had one guy who was determined to end the practice of clitoridectomy. ‘It has to happen sooner, not later,’ he insisted. ‘These women are being mutilated. We need to start a revolution all over Africa.’

  “Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t just walk into another culture and walk out. You can�
�t come in and tell the Maasai, ‘We can fix this for you.’ I told the guy that. He thought I was horrible.

  “I’m not in favor of female genital mutilation in any form. But change has to be gradual, and the Maasai have to want change in order for change to happen. That’s why we support education as a remedy, not a ‘revolution.’ ”

  In 2017 the Maasai continue to serve the need tourists seem to feel to expose themselves to a way of life utterly different from their own. But the “Maasai experience” comes packaged in a way that minimizes the squeamishness and indignation outsiders feel when they cede control of the encounter.

  Olpopongi is a visitor center in northern Tanzania that calls itself a “Maasai cultural village and museum.” Tourists stop for a day or an overnight stay in hopes of acquiring an in-depth understanding of these herders and hunters, despite the brevity of their visit. If you can believe their enthusiastic reports on such sites as TripAdvisor, this patently artificial replica of the Maasai way of life delivers the goods. One tourist raves about having had “the typical ‘Chai’ (tea) with the ‘Bibi’ (grandma) in a real Maasai hut.” Another waxes rhapsodic about how clean the hut was, “with . . . full flushing toilets and running hot water showers.” A third visitor comments that “it made the experience that much more authentic to sleep in the hut on a raised bed. Mosquito net included, of course.” Another describes the village as “a truly unique part of east African culture without all the fake tourist packaging . . . the real thing.”

  The key words embedded in these trip reports are “real” and “authentic.” If any of the clients recognized the corruption of Maasai culture crystallized in such sideshows as Olpopongi, they kept quiet about it. That dancing for tourists and hawking souvenirs had replaced hunting for game and gathering medicinal plants in the Maasai way of life, or that an “authentic” Maasai hut came equipped with flush toilets, showers, and mosquito netting, embodied an irony that was largely lost on the clients.

  The Olpopongi formula is hardly a new one. In 1902, when the Fred Harvey company opened its Indian Building in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Navajos and Puebloans were hired to make pots and weave blankets in live dioramas for the edification of tourists. In 1905, architect Mary Colter designed Hopi House on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, in emulation of adobe buildings she had admired at such ancient villages as Walpi and Oraibi. Inside, Indian men and women crafted jewelry to sell to visitors in quest of authentic artifacts. (More than a century later, Hopi House serves as a gift shop offering everything from postcards to snack food.)

  Lulled into the passive role that guided group tours prescribe, even the most earnest clients hungry for some talisman of the exotic and the authentic need the reassurance that such exposure comes in packages lasting no longer than a single overnight. The Maasai encounter becomes another shopping option, which inevitably disappoints some of the shoppers, including the visitor to Olpopongi who succinctly wrote, “Although village interesting and Maasai male dance interesting it [was] not worth $20 per person.”

  The ambivalence I felt during my ten days with the Suyá in 1995—fascination at odds with the fear of surrendering control—gets boiled down by the group tour to a manageable taste of an alien way of life. Even as the customer relishes his or her immersion in the “authentic,” the outfitter promises that the group will soon move on—toward a wildlife ramble in Ngorongoro Crater, for example, where the gazelles and zebras have little say in the structuring of the cultural exchange.

  At its most one-sided, the display of native pageantry for the benefit of paying clients degenerates into the obscene. In 1990 I came across the stunning work of a German photographer named Michael Friedel, who had embarked on a project to document what he called “homo turisticus.” Friedel’s images froze smug and entitled Westerners posing for their companions’ cameras in ludicrous and tawdry vignettes with performing natives: a cigar-chomping, overweight tourist lying athwart the laps of a row of bare-breasted maidens in Cameroon, an outrigger canoe full of clients in Hawaii transfixed as a man wearing a lei and a grass skirt pretended to throw a spear at them.

  I interviewed Friedel for American Photo. How, I wondered, had the man been able to get model releases from the boobs who made such a travesty of the Third World encounter? “In fact,” he said, “most of them are pleased with my pictures, because after publication all their friends can see that they’ve traveled far.”

  Friedel believed that the vogue of traveling in tour groups, which took off in the 1970s, unleashed the kinds of behavior he documented. “I should say right away that I think travel is good for people. . . . But modern travel—spending a single week or even a weekend somewhere being taken from place to place on a bus—teaches you very little. It breeds a contemptible attitude. In a big tour group the traveler feels safe, freed of all inhibitions.”

  Friedel discovered a Maasai showplace akin to Olpopongi. In his photo, a woman in a sheath dress and tennis shoes, clutching her purse and handbag, and her male partner in golf shirt and pants stand flanking a teenage Maasai girl sitting on the dirt. The couple beams at their companion, who crouches as he takes the snapshot. “This wasn’t a real village,” said Friedel. “It had been built just off a big highway in the bush, and buses would stop there. . . . The Maasai did not live there; they only posed there.

  “The strangest sight I’ve ever seen was in Nepal, at a hospital for lepers. This place was on a tour as an example of life in the Third World! Groups of tourists were pushing visiting relatives out of the way to get pictures of the sick and dying. I actually heard one of the tourists ask, ‘When is this man going to die? We have to see his cremation but we still have two more temples to visit before sunset.’ ”

  According to Friedel, the brevity of the visit had everything to do with the crude behavior of its European participants. “Gauguin needed six months to get to Tahiti; now you can get there in a weekend. We need to think about how we are going to act when we arrive.”

  Despite the desperate journey Mick Leahy and Mick Dwyer had survived in June and July 1930, as they staggered down the banks of the Purari River to the coast, both men could not wait to head back into the interior. From Salamaua, in November of the same year, they made their way back to the headwaters of the Ramu and crossed the same high mountain ridge, but this time veered westward into the Goroka and Asaro valleys. From their first trip, the men had learned that glass beads and bolts of calico cloth were far less valuable in the natives’ eyes than seashells. All kind of shells were prized by the highlanders, but the gold-lipped mother-of-pearl shells (known as kina shells in pidgin) represented unfathomable wealth.

  Shells, of course, were utterly commonplace along the coasts of New Guinea. Leahy and Dwyer could buy a pound of the tiny giri giri shells for sixpence—three hundred shells to the pound. It is a measure of just how cut off the highlands were from the coast that the rare traded shell that had found its way inland in pre-contact times became the most precious item in the highlanders’ world. In the 1980s, Rob Connolly and Robin Anderson recorded an elder’s rhapsodic memory of the wealth that Leahy and Dwyer brought with them in 1930: “We held them in our hands so carefully, and then we would wrap them up in leaves and put them in a house. And then we would have to go and have a look at them so we’d unwrap them again and look at them. We couldn’t believe how wonderful they were.” Eventually, Leahy’s importation of shells en masse would completely transform the highland economy.

  In each new valley that the prospectors entered, the drama of first contact played out anew. The belief that the white men were ancestors come back from the dead, though widespread, was by no means universal. It was inevitable that familiarity with the intruders would breed a certain disenchantment. In the film First Contact, Connolly and Anderson hear a man from the Seigu valley recall a crucial turning point in the interaction between his people and the strangers. “One of us hid one day and watched the whiteman excrete. ‘That man from heaven has just excreted,’ he told us. As soon a
s the whiteman had gone away everyone went to look. Their skin is different, they said, but their shit smells just like ours.”

  Leahy and Dwyer’s second foray into the New Guinea upland in 1930 ended up as fruitless, in terms of gold, as their first. But when one village after another greeted the prospectors with awe and astonishment but not hostility, they began to relax the guard that had initially kept them vigilant through every campsite. They even professed a certain concern for the welfare of the “kanakas” whose lives their coming had upended. In the jaunty dialogue Leahy crafted for The Land That Time Forgot:

  “What is going to happen to those thousands of nigs on the Bina Bina,” mused Dwyer, “when we get out and spread our little story?”

  “Well, for one thing,” I replied, “there will be a stampede of labor recruiters into that territory.”

  “And what will happen to our little cannibal friends when they are brought out to see the wonders of civilization?”

  “The first thing that will happen to them,” I said, “is that they will get malaria when brought down to the coast, and being mountain natives, they’ll probably die like flies. A nice thing to think about, isn’t it?”

  It was not until 1931 that relations with the highlanders took an ominous turn. On his third expedition, Mick Leahy was joined by his brother Pat, while Dwyer went his own way. On the Langemar River, the party entered the homeland of the Kukukuku tribe (known today as the Angu), who were feared by their neighbors as a particularly warlike people. Ignorant of this fact, but on edge because one of their carriers had had arrows fired at him by natives hidden in the forest, Mick Leahy slept that first night with a revolver and a rifle close at hand.

  He was awakened before dawn by one of the porters shouting in pidgin, “Massa! Massa! Kanaka killum me fella!” Leahy grabbed his revolver and crouched behind the tent, but could not find his flashlight. A shadowy figure loomed nearby. Assuming it was one of the porters, Leahy called out, “Where are the bastards?”