Voyage By Dhow

by Norman Lewis

  I now joined Donald at his photography, noticing by this time that several young missionaries, not in evidence before, had come on the scene. There were about twelve small huts in the immediate area of the mission house. These averaged some fifteen feet square and it was difficult to imagine how as many as 300 Indians could have been sheltered in them. We saw about thirty-five Guayakis in all, about half of them the possessors of skin of the extraordinary waxen whiteness for which anthropologists have been able to offer no explanation. All of them were extremely mongoloid in appearance, and many could have passed for Eskimos. At a rough estimate about fifteen of these were nubile young women, or mothers with babies. There were a half-dozen boys between eight and twelve years of age, and two young girls in this age-bracket, all with the distended stomachs and decayed teeth suggestive of malnutrition. The rest of the visible population was made up of adult males.

  All the Guayakis, with the exception of two or three men wearing pseudo-military uniforms, were in dirty cast-offs. There appeared to be no sanitary arrangements in the camp area, which smelled of human excrement. We noted that the adult males had access to bows and arrows with which they showed off their skill to the missionaries. The fact that these men were not at work, and that the missionaries fraternized with them in an affectionate manner, suggested at least the possibility that they were privileged, possibly as camp ‘trusties’, or even señuelos. In common with all other visitors to the reservation we observed an extreme disproportion in the sexes of its population. If Mr Stolz had told us correctly, there were 300 Indians, but—presuming women were not compelled to work with their menfolk on the farms—men outnumbered women by about twenty to one. We found it strange that we should have seen no old men.

  About half the Indian adults were lying on the ground in their huts in what seemed a condition of total apathy, giving no evidence of awareness of our presence as we came and went. We saw no signs of food anywhere in the huts—no scraps or left-overs.

  Some of the Indians had managed to keep the pets from which they are never parted when at liberty. In one hut we found three tame coatis, in another a fox cub, in another a baby vulture. The little boys with distended stomachs under their filthy shirts who came running up to stroke our hands and caress our fingers (the Guayaki are the most affectionate and outgoing of the Indian races) showed us their tame lizards. One had a hen perched on his shoulder, and another a hawk.

  Having finished his photography in the central area of the camp, Donald strolled off towards two huts on the outskirts, followed by Mr Stolz’s son, who by now was carrying his tripod, and a smiling young missionary who assured him that there was nothing more to be seen. In one hut he found two old Indian ladies, in the last stages of emaciation and clearly on the verge of death. They lay on the ground apparently having been abandoned to their fate. This was a scene of the kind one associates with the ultimate disasters of Ethiopia and Bangladesh. In the second hut lay a third woman, also in a desperate condition, and Mr Stolz’s son, who had come up with the tripod, explained that she had been shot in the side while being brought in.

  It was clear that behind the evasions and the resentful silences of Cecilio Baez a great deal remained to be explained before the charges made by the International League for the Rights of Man could be brushed aside. But it was also clear that attempts to probe further, at this time, into what went on behind the scenes would have been futile. Paraguay, the firmest of the Latin American dictatorships, is not a country where it is recommended to put too many inconvenient questions to persons entrusted by the government with the implementation of official policy. We should have been very unhappy indeed, for example, to have been obliged to surrender Donald’s films when leaving the country.

  But as it turned out, a few more of the facts were let slip by a visiting New Tribes missionary from the Chaco, who asked us when we left—after several hours’ fruitless waiting for the Guayakis to come in from the farms—to give him a lift back to Asunción. He had been stranded by the rains for four days at Cecilio Baez, and, convinced that God had sent us in answer to his prayers, in his euphoria and relief he threw caution to the winds.

  Mr Stolz had told us that the Indians received 100 guaranies a day (spendable at the mission’s store), but the Chaco missionary dismissed this as absurd. The farmers they worked for promised them 200 guaranies (66p) a week, but more often than not fobbed them off in the end with an old shirt, or a worn-out pair of pants. The Chaco missionary also succeeded in letting the cat out of the bag in the matter of Mr Stolz’s activities as an Indian-catcher. He had been out several times recently ‘to make contact’ he said, and once, indeed, had been narrowly missed by a Guayaki arrow.

  It would be impossible without an investigation to substantiate the allegations that have been made that Mr Stolz has engaged in traditional manhunts using señuelos, and no investigator is ever likely to be permitted at the camp. But it is clear that the Indian population of Cecilio Baez has much increased in the past few months, and it is hard to believe that free Indians would wish to make a journey of at least 100 miles from the remote forests where they still exist, in order to deliver themselves up to a condition hardly distinguishable from slavery. In fact their reluctance to be ‘attracted’ by Mr Stolz is very clear from his colleague’s account of the arrow that narrowly missed him.

  By Mr Stolz’s own admission the New Tribes mission at Cecilio Baez performs no religious function. What then is its purpose? It is hard not to agree with the view of Dr Mark Münzel in IWGIA Document No. 17, published in Copenhagen in August 1974, that: ‘The reservation has the function of a transitional “taming” camp: the proud and “wild” Indians of the forest would not be immediately willing to work in the white man’s fields; but they are willing once they have passed through the reservation, because they see no other solution, or because they are so instructed by the missionaries.’ It has seemed strange to outside observers that the countries of Latin America should tolerate and even favour the presence of such North American Protestant missions dispensing—when religious instruction is given at all—a version of Christianity which must be repellent to their own Catholic beliefs. The reason can only be that they are regarded by governments, intent at all costs on the ‘development’ of natural resources, as efficient in the performance of work that no other organizations are qualified by philosophy, temperament and—above all—by tradition, to undertake.

  I do not believe that Mr Stolz would be particularly concerned to defend himself from inclusion in the category of those missionaries who, by the verdict of Bishop Alejo Ovelar, ‘are implicated in the grave crime of ethnocide’, because he would see nothing wrong in the destruction of the racial identity of Indians for which he feels little but contempt.

  ‘We believe,’ says the printed doctrinal statement of the New Tribes Mission, in ‘the unending punishment of the unsaved.’ What is a few months or even years of misery at Cecilio Baez compared to that?

  1975

  THE TRIBE THAT CRUCIFIED CHRIST

  OUR FIRST VIEW OF the Panare was at the village of Guanama, sweltering at the end of the track from an unfinished dirt road that faltered southwards through Venezuela in the general direction of the Amazon. A half-dozen Panare males came out of a communal round-house, moving springily like ballet dancers, with an offering of hot mango juice. They were good examples of a people described as incredibly impervious to Western influence, dressed therefore in no more than scrupulously woven loinclothes, and armlets of blue and white beads. A long ancestry of nomadism had shaped them, and by comparison their nearest white neighbours, who spent their lives on horseback or in cars, seemed awkwardly put together, a little misshapen even, and inclined to fat. The Panare, who could run and walk fifty miles a day across the savannah if put to it, were lean, lithe and supple, coming close in their bodily proportions to the classic ideal.

  Guanama was spruce and trim, with everything in place, a little like an anthropological model. Its round-houses were master
pieces of Stone Age architecture, built for all weathers, and marvellously cool under their deep fringing of thatch. It was a quiet place, as Panare villages are wont to be. The dogs remained silent and respectful, children did not cry, and the adults, back from hunting or work in their gardens, slipped into their hammocks after greeting us, to resume soft-voiced discussions on the topic of the day. Only one thing seemed out of place in this calm and confiding atmosphere—the new barbed-wire fence, a symbolic intrusion of an alien point of view.

  We had made a point of this visit to Guanama after a report of extraordinary happenings by Maria Eugenia Villalón, who had gone there while employed in a census of the Indian population. A year before she had been in Guanama to record Panare songs, and now, returning for the census, she proposed to entertain the villagers by playing these back to them. No sooner had the tape recorder been switched on than the Indians leapt to their feet in a state of panic, running in all directions, their hands clasped over their ears. The machine was switched off and the commotion subsided. The Panare explained that what they had been compelled to listen to was the voice of the Devil speaking through their mouths. Now they had found Jesus, and henceforward would sing nothing but hymns. They lined up to oblige with one of these, a Panare version of ‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin …’, the first line repeated ad infinitum to Mexican guitars and the rattle of maracas. It was clear to Señora Villalón that the New Tribes Mission had moved in. Members of this organization are the standard-bearers in Venezuela of the new computerized, airborne evangelism that insists not only on conversion, but on the demolition of all those ceremonies and beliefs by which an indigenous culture is defined.

  The question now was how far the missionary labours had progressed. Evangelists rush to cover the unclothed human form, and the spectacle of Indians dressed in shapeless and often grubby Western cast-offs is frequently a glum reminder of their presence. Apart from the barbed-wire fence, Guanama was free from the ugliness too often associated with the disruption of belief. We preferred not to abandon hope, and Paul Henley, the British anthropologist who was with us, who has lived, off and on, among the Panare since 1975 and speaks their language fluently, now put the fatal question. ‘When is your initiation ceremony to be held?’ The reply was a depressing one, confirming our worst fears. ‘There will be no ceremony. God is against it. We have turned our backs on all these things.’

  It was a breach with the past indeed. The Katayinto, the great male initiation ceremony, held in the dry season when food is most plentiful, is for the Panare the culmination of the annual cycle, and to them the equivalent of all the religious and secular feasts of the West rolled into one. Weeks of food-gathering and general preparations are called for, and the festival itself, involving dramatic episodes and three major and a number of minor dances, may stretch over six weeks. It ends with the boys’ investiture with the loincloths signifying their attainment of adult status. To the Panare the loincloth represents what the turban does to the Sikhs, and to destroy the Katayinto ceremony is to remove the cornerstone and expunge the future of a culture believed by those who have studied it to have developed over thousands of years. No one understands this better than the missionaries, for whom all such ceremonies, and the wearing of the loincloth itself, shackles the Indian—as they see it—to the heathen past. From time to time Brown Gold, house magazine of the New Tribes Mission, prints a jubilant notice of a tribe that has been persuaded to change loincloths for trousers, evidence that it is at last on a road from which there is no turning back. Thus in Tanjung Maju: ‘The first time we entered the village they were wearing loincloths and very primitive … see how they have grown in the Lord.’

  The New Tribes Mission, now continuing its implacable advance in those parts of the world where ‘uncontacted’ tribal people remain to be swept into the evangelical net, was founded in 1941 in El Chico, California, and now has some 1,500 missionaries working with 125 tribes in 16 countries. In South America, which it has divided up with its missionary rival, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and where it is represented in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, it has rolled over the Catholic opposition. The Catholic Fathers, sometimes reproaching their flock with desertion, are discouraged by the reply, ‘You have no aeroplanes. You are not in touch with God by radio.’ To the outsider both fundamentalist missions are identical in their aim and the methods employed, but the New Tribes Mission criticizes the Summer Institute of Linguistics as ‘too liberal’. Both view Catholics with distaste, and their converts as hardly better placed in the salvation stakes than outright pagans.

  Mission finances, according to its prospectus, depend upon public donations. These do not necessarily take the form of cash. Survival International (1980) reports an offering of 2,500 hectares of land by the government of Paraguay, and in 1975 a missionary spoke to me of ‘a heck of a piece of land given to the Mission by a company in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco engaged in the extraction of tannin. They figured we could help with the Indians.’ The Mission does not hold itself aloof from engaging in commerce, acting frequently as middleman in the supply of goods to the Indians or the resale of their artefacts. Survival International mentions that they are in the fur trade in Paraguay, dealing in jaguar skins, which fetch high prices since the jaguar elsewhere is an internationally protected animal.

  Impressive technical equipment and abundant funds give the New Tribes Mission more than a head start in the race for souls. Thereafter its work is carried forward by the zeal of its ‘born-again’ fundamentalist missionaries recruited from those areas of the United States where Darwin is excluded from the school curriculum, fossils are explained away as Devil’s devices implanted in the rocks to cause confusion among the servants of God, and the reappearance of the witches of Salem would cause no great surprise. The Mission proclaims with fervour and enthusiasm the imminent Second Coming of Christ and the destruction of this world, and its doctrinal statement includes the belief in the ‘unending punishment of the unsaved’, thus committing to the flames of hell all adherents of Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, besides several thousand minor religious faiths and all the great and good men of all races whose misfortune it was to be born before the coming of Christ.

  Two thousand tribes remain to be contacted, all of them under a threat of everlasting fire, so conversion is a task of utmost urgency. It is this sense of time being so short that tends to outweigh all considerations of the convert’s welfare in this life, provided that his soul is saved for eternity. ‘He saves the souls of men,’ runs the New Tribes Mission doctrine, ‘not that they might continue to live in the world, but that they might live forever with Him, in the world to come.’

  Missionary tactics have undergone little change since the Jesuits first accompanied the Spanish to the conquest of the New World, although they are now reinforced by techniques of persuasion used with success by such sects as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity under the leadership of the Reverend Moon. The first task is to establish the dependence of the newly contacted native, and this is a matter of invariable routine. Here is a missionary speaking: ‘We leave gifts … knives, axes, mirrors, the kind of things Indians can’t resist … After a while the relationship develops. We have to break their dependence on us next. Naturally they want to go on receiving all these desirable things we’ve been giving them, and sometimes it comes as a surprise when we explain that from now on if they want to possess them they must work for money … We can usually fix them up with something on the local farms. They settle down to it when they realize that there’s no going back.’

  The manoeuvre never fails to work, accomplishing in the end the inevitable tragic result. There’s no going back. The trap baited with the fatal gifts is sprung and conversion follows with its long catalogue of prohibitions. The evangelized Indian is forbidden to drink, sing, dance, wear traditional ornaments, paint his body, take part in any of the old ceremonies, marry a non-believing wife. A stern and pleasure-ha
ting deity speaking through the missionary’s mouth lists his embargoes, backed by awful descriptions of the lake brimming with fire and brimstone. Too often, ‘something on the local farms’, whose owners may themselves be close to the poverty line, is hardly distinguishable from slavery, and in the end the detribalized Indian drifts away to his last refuge, the slums of a town where his wife’s prostitution provides the money to buy rum and oblivion.

  Military dictatorships are the natural supporters of the New Tribes Mission, with whom they share similar views. Les Pederson, a director, illustrates this identity of outlook in his autobiography Poisoned Arrows: ‘… the President of the Republic of Paraguay, don Alfredo Stroessner … assured me of his appreciation of what we are doing among the indigenous peoples of the country.’ Elsewhere efforts to get rid of the missionaries have been frequent, strenuous, and sometimes crowned with temporary success. The clamour has been loudest in Venezuela, where a united front of jurists, anthropologists and churchmen has accused the Mission of infringement of the Indians’ human rights, of coercion and forcible conversion. Public opinion has led to the creation of two Congressional investigations. The latter of these opened in 1979, and remained in session for some two years, filling the Venezuelan press with bizarre accounts of missionary goings-on.

  Naval Captain Mariño Blanco, charged with keeping an eye on the doings of foreigners in the country’s remote regions, spoke of scientific espionage. He noted that the missionaries inevitably installed themselves in areas known to contain strategic minerals such as cobalt and uranium, and claimed to have proved that they were in the pay of American multinationals, naming two of them as Westinghouse and General Dynamics. He noted that the Mission had been in trouble in Colombia, suffering expulsion for ‘damage to national interests and for having assisted illicit explorations carried out by transnational companies in areas likely to contain deposits of strategic materials’. The captain had found missionary baggage labelled ‘combustible materials’ to contain military uniforms and ‘other articles’—this being taken by the press to refer to Geiger counters. The uniforms were explained away by the missionaries as intended to impress the Indians. Captain Blanco said that the head of the New Tribes Mission had tried to bribe him. He gave his opinion that the missionaries’ involvement with the Indians was only a cover for their other activities.