But tides of war soon brought this euphoric interval to a close. The Australians and Americans gained the initiative and cut the Japanese supply lines. As their military situation deteriorated, the Japanese stopped paying for food or labor. When Tagarab, wearing his Samurai sword, protested, he was shot. The “ancestors” began to strip the native gardens, coconut groves, and banana and sugar-cane plantations. They stole every last chicken and pig. When these were all gone, they fell upon the dogs and ate them. And when the dogs were gone, they hunted down the natives and ate them, too.
The Australians who retook Madang in April 1944 found the natives sullen and uncooperative. In a few areas where the Japanese had not been especially active, cargo prophets were already predicting the return of the Japanese in greater numbers than ever before. To gain the loyalty of the rest of the population the Australians began to talk about “development” in the postwar period. Native leaders were told that in the peace to come, blacks and whites would live together in harmony. Everyone was going to get decent housing, electricity, motor vehicles, boats, good clothing, and plenty of food.
By this time, the most worldly and intelligent of the native leaders were convinced that the missionaries were unmitigated liars. The prophet Yali, whose career I shall follow from now on, was especially adamant on this point. Yali had remained loyal to the Australians during the war and was rewarded with the rank of sergeant major in the Australian Army. He was taken to Australia and shown what the Australians wanted him to believe was the secret of cargo: sugar mills, breweries, an aircraft repair shop, and harbor warehouses. While Yali could now see for himself certain aspects of the production process, he could also see that not everyone driving about in cars and living in big houses worked in mills and breweries. He could see men and women working in organized groups, but he couldn’t grasp the ultimate principles upon which their labor was organized. Nothing that he saw helped him to understand why from that vast outpouring of wealth, not even a trickle reached his fellow natives back home.
What impressed Yali most were not the roads, the lights, and the tall buildings, but the Queensland Museum and the Brisbane Zoo. To his amazement, the museum was full of native New Guinea artifacts. One of the exhibits even contained his own people’s carved ceremonial mask worn in the great puberty rituals of former times—the very same mask which the missionaries had called the “works of Satan.” Now, carefully preserved behind glass, the mask was being worshiped by priests in white frocks and a steady stream of well-dressed visitors, who talked in hushed tones. The museum also contained glass cases in which some strange varieties of animal bones were being carefully preserved. In Brisbane, Yali was taken to the zoo, and there he saw the whites feeding and caring for more strange animals. Reaching Sydney, Yali paid careful attention to the number of dogs and cats people kept as pets.
It was not until after the war, while attending a government conference in Port Moresby, the capital of Australian New Guinea, that Yali realized the extent to which the missionaries had been lying to the natives. During the course of the conference Yali was shown a certain book which contained pictures of apes and monkeys becoming progressively more similar to men. At last the truth dawned on him: The missionaries had said that Adam and Eve were man’s ancestors, but the whites really believed their own ancestors were monkeys, dogs, cats, and other animals. These were precisely the beliefs that the natives had possessed until the missionaries had tricked them into giving up their totems.
Later, in discussing his experiences with the prophet Gurek, Yali accepted the suggestion that the Queensland Museum was actually Rome, the place to which the missionaries had taken the New Guinea gods and myths in order to gain control over the secret of cargo. If these old gods and goddesses could be lured back to New Guinea, a new era of prosperity would dawn. But first they would have to abandon Christianity and revive their pagan ceremonies.
Yali was outraged by the duplicity of the missionaries. He was willing and eager to help the Australian officials stamp out all vestiges of cargo cults in which God or Jesus had any importance. Because of Yali’s war service, his familiarity with Brisbane and Sydney, and his eloquent denunciation of the cults, the district officer of Madang supposed that Yali didn’t believe in cargo. Yali was asked to address mass meetings called by the government. He enthusiastically ridiculed the Christian cargo cults and assured everyone that cargo would never come unless people worked hard and obeyed the law.
Yali was also willing to collaborate with the Australian officials because he had not yet lost faith in the promises made to him while he was in the army during the war. Yali treasured the words uttered by a Brisbane recruiting officer in 1943: “In the past, you natives have been kept backward, but now if you help us win the war and get rid of the Japanese, we Europeans will help you. We will help you get houses with galvanized iron roofs, plank walls, electric lights, and motor vehicles, boats, good clothes, and good food. Life will be very different for you after the war.”
Thousands came to hear Yali denounce the old road to cargo. Provided with a platform and loudspeakers, and surrounded by beaming officials and white businessmen, Yali warmed to his task. The more he denounced the former cargo beliefs, the more the natives understood him to be saying that he, Yali, knew the true secret of cargo. When word of this interpretation got back to Yali’s “handlers” in the government, they demanded that he give more speeches to tell the natives that he was not a returned ancestor, and that he didn’t know the secret of cargo. These public denials convinced the natives that Yali had supernatural powers and would bring cargo.
When Yali was invited to Port Moresby, along with other loyal native spokesmen, his followers in Madang believed that he would return at the head of a huge fleet of cargo ships. Yali himself may have believed that some important concessions were about to be made to him. He went straight to the administrator in charge and asked him when the natives were going to get the reward which the officer in Brisbane had promised. When would they get the building materials and machinery that everyone was talking about? Professor Lawrence’s account of the official’s reply to Yali is in Road Belong Cargo.
The officer is alleged to have replied that the administration was, of course, grateful for the services of native troops against the Japanese and was, in fact, going to give the people a substantial reward. The Australian Government was pouring vast sums of money into economic, educational, and political development, War Damage compensation, and schemes to improve medical services, hygiene and health. It would be a slow process, of course, but eventually the people would appreciate the results of the administration’s efforts. But a reward of the nature Yali imagined—a free hand-out of cargo in bulk—was quite out of the question. The officer was sorry, but this was just wartime propaganda made by irresponsible European officers on the spur of the moment.
To questions about when natives could expect electricity, the administrators replied that they would get it as soon as they were able to pay for it and not before. Yali became very bitter. The government had lied as badly as the missionaries.
Upon his return from Port Moresby, Yali entered into a secret alliance with the cargo prophet Gurek. Under Yali’s protection, Gurek spread the word that the New Guinea deities, not the Christian deities, were the true source of cargo. The natives must abandon Christianity and go back to their pagan practices in order to acquire wealth and happiness. Traditional rituals and artifacts as well as pig husbandry and hunting were to be reintroduced. Male initiation ceremonies were to be performed. In addition, small tables were to be set up, covered with cotton cloth and decorated with bottles filled with flowers. At these shrines (inspired by domestic scenes glimpsed in Australian households), offerings of food and tobacco would induce the pagan deities and the ancestors to send cargo. The ancestors would bring rifles, ammunition, military equipment, horses, and cows. Yali was henceforth to be addressed as King, and Thursday, the day of Yali’s birth, was to replace Sunday as the natives’ Sabbath.
Gurek said that Yali could perform miracles, and that he could kill people by spitting at them or cursing them.
Yali himself was repeatedly ordered out on patrol to put down the Yali cultists. He used these opportunities to suppress rival prophets and to establish a far-flung network of his own “boss boys” in the villages. He imposed fines and punishments, recruited labor, and maintained his own police force. Yali financed his organization by a clandestine system of redistribution. He promised to be a real big man.
The missionaries kept goading the administrators to get rid of Yali, but they found it hard to prove that he was actually behind the increasingly insolent behavior of the natives. It was even difficult to prove that there was a cargo cult, because the Yali cult members were all instructed to swear that they had no cargo beliefs. The natives were told that if they dared to reveal their cargo activities, the Europeans would steal the New Guinea gods for themselves once again. If the natives were asked about the table and flowers they were to answer that they were merely hoping to beautify their homes like the Europeans do. Whenever Yali was accused of stirring up trouble, he protested that he had nothing to do with the extremists in the villages who misrepresented his own publicly stated convictions.
Before long the Australian government was faced with what it regarded as an open rebellion. In 1950 Yali was arrested and tried on charges of incitement to rape and deprivation of the liberty of others. He was convicted and sentenced to six years in jail. Yali’s career did not end, however. Even while he was in jail, Yali cult members kept scanning the horizon, awaiting his triumphant return at the head of a fleet of merchantmen and warships. During the sixties a number of political and economic concessions were finally made to the native peoples of New Guinea. Yali’s followers gave him credit for the stepped-up rate of school construction, the opening of the legislative councils to native candidates, increased wages, and the end of the prohibition on the consumption of alcoholic beverages.
After his release from jail, Yali decided that the secret of the cargo lay in the New Guinea House of Assembly. He tried to get elected to the Madang Council but was defeated. As an old man he became the object of great veneration. “Flower girls” visited him once a year and brought away his semen in bottles. People continued to give him gifts, and he collected a fee for baptizing Christians who wanted to wash away the sins of Christianity and return to paganism. Yali’s last prophecy was that New Guinea would achieve independence on August 1, 1969. He prepared for this occasion by appointing ambassadors to Japan, China, and the United States.
Any human activity will appear inscrutable if it is jig-sawed into snippets too small to be related to the overall historical picture. Viewed over a trajectory of appropriate length, cargo shows itself to be the working-out along lines of least resistance of a stubborn lopsided conflict. Cargo was the prize in the struggle for the natural and human resources of an island continent. Each snippet of savage mysticism matched a snippet of civilized rapacity, and the whole was firmly grounded in solid rewards and punishments rather than phantoms.
Like other groups, savage and civilized, whose dominions and freedom are threatened by invaders, the people of Madang tried to make the Europeans go home. Not at the very beginning, because several years elapsed before the invaders displayed their insatiable appetite for virgin lands and cheap native labor. Nonetheless, the attempt to kill off the enemy was not long in coming. It was doomed to failure because, as in so many other chapters of colonial warfare, the contending forces were drastically ill-matched. The Madang natives suffered from two insuperable handicaps: They lacked modern weapons, and they were fragmented into hundreds of tribelets and villages incapable of uniting against a common enemy.
The hope of using force to drive the Europeans away never quite disappeared; it was repressed, but not extinguished. The natives backed off, and came forward again along what seem like crazy tangents. The invaders were treated like arrogant big men—too powerful to be destroyed, but still perhaps not invulnerable to manipulation. To get these strange big men to share more of their wealth and to moderate their appetite for land and labor, the natives tried to learn their language and penetrate their secrets. And so began the period of Christian conversion, abandonment of native customs, and submission to taxes and labor conscription. The natives learned “respect” and collaborated in their own exploitation.
This interval had consequences intended and foreseen by neither party. Separate and formerly hostile tribes and villages came together to serve the same master. They united in the belief that Christian big men could be manipulated into creating a state of paradisiacal redemption for all. They insisted that cargo be redistributed. This was not what the missionaries meant by Christianity. But the natives acted in their own self-interest in refusing to let Christianity mean what the missionaries wanted it to mean. They insisted on making the Europeans act like true big men; they insisted that those who possessed wealth were under the obligation to give it away.
Westerners are impressed by the natives’ amusing inability to understand European economic and religious lifestyles. The implication is always that natives are too backward, stupid, or superstitious to grasp the principles of civilization. This certainly misrepresents the facts in Yali’s case. It was not that Yali couldn’t grasp the principles in question, but rather that he found them unacceptable. His tutors were amazed that someone who had seen modern factories in operation could still believe in cargo. But the more Yali learned about how Europeans produced wealth, the less was he prepared to accept their explanation of why he and his people were unable to share in it. This doesn’t mean that he understood how the Europeans got to be so wealthy. On the contrary, when last heard from he was working on the theory that the Europeans had gotten rich by building brothels. But Yali always had the good sense to dismiss the standard European explanation, “hard work,” as a calculated deception. Anyone could see that the European big men—unlike their native prototypes—scarcely worked at all.
Yali’s understanding of the cosmos was scarcely a monopoly of the savage mind. In the South Seas, as in other colonial areas, the Christian missions enjoyed a virtually unchallenged mandate to provide the natives with an education. These missions were not about to disseminate the intellectual tools of political analysis; they did not offer instruction in the theory of European capitalism, nor did they embark upon an analysis of colonial economic policy. Instead they taught about creation, prophets and prophecies, angels, a messiah, supernatural redemption, resurrection, and an eternal kingdom in which the dead and the living would be reunited in a land of milk and honey.
Inevitably, these concepts—many rather precisely analogous to themes in the aboriginal belief system—had to become the idiom in which mass resistance to colonial exploitation was first expressed. “Mission Christianity” was the womb of rebellion. By repressing any form of open agitation, strikes, unions, or political parties, the Europeans themselves guaranteed the triumph of cargo. It was relatively easy to see that the missionaries were lying when they said that cargo would only be given to people who worked hard What was difficult to grasp was that there was a definite link between the wealth enjoyed by the Australians and Americans and the work of the natives. Without die cheapness of native labor and the expropriation of native lands, the colonial powers would never have gotten so rich. In one sense, therefore, the natives were entitled to the products of the industrialized nations even though they couldn’t pay for them. Cargo was their way of saying this. And that, I believe, is its true secret
Messiahs
I’M SURE THAT you’ve noticed the resemblances between cargo cults and early Christian beliefs. Jesus of Nazareth predicted the downfall of the wicked, justice for the poor, the end of misery and suffering, reunion with the dead, and a whole new divine kingdom. So did Yali. Can the phantom cargo mystery help us to understand the conditions responsible for the origin of our own religious lifestyles?
There seem to be some important differences. The c
argo cults were dedicated to the overthrow of a specific established political order and the creation of a kingdom which would have a definite terrestrial locus. The natives expected the dead to come to life as uniformed soldiers carrying weapons into battle against policemen and troops stationed in New Guinea. Jesus of Nazareth was not interested in the overthrow of any specific political system; he was above politics, his kingdom being “not of this world.” When the first Christians spoke of “battles” against the wicked, their “swords,” “fires,” and “victories” were mere earthbound metaphors for transcendental spiritual events. At least that is what almost everybody believes the original Jesus cult was all about.
It seems impossible that a lifestyle so otherworldly in design, so devoted to peace, love, and selflessness, could have been in any fundamental sense a product of definite material conditions. Yet this riddle, like all the others, has its solution in the practical affairs of peoples and nations.
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