35 words / 11:45
Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “50,000 Years of Failure,” on the 50,000-year-old mess that is Papua New Guinea, where the main pastimes include rape, murder, and cannibalism. See below.
Counter-Currents
4 comments
Those people might still be there in their mountains and jungles 50 thousand years in the future, what our own nations will look like in just 50 years is harder for me to have any realistic opinion on.
That young Rockefeller disappeared on the indonesian part of the island btw.
“Linguistic diversity”
Yes, there are over 800 languages in PNG (that number apparently does not include West Papua, formerly called Irian Jaya, the western half of the island of New Guinea, which is ruled by Indonesia), and many of those languages are almost totally unrelated to each other, due to the extremely violent and fanatically territorial warlike nature of the New Guinean people.
On your previous text version of this meditation on PNG, I left a comment that I had been there for almost 4 months in the mid 80s, and didn’t want to detail my experiences for privacy reasons, but I will say this: Where I was, in a rather mountainous jungle highland area, there was a “river” (more of a creek, only about a foot deep and 20 to 30 feet across at most, and easily waded across, people did it all the time). The people on one side of the “river” spoke a completely different language from the people on the other side of the “river”. The two groups didn’t seem to like each other much, and had fought a “war” with each other shortly before I was there (several men were wounded with spears, arrows, and clubs, but only 4 died).
PNG has a National Language called “Tok Pisin” or Pidgin English, which is a “trade language”, and it sounds like ooga-booga stuff. “Tok Pisin” is the language that, for lack of a better word, “unites” the people of PNG. One interesting aspect of Tok Pisin is that almost every preposition is covered by the word “long”, which does not refer to the length of an object, but is a stand-in word for most prepositions. For example, one could say “Mi goim long haus”, which could mean “I am going into the house”, or “I am going around the house”, or “I am going under the house”, or “I am going on top of the house”. It makes for an exciting guessing-game trying to figure out exactly what meaning is being attempted to be conveyed.
Tok Pisin “language” sounds like the “language” of the Gullah people, the Gullahs being the sea island dwelling descendants of freed slaves in South Carolina and Georgia. Q: “Has someone stolen your chicken?” A: “E teef him.” means “Someone has stolen it.”
If you haven’t heard about this great example of PNG culture, it’s a real doozy:
Male Babies Killed to Stop Tribal Fighting
Tuesday, 02 December 200
[Excerpts to follow, whole article at link below]
Women in a rural part of Papua New Guinea killed their male babies over a 10 year-period in an attempt to stop the tribal fighting that has brought death and destruction to their people for more than 20 years.
As reported by PNG’s The National, ‘two women from the area revealed this experience to The National in Goroka’ last week.
The women, part of a group from the remote Gimi area of Okapa in PNG’s Eastern Highlands province ‘were brought in to attend a three-day peace and reconciliation training in Goroka last week’ and revealed how, because of the death and destruction that has plagued their people for more than 20 years as a result of tribal fighting, ‘the women decided that if they stopped producing males, their tribe’s stock would go down and this would force the men to end the fight’.
“Therefore, all the womenfolk agreed to have all male babies born killed because they have had enough of men engaging in tribal conflicts and bringing misery to them,” they said.
…
‘The tribal fight in the Gimi area started in 1986 and it was triggered by some deaths blamed on sorcery’.
Full article at this link:
https://www.solomontimes.com/news/male-babies-killed-to-stop-tribal-fighting/3129
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