"Cohabitation"

Quaint Missionary Survival in Cook Is.

STRONG words in a private letter from a friend who has been living for some time in the Cook Islands:— “These natives —they are a gut-less lot. But I suppose one cannot blame them. They are at the mercy of repressive laws, under which all non-marital sex relations —from kissing to cohabitation — are crimes. They also are the victims of a weird system of ‘prohibition’—which doesn’t prohibit, because they brew then own.

“The effect of it is that they have become a race of snoopers and furtive tell-tales ”

Actually, the Cook Islanders are among the most attractive of the Polynesian peoples; but it is true, as our corres pondent says, that these people are op pressed by the antediluvian laws of New Zealand.

For a thousand years, before Europeans came to the Islands, the relations between the sexes, among Polynesians, were “free and easy”. After marriage, chastity was expected of both man and woman, and adulterers were severely punished. Before marriage, young people did as they pleased. Early European visitors found little wrong with social conditions in Polynesia—the people were happy, cleanly, kind and generous.

But the early missionaries regarded the Polynesians as people living in “awful sin”, and they attacked, like fana tics, the very easy relations among the unmarried. They put gowns on the women, and trousers on the men, and provided heavy penalties for any form of extra-marital intimacy.

Sexual morality is merely a compara tive term—a matter of an epoch or of latitude and longitude. That which is wrong in Calathumpia, in 1820, is quite correct and in order in Kamschatka, in 1940. But those bewhiskered missionaries of a century ago knew only one social code —namely, their own; and so they Imposed, upon a people who had lived freely in the sunshine for hundreds of years, and had no conception of “sin”, the stifling and stuffy laws of the Early Victorians. rERE was only one justification for such senseless “saving of the heathen”, and it had more to do with medicine than morals. The South Sea, early last century, was being invaded by the scum of the “civilised” earth — whalers, escaped convicts, buccaneers, slavers—and they fell like filthy wolves upon the trusting and hospitable Poly nesians, and introduced, among them, venereal diseases which slew them in tens of thousands. If the missionaries’ non cohabitation laws could have kept those human beasts away from the Polynesian women, they would have done some real good.

As it was, the bewildered Polynesians could make nothing of the new laws. In Tahiti, Hawaii, Cook Islands and, to a lesser extent, in Samoa and Tonga, they accepted missionary rule, and covered up their healthy brown bodies, and tried to please the queer-thinking white men in regard to their pre-marital conduct; but they never really obeyed. They did as their fathers had done, for hundreds of years; and they were not conscious of sin.

But they still tried to please the mis sionaries; and so, as our friend says, they became “snoopers” and deceivers.

As the decades passed, the silly old laws of the missionary governments were swept away; and, in most of the South Sea lands, there now is a happy—and usually unwritten—compromise between the rule of an understanding European

officialdom, and old-time Polynesia’s traditional way of life.

But, in the Cook Islands, the laws of the missionary regime survive. There, any intimate relationship between the sexes that has not been blessed by the sacrament of marriage is punishable as a crime. If, in Rarotonga, Juliet climbs over her verandah rail, and goes off on a completely innocent stroll in the moon light with Romeo, both Romeo and Juliet can be punished as criminals—not for what they did, apparently, but for what they might have done, as conceived in the mind of any hater of “sin”.

Well, the effect of all this can be guessed. Juliet, for a hundred years, has been sneaking out the back door, and hiding in the shadows with Romeo, and swearing, if challenged, that she never left her room. Cook Is. “cohabitation laws” have created a race of sneaks.

The evil has been recognised, and written about, for half a century. But the NZ Government, notorious for the Old Granny laws which it imposes on its Pacific dependencies, will do nothing in

the direction of reform.-

R.

Mr. W. Tracey, well-known in Madang and Wewak districts, TNG, has taken over the management of Mr. P. Leahy’s agricultural and dairy farm near Wau, while the latter is away with the AIF.