Cargo Cult

They Still Believe In

A New Guinea reader sends this photo graph of a cargo-house (built like an aeroplane) and writes as follows: IT is impossible to understand how the New Guinea natives can go on cling ing to this mad cargo-cult idea. The arrival of their ancestors’ “cargo” has had to be postponed so often now that one would think that even they would wake up.

The movement is found all over New Guinea (and apparently further afield) simmering here and flaring up there. Here are a few examples that have come to my own notice; A village on Manam Island (off the Madang coast) where night after night the villagers gather around at midnight, sitting in a circle to await the arrival of the heavily laden cargo boats that they believe will soon come.

Another village where they have built large houses in the shape of an aeroplane (see photo) and a jeep—evidently to in dicate the kind of transport that' they think their ancestors will use. Others

have built more orthodox sheds to house this heaven sent cargo, when it comes.

Recently I visited a village where no European had been since the end of the war. In the middle of it was a two storey house, built, I was told, for a lieutenant of that stormy petrel, Yali. I saw a boy with hair dyed blue and for a joke I called out, “Loman ‘i kam,” meaning the “Lawman has arrived”— the “lawman” in this case being the new law for the promised golden age. To my surprise they took me seri ously and were keenly dis appointed when I pointed to the blue-headed boy. I was given to understand that my sense of humour was mis placed.

Mrs. C. F. Corbett, of Fiji, returned to the Colony in early May, after spending several months in Sydney with her sister.