Helping the Native to Get Along
pp. 87-89 · Read in the full issue
Review:
Helping the Native to Get Along With Us
A SMALL booklet (The Blending of Cultures—An Essay on the Aims of Native Education), written by the late Dr, F. E. Williams, who was Papuan Government anthropologist from 1924 until he was killed while on duty early in the Pacific war, has recently been republished by the Papua-New Guinea Administration.
Primarily, it is intended for P-NG officials who are concerned with native administration, but it is interesting also to the layman in the light of post-war trends in the administrative approach to native affairs.
Dr. Williams wrote his essay in 1935, at i time when any aims in native education, J' l fv,^ P Jf^ ining e ?" & tenment of the native, was held to be >trictly the business of the very few “ the matter - , T 1^ e SfSiS £ lC +v, nc £ ave even a ?, acaden ? lc nost of It as 6 fLJf as rul:, kish, most of them, at i^ erß r 1 ? 10re concerned with rymg to make a living out of copra which vas then bringing about £9 in London. If hey had shown more interest then in lative problems we would probably have >een spared the violent reaction in the ther direction that first manifested itelf during the war years.
Since the war, the layman has had to in I ll terest X P native affairs whether i t Q i )r , n( £’ never b ? f °re has the heonst had such an opportunity of get- L S? 0 S o/ d c e ,? S y, mto P^chcc— and we can ope tlmt such opportunity will not come gam -
As far as Papua-New Guinea was con cerned, the Theorists went after the un fortunate exponents of private enterprise in full cry and, mixing their pet notions into large, rough pills, forced them willy nilly, down the gullets of their unwilling victims. The result has been acute mental indignation on the part of the layman and a revulsion from anything propounded by a Theorist, good or bad.
Probably it can be said, however, that the layman, having been forced to swallow the unpalatable pills, will retain some thing of them and that, in the years ahead, some happy medium between the extremes of Theorism and Conservatism may result.
In the meantime, probably even the conservatives are already sufficiently conditioned to this New Thought to be interested in what Dr. Williams had to say about the aims of native education away back at a time when they thought natives, as distinct from native labourers, were no concern of theirs.
DR. WILLIAMS states that no one who has seriously studied the question can believe that the natives should be left just as they are. Nor is the ideal straight out Europeanisation. The solution, he thinks, is a blending of the two cultures—the native retaining what is best in his own culture and adopting what is best for him in ours. “It is obvious,'’ he says, “that there is change ahead for every primitive society that is brought under European control or influence ”
When Dr. Williams wrote that, the Papua- New Guinea natives were still many years away from the Pacific war. The “culture clashes” that happened during that period were not brought about with the “due precaution” advocated by Dr. Williams
and the effect they had on the natives of New Guinea are well known to the residents of the Territory to-day.
Dr. WILLIAMS believed that there were three ways in which we could con tribute to the betterment of native existence; (1) A reformed horticulture—a practical training calculated to raise his
standard of living; (2) The teaching of the English language so that “the gate might be opened to wider fields of ex perience and knowledge;” And (3), Christianity.
Dr. Williams was not blind to the dangers of giving our religion to primitive people—they are, he said, particularly prcne to getting hold of the wrong end
of the religious stick which turns them into zealots —fanatical Puritans—or pro duces strange freaks of behaviour such as the various “cults” or “movements.” But he believes that “Christianity for the present and the long future is the best available spiritual diet we can offer to primitive peoples.”
IT probably can be said that these three fundamentals have formed the pattern of the post-war policy of the P-NG administration towards native administration. The manner in which the plan was put into action, however, was probably very much different to what Dr.
Williams had in mind. In his concluding paragraph he says this: “If it provides for understanding, helpfulness and goodwill between native and European, and if it enables the more backward race to develop latent powers to live a fuller and richer life, then the main aims of education will have been fulfilled.”
It will be noticed that Dr. Williams said goodwill between “native and European”— that is, Europeans in the mass, not missionaries or school teachers or adminis tration officials exclusively—Europeans generally. And it seems to this writer that in the first year or so after the resumption of civil administration in Papua-New Guinea, the men who should have been guiding the natives to this co-operation and understanding were producing just the opposite effect. With the backing of the rat-bags that were then in high places in Australia, some sections of the Ad ministration went back to the Territory believing that they had a charter to turn Fapua-New Guinea into what they con ceived to be a native heaven, in the quickest possible time. Only those who were professed hand-maidens to this scheme were tolerated. Those who in dulged in those mundane things lumped
together as “private enterprise” were not worth considering. This attitude coming when it did, on top of three years of war and more culture clashes than any anthropologist dreamed of, must have done far more harm to the Williams ideal of co-operation than any of the previous decades of so-called exploitation. The fact that there have not been far more reper cussions from those first few years of post-war Civil Administration is probably due to the fundamental good sense of the ordinary Territorian, European and native.
“It is obvious,” says Williams, “that our civilisation is incomparably richer than the natives’ and that we, who happen to be the masters, are in a position to broaden and elevate the life of those who are in the position of pupils.”
Our richer civilisation was not built en tirely by Administration officials or missionaries or those people who, in 1945, would have liked to have kept “private mterprise” out of the Territory so that the pure flower of administrative theory night be brought to bloom in a rarified itmosphere of higher thought.
In a nutshell, Williams’ idea of native education was to aim at something that vould allow natives and Europeans to get ilong together. If this ideal is now to be nade the cornerstone of future Adminis ration policy in New Guinea one can only include by saying that it is a pity that fhe Blending of Cultures was not dis
covered and re-printed sooner.-