Up Front

with the editor

One of the more fascinating spectacles on Nauru during the independence celebrations was an exhibition of the Nauruan wrestling called eakabarere.

ACCORDING to the Nauruans it is a form of judo, but to me it also had the elements of another kind of Japanese wrestling called sumo. Judo exponents of my acquaintance have been pretty athletic-looking chaps, with a lean and hungry look.

Nauruan eakabarere exponents whom I saw at the celebrations were built more along the lines of the sumo man-mountains whose bouts I occasionally used to attend when I lived in Japan after the war.

In sumo, which is highly stylised, semi-naked wrestlers go through an elaborate preliminary ritual before finally coming to grips. The first man to be put out of the ring or to touch the ground with any part of his body other than his feet loses the match.

Trial of force

In eakabarere there is no ring, and the contestants we saw didn’t waste very much time with ritual. They danced around each other only long enough to find a likely hold, and then they moved in quickly for what appeared to be a trial of brute force.

The idea was to get the other man off his feet and on to the ground, and the first man to touch the ground lost. If both men survived two or three minutes without either biting the dust then it was a tie.

There weren’t many ties in the contests we saw, but there were a couple of good arguments, resulting in the Nauruan police good naturedly escorting the contestants off—and in one case a couple of the handlers, too. Barrackers were noisily partisan, and the defeated contestant usually trailed off the ground in great dejection.

At the games I sat next to Nauru s grand old man, Pastor Jacob Aroi, who is the expert on Nauruan tradition, and the pastor was not overly impressed with the wrestling (although I found it of great interest).

The Nauruans didn’t do much of

this sort of thing now, Pastor Arc explained, and you saw it only o special occasions. As a result the ol skill seemed to be dying out. In th old days there were some fine e: ponents.

“Men had their favourite hol( and some of them were very clev< indeed,” said the Pastor. “There migl appear to be no headway on eithi side when suddenly you would s< one man tossed completely over tl other chap’s head and on to tl ground.”

Apparently there has also bet less interest in recent years in tl Nauruan ball game called Itsibwe which we Independence Day visitc also saw, and which isn’t like ai game I can think of. There were tv teams operating on either side of carefully marked out area about tl length of a cricket pitch. A ball w hit from one team to the other, ai points were lost if the ball w dropped by the catchers. The no\ elements in the game are the meth

)f delivering the ball, and the ball tself.

The ball is about twice the size »f a baseball and is hand-made of landanus leaves tightly woven around i central core of wood. The weave 5 so tight that the ball is extremely ard.

The bowler makes a run as in ricket, throws the ball in the air nd as it comes down smacks it down ic pitch with the palm of his open and. Clearly it requires an expert 3 deliver such a ball without break ig a hand.

An adaptation of this Nauruan ame is also played by the women, nd is similar to modern softball ex -pt that the palm is used instead f a bat.

Handicrafts

Evening closed in before the auruans were able to stage one or /o other games which were on the >enda —which was a disappointment, ne of the missed items was a demon ration of coconut husking—using method, it was promised, believed be peculiar to Nauru among all e Pacific Islands. I would like to ive seen that.

But I was able to see an exhibition Nauruan handicrafts which made e of only locally produced aterials. The organisers of this ex bition apparently had difficulty in ranging a supply of genuine handi afts in sufficient quantity and riety, for these skills, too —like e national games—apparently are it what they were.

I did hear expressed on Nauru me apprehension that Nauruan mes and handicrafts would very on die out completely under the assure of the phosphate-rich onomy, which has brought wash l machines and transistors to most luruan households, and often two rs.

But will it? It seems to me that astern Samoa has made more sincere orts to retain its own culture since lependence than it did before. In pendence is, after all, nationalism, d nationalism gets a people digging o the grass roots.

As Honor Maude pointed out in ■ readable article on Nauruan string ares in our February issue, the uruans are the most expert string .ire makers in the world. Probably s. Maude’s illustrated article will p revive Nauruan skills in that , and Nauruan realisation that their er skills are of genuine interest to siders will mean a new lease of life these, too. Anyway, I hope so.

Stuart Inder