*Footnotes

rHE tipsters are now giving us PAGINI as hot favourite in Papua-New Guinea’s Find-A-National- Jame Stakes. My own favoured horse, “Niugini”, eems to have no chance of doing better than third lace, even if placed at all. So let us give “Pagini” a rial run in this column this month and see what it ooks and sounds like.

In Pagini the great debate on Bride Price waxes and panes, like a bushfire which dies down and then uddenly bursts out again in furious flame. Lately it pas the subject of a lively “forum” organised by the *apua and New Guinea Society.

Bride price is, of course, an age-old custom in >agini, and only began to be questioned in the 1920 s phen, in Hanuabada, the pound note started to assume -reater importance than the traditional arm-shell as 1 bride price component. Looking back from the present ira of bride prices running into thousands of dollars, t seems odd to recall that anxiety first began to be ixpressed when the cash component of bride price cached three figures.

The pre-war Papua Administration tried banning dvil actions for the recovery of bride price from he jurisdiction of Courts for Native Matters, in the lope that this would induce caution. It didn’t; and

:ash bride prices continued to rise.

Courts for Native Matters and the Native Regulations which they admin stered are now things of the past, and t is probably only a question of time jefore one or other of our courts gets ituck with a civil claim for the return )f a bride price. If and when this lappens, the controversy will no doubt Dreak out again with redoubled ntensity.

Several local government councils lave toyed with the idea of imposing m upper limit on cash bride prices 3y council rule, and it has even been ;uggested that the House of Assembly should be asked to legislate such a limit. Even if this were done, it is

doubtful whether more would be achieved than the encouragement of ingenuity in law evasion.

In the interminable debate on the subject, it is rare for speakers or writers to get down to the rationale of bride price, and even when they do they don’t follow the argument through to its logical conclusion.

The basis of the custom of bride price is the fact that certain assets, namely the labour and skills of the bride, are being lost to one family group and gained by another.

After marriage, her labour in carrying water, chopping firewood and other household chores, and the skills she has acquired in growing food, will be lost to her family and gained by the bridegroom’s. So it is reason able that the latter should compensate the former for the loss of these valuable assets.

This argument is sound enough as long as we are considering people living in a subsistence economy. But

today, all over Pagini, people are moving out of a subsistence into a cash economy, and in the towns and urbanized villages the transition has been complete.

Is the argument for bride price valid in a cash economy? Obviously not. In fact, the whole argument goes into reverse.

Unless the bride is an actual or a potential wage earner, she is not an asset but a liability. The bride s father knows this only too well, and the bridegroom will soon find it out. That hard-headed body, the Public Service Board, has recognised it by giving its lower paid local officers a “family needs allowance”, calculated to provide not only for their children but for their wives too.

In Victorian and Edwardian England it was customary for a father to ask the suppliant for his daughter’s hand in marriage, “Can you support my daughter in the manner of life to which she has been accustomed?”

I understand that in capitalism’s bastion, the USA, the custom persists to this day, though the question now takes the form, “Can you afford two cars?”

I do not need to labour the point. It is clear that in a cash economy, unless she has some marketable skills, the bride is, economically, a liability, not an asset, and I find it ironical that some of the highest

bride prices currently being paid are expended on sophisticated misses who scorn the humbler household chores and don’t know how to grow yams.

“No thank you,” said one recently, “you don’t catch me spending the best years of my life carrying my mother in-law’s water and firewood”.

If, then, bride price is the logical system for a subsistence economy, the logical system for a cash economy is bridegroom price, or, as it is more commonly called, dowry. The dowry system recognises that the bridegroom is taking over not an asset but a liability from the bride’s father, and should be compensated for doing so.

My contention is, therefore, that

while bride price may be allowed to continue where the bridegroom is a subsistence farmer, and perhaps even where he is a cash crop farmer, in cases where he is a wage earner it should be replaced by bride groom price. However, bridegroom price should be remitted in cases where the bride has a diploma or certificate indicating that she possesses some form of ability or skill which has a marketable value.

Some kind of Board of Reference would probably be needed to adjudicate in borderline cases. For instance, should a B.A. in archaeology and pre-history count for remission of bridegroom price? I doubt it.

This modest proposal of mine, if adopted, is going to do more for the advancement of the women of Pagini than all the consultations, seminars and work shops which have ever been held on the subject.

Up to now, Paginian parents have too often been reluctant to allow their daughters to continue their

With Percy Chatterton

in Port Moresby

ducation to tertiary or vocational level. Some have ven objected to their going to high school. They want hem back home to be groomed for the bride market.

Once my proposal is adopted this reluctance will lisappear overnight, and parents will urge their laughters to go to high school and college.

Picture a typical scene at the airport. A neat, mini kirted damsel in her late teens is about to take off or Lae, where she has enrolled for a course in civil ngineering at the Institute of Technology.

“The Board of Reference won’t be able to fault hat one,” chuckles dad. “Work hard, darling”, whispers num, “remember what it will mean to your poor ather”. Then, as the trim figure pauses briefly at the op of the gangway to way goodbye, “Success in your tudies”, they cry, “go with God, and come back with diploma”.

By and by, when independence comes and the National League of Paginian Women has been formed, shall look for some small recognition of the blow am now striking for them—say, a golden heart with >ar.

In the meantime, a merry Christmas and a happy 'lew Year to all readers of this column.