Bloodthirsty Laewomba:

Guilty Or Maligned?

Archaeologists and oral historians are fast replacing social anthropologists as the most common species of academic researcher in the Pacific. There is a good reason for this: the new nations like to clothe their politico-legal legitimacy in the mantle of history, but, pre-literate societies until the middle of the 19th century or later, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, etc, do not have enough documents or other reliable written material for a written history.

The work of archaeologists, inquiring into the past through the evidence of im plements, former village sites, etc, and of oral historians, recording genealogies, myths, tales, etc, passed from generation to generation by word of mouth, is therefore of great importance, and so is any historically relevant research by linguists and other scientists.

In the case of Papua New Guinea, much skill and labour are necessary to find documents and books written before 1900.

However, as Dr Sack, an expert on Ger man land laws and practice in New Guinea, shows in The Bloodthirsty Laewomba?, there is more material than many people have believed. He does so by inquiring into the validity of verbal ac counts by islanders and written ones by Europeans about the Laewomba whose present-day descendants live in villages along the lower Markham River.

The Laewomba of the 19th and early 20th centuries have been regarded as bloodthirsty, ruthless killers who preyed upon groups, eg on the Lahe and Bukaua in the coastal region. In his detailed study, Historical Problems of Northeast New Guinea (1961), C. A. Schmitz sees the tribal fighting of those times as a clash between two sub-branches of a people who settled into the interior and pushing the in habitants further inland.

But, in Transformation Scene (1951), H. I. Hogbin, a renowned anthropologist, suggests that the fighting was between those intruders and other people coming after them from the coast. B. A. Hooley, a linguist, writing about the origins of languages spoken in the area, says that it is a waste of time to go through the existing literature in the hope of finding a substan tial amount of information on the history of the various groups.

The first well documented account of contact between Europeans and Laewom ba is a report by district commissioner

Stuckhardt who, with a party of two other Europeans, 10 New Guinean policemen and 44 labourers from a coastal village, was attacked by 50 to 60 “mountain people” on June 22, 1905. At least six Laewomba were killed and six members of Stuckhardt’s party were wounded. Two years later, the Lutheran missionary Lehner wrote that the Laewomba had kill ed seven Lahe and captured a woman, and that they were “bloodthirsty and

rapacious”.

Another missionary, Mailander, reported that the Labu had their villages in the middle of the Herzog Lakes because they feared the Laewomba. However, by 1909, the editor of a mission magazine reported that the Laewomba were not bloodthirsty but merely taking revenge for wrongs done to them by the Lahe. In 1911, Schmutterer, another missionary, reported that the Laewomba had killed five Yalu, while a report in 1914 told about Waing people attacking and killing six Laewomba to avenge a raid during which the Laewomba had slain eight of their people.

These and other reports by missionaries, officials and travellers make it clear that tribal warfare was endemic but, as Dr Sack shows by quoting from contem porary written material, eg Deutsches Kolonialblatt (a newspaper issued by the German Colonial Society) and Amtsblatt fur das Schutzgebiet Deutsch Neuguinea (official gazette), not used by other

resources, it is questionable that the Laewomba sinned more than they were sinned against.

As far as word of mouth accounts go, the Bukaua, Lahe, Labu, Buang and other groups in the area today give the Laewom ba a bad name, and, unless the Laewomba have changed their opinion about their neighbours, what Luluai Wis told me in 1943 still holds good: they regard everyone else in the area as “rubbish men”, lacking in manly attributes.

However, oral history, as Hogbin points out and any oral historian worth his salt knows, becomes “bent” when its purveyors have some objective, eg a claim to land or hunting rights in a dispute with neighbours. And even though written ac counts by foreigners are frequently biased and, therefore, unreliable, they are often of greater value than verbal accounts. Above all, they make cross-checking possible.

Dr Sack does not pretend that written sources are infallible, let alone adequate, but he does show that, with much more ex pertise and diligence than most researchers have so far shown, it is possible to obtain additional information of considerable value. He has done a great service to the Papua New Guineans who will, before long, tackle the monumental task of

writing their nation’s history.

Harry

Jackman.

(The Bloodthirsty Laewomba? By Peter G.

Sack. Published by ANU Press and Morobe District Historical Society, LAE, 1976. $4.95.)