Tribe in Tribe
This is the second part of a story about Papua New Guinea. You don’t need to read the first part, but you might like to. The events described happened in sequence.
My plane out of Tufi on the east coast of Papua New Guinea is delayed a day so I borrow a kayak and go for a paddle up a lonely fjord. From the air, if only I could get up there, this extraordinary landscape would look like fingers reaching out into the Solomon Sea. Flocks of parrots and cockatoos go squabbling across the jungled horizons on both sides of the water. I see a canoe coming the other way and we stop in the middle of the fjord for a chat. There are no roads on Tufi so Alfred has been to visit his uncle by canoe. I tell him he lives in a wonderful place, so peaceful and quiet.
"It is good," he agrees, without any enthusiasm. "But there are too many sorcerers."
Really? What do they do?
"Poisoning people is normal. And once they've killed one, it's easier to kill more."
Wherever you go in the world, you can stumble across communities that have gone through, or are going through, moments of obsessional collective delusion. Traditional forms of this may manifest as paranoia about sorcerors, but it equally might be a belief that a cabal of paedophiles runs the world from a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, or that Donald Trump is presidential material. In Iran some people believe that the sight of a woman’s hair can drive men into a frenzy of lust that will destroy family life. Women without headscarves are sent for psychiatric treatment, if they are lucky. It’s usually relatively easy to spot other people’s delusions, but not your own.

One common aspect to irrational beliefs and supernatural stories is that they are baffling and difficult to understand, which I suppose is what you might expect. On Tufi I had heard how one tribe of people were terrorised by another who had powerful snake magic. To avoid total extermination, they used octopus magic to disappear among their tormentors, forming a Fifth Column tribe undetected within the host group. Generations later they still lived inside their host tribe and would speak their own language with each other, knowing that detection would lead to death. After so much time there had been intermarriage and some families were split: the snake magic half not realising the other half were octopus people.
The day after hearing about this I had lunch with an elderly Australian couple who had run hotels and resorts all over PNG and Australasia. They were entertainingly indiscreet about it.
"One day this old Sheila turns up with a face like a fried apple," says Bruce, "I thought this one's fuckin' trouble."
His wife interrupts. "Bruce, don't say 'fuck' so much - for all we know this fella might be religious."
Bruce frowns. I think he's trying to work out if she's joking, and whether conversation without the word fuck is actually possible. After a pause, he continues.
"Anyways, this fuckin' - pardon my French - woman comes down in the night and says, 'Sorry, I soiled the bed.’”
Bruce pulls a face of disgust. “I says to her, 'No worries. Happens to the best of us.' But then I went and looked in the room. Fuck me, she'd only gone and spray-painted the walls. I says to her, 'What happened, crocodile death roll?'"
I share a ride out to the air strip with them, feeling like I’m a tribe within a tribe, hoping to escape detection. Sadly they disembark in Port Moresby while I carry on over the Solomon Sea to Hoskins in New Britain.
I stay at a dive resort again (see my last story You Don't Know What You've Got…), this one backed by an enormous palm oil plantation.
A well-established palm oil plantation is a horrible thing to behold. The trees stand in lines for mile after mile. They are a primeval dark green, frothy with ferns and utterly silent. To maintain the monoculture requires heavy and frequent spraying with herbicides and pesticides.
The owner of the dive resort, Max, had come here in the 1960s as a palm oil manager, overseeing the cutting down of the rainforest. The felled timber went off to make chipboard. The palm oil seeped into the ultra-processed food that Australia needed. Without it, their cities would creak to a standstill, their cricketers would lose The Ashes, and men like Bruce wouldn't swear so fluently.
By the 1990s, however, palm oil was controversial and the Australian company who had started it needed to prove their eco-credentials. They were under pressure from the environmental lobby and so they went green. Their move, however, was not enough. Palm oil had become a toxic product. They sold the plantation to a Malaysian business. The Malaysians were much more hard-nosed about it and did not have the environmental lobby on their backs. Max had a pragmatic attitude. "In this area, palm oil is the best we can grow, and we need to produce something. We need jobs."
The bad part was that the Australians had simply washed their hands of any responsibility instead of staying and working to improve things.
Max himself had done a huge amount to educate local people about the value of their environment, setting up an educational institute and teaching extra-curricular courses to over 30,000 children over the years, plus funding university places and Phd studies. He thanked the oceanographer and diving pioneer Jacques Cousteau for this. "His visit galvanised me to do something for the environment."
Cousteau was not the only famous visitor. "In about 1996, we had an old German lady turn up here. She was 94 years old and came with her 56 year-old toy boy and a ton of film equipment. She said she was going to stay until she had made the best underwater film ever."
He gets up and fetches a photograph to show me. "Her name was Leni Riefenstahl. I don't know about her Nazi past, but she was a wonderful old lady, out there diving every day - incredible."
They became friends and Max met her a few more times. In 2000, at the age of 98, she survived a helicopter crash in South Sudan. She had gone there to find old friends among the Nuba people who were suffering the consequences of war.
A few days later, I meet Joseph. He had been a divemaster once, but a bad case of the bends had left him unable to dive. Instead he drives for the dive resort. He is standing at the gates which lead out into a palm oil plantation, staring through binoculars. I ask what he's looking for.
"There is one bird..."
It turns out we have a shared passion. He tells me that three days earlier he had been driving through the plantation when he saw an owl sitting on a post. "It was like nothing I'd seen before."
There were two Japanese divers in the car, coming from the airstrip. He got one of them to take a shot on his phone. When they got back, he provisionally identified it as a Golden Masked Owl, a species thought by some experts to be extinct. He had been out every night since, trying to get a better photo.
That night I went with him.
We drove up and down the long shaggy lines of palms, occasionally stopping to listen. After three hours we gave up and drove back to the resort. Joseph dropped me by the gate and as I got out the car, something huge flew low over my head.
"That's it!" shouted Joseph. I caught a glimpse of the wings in the car headlamps and it was gone. A few weeks later Joseph got his photo and confirmed the identity of the bird. The Golden Masked Owl had been living in plain sight all the time, a tribe within a tribe. For all the horror of the palm oil monoculture, it had found a way to survive.