submitted on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 14:31 in Travel Asia with Raimondo Bultrini Group by zorg 
Published on the magazine Il Venerdì della Repubblica Black magic, black magic,/ Flames of danger and tragicUnder the shadow of the moonlight/ Eyes filled with terror and fright…(JobZigu) GOROKA (Eastern Highlands) – He liked to be called ‘Black Jesus’, perhaps for the color of his skin or the darkness of the cult he created after having been expelled from the Lutheran seminary.
Photographs published at the end of March showed Steven Tari, 32, his face bruised and his entire body battered by an angry mob, hundreds strong, which tried to wrest him away from the police as they dragged him, lashed to a bamboo staff, to the prison house of Madang, on the north west coast of the main island of New Guinea.
His arrest, after a long manhunt, may have brought a sigh of relief to the six thousand followers who worshipped and feared him sufficiently to offer him their daughters for his cannibal rites.The first of his 26 alleged victims, thirteen year old Rita Hamen, was one of the ‘Flower Girls’ dreamed up by Tari so as to surround himself with virgins to be possessed and then devoured.
It was her own mother who agreed to the sacrifice which involved the sexual act, death and libations with the victim’s blood. By what logic could this have come about? It is known that Tari preached his own completely indigenous interpretation of the Bible, and went around with a worn out copy of the Holy Book and a ceremonial sword. Above all, though, he was emulating the ritual practices practiced for centuries in the Solomon Isles, and described by anthropologists as the ‘cargo cults’.
The modern legend that prevailed in these parts was that the material riches of the white man resulted from the sacrifice of a man, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for the good of others, as Padre Franco Zocca writes in “The Black Christians of Oceania.” Zocca recounts a story from the visiting American bishop, Adolph Noser, who celebrated Mass with an entire highlands village one morning. Shortly afterwards in the churchyard, a youth was brought forward and his throat was slit in front of all present.
The villagers then explained that the ‘martyr’ had happily offered his life for the greater prosperity of his village and clan, just as Christ had done. “They were thus,” Noser explained, “fully expecting that the moment the blood touched the ground, it would open up and countless chests of merchandise would emerge.”If his followers’ stories are to be believed, Steven Tari too, as the Australasian son of God, promised worldly goods ‘ beyond imagination.’ To gain a better understanding of the origins of certain ancestral practices in this terrestrial paradise shared by a thousand tribes speaking 850 archaic languages, one needs to learn more than can be discovered at the massive archives of the Institute of Melanesian Culture or the research centres of the world’s universities.
The one certainty is that the phenomenon, rather than decreasing under the west’s cultural and religious influence, is growing and spreading wider. Similarly, we are seeing an increase in domestic violence, particularly involving women and children, and incest, which is very probably connected.Reliable statistics are not available, but the evidence collected by an education official in Port Moresby contains stories of dozens of cases of sexual abuse within the home. In a chain reaction, the young victims, beaten or raped, flee home to join the ranks of the ‘rascals’, the gangs of thieves, kidnappers, pimps and prostitutes who hold power over entire urban neighborhoods.
In the capital, considered one of the world’s most dangerous cities, the police have taken to using squads, licensed to kill, to confront the gangs.But even here, with the influx of people from the mountain tribes, it is the power of magic that holds sway over politics, social relationships and civic affairs. In a well known study, Bruce Knauft maintains that, of 10,000 deaths annually, 500 are caused by suspicion of witchcraft leading to torture and other crimes.
This statistic is explained by the ancestral belief that no death takes place without a human being responsible, either acting on his own initiative or under the control of a spirit possessing his body.“Today, now that 200 churches stand on the island”-says Caspar Damien, a researcher in Simbu ethnography at the Melanesian Institute-“no one remembers that it took over a thousand years in Europe to eliminate the mass paranoia caused by witchcraft.
This only came about with the spread of prosperity and the social harmony it brought. But amongst us, very few are wealthy and we live in a world unchanged for millennia.”Sanguma, the term for witchcraft or black magic in the nationwide tok-pisin language, returned to the news in a story, reported internationally, of the recent discovery of the mutilated and decomposed bodies of four women in their thirties accused of using black magic to cause a car accident in the impenetrable Eastern Highlands.
This is the land of the Simbu, the ethnic group most often morbidly associated with the cults of Sanguma and Kumo, which is described literally as the human power to make an animal, either lizard, snake or rat, leave one’s body, ready to kill with the sound of a magic word. It is in such forms, according to witnesses in Goroka, that everyone saw the kumo of the four women traveling along the high tension cable like electrical currents all the way down from the village of Kamex to the scene of the accident hundreds of kilometers away. The brother of one of the victims, speaking to a journalist from The National Newspaper Zachery Per, indicated that there might be some truth in the power attributed to the women:“After calling her Christian name in vain, we decided to call our sister in Isafa, the language of our tribe, and immediately a small black bird began to fly backwards and forwards from a banana tree.
In a hole just below it we found my sister and the others buried, horribly mutilated.”The government Justice minister Bire Kimisopa has defined sanguma as ‘one of our greatest unresolved problems of public order’, while an ex Prime Minister and current Minister of Treasury Sir Rabbie Namaliu, is constantly accompanied by his own witchdoctor as protection and as a counter threat to ill wishers.
The Bishops’ convention turned in alarm to the Institute of Melanesian culture for advice. From the extended studies undertaken, we learn that the victims are of all ages, but are predominantly female, in a ratio of six to one. Hundreds of cases have been recorded. In August 2005, a child of eight months old was cut in two and his house burned in the village of Pari. A girl student was decapitated in front of her compliant parents in October 2006 and her head tossed into the River Wanghi, where five months earlier were found the abandoned bodies of a boy and his father killed after being tortured.
Although an ‘Anti- Witchcraft Law’ was passed in 1976, few perpetrators of such acts end up in prison. Since the archipelago’s population is barely 5 million, the 500 victims annually represent a far higher percentage than that for similar cases in Africa or India.Yet, science is near at hand, with university research centres linked to Australia and other developed nations, and the arrival of internet- albeit still expensive – to connect the remotest parts of the territory.
But what influence can this have in a nation where fewer than 20% of children go to school? Few roads exist - Port Moresby has none to connect it to the rest of the country – and few teachers from the outside world are willing to live in a wilderness with no electricity or hospitals.
The lack of development is attributable not only to the widespread corruption. In much of Papua – divided by an imaginary line separating the autonomous region from that governed by Indonesia – the land belongs to clans, either through patriarchal or matriarchal lines, with no registry and every change gives rise to disputes which easily escalate into feuds involving sanguma. In the villages, everyone is under scrutiny, especially those who are thought to be behaving strangely; remaining awake or going for walks at night, visiting cemeteries, falling into near catatonic states when kumo might “venture forth’ to do their deadly work.
Thus any suspicious death is linked to the lonely, weak or marginal in a community. The same is true regarding Aids- as indeed it was in the times of cannibalism with the Kuru which came out of the corpses –so that the blame is placed on non- human beings guided by witches and shamans. In the case of the Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome, the witches and the victims both suffer unimaginable violence, albeit in different forms.
During a trial for sanguma, confessions are extorted with bamboo stabs all over the body and doses of poison, while the afflicted may be thrown from a cliff, burned at the gates of the village, locked away in huts or chicken coops or abandoned, starved and filthy, at the city hospitals, perhaps ending up in the renowned Ward 4B of Port Moresby’s General Hospital.Today, 2% of Papuans, the highest percentage in the entire Pacific region are afflicted, with the rate increasing 50% annually.
Everywhere one sees enormous billboards proclaiming “Lukautim Yu YetLon Aids” or “Beware! Stay away from Aids!” But information on what it is or how it is transmitted is nowhere to be found. Hermann Spingler, a priest and scholar, director of the Melanesian institute, points out that, according to a recent survey, “only 30% of the respondents knew that transmission occurred through sex or contact with blood.”Not surprisingly, politicians continually announce that billions of kina will be spent on education.
But this is a drop in the ocean, and these declarations are probably only election promises anyway. When polling day comes, the tribes people descend from the forests in traditional dress to vote for their chosen candidate, receive a small cash handout and more promises of electricity and schools for their children. But then everything stays the same and the old men go back to telling their tales by the light of the bonfire - of sorcerers and sorceresses, of witches and men of magic killed by their fathers, grandfathers and ancestors who feared their powers.
