Tik Merauke: An Epidemic Like No Other

By John Richens

When the Dutch government moved to stop headhunting by the Marind people of New Guinea in 1902 their actions unleashed new epidemics among a population already suffering from low fertility. Donovanosis (Tik Merauke in Marind), a rare, newly recognised sexually transmitted infection for which no medicine was available, affected huge numbers. This compelling book investigates the causes of this unique epidemic by exploring the fascinating lives and rituals of the Marind along with those of the missionaries, anthropologists, doctors, administrators, film makers and bird hunters swept up in the events. Tik Merauke shows how the discovery of an effective medicine brought relief, but how the coercive resettlement of the Marind into model villages has left a troubled legacy still felt by the surviving people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780522878158

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TIK MERAUKE

TIK MERAUKE

AN EPIDEMIC LIKE NO OTHER

John Richens

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2022

Text © John Richens, 2022

Images © various contributors, various dates

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2022

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Typeset by Megan Ellis

Cover design by Pilar Aguilera

Cover image of a woman from Merauke by Petrus Vertenten, Collection

   Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen: RV-A440-c-24

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522878141 (paperback)

9780522878158 (ebook)

CONTENTS

Notes on the illustrations

Preface

Timeline

1 New Guinea: The bird

2 Barenda: Life as a Marind man

3 The lives of Marind women: Roles and rituals

4 Headhunting: Turning the enemy into a friend

5 Captain John Strachan and Sir William MacGregor

6 The arrival of the Sacred Heart missionaries

7 Paul Wirz: Maverick Swiss anthropologist

8 Petrus Vertenten: ‘Saviour of the Kaya-kayas’

9 Interlude: How news of impending Marind extinction reached US cinemas

10 A stealth pathogen, serpiginous ulcers and the Spanish flu

11 The epidemics strike

12 Max Thierfelder and the treatment campaign

13 After the epidemic: Jan van Baal and Jan Verschueren debate the way forward

14 Yul Bole Gebze: A Malind voice

15 The threat of extinction returns

Notes

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Index

Notes on the illustrations

Motifs at the start of each chapter are by Veronica Spooner.

PREFACE

Early in the twentieth century, donovanosis, a rare tropical sexually transmitted infection, which is now disappearing, fuelled a huge epidemic among the Marind people of New Guinea. The prevalence of donovanosis among the Marind reached levels not seen again with any sexually transmitted infection until HIV reached around 20 per cent prevalence among adults in parts of southern Africa in about 2004.

The Marind first attracted attention due to their large headhunting raids along the south coast of New Guinea. Their colourful and violent culture fascinated colonial governors, anthropologists, Catholic missionaries and, rather belatedly, a Dutch dermatovenereologist. This book, drawing on recent advances in our understanding of how sexually transmitted infections spread, offers a fresh theory about why such a unique and serious epidemic of donovanosis erupted shortly after the Dutch sent in armed forces to put a stop to headhunting.

In 1984 I travelled to Goroka, a small town in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, to embark on six-and-a-half years’ work as a general physician. My preparation for this included a year at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, acquiring a master’s degree in clinical tropical medicine. One of my tutors, Dr Hugo Rée, had highly recommended PNG as a fascinating place to work and gave me the necessary contacts to secure a job there. He told me I would encounter patients with donovanosis and this neglected disease was worth studying.

I found that Goroka Base Hospital’s medical ward had rooms set aside for patients with Hansen’s disease (leprosy), tuberculosis and donovanosis. I set out to learn all I could about donovanosis as I saw my first patients, collecting everything that had been published around the world since the first detailed description in the British Guiana Medical Annual of 1896. I started to encounter tantalising references to a spectacular epidemic among the Marind in the 1920s, as when I examined an early edition of the classic tropical medicine textbook Manson’s Tropical Diseases. This led me to first-hand accounts of the epidemic by Dr N Cnopius and Dr Max Thierfelder.

I was puzzled about why a donovanosis epidemic of unparallelled severity struck the Marind in a way unseen in any other part of the world. For answers, I turned to social anthropologist Jan van Baal’s magisterial treatise on the Marind, and Gilbert Herdt’s Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, which came out the year I arrived in Papua New Guinea. Van Baal describes how Catholic missionaries, from 1905 onwards, had become very active as amateur ethnologists and linguists, as well as struggling to provide healthcare; the Netherlands Sacred Heart Mission has celebrated the achievements of Father Petrus Vertenten in persuading the Dutch Government to fund a full-blown disease control campaign.

Such praise needs to be compared with the sharp criticisms from Paul Wirz, the first trained anthropologist to study the Marind. Wirz arrived in PNG in the hope of finding a ‘naturvolker’: a tribe in its natural state, untouched by the outside world. He was horrified to discover missionaries doing their best to dismantle and replace the Marind belief system with Christianity; rebuilding their villages, to break up their social structure; and replacing their elaborate and striking traditional ornamentation and dress with European clothing.

Caught between these two extremes were individuals like Jan van Baal, who arrived as an administrator and returned to the Netherlands to become a professor of anthropology, and his collaborator, Jan Verschueren, a missionary who spent thirty years among the Marind, gaining a unique understanding of, and sympathy with, their culture. This pair debated with each other the challenges of helping the Marind adapt to the fast-changing world.

Following the establishment of the first military garrison at Merauke, in 1902, infectious diseases had a dramatic and highly visible impact on the Marind. The missionaries’ capacity to provide basic healthcare was overwhelmed by an outbreak of an unidentified form of genital ulceration; a Dutch packet ship brought the Spanish flu pandemic to Merauke, killing close to 20 per cent of the coastal population in 1919. While the flu was clearly a foreign import, donovanosis could not be so easily explained as a ‘gift’ from the outside world. For example, the suppression of headhunting caused immense social upheaval among the Marind, which, it is highly likely, made infections more likely to spread. The earliest accounts of contact with the Marind make frequent mention of a low birthrate and shrinking communities, pointing to a high rate of tubal infertility from gonorrhoea (and possibly chlamydia). Due to this, the abduction of infants was important in headhunting raids, with more than 10 per cent of children in some Marind villages being reported as abducted.

The expatriates I read about reminded me of the popular categorisation of those drawn to New Guinea that I encountered when I arrived in 1984: the four Ms, standing for missionaries, medics, mercenaries and misfits. The story this book tells abounds in all four. Father Petrus Vertenten, a gifted Flemish missionary, painted impressive portraits of the Marind. He is commemorated with statues in Belgium and New Guinea as the ‘saviour of the Marind’. Father Jan Verschueren spent decades living among the Marind, giving him exceptional insight into their culture. Dr Max Thierfelder and his wife, Dr Marie Thierfelder-Thillot, with limited resources organised treatment for thousands of patients in remote locations and harsh conditions. Among the mercenaries are the minor characters who saw commercial opportunities in trading coconut products, bird of paradise feathers, or creating film footage of supposed headhunters or cannibals. The eccentric, irascible Swiss ethnographer and collector Paul Wirz undoubtedly has to be placed in the misfit category. Frustrated in his hope of finding an untouched tribe, he felt his only option was to salvage (some would say plunder) what he could of the Marind’s glorious artefacts, photograph their disappearing ceremonies, and create an emotional and polemical account of their myths and customs for posterity. To this colourful dramatis personae should be added Sir William MacGregor, the fearless Scottish colonial governor of British New Guinea, and Jan van Baal, the Dutch anthropologist who also served as the last governor of Dutch New Guinea.

In exploring this story, I have also been ushered down unexpected byways, such as the ‘plume boom’ of 1900–20 that saw thousands of New Guinea bird of paradise feathers auctioned in London, Paris and Amsterdam to the makers of fashionable women’s hats; the sensational memoir of a Hollywood silent film director purportedly shipwrecked among the Marind in 1920; and the tale of ‘German Harry’, the hermit of a tiny island in the Torres Strait, visited, and then immortalised in a short story, by Somerset Maugham.

Centre stage are the Marind themselves. Sir William MacGregor, who endeavoured to block their incursions into British New Guinea, described them as ‘active, powerful, daring, enterprising spirits’ in his Annual Report for British New Guinea of 1889/90. Alongside this, their headhunting and unusual semen practices were abhorred by outsiders and threatened them with extinction. The Marind’s encounter with the outside world resulted in the introduction and spread of new and old infectious diseases; an inexorable transformation of their way of life; the dismantling of their traditional villages; and devastating encroachments on their land by uninvited educated Europeans and, later, Indonesians. Extending back many years, the conspicuous neglect of Marind welfare and insufficient understanding of their culture have seriously disrupted the original close, self-sufficient relationship they once enjoyed with their environment. Too many of those who have visited their land have taken away more than they have given. The losses to the Marind extend from land and natural resources, to artefacts now scattered round the world’s museums; and most of the wealth of data collected by anthropologists is hidden away in distant libraries or the digital cloud in languages inaccessible to today’s Marind.

My Marind project originally set out to explain a puzzling epidemic, drawing useful lessons from the way it arose and was handled. As I researched, my first impressions of Dr Thierfelder were favourable. He had come to New Guinea as an energetic, enthusiastic young doctor and, it appeared, he had rolled back a major epidemic in very difficult circumstances. I came to realise, though, this was not quite the outstanding model of infection control it had seemed on first inspection, and was more than one man and his wife successfully treating a large number of people.

Uncomfortable truths started to emerge about the reasons the Marind were exposed to epidemics of infection. Their culture was ill-suited to dealing with an outbreak of sexually transmitted infection, and I wanted to write respectfully about it but not shy away from the extreme measures they appear to have adopted at the height of their reproductive health crisis. It was not possible to account for the extraordinary intensity of the donovanosis epidemic without exploring this.

My problem became how to avoid reinforcing unfair stereotyping of Papuans as ‘primitive’, ‘savage’ and ‘hypersexual’. As such, I explain how the Marind’s rituals briefly underwent extreme intensification in response to the deep combined trauma of severe infertility, the suppression of headhunting, and the devastating Spanish influenza epidemic. This resulted in a catastrophic epidemic of donovanosis, which catalysed radical changes in the Marind lifestyle that ensured these events could never happen again. While there are elements of this story that could easily attract prurient interest or be sensationalised, it also presents an important opportunity to draw attention to the completely different Marind community of today, which has suffered decades of neglect. It is not my intention to do disservice to the Marind by returning to a history that some refute and would prefer to be buried. I want to see the extensive misrepresentation that has occurred corrected, and the past set in a context that deepens understanding and sympathy.

I hope this book will make more people aware of the plight of the Marind, and inspire efforts to curb the degradation of their environment and way of life, and I will direct proceeds raised to charities working with them. My researching has increased my respect for the Marind’s achievements and the glories of their material culture, while deepening my sympathy for the injustices they have endured.

TIMELINE

1

NEW GUINEA

The bird

I first became aware of New Guinea when I encountered a picture in a family heirloom, Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia. It compared the shapes of various countries to everyday objects, and New Guinea resembled a fat duck with a drooping tail, facing west, perched 90 miles above the tip of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula. This obvious likeness to a bird led to the western end being named the Vogelkop (Bird’s Head) Peninsula, and the eastern end the Bird’s Tail Peninsula. Fittingly, New Guinea is the island home of what Alfred Wallace called ‘the most extraordinary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabitants of the earth’, the bird of paradise. ¹ Its silhouette’s resemblance to the African guineafowl reminds us that New Guinea derives its name from a part of Africa known to its early European visitors. The most widely spoken language in Papua New Guinea is Tok Pisin or Melanesian Pidgin.

Another constant childhood presence was a quirky wall map, designed by MacDonald Gill, which harked back to an era when some of my Scottish forebears were working in Nigeria, Malaya and Burma. ² Peppered with quotes and jokes, it crammed the world into an unusual semicircular projection centred on a diminutive Britain, its empire picked out in a blaze of strong red (see image section, p. 1, top). The map’s confident subtitle ‘Imperialism without tears’ rings hollow in the light of Britain’s troubled post-war colonial legacy, such as the slaughter of the India Partition. I wondered why only the eastern half of New Guinea was red. Who was responsible for that dividing line on the 141st meridian east, which was later described as one of colonial cartography’s more arbitrary, yet effective, boundaries? ³ How did Britain get involved with this huge island 8000 miles away?

The literature on New Guinea splits as neatly as the dividing line into works in English and works in Dutch or Indonesian; few deal with the island as a whole. The Marind headhunters who crossed this invisible line precipitated the first crisis of their contact with the outside world. Directly above New Guinea on Gill’s map was a scroll with an apposite quote from Shakespeare’s Pericles: ‘Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea. Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.’ The Marind’s neighbours suffered much from their headhunting. The Marind, in their turn, were to suffer more profoundly from the territorial ambitions of the Netherlands and, later, Indonesia.

The antithesis of MacDonald Gill’s map is the humorous 1929 The World at the Time of the Surrealists, which places Oceania and New Guinea at the centre, and shrinks Britain, the US and Australia to tiny, pathetic remnants. ⁴ Surrealist figurehead André Breton was a huge fan of Oceanic art; he and Max Ernst both had items from New Guinea in their collections.

The word ‘Guinea’ was taken by the Portuguese from the Berbers of North Africa, who used it to describe Africans from beyond the Sahara Desert in the area that now encompasses the modern countries of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea. Golden guineas were originally minted from West African gold. Guinea pigs, which originate from the Andes, where they are still raised for food, may have got their name from the Guineamen slave ships that plied the triangular trade between West Africa, the Americas and Europe. West Africa sits above the Gulf of Guinea, the bight that was home to Brazil before the continents of Africa and South America drifted apart. In 1545 the Spanish explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez decided to give the name Nueva Guinea (New Guinea) to an intriguing island in the East Indies whose Melanesian population’s features were closer to Africans’ than other South-East Asian peoples. Much more recently, huge tracts of New Guinea rainforest have been swept away to accommodate controversial commercial plantations of the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), whose original habitat is African Guinea.

As a medical student in the early 1970s, I was fascinated to learn about a small group of rare diseases, now designated ‘prion’ diseases, which appeared to be transmissible in the absence of conventional micro-organisms; there was speculation they were caused by undetectable ‘slow viruses’. The circumstances of one particular epidemic, reported in the 1950s from New Guinea, seemed wholly extraordinary.

The name ‘kuru’ was given to an illness affecting members of the Fore tribe of the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. The disease attacked the brain, gradually impairing movement and leading, via dementia, to death in about two years. Carleton Gajdusek was awarded a Nobel prize in 1976 for experiments conducted on monkeys that led him to conclude the disease was caused by a novel type of infectious particle without nucleic acid; and that the most likely means of transmission was ritual transumption (endocannibalism), which involved the consumption of the deceased’s brains by women and children. Subsequently, diseases of this type became widely known when the mad cow disease epidemic hit Britain and cases of a related disease were reported in humans.

When I arrived in the Eastern Highlands of PNG in 1984, the kuru epidemic was almost over. Patients with kuru seldom attended hospital, as there was no treatment available and the diagnosis was obvious to Fore villagers. I treated one patient in the early stages of the disease, who had attended with asthma; her son was a member of my medical team. The last reported case of kuru occurred in 2010. Meanwhile, there was no shortage of other little-studied conditions, including donovanosis, to absorb my interest, as well as rewarding opportunities to teach and to conduct research.

Today, the 141st meridian divides New Guinea into the independent state of Papua New Guinea, to the east; and, to the west, the easternmost provinces of Indonesia currently called West Papua (the Bird’s Head) and Papua (the remainder of Indonesian Papua). Independence activists prefer the term West Papua. In 1985 my wife, Veronica, travelled the entire length of the international boundary by helicopter, assisting a government vet to take blood samples from chickens in villages close to the border in order to monitor the possibility of spread of Newcastle disease (a dangerous viral disease in the poultry world) from Indonesian Papua, then called Irian Jaya (West Irian).

An apocryphal tale, once repeated by a British foreign secretary, claimed that President Sukarno had a teasing habit of referring to the remainder of New Guinea as East Irian, and the invitingly empty spaces of northern Australia as South Irian. The territory of the Marind is now part of Indonesia. At the time of the story this book tells, it was administered by the Dutch as part of Netherlands South New Guinea. Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands in 1949, but the Dutch declined to cede control of New Guinea until 1962, when the US coerced them into handing it over to UN control. In 1969 Indonesia conducted a flagrantly unfair ‘Act of Free Choice’, whose results have been challenged ever since by indigenous Papuans. In 2017 a secret petition demanding a new independence referendum was presented to the UN. It was signed by 70 per cent of the indigenous population of West Papua (then 1.8 million).

The territory of the Marind on the south coast of lndonesian New Guinea extends from the border with Papua New Guinea to the island of Kolopom. Smaller additional populations dwell along the Bulaka, Bian, Kumbe and Maro rivers. (John Richens)

Marind territory extends from the international border with Papua New Guinea to Kolepom Island (formerly Frederik Hendrik Island). Close to the equator, it is hot, humid and low-lying, with areas of forest and savannah. Large swamps form in the wet season and mosquitoes swarm in prodigious numbers. It is said to be impossible to do one job at a time; a hand always has to be free to swat the swarms of insects. The coastal dwellers turn more to the sea for food. For inland dwellers, many fish are trapped in receding flood water as the wet season ends. The coast is formed mostly by sandy beaches backed by low-lying dunes, covered by vast coconut groves. Mangrove swamps are found near the Bian River.

The Marind in one of the extensive coconut groves that occur all along their coastline, 1908 ( from Snelleman, FJ, Merauke, en wat daaraan vorafging, 1908, courtesy Leiden University Library, KITLV3 M g 67)

The majority of Marind villages are on the coastal strip. Before 1902 there were probably 8000–10 000 Marind living in around forty villages spaced at 5-kilometre intervals along a 200-kilometre stretch of coastline. Another 6000 lived along the great rivers (the Bulaka, Bian, Kumbe and Maro). A mixture of wild and cultivated sago palms used to be the major food source; yams, bananas and taro were grown in gardens. Deer were hunted for meat in the dry season. Savannah-like flatlands, with areas of peatland, forest and swamp, once extended back from the coast, with occasional sandy ridges and stands of eucalyptus, for some 30–40 kilometres. The sandy ridges are evidence that most of the coastline has been steadily advancing (progradation) over an extended period. ⁵ Further inland were bamboo-rich forests with lots of wallabies ( Macropus agilis ). Further inland still, the bamboos give way to tropical rainforests, which extend up into the foothills of the great central mountains of New Guinea.

These central mountains reach to nearly 5000 metres (exceeding Mont Blanc). In 1623 Dutch explorer Jan Carstensz reported his surprise that snow-capped peaks were visible from the south coast of New Guinea only 4 degrees south of the equator. He estimated their distance as 10 miles; in fact, he would have been nearer to 50 miles away, on a day with exceptional visibility. He was disbelieved for the next 200 years. ⁶ Great rivers flow down from these huge mountains, creating floods in the wet season and providing fish and highways for canoe travel. Small equatorial glaciers were obliterated by global warming by 2015.

The south coast has few places where large ships can find harbour. The populations who dwelled there had contact with the South-East Asian traders before the arrival of Europeans. To the west was a thriving coastal trade between New Guinea tribes who were expert potters and those with food surpluses. The first postage stamp from New Guinea I acquired depicted a lakatoi, the traditional double-hulled sailing vessel with upsidedown-looking ‘crab claw’ sails used by the Motu people for trading.

Stone-headed clubs were essential to the Marind. They had no stone, so could only acquire the clubs by raiding or trading. ⁷ In exchange, the Marind could offer the aromatic coconut-flavoured bark of Cryptocarya massoia , known as massoy, used in cooking and medicines; delicacies such as sea cucumber (trepang or bêche-de-mer); and, most prized, exquisite bird of paradise feathers, some of which were reaching Nepal and Korea early on. ⁸ For the sultans of the East Indies, New Guinea was an important resource for slave trading.