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Robert W. Williamson - The Mafulu

R >> Robert W. Williamson >> The Mafulu




One can hardly leave the question of physical communications without
also referring to the marvellous system of verbal communication which
exists amongst the Mafulu and Kuni and other mountain people. Messages
are shouted across the valleys from village to village in a way which
to the unaccustomed traveller is amazing. It never seemed to me that
any attempt was made specially to articulate the words and syllables
of the message, or to repeat them slowly, so as to make them more
readily heard at a distance off, though the last syllable of each
sentence is always prolonged into a continuous sort of wail. This
system of wireless telegraphy has, however, been before described by
other writers, so I need say no more about it.






CHAPTER VII

Government, Property, and Inheritance


Government and Justice.

There is, as might be expected, no organised system of government
among the Mafulu, nor is there any official administration of justice.

As regards government, the chiefs in informal consultation with the
sub-chiefs and prominent personages deal with important questions
affecting the community or clan or village as a whole, such as the
holding of big feasts and important ceremonies, the migrations or
splitting-up or amalgamation of villages, and warlike operations; but
events of this character are not frequent. And as to justice, neither
the chiefs nor any other persons have any official duties of settling
personal disputes or trying or punishing wrongdoers. The active
functions of the chiefs, in fact, appear to be largely ceremonial.

Concerning the question of justice, it would seem, indeed, that
a judicial system is hardly requisite. Personal disputes between
members of a village or clan, or even of a community, on such possible
subjects as inheritance, boundary, ownership of property, trespass
and the like, and wrongful acts within the village or the community,
are exceedingly rare, except as regards adultery and wounding and
killing cases arising from acts of adultery, which are more common.

There are certain things which from immemorial custom are regarded
as being wrong, and appropriate punishments for which are generally
recognised, especially stealing, wounding, killing and adultery; but
the punishment for these is administered by the injured parties and
their friends, favoured and supported by public opinion, and often,
where the offender belongs to another clan, actively helped by the
whole clan of the injured parties.

The penalty for stealing is the return or replacement of the article
stolen; but stealing within the community, and perhaps even more so
within the clan or village, is regarded as such a disgraceful offence,
more so, I believe, than either killing or adultery, that its mere
discovery involves a distressing punishment to the offender. As regards
wounding and killing, the recognised rule is blood for blood, and a
life for a life. The recognised code for adultery will be stated in
the chapter on matrimonial matters.

Any retribution for a serious offence committed by someone outside
the clan of the person injured is often directed, not only against
the offender himself, but against his whole clan.

There is a method of discovering the whereabouts of a stolen article,
and the identity of the thief, through the medium of a man who is
believed to have special powers of ascertaining them. This man takes
one of the large broad single-shell arm ornaments, which he places on
its edge on the ground, and one of the pig-bone implements already
described, which he places standing on its point upon the convex
surface of the shell. To make the implement stand in this way he puts
on the point, and makes to adhere to the shell a small piece of wild
bees' wax, this being done, I was told, surreptitiously, though I
cannot say to what extent the people are deceived by the dodge, or
are aware of it. The implement stands on the shell for a few seconds,
after which it falls down. Previously to doing this he has told his
client of certain possible directions in which the implement may fall,
and intimated that, whichever that may be, it will be the direction
in which the lost article must be sought. He has also given certain
alternative names of possible culprits, one of such names being
associated with each of the alternative directions of falling. The
fall of the implement thus indicates the quarter in which the lost
article may be found and the name of the thief. Father Clauser saw
this performance enacted in connection with a pig which had been
stolen from a chief; the falling bone successfully pointed to the
direction in which the pig was afterwards found, and there was no
doubt that the alleged thief was in fact the true culprit. Presumably
the operator makes private enquiries before trying his experiment,
and knows how to control the fall of the implement.





Property and Inheritance.

The property of a Mafulu native may be classified as being (1) his
movable belongings, such as clothing, ornaments, implements and pigs;
(2) his house in the village; (3) his bush land; (4) his gardens.

The movable belongings are, of course, his own absolute property.

The village house is also his own; but this does not include the site
of that house, which continues to be the property of the village. Every
grown-up male inhabitant of the village has the right to build for
himself one house in that village; he is not entitled to have more than
one there, but he may have a house in each of two or more villages,
and a chief or very important man is allowed two or three houses in
the same village. On a house being pulled down and not rebuilt, or
being abandoned and left to decay, the site reverts to the village,
and another person may build a house upon it. [65] Houses are never
sold, but the ordinary life of a house is only a few years.

The man's bush land is his own property, and his ownership includes
all trees and growth which may be upon it, and which no other man may
cut down, but it does not include game, this being the common property
of the community; and any member of the community is entitled to pass
over the land, hunt on it, and fish in streams passing through it,
as he pleases. The whole of the bush land of the community belongs
in separate portions to different owners, one man sometimes owning
two or more of such portions; and it is most remarkable that, though
there are apparently no artificial boundary marks between the various
portions, these boundaries are, somehow or other, known and respected,
and disputes with reference to them are practically unknown. How the
original allocations and allotments of land have been made does not
appear to be known to the people themselves.

The man's garden plot or plots are also his own, having been cleared
by him or some predecessor of his out of his or that predecessor's
own bush land; and he may build in his gardens as many houses as
he pleases. His ownership of his garden plot is more exclusive than
is that of his bush land, as other people are not entitled to pass
over it. But on the other hand, if he abandons the garden, and nature
again overruns it with growth--a process which takes place with great
rapidity--it ceases to be his garden, and reverts to, and becomes
absorbed in, the portion of the bush out of which it had been cleared;
and if, as it may be, he is not the sole owner of that portion of bush,
he loses his exclusive right to the land, which as a garden had been
his own sole property.

No man can sell or exchange either his bush land or his garden plots,
and changes in their ownership therefore only arise through death
and inheritance. This statement, however, is, I think, subject to the
qualification that an owner of bush-land will sometimes allow his son
or other male descendant to clear and make for himself a garden in it;
but I am not sure as to the point.

On a man's death his widow, if any, does not inherit any portion of his
property, either movable or immovable, but three things are allowed
to her. She is generally allowed one pig, which will be required by
her at a later date for the ceremony of the removal of her mourning;
and she shares with her husband's children, or, if there be none,
she has the sole right to, the then current season's crops and fruit
resulting from the planting effected by her late husband and herself,
though this is a right which, after her return home to her own people,
she would not continue to exercise; and she is allowed to continue to
occupy her husband's house, but this latter privilege terminates at
the mourning removal ceremony, when the house will be pulled down, and
its site will revert to the village, and she will probably return to
her own people in her own village, if she has not done so previously.

Subject to these three allowances, I may dismiss the widow entirely
in dealing with the law of inheritance. I may also dismiss the
man's female children by saying that, if there be male children, the
females do not share at all in the inheritance, and even if there be
no male children the female children will only perhaps be allowed,
apparently rather as a matter of grace than of right, to share in
his movable effects; and that, subject to this, everything goes to
the man's male relatives. I may also eliminate the man's pigs, as
apparently any pigs he has, other than that retained for his widow,
are killed at his funeral.

On the death of an owner everything he possesses goes, except as above
mentioned, to his sons. They divide the movable things between them,
but the bush and garden land pass to them jointly, and there is no
process by which either of these can be divided and portioned among
them. The male children of a deceased son, and the male children of
any deceased male child of that deceased son (and so on for subsequent
generations), inherit between them in lieu of that son. There does not
appear, however, to be any idea in the Mafulu mind of each son of the
deceased owner being entitled to a specific equal fractional share,
or of the descendants of a deceased son of that owner being between
them only entitled to one share, _per stirpes_. They apparently do
not get beyond the general idea that these people, whoever they may
be and to whatever generations they may belong, become the owners of
the property.

They take possession of and cultivate the existing gardens as joint
property. Any one of them will be allowed to clear some of their
portion of bush, and fence it, and plant it as a garden, and it will
then become the sole property of that one man, and if he dies it
will pass as his own property to his own heirs; though, as before
stated, if he abandons it, and lets it be swallowed up by the bush,
it will cease to be his own garden, and will again be included in the
family's joint portion of bush land, and on his death his heirs will
only come into the joint bush ownership.

In this way the ownership of a garden must often be in several persons,
with no well-defined rights _inter se_, and the general ownership of
bush land which has never been cleared, or which, having been cleared,
has been abandoned and reverted, must often be in a very large number
of persons without defined rights. In fact, so far as bush land is
concerned, one only has to remember that on the death of an owner it
passes into joint ownership of children--that on the deaths of these
children fresh groups of persons come into the joint ownership--that
this may go on indefinitely, generation after generation--that bush,
having once got into the ownership of many people, is hardly likely
to again fall by descents into a single ownership--that indeed the
tendency must be for the number of owners of any one portion of bush
steadily to increase--and finally that there is no way by which the
extensively divided ownership can be terminated by either partition
or alienation--and one then realises the extraordinary complications
of family ownership of bush land which must commonly exist.

As regards both movable effects and gardens and bush land there must
be endless occasions for dispute. How are the movable things to be
divided among the inheritors, and, in particular, who is to take
perhaps one valuable article, which may be worth all the rest put
together? How are questions of doubtful claims to heirship to bush
and garden land to be determined? How is the joint ownership of the
gardens to be dealt with, and how is the work there to be apportioned,
and the products of the gardens divided? How are the mutual rights
of the bush land to be regulated, and especially what is to happen
if each of two or more joint owners desires to clear and allocate
to himself as a garden, a specially eligible piece of bush? Such
situations in England would bristle with lawsuits, and I tried to
find out how these questions were actually dealt with by the Mafulu;
but there is no judicial system there, and the only answer I could
get was that in these matters, as in the case of inter-community bush
boundaries and personal bush boundaries, disputes were practically
unknown; though it was pointed out to me, as regards bush land,
that the amount of it belonging to any one family was usually so
large that crowding out could hardly arise.

If a man dies without male descendants in the male line, then, subject
perhaps to some sort of claim of his daughters, if any, to share in
his movable effects, his property goes to his nearest male relative
or relatives in the male line. This would primarily be his father,
if living, but the father could hardly be the inheritor of anything
but movable things and perhaps garden land, as the deceased could not
be the owner of bush land during the lifetime of his father. Subject as
regards movable things and perhaps gardens to this right of the father,
the persons to inherit everything would be deceased's brothers and the
male descendants in the male line of any such brothers who had died;
or in default of these it would be the father's (not the mother's)
brothers and their male descendants in the male line, and so on for
more distant male relatives, every descent being traced strictly in
the male line only, on a principle similar to that above explained.

Male infants, by which term I mean young children, there being of
course no infancy in the defined sense in which the term is used
in English law, like adults, may become possessed of property by
inheritance as regards bush and garden land, and by inheritance
or otherwise as regards movable property, but they would hardly be
likely to be the owners of houses; and the descent from these infants
is the same as that in the case of adults.

No woman can possess any property, other than movable property,
and even this is at best confined to the clothes and ornaments which
she wears. On the death of a married woman all her effects go to her
husband, or, if he be dead, they go to her children or descendants,
male and female, equally, If she has no children or descendants, they
go to her husband's father, or, failing him, to such other person or
persons as would have been entitled to inherit if her effects had
been those of her husband. Her own blood relations do not come in,
as she had been bought and paid for by her husband. If the deceased
woman were a spinster, then her effects would pass to her father,
or, failing him, to her brothers, or, failing them, to her nearest
male relatives on her father's side.

The guardianship of and responsibility for infant children whose
father dies falls primarily upon the children's mother, and she,
if and when she returned to her own people, would probably take the
children away with her, though her sons, who shared in the inheritance
from their father, would usually come back again to their own village
when they became grown up, and might do so even when comparatively
young. If there is no mother of the children, the guardianship and
responsibility is taken up by one or more of the relatives of either
the deceased father or deceased mother of the children, and it might
be that some children would be taken over by some of such relatives,
and some by others. There appears, however, to be no regular rule as
to all this, the question being largely one of convenience.

Adopted children have in all matters of inheritance the same rights
as actual children.

From the above particulars it will be seen that there is no system
of descent in the female line or of mother-right among the Mafulu,
and I could not find any trace of such a thing having ever existed
with them. As to this I would draw attention to the facts that the
mother's relatives do not come in specially, as they do among the
Roro and Mekeo people, in connection with the perineal band ceremony;
that a boy owes no service to his maternal uncle, as is the case among
the Koita; that there is no equivalent of the Koita _Heni_ ceremony;
that in no case can a woman be a chief, or chieftainship descend by
the female line; that children belong to the clan of their father,
and not to that of their mother; and that no duty or responsibility
for orphan children devolves specially upon their mother's relations.







CHAPTER VIII

The Big Feast

This is the greatest and most important social function of a Mafulu
community of villages. I was unable to get any information as to its
real intent and origin, but a clue to this may, I think, be found in
the formal cutting down of the grave platform of a chief, the dipping
of chiefs' bones in the blood of the slain pigs, and the touching of
other chiefs' bones with the bones so dipped, which constitute such
important features of the function, and which perhaps point to an
idea of in some way finally propitiating or driving away or "laying"
the ghosts of the chiefs whose bones are the subject of the ceremony.

The feast, though only to be solemnised in one village, is organised
and given by the whole community of villages. There is no (now)
known matter or event with reference to which it is held. It is
decided upon and arranged and prepared for long beforehand, say a
year or two, and feasts will only be held in one village at intervals
of perhaps fifteen or twenty years. The decision to hold a feast is
arrived at by the chiefs of the clans of the community which proposes
to give it. The village at which the feast is to be held will not
necessarily be the largest one of the community, or one in which is
a then existing chiefs _emone_. The guests to be invited to it will
be the people of some other (only one other) community, and at the
outset it will be ascertained more or less informally whether or not
they will be willing to accept the invitation.

When the feast has been resolved upon, the preparations for it
begin immediately, that is a year or two before the date on which it
is to be held. Large quantities will be required of yam, taro and
sugar-cane, and of a special form of banana (not ripening on the
trees, and requiring to be cooked); also of the large fruit of the
_ine_, a giant species of Pandanus (see Plate 80--the figure seated
on the ground near to the base of the tree gives an idea of the size
of the latter and of the fruit head which is hanging from it), which
is cultivated in the bush, and the fruit heads of which are oval or
nearly round, and have a transverse diameter of about 18 inches; and
of another fruit, called by the natives _malage_, which grows wild,
chiefly by streams, and is also cultivated, and the fruit of which
was described to me as being rather like an apple, almost round,
green in colour, and 4 or 5 inches in diameter. [66] And above all
things will be wanted an enormous number of village pigs (not wild
pigs); and sweet potatoes must be plentiful for the feeding of these
pigs. And finally they will need plenty of native tobacco for their
guests. In view of these requirements it is obvious that a year or two
is by no means an excessive period for the preparations for the feast.

The existing yam and taro gardens, intended for community consumption
alone, will be quite insufficient for the purpose, and fresh bush
land is at once cleared, and new gardens are made and planted,
the products of these new gardens being allocated specially for the
feast, and not used for any other purpose. There is also an extensive
planting of sugar-cane, probably in old potato gardens. For bananas
there will probably be no great need of preparation, as they are
grown plentifully, and there is no specific appropriation of these;
but the sufficiency of the supply of the tobacco for the visitors,
and of the sweet potatoes for the pigs, has to be seen to, also
that of the _ine_ Pandanus trees, the fruit of which has often to be
procured from elsewhere, and of the trees. And finally the village
pigs must be bred and fattened, for which latter purpose it is a
common practice to send young pigs to people in other communities;
and these people will be invited to the big feast, and will have pig
given to them, though not members of the invited community; but never
in any case will any of them have a part of a pig which he himself
has fattened. The cultivated vegetable foods and the pigs are not
provided on a communistic basis, but are supplied by the individual
members of the community, each household of which is expected to
do its duty in this respect; and no person who or whose family has
not provided at least one pig (some of them provide more than one)
will be allowed to take part in the preliminary feast and subsequent
dancing, to be mentioned below.

The bringing in and storing of the _ine_ and _malage_ fruits commence
at an early stage. The _ine_ fruits are collected when quite ripe;
they split the large fruit heads up into two or more parts, put these
into baskets roughly made of cane (at least half a fruit head in
each basket), and place these baskets in the _avale_ or ceiling of
the _emone_, where the fruits get dried and smoked by the heat and
smoke of the fire constantly burning beneath. If, as is sometimes
the case, the _emone_ has no _avale_ one is constructed specially
for the purpose. The fruits are left there until required; in fact,
if taken away from the smoke, they would go bad. Sometimes, instead of
putting portions of the fruit heads into baskets, they take out from
them the almond-shaped seeds, which are the portions to be eaten,
string these together, each seed being tied round and not pierced,
and hang them to the roof of the _emone_ above the _avale_. The fruits
of the _malage_ are gathered and put into holes or side streams by a
river, and there left for from seven to ten months, until the pulp,
which is very poisonous, is all rotted away, a terrible smell being
emitted during the process; they then take the pips or seeds, the
insides of which, after the surrounding shells have been cracked,
are the edible parts, and place these in baskets made out of the
almost amplexicaul bases of the leaves of a species of palm tree,
and so store them also on the _avale_ of the _emone_. [67]

Large preparations of a structural and repairing nature are also
required in the village where the feast is to be held. The _emone_,
the true chiefs _emone_, of the village is repaired or pulled down
and entirely rebuilt; or, if that village does not possess such an
_emone_, one is erected in it. In point of fact the usual practice is,
I was informed, to build a new _emone_, the occasion of an intended
feast being the usually recognised time for the doing of this. [68]
The houses of the village are put into repair. The people of the other
villages of the same community build houses for themselves in the feast
village, so that on the occasion of the feast all the members of the
community (the hosts) will be living in that village. View platforms,
from which the dancing can be watched, are built by all the people of
the community. These are built between the houses where possible, or
at all events so as to obstruct the view from the houses as little as
possible. They are built on upright poles, and are generally between
12 and 20 feet high, each platform having a roof, which will probably
be somewhat similar to the roofs of the houses. Sometimes there are
two platforms under one roof, but this is not usual. Sometimes the
platforms, instead of being on posts, are in trees, being, however,
roofed like the others. Two or more houses may join in making one
platform for themselves and their friends. All the above works are
put in hand at an early stage.

The following are done later, perhaps not till after the sending out
of the formal invitation (see below), but they may conveniently be
dealt with here. The people erect near to, but outside, the village in
which the feast is to be held one or more sheds for the accommodation
of the guests, the number of sheds depending upon the requirements of
the case. These are merely gable and ridge-shaped roofs, which descend
on each side down to the ground, or very close to it, being supported
by posts, and there being no flooring. They are called _olor' eme_,
which means dancers' houses. Posts about 20 or 25 feet high and 12
inches or nearly so in diameter are erected in various places in the
village enclosure, and each of these posts is surrounded with three,
four, or five upright bamboo stems, which are bound to the post so as
together to make a composite post of which the big one is the strong
supporting centre. The leaf branches of these bamboos, starting out
from the nodes of the stems, are cut off 3 or 4 inches from their
bases, thus leaving small pegs or hooks to which vegetables, etc.,
can be afterwards hung; and in the case of each post one only of its
surrounding bamboos has the top branches and leaves left on. Each
household is responsible for the erection of one post. I may here say
in advance that upon these post clusters will be hung successively,
yams and taro in the upper parts, human skulls and bones lower down,
and croton leaves by way of decoration at the bottom. The sugar-cane
and banana and _ine_ and _malage_ are dealt with in another way. There
is a further erection of thin poles, which will be mentioned in its
proper place.

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