GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 3 3 5
hair. Glancing at Wiwor's tough, tightly coiled hair, he handed the comb
to Wiwor. It immediately stuck in Wiwor's hair, then broke as soon as
Wiwor pulled on the comb. Everyone laughed, including Wiwor. Wiwor
responded by reminding Achmad that he should buy lots of rice, because
there would be no food to buy in New Guinea mountain villages except
sweet potatoes, which would upset Achmad's stomach—more hilarity.
Despite all the laughter, I could sense the underlying tensions. Achmad
was Javan, Ping Wah Chinese, Wiwor a New Guinea highlander, and
Sauakari a New Guinea lowlander from the north coast. Javans dominate
the Indonesian government, which annexed western New Guinea in the
1960s and used bombs and machine guns to crush New Guinean opposition.
Achmad later decided to stay in town and to let me do the forest
survey alone with Wiwor and Sauakari. He explained his decision to me
by pointing to his straight, coarse hair, so unlike that of New Guineans,
and saying that New Guineans would kill anyone with hair like his if they
found him far from army backup.
Ping Wah had put away his newspaper because importation of Chinese
writing is nominally illegal in Indonesian New Guinea. In much of Indonesia
the merchants are Chinese immigrants. Latent mutual fear between the
economically dominant Chinese and politically dominant Javans erupted
in 1966 in a bloody revolution, when Javans slaughtered hundreds of
thousands of Chinese. As New Guineans, Wiwor and Sauakari shared
most New Guineans' resentment of Javan dictatorship, but they also
scorned each other's groups. Highlanders dismiss lowlanders as effete sago
eaters, while lowlanders dismiss highlanders as primitive big-heads, referring
both to their massive coiled hair and to their reputation for arrogance.
Within a few days of my setting up an isolated forest camp with Wiwor
and Sauakari, they came close to fighting each other with axes.
Tensions among the groups that Achmad, Wiwor, Sauakari, and Ping
Wah represent dominate the politics of Indonesia, the world's fourth-mostpopulous
nation. These modern tensions have roots going back thousands
of years. When we think of major overseas population movements, we
tend to focus on those since Columbus's discovery of the Americas, and on
the resulting replacements of non-Europeans by Europeans within historic
times. But there were also big overseas movements long before Columbus,
and prehistoric replacements of non-European peoples by other non-European
peoples. Wiwor, Achmad, and Sauakari represent three prehistorical
waves of people that moved overseas from the Asian mainland into the