As argued in the introduction to this dissertation, the concept of frustrated modernity is grounded in the horizon of expectations of a better future and its non-existence in the present. The previous chapters have discussed how certain historical events and periods are conceptualised by Kerewo people through a Christian idiom in order to make sense of the present lack of signs of development in Kikori area. As Ferguson poignantly illustrates in his ethnography of 1980s Copperbelt miners in Zambia, expectations of modernity are grounded in material objects constituting signifiers of the presence or absence of ‘modernity’.511 I suggest that the roots of present socio-economic conditions that coalesced into what I call frustrated modernity are to be found in the long socio- economic history of the Kikori region. As District Commissioner John Murphy remarked in the late 1960s, ‘The Goaribari [area …] has been subjected to a number of schemes and hopes which have […] never materialised’.512 Trends already visible in the early years of colonisation would become exacerbated during the post-war period.
If the socio-economic history outlined below accounts for the structural nature of the genesis of a sense of frustrated modernity, this chapter also opens a window onto the importance of historical silences for the analysis of historical consciousness, a theme magisterially explored by Trouillot.513 Paradoxically this chapter relies more on archival material than the usual site for subaltern histories, oral narratives, inverting the common idea that Western written documents hide or omit aspects of the past that only oral history can bring to the surface. In contrast to many of the oral stories I used in the previous chapters, those pertaining to the post-war period are not organised into a common master narrative that is more or less shared among all Kerewo across generations. I suggest that the absence of an organised shared narrative about this period is a refraction of the experience of the loss of a sense of centrality of Kerewo in the Kikori area during the post-war years. This decentring was experienced on two separate and yet interlinked levels: on one hand the mission’s changed interests in the area, and on the other the place of Kikori in the political-economy of marginal capitalism. Although I will treat these two factors separately, before re-combining them in conclusion, it is to be borne in mind that they were always unfolding simultaneously.
511 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.
512 Kikori Patrol Reports, Patrol n. 2/1968-69 (my italics). 513 Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
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From neglect to margins
In Chapter 4 I analysed at length the centrality of Kerewo people in the evangelical work of Ben Butcher at Kikori and the establishment of the LMS mission at Aird Hill. Butcher retired in 1939 and in the following years the place of Kerewo in the LMS evangelical agenda became more marginal. Butcher was soon replaced by an Australian couple: Edward Richard Fenn and his wife Ida Elizabeth Muriel Prosser.
In her memoir Ida Fenn recounts their arrival at Aird Hill briefly overlapping with Butcher’s presence. Both Ida Fenn’s memoir and Edward Fenn’s official reports to the LMS in London present a picture of the early days as a moment when the old enmity between Kerewo and Porome was fading due to the presence of the mission: ‘our station people are getting together into more a family group, whereas before, they resented other villages and tribes having anything to do or say in our station work’.514
Very early on, the old staffing problem of the LMS mission in the Gulf area forced Fenn to divide his work between the mission at Aird Hill and those of Urika (Orokolo) and Daru alternatively. Moreover, problems of transportation prevented him from conducting evangelical circuits along the Kikori River. Veiru and its Technical School, which were more easily reached, kept Fenn busy enough, while Kerewo teachers reported an increase in school attendance at Apeawa and Dopima villages. In those first years, a station was opened at Karaulti, east of Kikori, to consolidate the progress achieved among Gope, Era, and Urama people.515 The latter accomplishment was credited to Wanua, son of that Dauwa who was the first Kerewo to be baptized, whom Fenn described as ‘the man who pioneered the Gope district […] our Kerewo
514 Edward Fenn, ‘Papua District Committee Annual Reports, 1940’, p. 35, CMW 1941-50 PNG/7, folder 1, SOAS Archives, London.
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“Job”’.516 The area east of Kikori became for Fenn a priority prompted ‘partly by the threat of a large scale S.D.A. invasion’.517
With the approaching menace of the Japanese invasion the Mission Station was left to the care of South Sea Islanders. First Ida Fenn, in line with LMS instructions, left the colony in 1942,518 and then Fenn took a furlough between 1943 and 1944. At his return to Papua when the war was nearly over, the situation at Aird Hill changed again. A particular episode marked this shift for the Australian missionary:
In early October [1949] we had a deputation from three Poromi villages asking for our help to regain their old village site near Aird Hill, deserted by them when so many of their people were massacred by Government police forces on May 6th 1914.
Kerewo people have “squatted” on this land ever since and proved themselves a bane to us.519
The delegation, at least according to Fenn, did not come to take the land back, but to ask for his help and guidance for the construction of a new village near the station; the would-be Ero village. Probably struck by this request, Fenn’s sympathies unmistakably shifted toward Porome people. The contrast Fenn draws between Kerewo and Porome people in his reports is strikingly clear:
516 Fenn described Wanua’s dedication to his evangelising mission as such: ‘Misfortunes have come thick upon him and yet, through it all his faith has stood firm and strong. His father dies, his wife follows soon after, his son goes astray and he loses all his worldly possessions in a canoe incident, yet he cheerfully goes on his way praising God for His Mercies’, Edward Fenn, ‘Papua District Committee Annual Reports, 1947’, p. 5, CMW 1941-50 PNG/7, folder 8, SOAS Archives, London. See also Edward Fenn, ‘Papua District Committee Annual Reports, 1940’, p. 35. On other occasions Fenn was less generous in his description: ‘not over-blessed with brains yet endowed by Nature with an extremely pleasant temperament it is only the real “old dyed in the wool” savage that can resist his smiles’. Fenn Edward Fenn, ‘Papua District Committee Annual Reports, 1945’, p. 4, CMW 1941-50 PNG/7, folder 6, SOAS Archives, London.
517 Edward Fenn, ‘Papua District Committee Annual Reports, 1946’, p. 3, CMW 1941-50 PNG/7, folder 7, SOAS Archives, London.
518 ‘Chatterton [a prominent LMS missionary] affirms that all male LMS missionaries remained. Their wives and the unmarried female missionaries were evacuated to Australia, but this was a mission and not a government decision’ Robinson, Villagers at War, 101.
519 Edward Fenn, ‘Papua District Committee Annual Reports, 1949’, p. 6 (my italics), CMW 1941-50 PNG/7, folder 10, SOAS Archives, London.