Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509080123
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MERLE ENGLISH NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Faces beaming, they piled into our bus, which had stopped on the road leading to our lodge 7,000 feet above the town where we had gone for dinner. The villagers extended their hands, eager to get close to us. We were the first black people they were meeting from outside their island world of Papua New Guinea.
We were a group of two-dozen black Americans taking a tour organized by Simmons African Museum in New York City, which runs cultural trips to Africa and South America, and were three days into our second South Pacific adventure. We had visited Fiji, Vanuatu, Western Samoa and Tonga two years before in our quest to make contact with some of the millions of black people living on the islands known as Melanesia, and with the people of the Polynesian archipelago.
With great excitement we had left the United States last July for Papua New Guinea, brushing off ribbing from friends and family about the country's past cannibal reputation: ``Make sure you come back with your heads'' and, ``Don't end up in the pot.''
But nothing we had read or watched on television prepared us for the outpouring of affection we received as we traveled through the picturesque mountain, coastal and river villages of the land Portuguese explorers had christened Ilhas dos Papuas - ``Island of the Fuzzy Hairs.''
Everywhere we went, the people welcomed us like long-lost kin. Entire villages came out to greet their ``brothers and sisters from the other side of the world.'' Walking from the recesses of their lush villages, women embraced us, men grasped our hands in warm handshakes. Even the babies smiled as everyone regarded us with friendly curiosity.
All activity ceased and traffic halted in one town when we stopped at a bank to change dollars into kina, the local currency. Few had ever seen blacks other than themselves. Wantok, a village leader, greeted us in his native language. One of the few who spoke English, he explained that the word meant, ``You are family. We are one skin. We're the same.''
As we walked through an airport a man told a member of our group: ``I've seen you [black Americans] on MTV, but I've never seen you in person.'' He rubbed her hands as if testing the fastness of her skin color.
We began our journey in Goroka, 5,000 feet above sea level, capital of the Eastern Highlands Province. The people had lived there undiscovered until the 1930s, when Australian gold prospectors came upon them.
Our first excursion took us to a village nestled among banana, poinsettia and bamboo trees in the foothills, where the people live in circular houses with walls of woven mats and conical thatched roofs topped by tufted spires.
Young men who spoke English told us the village was 50,000 years old. They showed us their pet goats and offered us gifts of bows and arrows.
Bilums, colorful knitted bags that women wear slung from their foreheads, were displayed for sale outside the houses. But the villagers were more interested in the braided hairstyles and long fingernails in our group than in their sales pitches.
That day we visited Asaro, home of the legendary mudmen who once daubed their bodies with gray clay and wore mud masks over their heads to create ghostly apparitions that terrified their enemies. A local group re-enacted the mudmen's stealthy attacks.
The next day we left the Bird of Paradise Hotel, one of our four-star accommodations during the trip, and boarded charters for the flight to Mount Hagen, capital of PNG's Western Highlands Province.
When a bus transporting half of our group to the mountain lodge where we would stay got stuck in the muddy, unpaved road, people from the surrounding village swiftly got the bus out of the mud. It was these villagers who came to see the bus that night when we returned from dinner.
The nearly 4 million Papua New Guineans who gained their independence in 1975 live on the eastern half of what is the world's second largest island after Greenland. The island was the last inhabited place to be explored by Europeans. Dutch settlers called the island New Guinea, because it reminded them of East Africa's Guinea.
PNG includes 600 smaller islands, atolls, volcanoes and coral reefs of spectacular beauty, but tourism is still in its infancy. The people, reflecting 800 cultures and languages, are accustomed to seeing mostly German and Australian visitors. Except for anthropologists, they encounter few Americans.
``We think we are the only black people. We don't know about you,'' one village chief told us through an interpreter. ``We are happy you are one of our brothers and sisters. The dress is different, but the color is still the same. When you go back to your country, talk about us. Say you saw some of your family in PNG.''
Some in our travel group asked Stanley Lumbia, 28, an aspiring politician, what other visitors had told them about black Americans.
``Those of us who have been to school, we meet many Americans, but very few of them have good thoughts about African-Americans,'' he responded. ``They say you are trouble-makers, aggressive. I saw you coming. I say our wantoks are coming, same color, friend.
``We learned about your unfortunate history a long time ago and always felt sorry for you, how they went and got your ancestors and took them out. It could have been us,'' he added.
A village chief, Ray Mato, told us, ``We saw you in the films. We see that you are very good sports people. They don't show you're doctors and lawyers.''
He also told us he'd read about the 19th-century black American educator Booker T. Washington and was impressed. ``You people have determination. We don't agree with what they did to you. If they'd come this way, we would have been slaves.''
Our tour leader, Stan Simmons, told them: ``We're very interested in the culture of our people around the world. We want you to learn about us, because the [limited] information you got about us is misinformation.''
This same educational quest had taken the group to Fiji and other islands of the South Pacific, but none of our experiences had touched us as much as our contact with the Papua New Guineans. Our river voyage ended at Madang, a coastal town. We said our final goodbyes during an impromptu stop at an elementary school, where the children and their teachers abandoned their classes to crowd around us.
They sang their school song, their national anthem, ``Oh Arise,'' and a farewell serenade: ``May our love go with you when you're gone,'' then scattered flowers at our feet and handed us blossoms as we returned to our bus. A teacher said the children had read about black Americans but never seen any before.
``We touched the lives of these people as much as they touched us,'' one of our group reflected at journey's end. ``I don't think they will be the same.''
Leaving PNG, like Papua New Guineans, we said goodbye in Pidgin: Lukim yu bihain.
by CNB