I just received news from Papua New Guinea that Tongope died at Paiyam Hospital on 27 August 2003. A key figure in the history of gold mining in Porgera, and a man who witnessed a unique period of history, Tongope was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met. His loss is an incredible blow to both Porgera and the world.
Tongope grew up in the Wake valley of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea. An ethnic Huli, he was part of the wave of Huli expansion that entered the Wake from the Huli homeland, draining the swamps of that high valley and planting sweet potato. During the 1930s, the Huli were a populous group of perhaps 40,000 people or so who had never been contacted by the ‘outside world’. They had no experience of metal or textiles, much less radios, aircraft, or firearms. Their initial contact occurred in the course of two exploratory patrols – one by the Fox Brothers, the other by Jack Hides. Nevertheless, white men – honebi, as the Huli called them – were nothing more than vague myths to the young Tongope, if he had heard about them at all.
By the time of the second world war, the little-explored central highlands became a strategic concern to Australian military planners who feared the Japanese on the north coast of New Guinea could use the valleys of the highlands for a possible advance towards Port Moresby, and thence to Australia. At the very least, they were concerned for downed airmen who might find themselves unprotected and alone in what were then barely-known areas. As a result Dan Leahy, an Australian gold miner turned volunteer soldier, was assigned to lead a patrol into Huli territory and recruit young men and boys who could be trained as translators.
Tongope was one of the people Dan recruited. A child without chest hair or a beard, he bravely volunteered to leave his home to see what the world had to offer. As he marched out of the valley with Dan’s patrol, his parents mourned him for dead, since they believed white men to be spirits or monsters, and thought he had been taken away forever.
Tongope spent the remainder of the war working at the government outpost of Mt. Hagen. Today the location of an international airport, Mt. Hagen was at that time the effective western limit of Australian expansion into the highlands. Tongope marveled at electric lights, wondered at the ease of chopping down a tree with a steel axe instead of a stone one, and was awestruck at the munitions dropped by the Japanese as they bombed the aerodrome at Mt. Hagen.
After the war, whites became interested in the gold discovered in Porgera during Taylor and Black’s patrol into the area in 1938-39. Tongope accompanied patrols into the area as a translator, eventually settling at Mungalep amongst the Angalaini people who lived there. Over the next five decades he became a powerful middle-man, using his influence amongst the Ipili and Australians to become one of the most important people in the history of the valley.
Many Porgerans remembered Tongope as the first person they knew ever to wear clothes. Many men in their forties remembered to me how terrified they were of Tongope as children. Late at night he would go into his tent – a tent! – and light his lantern and they would watch in horror as his sillhouette opened a can of tuna and ate it with rice. At a time when most Porgerans had never seen a fish, let alone rice, Tongope’s mastery of powerful foreign influences and advanced technology made him a figure of terrifying power. Young children were afraid to look him in the eyes. His monopoly of the gold trade in the upper Porgera was nearly complete. His constant rival, Puluku Poke (who is still alive), controlled the alluvial workings on the Porgera at this time. Their constant battles for influence and power are the stuff of which legends were made.
While the official history of Porgera reports the history of the valley as a series of progressive triumphs by white Australians over inclement terrain and hostile natives, much of their early success relied on the indigenous translotrs and middlemen who guided their patrols and directed their work. In 1990, Porgera was the third largest gold mine in the world. Officially today, the credit for discovering the source of Porgera’s gold goes to the Australian geologist who led the patrol which originally located them. But people around at the time know that Tongope’s knowledge of the geography of the valley and it’s alluvial resources were unparalleled. It was he, and not the geographer, that pinpointed the mountain within which Porgera’s gold laid buried.
As a powerful man, Tongope forged numerous marriage alliances. He took wives from neighboring tribes to create alliances with them, engaging in a subtle matrimonial diplomacy that would leave him with many allies and few foes, although many people envied his success. When I lived in Porgera in 1999-2001, Tongope had eight wives, twenty six children, and an even larger number of grandchildren.
When Tongope began work, Porgerans were paid in salt, shells, and steel tools – all valuable items in the traditional culture. Throughout his tenure in Porgera, he was one of the first people to pay workers in cash, and to introduce them to the concept of money. As interest in the Porgera gold deposits grew, Tongope served as the unofficial mayor of the rapidly growing town that crystallized around the exploration camp. Without his ability to bridge the two worlds of modern industrial mining and local expectations, the Porgera mine could never have come to fruition.
But by the 1990s, time had passed Tongope by. Younger men who could speak English and who had been to university took over as the middle-men who negotiated with the mine on local people’s behalf. The world no longer needed a man who could remember the first time his people had seen metal or who impressed others by using lanterns and eating rice. In memory of his long service to the community, Tongope was given a job at the mine – as a janitor.
Disgusted at the pittance they had given him, Tongope retired to Mungalep, the part of Porgera he had made his home over the past fifty years. When I met him, he was an old man with an infinity of stories to tell and a history whose import had been forgotten by those around him. Although his name was known throughout the valley, few could associate the mythological ‘Tongope’ with the small, stooped man who I met.
I never got to know Tongope as well as I hoped. How could I? With a lifetime of stories behind him, I could only begin to grasp the complex politics that his tales traversed. And most noticeable of all, of course, was that Tongope never lost his keen sense of politics even in his old age. I wanted to know many things about him, but he was interested in telling me about just one: his role in the history of the valley, and the way it had been forgotten.
My first book, a popular history of the valley published in Papua New Guinea and available there, was my attempt to fulfill the promise that I made to him that his story would be told. I wanted him to know that his work and remarkable story would not be forgotten.
I can’t do justice here to how remarkable Tongope was or what he lived through. He was one of the few remaining members of a generation who could remember a time when their world was ruled by outsiders. As a child, he knew a world where the ‘outside world’ was in abeyance – he lived in one of the few corners of the world where European colonialism had not yet reached. Throughout his life, he bravely ventured into a world he did not understand with the confidence that he could soak up the novelty to which he was exposed. With his death the world looses not just the memory of a world before colonialism, but the nervy self-confidence of a people who refused to be cowed by the new. For Tongope’s greatness lay not only in his memory of a life of stone tools and ancient heritage, but in his bravery in thrusting himself headlong into the circumstances in which he found himself without doubting for an instance his ability to thrive in his new situation. Tongope’s greatest contribution lies not in preserving a prehistoric heritage, but in the example that he provided us of how best to deal with the new. I will miss him.
