I have just been struck by the parallels between passages in two books I have recently read and thought I'd comment briefly. The first passage is in Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday:
The second is in Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia, which reflects on a story recounted in Johnny Steinberg's book Thin Blue. The story is told to Steinberg by Mtutuzeli Matshoba who, when he was a young man, was on one particular occasion harassed and assaulted by corrupt police reservists in apartheid-era South Africa. Matshoba relates that his mother actually arrived on the scene during this attack and reacted in a way he found surprising:
Steinberg then goes on to speculate about why she behaved this way:
Steinberg expresses more clearly an ambivalence that is probably also present in the New Guinea tribespeople. While they may resent many of the colonial impositions of the Australian authorities, they also have legitimate interests in what these authorities can provide: namely peace and stability. Almost everyone has something to lose to violence, and people will make compromises even with illegitimate authorities who can offer peace. This is hardly a new point, but it's worth revisiting in the context of recent reversals of democratic revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere. A democracy that cannot deliver peace is always under threat from authoritarians who seem to promise it.
Despite the excitement and the prestige of tribal fighting, tribespeople understand better than anyone else the misery associated with warfare, the omnipresent danger, and the pain due to the killings of loved ones. When tribal warfare is finally ended by forceful intervention by colonial governments, tribespeople regularly comment on the resulting improved quality of life that they hadn’t been able to create for themselves, because without centralized government they hadn’t been able to interrupt the cycles of revenge killings. Anthropologist Sterling Robbins was told by Auyana men in the New Guinea Highlands, “Life was better since the government had come because a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot. All men admitted that they were afraid when they fought. In fact, they usually looked at me as though I were a mental defective for even asking. Men admitted having nightmares in which they became isolated from others in their group during a fight and could see no way back.”
That reaction explains the surprising ease with which small numbers of Australian patrol officers and native policemen were able to end tribal warfare in the then-territory of Papua New Guinea. They arrived at a warring village, bought a pig, shot the pig to demonstrate the power of firearms, tore down village stockades and confiscated the war shields of all warring groups in order to make it lethally dangerous for anyone to initiate war, and occasionally shot New Guineans who dared to attack them. Of course, New Guineans are pragmatic and could recognize the power of guns. But one might not have predicted how easily they would give up warfare that they had been practicing for thousands of years, when achievement in war had been praised from childhood onwards and held up as the measure of a man.
The second is in Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia, which reflects on a story recounted in Johnny Steinberg's book Thin Blue. The story is told to Steinberg by Mtutuzeli Matshoba who, when he was a young man, was on one particular occasion harassed and assaulted by corrupt police reservists in apartheid-era South Africa. Matshoba relates that his mother actually arrived on the scene during this attack and reacted in a way he found surprising:
Just then, Matshoba's mother and her friends appeared. Matshoba told Steinberg: 'You will not believe what they did. They joined in on the side of the of reservists and laid into me with their handbags. "How can you fight the law like that?" my mother shouted. "These men are working for the law. What trouble are you trying to bring?"'
Steinberg then goes on to speculate about why she behaved this way:
On the one hand, she was acknowledging that these thugs were dangerous, that the state itself was lethally dangerous, that in this world her son ought to keep his head down. And so her anger was maybe the displaced expression of a great fear. But perhaps something else was going on. Mrs. Matshoba's son was a young man at a time when many young men were running wild... It was a time of notorious thuggery, and without a decent police service, there was nothing to keep it in check. So perhaps Mrs Matshoba was expressing a hunger for authority, for men in uniform who would throw a cordon around her son's life to stop him straying. That she had to invest this wish in the thugs who menaced the Mzimhlophe station platform has about it a feeling of pathos; in this deformed world, order and authority became confused with state violence and depravity.
Steinberg expresses more clearly an ambivalence that is probably also present in the New Guinea tribespeople. While they may resent many of the colonial impositions of the Australian authorities, they also have legitimate interests in what these authorities can provide: namely peace and stability. Almost everyone has something to lose to violence, and people will make compromises even with illegitimate authorities who can offer peace. This is hardly a new point, but it's worth revisiting in the context of recent reversals of democratic revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere. A democracy that cannot deliver peace is always under threat from authoritarians who seem to promise it.
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