Resource Spotlight | “Tik Merauke: An Epidemic Like No Other” by John Richens
TIK MERAUKE
An Epidemic Like No Other
by John Richens
Published by Melbourne University Press.
A recently published book provides a fresh opportunity to introduce some of the glories of the Marind culture of south New Guinea to a wider audience. John Richens’ Tik Merauke. (meaning: the disease from Merauke), is an account of an exceptional epidemic of a rare sexually transmitted infection which affected the Marind people of New Guinea one hundred years ago. The Dutch referred to it as “granuloma venereum'' whilst the British, taking pride in colonel Charles Donovan who had first described the causative organism, now prefer the term Donovanosis. To the Americans, it became “granuloma inguinale.”
In trying to gain a deeper understanding of how such a unique epidemic erupted among the Marind, He had to delve deeply into all aspects of Marind culture as recorded by early visitors. The early Sacred Heart Missionaries were remarkably diligent in studying the language and culture of the Marind and recording their findings in photographs, drawings, and paintings. An anthology of these striking archival photographs with commentary can be seen in Raymond Corbey’s Headhunters from the Swamps. Later the missionaries helped the Swiss anthropologist and collector Paul Wirz in making his major study of Marind culture. Wirz, although active in many parts of the world, retained a lifelong connection with New Guinea. He died and was buried there in 1955. His two volumes on the Marind laid the foundations for all future studies of the Marind and are regarded as his best piece of anthropological field work. Subsequently, he focussed more on collecting indigenous art and became the foremost collector of Oceanic Art during his lifetime, making extensive contributions to museums in Europe, the USA, and Indonesia, notably the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum and the Basel Kunstmuseum. Wirz was active at a time when Oceanic Art was attracting great interest in the surrealist movement, as evidenced by the 1929 humorous “World at the time of the Surrealists'' which places an enlarged New Guinea at the centre and shrinks parts of Europe and the USA to pathetic remnants. Jonathan Jones commenting on the Royal Academy’s 2018 Oceania exhibition, wrote, “It’s clear the sheer scale of modern art’s debt to the Pacific has yet to be properly acknowledged or fully understood.”
The domain of material culture in which the Marind excelled was body decoration and costume making. Unlike their Asmat neighbours to the west, who were magnificent wood carvers, or their Gogodala neighbours to the east, who built spectacular longhouses, the Marind were at their best in dressing the human body with complex costumes and headdresses which depicted their numerous spirit ancestors known as “dema” each of whom had an easily recognizable attribute usually mounted on the head which indicated the totem group to which the wearer belonged. The dema/totems included a vast range of animate and inanimate objects that made up the Marind cosmos, such as coconut trees, sago palm, pigs, crocodiles, wallabies, snakes, the human penis, the sea, and the sky. While such costumes were made for special occasions and then discarded, day-to-day body decoration was also elaborate and changed in a carefully determined sequence from childhood, through adolescence, and on into adulthood. The decorations would include hair extensions, face paints, nasal piercing, necklaces, armbands, complex belts, penis covers, anklets, and feather decorations. Women’s bodies often displayed extensive and elaborate scarification patterns.
Tik Merauke is not simply a narrative about a serious epidemic. It seeks to explain how the pacification of the Marind brought in its train a host of unintended consequences, including epidemics, which led inexorably to irreversible changes in Marind culture and loss of many of the artistic traditions which astounded early observers.
Merauke was built by the Dutch in 1902 to suppress headhunting across the international boundary into British New Guinea. Coastal headhunting took place on an annual basis when winds were favourable and was the culmination of a complicated set of rituals which the missionaries urged the government to rein in. It had become apparent to Wirz and the missionaries that Marind rituals often involved the collection of human semen in ways which created very high risks of disease transmission, notably for women and adolescent boys. It appears highly likely gonorrhea reached the Pacific region from Europe at the time of Captain Cook onward and was propagated extensively by the whaling industry and European settlers. Many Marind had become infertile by the time the Dutch arrived as evidenced by a high frequency of child abduction by women during headhunting raids. This was the only way the Marind could offset infertility and was abruptly halted by the suppression of headhunting. The risky ritual semen practices of the Marind inevitably escalated as a consequence.
Missionary endeavour sought to bring an end to sexually segregated living among the Marind, rehousing the upcoming generation in new model villages and clothing them in the European manner. Only in this way, they argued, could the disease transmission be brought under control. Wirz arrived at a time when the old culture was rapidly disappearing. He inveighed against the missionaries and busied himself in collecting as many the traditional artefacts of the Marind as he could before the skills required for their creation were lost.
The peak of the epidemic of granuloma venereum came in 1923. Thanks to some brilliant campaigning for government intervention by Petrus Vertenten and to a highly efficient disease control programme led by German doctor Max Thierfelder, thousands of suffering patients were successfully treated. Among the nurses recruited to deliver the complex intravenous treatment with antimony potassium tartrate were Javan bird-of-paradise hunters who had lost their jobs when the international ban of hunting these birds was finally instated in Dutch New Guinea. They were retrained as nurses by Thierfelder’s wife, Marie, who was also a doctor.
This great upheaval of Marind culture caused great anguish and despondency even after the recovery of fertility. Further setbacks followed when the control of Dutch New Guinea passed to Indonesia. Huge numbers of Indonesian transmigrants came to Merauke from the 1970s onwards, soon outnumbering the local Marind population. Later came the clearance of forests for palm oil plantations with significant destruction of habitat, pollution, and loss of biodiversity. The Marind of today struggle to make their voices heard and face a new existential crisis no less severe than the terrible epidemic they faced 100 years earlier. Nonetheless, remnants of their old culture are still to be found. Collector and dealer of oceanic art, Todd Barlin was involved in mounting an exhibition of Marind art in 1999 at the Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie in Paris (Le musée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac), which included costumes freshly re-created by the Marind in the style once used in their ceremonial parades of old.
In choosing illustrations for his book, the author sought to demonstrate to readers the magnificence of Marind culture at the time of first contact as recorded by early missionaries and Paul Wirz in photographs, drawings, and paintings. The author drew on the rich photographic archives of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen and Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven. Of particular interest are the oil paintings of Father Petrus Vertenten, MSC, which provide images in colour of Marind individuals in traditional dress, artworks in their right which vividly convey the richness of Marind body art. Vertenten was also an able photographer; his arresting image of a woman from Merauke adorns the cover of the book, and there is a further photograph which appears to show the same woman adjusting a young man’s hair extensions. The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam has a special display devoted to Vertenten that includes his art and a mock-up of his study in Okaba. Vertenten’s reputation among today’s Marind rides high, and a statue to him was erected in Okaba in 2013. In print, he could be highly judgmental, and to a modern eye, his paintings can be read as the work of an artist both captivated and repelled by a culture he considered to be crying out for radical reform by a dedicated missionary such as himself. Wirz, on the other hand, was contemptuous of missionary aims and took the view that the Marind could not survive in a modern world; he felt all he could do was salvage a few remaining objects for posterity to admire in distant museums once their inevitable extinction came to pass.
In addition to archive images, the author’s wife, Veronica Spooner, has created pen and ink motifs, many of them taken from Marind art and photographs, to go with each chapter heading. Subjects portrayed include Marind canoes, fishing nets, penis covers, and bullroarers.
— John Richens
John Richens
John Richens is regarded internationally as a leading expert on the sexually transmitted infection donovanosis. He studied classics and medicine at King's College Cambridge and King's College London and then tropical medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His interest in donovanosis was sparked by patients he encountered while working in the highlands of Papua New Guinea from 1984 to 1990. After returning to the UK he became an academic specialist in HIV and sexually transmitted infections at University College London and overseas as a consultant to the World Health Organization and other aid agencies.
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