By Dr Joseph Ketan

Who are these people? Where did they come from? Who have they been closely associated with? These and other similar questions on our identity, ethnicity, culture, language, and history ought to be captured systematically for scientific scrutiny.

Universities and colleges use textbooks written by outsiders for the promotion of other people’s culture and history. If anthropology was the handmaiden of European colonialism, then globalization via the internet is the most effective facilitator of small developing countries getting overwhelmed by neo-American imperialism.

If speaking like Europeans and dressing and eating like them were not enough, we are mimicking them in almost everything.

We have lost our values – the principles that govern human relations, rules on gender relations, ethical conduct, and on governance. As a result, we are literally losing a whole generation of young people to drugs, alcohol, and to sexually transmitted diseases. Many young women will never be able to have children because their fallopian tubes have been destroyed by STD. Many suffer in great pain from UTI infections. Young men are incapable of looking after themselves and wander in outer space, high on marijuana and moonshine. Marriages and families are ruined even before they start.

We are losing something significant about our humanity. We have lost direction as a people. Our particularistic leadership, myopic and directionless, reflects this impoverished cultural value system. We have become poor in principles and values. We have lost our moral compass.

Our streets and villages are filled with children having children. Midgets running around with babies under their arms. Governments have no policies on babies with babies; or on mental illnesses caused by “steam” or home brewed alcohol; or on culture and history.

Our education and health systems are collapsing. Our education system is failing our children. Universities and colleges do not have space for all our kids. They are being forced out. Where will they go?

Our rural farmers have been let down by our government. Australian and NZ farmers get subsidized transport, haulage, storage, and marketing. Our farmers get no such benefits.

Our government is incapable of providing basic services for us. We are losing at both ends: modern as well as culture.

I suggest that we go back to our roots. We must find out what we have lost. We must revive the good parts of our cultural heritage.

In Western Highlands, we are using the Rural Development Handbook (2001) by Luke.W. Hanson, Bryant Allen, Richard Michael Bourke, T.J. McCarthy as the basis for the production of our history. We are fortunate to have three tribal structures and clan maps produced in 1987/88 by Dr John Ellisen Burton on North Wahgi, South Wahgi and Hagen.

We intend to use these to write our local history on Melpa, Wahgi, Ek Nii, Enga and Jimi speaking tribes of the Western Highlands. We will document our rich cultural heritage. This will be translated into high school and college textbooks for teaching our children about their people, values and history.

The idea is to retain our identity. We are Papua New Guineans with over 800 languages. We may lose some of them, but lets write our history now so we can save somethings that make us Melanesians. We are not carbon copies of Europeans. We do have cultural traditions – great traditions – from which to build on. We owe it to ourselves and to our children to write about ourselves.