Waiting for That Cargo

It was a weird scene even for the Stone Age world of New Guinea. Deliberately, several brown-skinned Melanesian tribesmen made their way down from the top of fog-shrouded Mount Turu. Strapped to the bamboo poles on their shoulders were two concrete survey markers that had been planted on the summit years ago by a U.S. Army team. Behind the bearers trudged 4,000 other natives from New Guinea's jungled East Sepik district, reciting the Roman Catholic rosary and clutching handfuls of precious mud that they had scooped from the mountaintop.

The procession ended at Yangoru, a village four miles from the mountain. The leader, a sometime policeman and Catholic mission employee named Yeliwan Matthias, 42, told the bearers to drop the stolen markers outside the local government post, part of Australia's administrative network in Northeast New Guinea. Then Yeliwan raised his eyes and wailed: "It all depends on God."

No Birds. Not even He could be expected to work the marvels that were supposed to follow last week's ceremony. Yeliwan and his followers believed that the white man's survey markers were corking up all the treasure within Mount Turu. Once the markers were removed, Yeliwan prophesied:

> Crops would grow profusely, and "we shall go hunting and there will be plenty of game in the bush."

> The bird of paradise, which has all but disappeared from East Sepik in recent years, would return and flourish.

> A fleet of 500 jet transports would disgorge thousands of sympathetic Americans bearing crates of knives, steel axes, rifles, mirrors and other wonders.

By week's end, neither the birds nor the jets had appeared. But even if they never show, the people of New Guinea's primitive north coast are not likely to abandon the so-called "cargo cult" --a conviction that if only the dark-skinned people can hit on the magic formula, they can, without working, acquire all the wealth and possessions that seem concentrated in the white world. Officials are forever trying to explain how the world uses labor, capital and raw materials to acquire its "cargo," but that is all so much hocus-pocus to the tribesmen. As Sydney University Anthropologist Peter Lawrence notes, "They can't conceive of a factory where goods are manufactured. They believe that everything has a deity who has to be contacted through ritual," and who only then will deliver the cargo.

The cult goes back to the mid-19th century, when Russian explorers and Christian missionaries arrived in New Guinea with a dazzling array of possessions. It really took hold during World War II, when all manner of amazing cargo came from the skies, dangling under American parachutes or carried to earth by huge silver birds.

Since then, cult leaders have tried again and again to duplicate the white man's magic. They hacked airstrips in the rain forest, but no planes came. They built structures that look like white men's banks, but no money materialized.

A group on nearby New Hanover Island once raised $2,000 to buy Lyndon Johnson; they reasoned that if L.BJ. were to come, American cargo would surely follow. Cultists at the New Guinean port of Madang were deeply disappointed when the Duke of Edinburgh visited early this year but did not walk on the water or bring a big iron key to unlock a storehouse of goodies.

Great Event. In the Yangoru area, Jesus Christ is thought to be the secret. It was the Crucifixion, the tribesmen suspect, that got the white world its cargo.

At first, Cult Leader Yeliwan seemed bent on doing for his people what Christ had done for the whites. He stole off to Mount Turu last month to begin a solitary fast. Word went out on the jungle grapevine that he would be beheaded on the peak; when his blood flowed over the white man's markers, the story went, the cargo sealed inside the mountain would at last be unlocked. Then, two days after "the great event of the seventh day of the seventh month," Yeliwan would rise from the dead.

Tribesmen began abandoning their jungle plots and their jobs in sawmills and rubber plantations to converge on Yangoru. There, in a few days of brisk recruiting, Yeliwan's deputy collected a tidy $20,000 in cult initiation fees--$10 for each man, $2 for each of his wives.

Why was the sacrifice called off? Warnings by Australian officials might have helped. What about the $20,000? As Yeliwan's deputy told it, the money would be used to construct a memorial, 2,200 miles away in the Australian capital of Canberra, to the ancestors of the Sepik people. Both the Queen and Pope Paul would attend the unveiling, he promised, and that would surely hasten the arrival of the cargo.

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