A Black and White View of a Colourful Tradition: Middle Sepik Sing-Sing, Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is intensely colourful.

Papua New Guinea is also – thanks to rugged terrain and relative isolation from the outside world – exceptionally regional.

This is certainly the case for the speakers of between 50 and 250 distinct languages (depending on how you categorise things) who live in tightly knit clans in small villages scattered around remote pockets along the meandering, tropical Sepik River and its myriad of tributaries. Life here centres around the waterways and continues much as it has for thousands of years: fish and sago are dietary staples, dugout canoes are the principal transport, the river waters are the children’s playground, and the bamboo houses are built high up on stilts to ride out flooding. Water is carried, electricity – when it exists at all – is locally generated, and cell-phone coverage is practically non-existent. Head-hunting was still a rite of passage for the young men here when the first Europeans ventured into the area in the late 1880s.

In theory, regular sing-sings – a Papua New Guinean form of dance-off – have replaced traditional tribal warfare, and head-hunting as a ritual ceremonial practice has been strongly discouraged since colonial times.

But, little else has changed.

The Sepik region remains remote: to visit the village of Kanganaman in the Middle Sepik with photographer Karl Karl Grobl from Jim Cline Photo Tours, I started from Port Moresby, where our group was lucky enough to get one of the few direct flights to Wewak. From there, it was a long, bumpy bus ride (see: Maprik Market Portraits) to Pagwi. The next leg of the journey was a leisurely two-hour trip up the mighty Sepik River in a motorised dugout boat.

Kanganaman is well known for having oldest haus tambaran – spirit house – on the Sepik River. In fact, this village has not one, but two spirit houses (see: Welcome to the Spirit House): the smaller of which is open to women. Most spirit houses are open to initiated-men only – with exceptions made for tourists.

Kanganaman is also known for having inaugurated a regional sing-sing, called the Sepik River Festival, in 2014. This festival has proved popular with locals and tourists alike, and ours was not the only international group of visitors braving the heat and mosquitos to enjoy displays of distinctive culture, dance and music. 

To say that this festival was “colourful” would be an understatement! The two nights I spent in the village provided me with a veritable feast of sensory impressions and images, and I’ve struggled to sort and prioritise the pictures, and to make sense of it all. I have written before about the challenges of trying to truly understand some of the local cultural practices (see: Crocodile Men and Innocent Eyes), especially when they are explained in rather “black and white” language.

I hope you’ll excuse the mixed metaphors, but sometimes it helps to reduce the noise and confusion if you compartmentalise, and look at things in black and white.

The following pictures focus on the local men getting ready in the Kanganaman spirit house – I’ll get back to the preparations and dances of the women and other villagers one day: watch this space!

Please join me as I watch some of the crocodile men get ready for the cassowary dances they will perform at the sing-sing that they are hosting for us and the neighbouring villages.

Word reached us that dancers from neighbouring villages had arrived, and were getting ready in various locations around the village green. It was time to leave the men of Kanganaman Village to their preparations, and to go check out the other groups.

More about them another day.

In the mean time,

Keep Smiling!

Photos: 14August2017