New Britain: Stern Affair

It was the noisiest weekend in Rabaul since 1943, when U.S. bombers flattened the South Pacific town. Seemingly bent on the same sort of destruction, rival tribesmen swarmed into the two-acre market square, wrecked the open-air benches piled with produce, belted one another, battered police cars, beat up the native constabulary and shoved a fire engine over a four-foot bank. It all began when, in the midst of a jostling market crowd, a Sepik tribesman pinched the stern of a shapely Tolai tribeswoman.

In other cultures, this simple admiring social gesture might have earned no more than an unappreciative slap. But the Tolais have been nursing a grudge against the Sepiks for years—ever since the Sepiks began migrating from the New Guinea mainland two decades ago and rose in status as laborers around Rabaul. The pinched tribeswoman called her cousin to avenge her insult. A Sepik pitched in to help the pincher. Soon it was tribe against tribe. Tolais with white-painted faces armed themselves with baskets of stones and heavy sticks. The more imaginative Sepiks stuck hibiscus blooms in their hair for battle identification and began to flail away with iron bars, bicycle chains, hammers, axes, scissors, knives and jagged can lids nailed to sticks. With fire hoses and a few rifle shots, native and white police finally restored order (New Britain is a U.N. trusteeship administered by Australia). Final casualty list: two Tolais dead, 29 natives injured.

Tourists were quick to note that the riot was strictly a native affair; no one seemed mad at the white population of Rabaul. “My friends will be green with envy,” said an Australian woman as she posed in the middle of a crowd of weapon-waving natives. But the Sydney Morning Herald took a less lighthearted view. “This outburst of savagery,” said an irate editorial, “should provide a convincing answer to those members of the United Nations Trustee Council who last month voted for immediate independence for Papua and New Guinea.”