Book of the Week: Cargo Cult as Theatre

Dorothy Billings, Lexington Books, 2002

Reviewed by Scott Hamilton

American voters have just rejected Donald Trump. If people in other countries could have cast ballots the Republicans would surely have done even worse. From Europe to South America to Oceania, Trump has become a hate figure. Protesters burn his effigy; governments lament his tariffs, his contempt for old allies, and his xenophobic language.

To find an American leader as despised as Trump we perhaps have to go back sixty years, to Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ won the 1964 presidential election in a landslide after taking the place of the slain John F Kennedy a year earlier. He put his name to some progressive civil rights legislation, and extended America's welfare state. But these achievements were soon overshadowed. Johnson steadily increased America's military presence in South Vietnam and conscripted his country's young men. He became as synonymous with that conflict as Trump is with the war in Iran.

By 1968 the Tet offensive and riots in American cities had made Johnson's position untenable. He decided not to run in that year's election. Johnson had lost America, but he was apparently very popular on a small island in faraway Melanesia.

New Hanover or Lavongai Island is part of Papua New Guinea's Bismarck archipelago. In was a piece of German New Guinea until World War One, when Australia took control. Under pressure from the United Nations' newly independent members, Australia had begun by the early sixties to accept the prospect of Papua New Guinean independence. In 1964 the Australians finally organised their colony's first democratic election. Previous contests had seen most indigenous people kept off voting rolls and prevented from standing. The 1964 election gave the colony its first taste of universal suffrage.

In 1964 two thousand voters from New Hanover Island cast invalid ballots. Instead of choosing one of the candidates on their ballot, they had written 'Johnson' or 'LBJ'. The islanders had been presented with ballots by Australian colonial officials and ordered to vote. None of the candidates was local, or even known to the New Hanoverians. There had been no election campaign on their island, and no information about candidates had been circulated by the Australians. The Aussies were not amused to find an American president's name on the ballots the islanders handed over.

Like the Germans before them, Australian administrators had tried to 'modernise' New Guinea society by imposing 'head taxes' on men. The annual taxes had to be paid in cash, even though the vast majority of people lived outside the cash economy. To be able to pay their taxes, the colonists calculated, men would have to enter the economic mainstream and increase their 'productivity'. They would have to get paid work, perhaps on a plantation, or sell enough crops or fish to pay their tax. If men could not pay their tax then they could be forced to work off their debt by building roads, and thereby helping 'modernise' their country.

The head tax was unpopular in many places. Some men tried to avoid by retreating deep into the forest and mountains, to places tax collectors could not reach. Some communities held mass meetings to protest the tax. In a few places tax collectors were attacked and even killed. The New Hanoverians followed their electoral protest with a boycott of the head tax.

New Hanoverians did have some cash, but rather than hand it over they pooled and kept it. They told the Australians that they intended to use the money to buy LBJ for their island. Once again, the Aussies were unamused. But the Americans laughed. Periodicals like Time and Newsweek ran stories on the affection for Johnson on New Hanover. The 'Johnson cult' was seen as the latest in a series of bizarre 'cargo cults' to emerge in Melanesia. These cults allegedly showed Melanesians failing to understand the modern world. They could not grasp the sources of the West's wealth and power, attributing them to magic rather than technology and economics. The cults supposedly organised ceremonies and stunts that tried to conjure Western wealth, but these ended in comedy and failure.

By the sixties the West had become fascinated by cargo cults.  The Johnson Cult was filed alongside Tanna's Jon Frum movement as an example of Melanesian irrationality. While most Westerners laughed, some worried that the cults were roads to communism. Peter Worsley was a British Marxist, but he didn't entirely disagree. His influential book The Trumpet Shall Sound argued that cargo cults represented early, semi-coherent expressions of anti-colonial protest. They would mature in time, he promised, into respectable left-wing national liberation movements, like South Africa's African National Congress. 

In the meantime Australia had sent scores of members of the Johnson cult to jail. They had been convicted for failing to pay their taxes and refusing to work for the administration to pay their tax debts. The same media outlets that had laughed at the New Hanoverians' fondness for LBJ ignored this repression. 

Dorothy Billings was an anthropologist who grew up in Wisconsin but studied the subject at the University of Auckland and then the University of Sydney. Looking for a place to do postgraduate research, she noticed reports of the 'Johnson cult' and headed to New Hanover. It was the beginning of an association with the island and its people that would last until her death in 2022.

Billings' book Cargo Cult as Theatre: Political Performance in the Pacific was not published until 2002, when she was sixty-nine years old. It is an attempt to defend the New Hanoverians from what EP Thompson called the 'enormous condescension of posterity'.

To try to understand the 'Johnson cult', Billings conducted long interviews with men and women who had defied the Australian administration. Often the interviews were the beginning of friendships. Billings initially talked to New Hanoverians in Tok Pisin, New Guinea's national Creole, but later gained a working knowledge of their first language, Tungag. The cover of her book shows her posing during a return visit to New Hanover with her informant and friend Tangamiss, who was a young man when he spoiled his ballot in 1964. By sharing the cover with Tangamiss, Billings makes a statement. The story she tells belongs to New Hanoverians. She is not imposing an analysis on the islanders but helping readers understand their actions. 

After a couple of years of research on New Hanover, Billings decided to write to president Johnson, and to tell him what she had discovered on the island. 'It's great these people appreciate the American way of life', the president wrote in his reply to her.  By now LBJ was very unpopular for his warmongering in Vietnam; some Americans had joked that he should, after all, be sent to New Hanover. 

Johnson's reply suggests that he had not actually read Billing's letter. As she had gotten to know the islanders, Billings had begun to appreciate their very dry humour, their sense of theatre, and their love of satire.  Like many Melanesian peoples, New Hanoverians had an egalitarian social structure. Marshall Sahlins famously talked of the way 'big men' would periodically win the consensual support of Melanesian communities, and try to extend that support to other communities.

'Big men' would often mobilise their followers around a task: the preparation of a large feast, or an elaborate gift exchange ceremony, or a raid on enemies, or the digging or repairing of an irrigation system. They would bring together labour and resources for this task, but they were always reliant on their oratory and their organisational skills for support, and that support could give way quite suddenly. Sahlins drew a contrast between the hereditary chiefdoms and kingdoms of larger Polynesian societies like Tonga and Hawai'i, where power was institutionalised and force was often used to mobilise labour and warriors, and the smaller, much more fluid 'big man' societies of Melanesia.

For every successful 'big man' on an island like New Hanover there were many failures. Satire and ridicule had a prominent place in oratory there, because they were ways for islanders reluctant to support a would-be big man and join a proposed project to register their dissent. At the open air village meetings that were a regular part of life speakers would rise to puncture the bubbles of would-be leaders they disliked or distrusted. Humour was often the best way to discredit a solemn speech by a pretender to power. The 'Johnson cult' reflected the islanders' capacity for satire and their tradition of regularly choosing new and temporary leaders.

The New Hanoverians were satirising the Australian administration when they suggested that a faraway American president could do a better job. They were proposing Johnson as a 'big man'. Their 'vote' for LBJ didn't imply that they thought of him as some sort of superhuman or supernatural entity, and it certainly wasn't a call for American colonisation of their island.

And by proposing that an American rule their island, New Hanoverians poked a sore spot. During World War Two American troops had arrived in numbers on many Melanesian islands. After decades of minimalist administration by niggardly British and Australian colonisers, the scale of the American occupation was a revelation for islanders. They watched fleets of ships unload everything from tanks to prefabricated rooves to tonnes of cans of bully beef, and they saw the Americans lay airstrips and build barracks in mere weeks. Plantations often went untended, as men flocked to the waterfront and bases to work for the Americans, who offered far better wages than colonial administrations had. Friendships were made with both black and white GIs, and the guitar was adopted by local musicians.

The British and the Australians feared and resented the wealthy American interlopers. They knew that the largesse of the Americans and their relatively good treatment of Melanesians contrasted with their own shoestring administrations and with the apartheid-like racial restrictions they had imposed in their colonies. After the Americans left islanders launched new anti-colonial initiatives. The Maasina Rule movement wrested control of large parts of Malaita from the British for years. Maasina means 'marching' in Solomons Pijin, and members of the group marched around the island like the long columns of American GIs they had recently watched. 

Jon Frum had begun on Tanna in the '30s as a traditionalist rebellion against Presbyterian  attempts to ban kava, feasting, and dancing. But when the GIs came it adopted American imagery in a conscious and very successful effort to enrage missionaries and administrators. Members marched like GIs and assembled under American flags.

Dorothy Billings explains all this as she reveals the 'Johnson cult' as a satirical piece of political theatre. It was not the New Hanoverians who were being ignorant, but the Americans who laughed at them.

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