An old man's needs

Obituary: Menjpi Kandel, Wu Denga ('Hard Man'), of Orpal hamlet, Tungei tribe, Western Highlands, c.1896-1988

From the Times of Papua New Guinea, 12 April 1990.
This entry 21 Feb 96.

The old man was fast asleep under an afternoon sun. I coughed and he started up. 'It's me,' I said.

'The Red Man has come!' said a middle-aged woman who had followed us into the clearing between towering clumps of bamboo.

The spare frame before us was like a bag of skin, stretched over stick- like bones. As it stirred, ancient joints strained into life with a slowness that suggested they belonged to another century. Stiff-fingered hands brushed dust from leathery elbows as the old man raised his head to follow the sound of voices. He strained with narrowed eyes to identify his visitors.

'Red Man!' he said at last, his deep, booming voice surprising me as always and reassuring me that his mind was as clear as the stream near his house. On appearance, one expected a thin, reedy old man's tremor and the kind of fidgety conversation one so often has to keep up with the wandering attention of the very old.

I couldn't help smiling from the relief of it. This was Hard Man, the oldest man of the tribe by eight or so years. This was a man from whom streamed, even in the decline of old age, power and authority to a degree that other men cannot attain. And in the extraordinary nature of his resonating voice, it was as if fate had granted him a last wish and allowed him to cheat one of the humiliations of senility.

His age is important to this story. He was born perhaps four years before the turn of the century and would have been in his middle to late thirties at the coming of the Australians. His life history supports this. More than ten years before this upheaval, by my reckoning, he was already a leading fighter among his battle-hardened clansmen. Then he came the deed that made him famous. In the language of citations for valour, one could phrase it this way: that '... without regard for his personal safety, he led an attack on superior enemy forces, over- running their position and personally accounting for several of their number.'

The point of this was that he spilt the blood of his enemy right on the very spot where we were now standing.

I had with me a doctor from a volunteer agency and I explained the purpose of our visit. The doctor had spared a little time to come, I said, to check up on some of the old people that wouldn't normally get to hospital. The old man agreed to submit himself to a brief examination and was duly pronounced reasonably fit and well for some one of his age.

I wasn't surprised. You would have to be healthy to live as long as this, without the heart disease or chest infections that account for many of the 'younger' elderly in their sixties and seventies. Hard Man was doing quite well in his nineties, all things considered.

The main thing that I did consider was that he lived more or less alone. He did so because he refused to move away from a piece of land he won by being fierce and fearless. He was born into an age when the conquest of territory was admired. Now he was out of place. I felt sorry for him, because he was paying a price for his stubbornness.

Hard Man's land is superbly secure in its little mountain valley, if you happen to need a natural fortress against tribal enemies. But in the modern age it is hopelessly unsuitable as a place for growing coffee or from which to send children to school. His clansmen began to move out and settle by the highway in the 1970s. They have become amongst the most successful in the district in 'coffee group' enterprises and in educating their sons and daughters for the realities of a very different world. Today only a handful remain in Hard Man's valley, like caretakers over a land ruled by ghosts.

Once before I had said, 'Hard Man, can I get you something? Let me bring you a T-shirt.'

'What will I do with a T-shirt?' he had replied almost angrily. 'I want food! I'm hungry!'

It was true. Because his grown-up family habitually lived a couple of hours walk away, he was virtually starving to death, in a landscape of plenty. He needs would not have been great, but he was himself beyond exertion in the garden and probably subsisted on a rather ill- balanced and perhaps irregular diet of sweet potato cooked in the ashes.

The last surviving of his three wives was being cared for by the local pastor. She seemed mentally past it as far as coping with household chores were concerned.

With living alone came other dangers. One night he knocked over his lamp and burnt his house down. But he made a miraculous escape, crawling out alive as neighbours rushed to his assistance. A younger generation growing up on the highway would know little of this. They would see a shrunken old man too set in his ways to understand modern ways and the need for development. Village society is often praised for the way the aged can be cared for in familiar surroundings and given the dignity to live out their days by the family hearth. But Hard Man had no such opportunity - unless he would compromise and agree to move away from his sacred land.

Short Man did so, and so did Hip Bone Man, both old comrades in arms and both over eighty. They moved to a coffee block where they can be looked after and where medical services are much closer to hand. Hard Man did at one time go on visits to the highway, but he always returned to his own ground sooner or later - and here he was today.

My friend the doctor closed his bag and we prepared to depart. I had learned enough to write in my notebook, 'Loose connective tissue. Osteoarthritis in knees.' It wasn't very much, just a refined way of saying that he was a bag of skin stretched over old bones. We finished up, gave our thanks and left.

A year later Hard Man went to join his ancestors and the younger brothers he had out-lived, and was buried with them on the hill behind his house. Vale.

© 1990 John Burton and Times of Papua New Guinea