THE TUNGEI

Western Highlands Province, South Wahgi Census Division, map ref BP 247539 (Aviamp CS) BP 182578 (Ningei, or Aviamp No.2) • political tribe, one of 20 Wahgi tribes in the division • Ek Nii language • access by road, approx. K1.20 PMV fare from Hagen • churches include Catholic, Lutheran, and Nazarene • community schools at Aviamp CS and Rogamb CS • Nazarene Bible College at Ningei • Nazarene Church and former mission station at Tun • small roadside markets at Aviamp and Rogamb • this entry by John Burton, 28 Feb 96.

About the TUNGEI

The Tungei are a tribe made up of six original clans - Komnemb, Ekiemb, Kenjpi-emb, Akamb, Eska, and Kupaka - who say they arose at a grassy knoll called Kiltei Ku (right). Another clan, the Menjpi, joined later from an origin place at Num Kala, a small lake not far from Mt Hagen town. The ancestral couple of the Tungei, Jimbe and Doimbe, are credited with the discovery of stone axe quarries, from which the Tungei became famous for their manufacture, until the arrival of the Australians in the 1930s, of a stone axe type called kunjin. Story-tellers think of lines of men descending from Jimbe and Doimbe, ultimately reaching living people.

Axe makers of the Wahgi

The stone axes were widely traded in central New Guinea, west through Enga towards Lake Kopiago, east into - but not beyond - Chimbu, south as far as the mouth of the Kikori, in Gulf, southwest to the Fly River close to the Irian Jaya border.

Two Komnemb men, Duri, left, and Kombra, a traditional clan leader, right, demonstrating how to make an axe hafting, near my house in 1981.

The last time axe stone was quarried here was in 1933. It became impossible to continue to make kunjin axes after this as their prime value to their producers was as high-value trade items, not work implements. Steel tools were in short supply for some years, but demand for stone axes dropped off sharply because more and more pearshells - originally of equal value to axes - began to circulate after the arrival at Mt Hagen of the first Australian patrol in this year. (The patrol overnighted on Tungei land on 2 May 1933.)

Unlike at smaller quarries in other parts of the highlands and in Irian Jaya, the industrial scale of production of kunjin ruled out further quarrying expeditions. At these other places, individual men, or at most parties of a dozen, could continue to make axes for some decades. But the Tungei method of quarrying required the seclusion of over 200 men at once in a mountain encampment. This was not attempted again after 1933.

Duri was not a man like Kombra with political talents and skills of diplomacy. He was a quiet gifted man with a special knowledge of the selection of materials and elaborate cane binding needed to carry out axe hafting. While they didn't make new axes after 1933, the repair of old ones might have gone on well into the 1940s, when Duri and Kombra were in their twenties. This example, which he worked on in 1981, is now in the collection of the National Museum of Papua New Guinea.

Today the Tungei make a living through subsistence agriculture, growing sweet potatoes, corn, sugarcane, bananas and a great variety of green-leafed vegetables, and raising pigs. Their land is suitable for coffee-growing and many families have re-located their homes from more traditional sites at higher altitude in side valleys to the floor of the Wahgi Valley, at about 1600m altitude, where coffee production is considerably easier and where the Highlands Highway allows people to come and go by bus and truck.

Kenjpi-emb Aus, with a pig of his.
(This one's worth about K600 I shouldn't wonder.)