Peaceful Societies

The lush green and brown farmlands of central Lancaster County and the lives of the Amish and Old Order Mennonite farming families who live there are seriously threatened by a proposed development. Opponents of the development claim that the horse and buggy culture of the Plain People will be disrupted if not destroyed by all the traffic that the project will bring into their rural Manheim Township community.

Traffic on U.S. 30 near the entrance to Rt.272, the Oregon Pike (Photo by Ken Lund on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

An article published last Thursday in Philly.com provides details about the controversy. It indicates that the developers want to build 550 homes plus a restaurant, hotel, banquet hall, convenience store and supermarket on a 75-acre tract located on the Oregon Pike, PA route 272, a few miles north of U.S. 30 and the city of Lancaster. Main roads like U.S. 30 are already crowded with traffic but this development will threaten the horses and buggies of the Old Order folks on the narrower, back country roads.

Supporters claim that the development, to be called Oregon Village, will bring fresh commerce, new housing, and much-needed revitalization into the township. An important selling point in their view is that it would bring in $3 million per year in new tax revenues. And, the argument of developers everywhere, it would create jobs.

Mary Haverstick, the co-founder of Respect Farmland, a local citizens’ organization, expressed the opinion that the proposed development would be just like “plopping a small city in the middle of farmland.” The critics argue that the development would completely destroy the lifestyle of the Plain People and would signal the beginning of the end of bucolic country life in the county.

Pennsylvania State Route 272 (Photo by Doug Kerr on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The village of Oregon, located along route 272 in Manheim Township, with about 50 houses at present, would balloon to over 550 dwellings. The resulting surge in the number of vehicles on the roads would threaten and perhaps end the horse and buggy traffic and the culture that goes along with it.

Amish farmer Amos Beiler spoke frankly to the reporter while standing in a field in the township. He said that he couldn’t imagine taking his horse and buggy out onto a six-lane highway. He admitted he was undecided about the proposal: “I just don’t know how it’s going to work,” he said.

Supporters of the project say that traffic can be detoured away from the smaller roads; detractors suggest that it will be a nightmare for the Amish and Mennonites. Pamela Haver, a cousin of Mr. Beiler’s, was blunter than he was: “It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” she said. Both the developer and the opposing groups have hired law firms to represent them in the contest.

A different article about the same controversy published two weeks ago revealed that some Amish farmers in Manheim Township approached Donald Kraybill, famed authority on the Amish, for his take on the issue. The retired faculty member at Elizabethtown College, who is a senior fellow emeritus at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, expressed the thought that the development might provoke concerns for the First Amendment rights of the Amish.

“It could be seen as a detriment to their ability to practice their religious faith because their churches stipulate that they use horse-drawn vehicles,” Kraybill said. He went on to say that, in time, the Amish could leave the area if the project is indeed built. After all, it is proposed for the middle of one of their communities, which justifies their special concern about it.

Cherishing the Lepcha culture while searching for ways to strengthen their society were the basic themes of a day-long conference held in Gangtok, Sikkim, on April 27. The Balipara Foundation, based in Assam, India, sponsored the conference titled “Community, Conservation and Livelihoods: The Lepcha Community” held at Sikkim University.

Houses in a Lepcha village of North Sikkim (Photo by Kandukuru Nagarjun on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

One news report about the event provided good coverage of a presentation by Prabir Banerjee, the co-founder of the foundation and a featured speaker at the conference. He described the folklore of the Lepcha, saying that “they are supposed to be one of [the] finest weather forecasters in the world.” Banerjee added that they have a very deep connection with nature, but it is important to find ways to share their understandings with the rest of humanity.

He praised the state of Sikkim, which is heavily influenced by Lepcha traditions, for taking “the best practices in what Sikkim has done in terms of protecting the environment to the rest of the Eastern Himalayan region, like a cross pollination of knowledge and ideas…” Banerjee also commended the organic farming movement in the state, which often makes the news in India, for protecting the soils and waters in the mountains. He concluded that Sikkim has shown leadership and commitment to important ideals.

Prayer flags in a Lepcha village of North Sikkim (Photo by Kandukuru Nagarjun on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Another story from a northeastern Indian news service reported on some of the other speakers at the conference. One session, moderated by Dr. Sandhya Thapa from the Sociology Department in the university, discussed the challenges and threats faced by the Lepchas as well as their folklore, connections to nature, history and traditions. Dawa Lepcha discussed their indigenous knowledge and their approaches to securing livelihoods.

Gacho Lepcha, another academic, also spoke about the close Lepcha feelings toward nature. He emphasized that they have been protecting their surrounding natural environment for ages.

An elderly Lepcha woodcutter in the Dzongu Reserve of North Sikkim (Photo by Kandukuru Nagarjun on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

At a different session, a range of experts from fields such as geology, film-making, mountaineering, social justice, and chemistry discussed the Dzongu Reserve, the cultural heart of the Lepcha society in North Sikkim—its problems, and possible solutions that should be sustainable.

Neela Mazumdar, from the Earth Day Network-India, announced at the conference the launch of the Global Cleanup of the Mountains—a campaign to raise awareness of the need to remove countless pieces of trash from the natural environment. Following her presentation, a 22-minute documentary film “Voices of Teesta” was screened by its director, Minket Lepcha, for the large crowd of participants at the conference, many of whom were students.

With the success of this conference, the organizer, the Sikkim Chapter of the Balipara Foundation, plans to continue its work by organizing community-specific discussions in various places around the Eastern Himalayas.

Thirty-six Tahitians have filed claims that they are still suffering from the effects of the radiation released over French Polynesia from the nuclear bomb testing conducted in the territory for many years. The government of France has responded by sending a team of experts to the Pacific territory to determine whether or not it should pay compensation to the people who are making the claims.

Edouard Fritch, President of French Polynesia (Photo by Denys in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

According to a news report published on Wednesday last week, this is only the latest chapter in the long-standing drama about the former testing program of nuclear bombs by France. As recently as November 2018, the president of French Polynesia, Edouard Fritch, admitted he had helped cover up the fact that the testing had been quite harmful to the Tahitians. Earlier, French Polynesian groups had unsuccessfully applied to the International Criminal Court arguing that France had committed crimes against humanity with its testing.

The recent news story argues that the pro-independence movement among the Tahitians has gotten an important boost from the acknowledgement by President Fritch of the cover-up. It points out that the US and Britain have both admitted the harm caused by radiation from their bomb testing in the Pacific in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Licorne explosion on Fangataufa Atoll, 25 miles south of Mururoa, on July 3,1970 (Photo by the French army, loaded on Flickr by Pierre J., Creative Commons license)

But France has long denied that its testing, which lasted from 1966 until 1996, caused any problems. France tested 193 weapons and the ones detonated in the atmosphere caused the most harm. The experts being deployed from France to Polynesia are planning to visit the islands of Huahine, Fakarava, Raiaatea, and Maupiti.

In July 2016, the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test in French Polynesia, a review of the history, politics, and protests concerning the testing pointed out that at first in the 1960s, some Tahitians protested but many accepted the assurances of the French government that the tests would be harmless. One Polynesian official said that his grandmother even displayed a nice picture of a bomb test on the wall in her home.

But the rates of cancers and leukemia among Polynesians exposed to the radiation continued to rise in the years after the testing was finally stopped, though the government in Paris continued to deny, at least through 2009, that its bomb tests could have been the cause. When the French government then introduced a program to grant compensation to the victims of radiation, it awarded payments to only 19 people out of more than 1,000 claimants. One must wonder if the current crop of 36 claimants will make out any better.

A Hutterite child was accidentally shot in the chest late Monday morning last week but his condition appears to be stable.

A guided tour of the Pincher Creek Colony (Photo by Bruce Bonta, July 5, 2006)

According to a report in the CBC news and several western Canadian sources, an 11-year-old boy was accidentally shot at the Pincher Creek Colony in southern Alberta by a 13-year-old boy who had obtained a loaded 22 caliber pistol. At about 11:30 a.m. on April 22, the family of the injured boy took him to the hospital in the town of Pincher Creek, a few miles east of the colony. The hospital alerted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, RCMP, Canada’s national police force.

The police told the press that the 13-year-old had found the pistol, already loaded, in a colony outbuilding. He started playing with the gun and it accidentally went off, hitting the younger boy in the chest. No adults were present to witness the accident. Once the injured boy’s family had taken him into the local hospital, the staff there stabilized his condition and he was soon on a life flight to the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary.

Cpl. Jeff Feist of the RCMP told the press that the shooting was under investigation since Canada generally has been working to make the ownership and possession of firearms safer. He indicated that the gun had been seized and that the colony members were cooperating with the police investigation. The police were considering pressing charges against the owner of the gun for not storing it securely.

A shop in one of the outbuildings on the Pincher Creek Colony (Photo by Bruce Bonta, July 5, 2006)

A news story from Tuesday afternoon on CTV News added some additional details and corrected some statements published on Monday. One revision to the original story is that the two children were involved in a water pistol fight when the older boy found the loaded 22 pistol in a drawer in a shop, grabbed the gun, and fired at the younger boy, his cousin. Fortunately, though he was hit in the chest, the bullet missed his important organs. Colony officials told CTV that the boy will probably survive. It turns out that the victim was only nine, not eleven as originally reported.

But one might reasonably wonder why a people who are so well known for their pacifist beliefs have guns in the first place. As Packull (1995) points out in his book on the early period of Hutterite history, the beliefs of the Anabaptists, from whom the Hutterites developed in the early 16th century, were based on the Sermon on the Mount. They refused to bear arms such as guns, swords, or daggers; they were only allowed to carry broken bread knives.

Packull observes, however, that in 1532, Jacob Hutter, founder of the Hutterites, was noticed carrying a gun, a statement that the author has a hard time accepting since it would have contradicted the basic beliefs of the Hutterite pacifist faith. He posits a possible explanation—that the sighting dates from an earlier period of Hutter’s life, before he converted to Anabaptist beliefs.

Skipping to much more recent times, Hostetler (1974) writes that in general hunting is practiced very little among the Hutterites. “Guns, with few exceptions, are taboo; when permitted, they are used for shooting coyotes (p.175).”

In a still more recent scholarly work, Janzen and Stanton (2010) differ from Hostetler only in emphasis. They write that some colonies permit hunting, even though their church has historically opposed the possession and use of guns. But even though some colonies are strongly against allowing their members to own guns and will destroy them whenever they can, in others they may be used to shoot animals that threaten the livestock.

None of that answers why the loaded pistol was in the workroom at Pincher Creek in the first place, but shooting at local coyotes that prowl around the colony would be the best guess.

About 140 miles southwest of Winnipeg on the border of Manitoba with North Dakota, the International Peace Garden beckons travelers to stop and contemplate the meaning of peace. The ambience of formal flower beds, fountains, some towers, and the international border between the two nations running straight through the middle of the garden effectively symbolize our natural desires for peaceful coexistence.

Fountains and flower beds at the International Peace Garden (Photo by Dig deeper in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

As the Wikipedia article on the garden points out, North Dakota has adopted as its motto the “Peace Garden State.” An article in the CBC on April 11 didn’t discuss the garden but it did reflect on the peaceful approaches of a couple Manitoba communities in the vicinity of the garden complex and the way they resolved a potentially contentious issue.

The Willow Creek Hutterite Colony, located 27 miles east of the garden and just north of the border, has grown beyond the bounds of their lands and facilities. As colonies usually do when they become too large, the Hutterites are looking for ways to subdivide. But Willow Creek came up with a novel proposal. Instead of finding a large tract of prairie, buying it, and building all the facilities that half of their members could then move into, why not buy a nearby, intact, but shrinking village?

Mather, Manitoba, is 13 miles farther from the peace garden and is just such a dying community. Rumors started circulating in Mather that Willow Creek was interested in making an offer, so representatives of the Hutterites held a meeting one Monday evening. Over 40 people, the majority of the citizens of Mather, showed up to hear what the Hutterites were proposing.

The Main Street of Mather, Manitoba, in 1908 (Photo by the Winnipeg Photo Co; digital image from the British Library, in the public domain)

Willow Creek was proposing to buy the entire town of Mather—buildings, yards, streets, the entire community and all of its infrastructure. They were offering 1.5 times the assessed values of the properties. According to a lawyer representing the colony, John Stewart, the Hutterites were willing to negotiate beyond that. The CBC reporter quoted Bob Yake, owner of an auto shop business in Mather, as saying that at least some of the town residents were confused.

Mr. Stewart told the CBC that most of the residents of Mather were not interested in selling. And, he added, that was the purpose of the meeting—to give everyone an opportunity to hear the Hutterite proposal and to react to it together. He displayed an easy acceptance of the feelings of the Mather community.

Mr. Yake said that there were a lot of concerns about the offer—where would the people move to and would the sale of their properties provide enough money so they could find a new place to live? He indicated to the CBC that for most of the Mather people, it was enough that seven or eight of their fellow citizens simply couldn’t make it work for the rest to turn against the idea.

Young Hutterite women hanging out on a Winnipeg street (Photo by Dave Shaver on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

So Willow Creek has abandoned its proposal, sensible as it must have seemed to them. Attorney Stewart said that the colony does not at the moment have a Plan B prepared, but they will begin making plans for another sort of future. Mr. Yake said he thinks things in Mather are also “getting back to kind of normal.”

Is the kind of normal that Mr. Yake speaks about usually characterized by open discussions and peaceful resolutions of contentious issues such as happened in Mather a couple weeks ago? Or is that peacefulness the result of ingrained approaches to resolving conflicts held by the Hutterites and their local prairie neighbors? Or is it a halo effect fostered by the International Peace Garden a few miles away across the Manitoba prairie?

Last week The New Indian Express sent a reporter into a Kadar colony in Kerala to see how the tribal people there were reacting to the prospect of voting. The third phase of the Indian General Election was scheduled to include the state of Kerala on April 23. The Kadar whom the reporter interviewed expressed utter distain for the voting. It does no good anyway.

A road through the Athirappilly Forest in the Vazhachal Forest Division (Photo by Jaseem Hamza in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The reporter, Manoj Viswanathan, visited Mukkampuzha, a colony, he writes, of around 4,000 tribal people, 90 percent of whom are Kadar. It is located in the Vazhachal Forest Division of Kerala. The colony is fairly near the Poringalkuthu Dam, a facility which attracts herds of elephants that tend to damage human structures.

Manoj writes that the Kadar much prefer the pleasures of living close to nature rather than those of town life—much more engaging than the obsession that the rest of the country has with its elections. While other citizens talk about the polls, the Kadar focus on honey bees. The honey that they harvest in the forest makes a much more significant difference in their lives than the politicians ever could, they feel.

Kadar huts (Image from L.K. Anantha Krishna Iyer, Cochin Tribes and Castes, 1909, vol. 1, p.3, in the public domain)

One Kadar man, Sasidharan, expressed his opinions to the reporter. “What good can elections bring us? We’ve to strive for our livelihood. Politicians give tall promises and vanish after [the] polls.” He pointed to the houses and said they were leaking. The government awards contracts for work to be done but the contractors use only poor-quality materials.

He said that they have decided against voting in the coming election unless the candidates promise them good houses and good land for cultivation. He mentioned an area near the Vachumaram colony where they could be given land to cultivate—so they could earn a living. While he is a branch committee member of the CPM party, he still doesn’t mind stating that politicians betray the tribal people.

Tribal girls, probably Kadar, photographed in a Kadar area near Kochi, Kerala (Photo by Eileen Delhi on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Another person the reporter interviewed, Sivan, said the colony has a severe scarcity of drinking water. The people also do not make much progress due to their lack of education. Sivan added that while many of the Kadar do complete class XII schooling, they are not willing to go on to college. Instead, they take jobs in nearby towns as laborers so they can continue living in the forest, which they prefer anyway over indulging in expensive luxuries. Some young people, however, have started consuming alcohol.

But the calendar for voting happens to conflict with the honey-gathering season, which has just begun for the Kadar in Pokalapara, Mukkampuzha, Poringal, and Vachumaram as well as in Vazhachal. Young people go out into the forests from those settlements to spend weeks searching for honey. The reporter, clearly a city person, describes the places where the Kadar look for honey as “treacherous forest paths where elephant herds, wildcats and scary bear roam.”

A large bees nest in Munnar, Kerala, India (Photo by shanmuga varadan asoka on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The head of the Pokalapara colony, Subramanian, said that a big honey comb can contain as much as 40 kg of honey. With the price of wild honey running about 450 rupees (US $6.48) per kilogram, finding some big combs in the forest provides a lot of money which helps sustain the people during the monsoon season. Subramanian added that they also gather frankincense and tubers while they are in the forest.

A news report five years ago also mentioned the hostility of the Kadar in the Vazhachal Forest to the Indian general elections. According to that story, over 340 potential voters in one community simply fled town at dawn on Election Day and went into the forest to gather: the best way of avoiding politicians who want to make lots of empty promises to potential voters. Spending the day in the forest is more enjoyable and certainly more productive.

A court hearing has finally been held in Aswan, Egypt, for the 32 Nubian protesters who had been arrested following their demonstration on September 3, 2017. Of the 32 people, 24 were arrested during the protests that day and the rest were apprehended later. Charged by the government with such crimes as inciting protests, disrupting public order, and blocking roads, eight of the protesters were acquitted this April 7th of the charges, according to one news report, though another source reported that seven were acquitted.

Nubian kids in Aswan (Photo by Eve Fouché in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The remaining 24 (or 25) defendants were fined by the State Security Emergency Court between 30,000 and 50,000 Egyptian pounds (U.S.$1,733 – $2,890) each, though the fines will only be enforced if the guilty individuals commit more crimes. The nature of their crimes was that they participated in a peaceful demonstration in the city of Aswan for the recognition of their rights as guaranteed by the constitution of 2014—the right of return to Old Nubia. In essence, they were arrested for insisting on the validity of the constitution.

A third news story about the court hearing gives better background of the issue. It indicates that the protest march nearly two years ago was inspired by article 236 of the Egyptian constitution which says, “The state shall work on developing and implementing projects to return the residents of Nubia to their native areas and develop them within 10 years.”

Nubian kids playing with paints in Aswan (Photo by Amro alashrf in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Mohamed Azmy, a Nubian lawyer and activist, is quoted in the story as saying in 2016 that several organizations were preparing to file a complaint against the government with the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights.

The reporter also quoted Fatma Eman, a well-known Nubian activist, for her statement, “we’ve reached the stage where we are unable to deal with the government.” She went on to say, “we thought in 2014 that the government had changed its attitude towards Nubians, but time has proven that these constitutional guarantees are just ink on paper.”

That classic authority on the English language the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED) defines a “war of words” as a journalistic phrase meaning “a sustained conflict conducted by means of the spoken or printed word.” Such a “war” had erupted three weeks ago in news stories about the causes and cures for a skin disease afflicting many young Batek people in Kuala Koh, Malaysia. The good news more recently is that the people are getting better.

A Batek girl (Photo by Heng Fu Ming on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The conditions endured by the Batek were described in several Malaysian news sources and summarized here a week later, on April 4. A couple of Batek quoted in the news stories indirectly castigated the health department. One person criticized the local health clinic for their inability to provide medicines that would cure the infection and another urged the department to become more involved with the health problems in the village.

The report in this website also summarized a news story published a day after the others that raised the sniping by the Batek into a war of words by the health authorities. The health department of Kelantan state argued that the problem was caused by the stubborn refusal of the Batek to take a bus into the health clinic for treatments, and that the illness was a type of skin fungus that the medical personnel would be able to diagnose. The subtext was, once the people were willing to cooperate they could be cured.

Last Thursday, the 11th, a story in Kosmo, one of the Malay-language news services that had carried the original description of the problem three weeks ago, reported that the Batek have found their own cure by using traditional sources—and they deny categorically that they refused to cooperate and take the bus, as the earlier report had indicated.

A Batek woman (Photo by Heng Fu Ming on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The reporter spoke with Ani Ong, 35, who said that a large number of Batek in the village had already been healed by spreading on the infected areas of their skin a concoction of limestone chalk and pepper taken from plants growing around their houses. He admitted that some people were not completely cured by using the traditional medicine but after the treatments they were not infected as seriously.

Anisah Pinang said his young children were also cured by the concoction of chalk and pepper. He said that they were forced to try the traditional medicine since they had not received any helpful treatments “from any of the parties,” in the wording of the Google translation, meaning the health authorities. “Although my child’s body is still itchy … it is not as serious as before after being rubbed with chalk and with pepper,” he said.

The reporter also spoke with Jamil Hendi, 23, who said that almost half of the 300 villagers had been infected by the skin disease. He argued that modern medicines seem to be ineffective against the infection. His engagement in the war of words was temperate: “We deny the accusations of certain parties [meaning the health authorities cited earlier] claiming that we did not cooperate and run away from the jungle for fear of disease treatment.”

He further softened his rhetoric by adding that he hoped modern healthcare could be brought to the village more often to treat the people, even though Kuala Koh is in a very remote location. He was using, to make up a phrase, “peacemaking with words” rather than the more familiar “war of words” to make his points gently. Someday, hopefully, the OED will include that peacemaking phrase that the Batek exemplify so effectively as well as the phrase exemplifying violent approaches to contentious issues.

Malaysia’s Perak state has decided to go ahead with the construction of a hydropower dam on the Geruntum River, despite the fact that it will harm the lands of a group of Semai villages.

A Semai village in Gopeng (Photo by lets.book in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The Semai in the town of Gopeng have expressed their opposition to the dam-building project since it was first announced by the state in 2012. According to a news story in June 2018, the project began to get a lot of news coverage when the Semai launched large, but peaceful, demonstrations protesting the destructive practices of the construction firm doing preparatory work along the river for the dam.

The news report indicated that politicians from the Pakatan Harapan party had promised in their election campaigning that it would “respect the customary lands, cemeteries, and properties used for food production by the Orang Asli”—in essence, giving the impression that the dam project would be set aside if they won. They did win the national elections held on May 9, so, for the Semai, hope was in the air—their riverside crops and lands would be safe. But just to make sure, they filed a suit in the High Court for Perak, located in the state capital, Ipoh. The state announced on June 7 that it was putting the dam on hold pending further studies.

The High Court of Perak in Ipoh (Photo by Miss Prema Darshini in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

A news story from Malaysia on Tuesday last week, April 2, indicated that the new PH state government is planning to renege on its promises to the Semai and proceed with the construction of the dam. Speaking to reporters at an event in Ipoh, Abdul Aziz Bari, the chair of the Education, Science, Environment and Green Technology Committee for the state, said that the new government was, in his opinion, bound to honor the written commitment made by the previous Barisan Nasional government to the company planning to build the power plant.

“In legal terms” he said, “we cannot simply do away with or simply dishonor the agreement that has been made by the previous administration.” The previous government had signed an agreement with Perak Hydro Renewable Energy Corporation (PHREC) for the construction of the hydropower plant in the river.

Semai kids in Gopeng (Photo by lets.book in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

According to the news report, Abdul Aziz said he had gone to the Ulu Geruntum communities a couple weeks ago to reassure the Semai that they “will not be sidelined.” He also sought to convince the people that any complaints they might have will be addressed. The news story did not indicate if he was concerned about the support promised to the Semai last year. He stressed during his news conference the importance of the government following the rule of law—which would seem to equate government commitments to corporations more than to indigenous people.

Abdul Aziz addressed complaints about the project made by white-water rafting companies that use area rivers for their business. He said he was told that their complaints were not due to the hydropower project but to upstream logging. This differs from the news stories last June which reported that the contractor working on the dam had polluted the river earlier due to not properly following an erosion and sedimentation control plan.

The reporter concluded the story last week by mentioning the suit filed in the state’s High Court in Ipoh last year by the Semai against the Malaysian government, the Perak state government, the PHREC, and others. The Semai suit seeks protection for their customary land rights. It appears from the recent article as if the state is ignoring the legal suit for the moment and announcing their plans for when and if the court finds against the Semai.

The Ju/’hoansi are having trouble caring for their dead. According to an article in the New Era, one of Namibia’s major news agencies last week, the mortuaries in Tsumkwe and other nearby communities are more or less dysfunctional. One, located at the Tsumkwe Health Clinic, has not been functioning since 2015. A second mortuary at the police station in Tsumkwe has not been able to store human bodies since August 2017.

A Ju/’hoan walking in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy (Photo by David Barrie on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The families of the deceased in Tsumkwe, the largest community in Namibia’s Nyae Nyae Conservancy, are faced with transporting bodies to Mangetti Dune, 80 kilometers away, or all the way to the nearest large town, Grootfontein, 250 kilometers to the west. The logistical nightmare is compounded for the grieving family, which has to make the funeral arrangements near the home community and then find a way to bring the body all the way back. Fransina Gauz, the Tsumkwe Constituency Councilor, commented that the only way it works is that everyone helps each other out.

The reporter for the New Era spoke with officials at the mortuaries. All gave plausible excuses for the fact that their facilities were not working: at one, the staff is waiting for a new cylinder of petrol; at another, an official said the mortuary regularly short circuits from rain water leaking into the room. Another mortuary malfunctions due to an internal leakage. The excuses are sad to read.

Samuel Shilikomwenyo, the Acting Otjozondjupa Regional Health Director, said the ministry is aware of the problems—the morgue at the Tsumkwe Health Clinic, for instance, badly needs to be overhauled. But the agency has financial problems that are causing the delays. Similarly, he said that the mortuaries in Gam and Mangetti Dune will be updated when funds become available. He asked people to be patient.

An elderly San woman in Botswana holding a plant she has gathered (Photo by Dietmar Temps on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A nurse in Gam explained to the reporter how everyone in the community pitches in when an elderly member of their community dies. “Everyone helps each other. They will always give a helping hand. There was this one time someone passed away. My ambulance driver gave his private car for the corpse to be taken to Mangetti. He just knows the people. I don’t think they’re relatives, but he lent his car for free for the corpse to be taken,” he said.

A nurse at the Mangetti Dune mortuary described the pressures on them when more than one individual has died, sometimes forcing the staff to stack the bodies one on top of the other in chambers large enough for just one corpse. She urged health officials to do more for them. It is not reasonable for the 10,000 people living in the Tsumkwe Constituency to have access to just the one small mortuary at Mangetti Dune.

All of this, important and practical as it is, makes the curious reader wonder how the traditional Ju/’hoansi beliefs concerning their dead might fit in. Lorna Marshall, in an article she published in 1962, touched on the religious beliefs of the people, at the time called the “!Kung,” regarding their deceased. (She reprinted her 1962 paper as Chapter 1 in her 1999 book Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites.) Marshall wrote that the spirits of the dead, called //Gauwasi, lived with the great god Gao!na in the eastern sky and came to earth to do his bidding—causing accidents and sickness and in general interfering with the lives of humans.

Marshall pointed out that the people did not make distinctions between good and bad individuals when they died: they all became //Gauwasi and joined the great god in the east. The Ju/’hoansi were not terrified of the spirits of the dead since the people believed they could be good as well as bad. The news report last week concerns too serious an issue for the reporter to speculate about the possibility that the //Gauwasi are simply interfering with the smooth functioning of the health clinic mortuaries for their own perverse reasons.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Development Proposal Threatens the Amish

Conference Focuses on the Lepchas

Atomic Bombs over the Tahitians

A Gun at a Hutterite Colony

Resolving Issues in Manitoba

Honey Time in the Kerala Forests

Court Hearing for Nubian Protesters

Pepper, Chalk, and a War of Words

Dam Builders May Triumph After All

Death among the Ju/’hoansi

Subscribe to our weekly digest

Subject Listing

Previous News and Reviews