Book Review: The People Time Forgot

Title: The People Time Forgot

Author: Alice Gibbons

Date: 1981

Publisher: Christian Publications

ISBN: 0-87509-405-8

Length: 346 pages

Quote: “Now you have come with the gospel, and we want to thank the Christians in America who sent you to us...we want new missionaries to take your place.”

One of the last pockets of Stone Age culture was the Damal tribe of Irian Jaya, Indonesia...and while it's easy to fall in love with the quaint, Green, often beautiful “folk cultures” of prehistoric or barely-literate tribes, it's also easy to forget the horrible effects some superstition or other has had on most groups of illiterate people. This web site has had few readers in Indonesia and can talk frankly about that country. So let's be frank...first, about richer, more "modern" countries.

Before discussing the Damal tribe, may I remind readers of the finger-sacrifice scene that opens Christy, the crazy confusion about diseases of which pruritus was actually an effect but was believed to be a cause even into the twentieth century, the blood feuds in some parts of Europe and North Africa and North America, the myths spun to support the perversion-even-of-slavery that was legal in the United States up to 1865, the violent opposition of European doctors to the idea of washing their hands in between patients, and the still ongoing efforts to market making unwanted babies and having surgical abortions as “liberating” for our most poorly educated young people. The Damal had no monopoly on stupid, crazy, barbaric, anti-Christian, anti-Islamic, anti-Humanist, and generally unaccountable behavior. Readers from the Global South are entitled to say “And what price your superstitions?” We have several, not all of them the cute, harmless kind like picking up unusual stones/leaves/flowers “for luck.” Some of us still believe in separate “human races.”

That said...the scenes with which we meet the pre-Christian, un-Muslim Damal tribe, as The People Time Forgot, read like an exaggeration a corrupt mission might have concocted for fundraising purposes. They're not. Independent research determined that some situations may have been even worse than the missionaries thought.

In many Stone Age cultures and even in some literate ones, tradition required men and women to eat separately and follow different dietary rules. In some of these cultures, most or all protein foods were designated for men only. Most notably in the Fore tribe, protein-starved women took to sneaking out at night to dig up and eat freshly buried human corpses. Rumor spread through the islands that women were cannibals and might kill someone—through “witchcraft” if not outright murder—in order to eat his or her flesh. So when a child died, not only were its parents unlikely to console each other, but its father was likely to blame and kill its mother. And these people lost a lot of children. They blamed “witches” when adults died, too. The protagonist of the story that opens this book, Meyong, a reluctant child bride, will soon be fleeing for her life when her brother-in-law dies in a perfectly natural accident...and although Meyong didn't cause or expect the brother-in-law's death, and doesn't tell the missionaries whether she ate some portion of his dead body, she emphasizes and reiterates that she was just awfully hungry when he died. In the 1990s women like Meyong, and younger people who had been the babies in their arms, would die horribly from kuru, the human equivalent of Mad Cow Disease, a direct consequence of cannibalism.

(Richard Rhodes' Deadly Feasts, which reported preliminary studies linking kuru with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the Global North, is the book I remember. Amazon is currently touting a newer study of this subject that I've not read, Robert Klitzman's Trembling Mountain.)

Islam is also a missionary religion, and Muslim missionaries are credited with raising the cultural standards of some parts of Indonesia, but they hadn't reached the Damal people. Alice and Don Gibbons, and others from their church, were the first to confront the devastating effects of this tribe's primitive superstition. Some twentieth century missionaries, like Elisabeth Elliot, brought back lessons the English-speaking world could learn from insular low-tech communities; apart from feeling like cornered rats who had to kill or be killed whenever they saw a foreigner, the Waorani apparently had many good ideas. Other insular low-tech communities, like the heart-sacrificing Aztecs and like the crypto-cannibals in some parts of Indonesia, seem to have reached points from which their cultures could either convert to foreign customs pronto or self-destruct.

It's fashionable and politically correct to deride the claim that Stone Age people who had been “converted” to religions they didn't understand were grateful to either Christian or Muslim missionaries. Phillis Wheatley (was she even thirteen years old at the time?) wrote her little exercises in poetic form: “'Twas God who brought me from my native land.” Modern readers squirm and mutter, “Oh, right!” Then we consider the puberty rites Wheatley was likely to have escaped by being enslaved, and the fact that even rich girls, in the eighteenth century, weren't always rewarded for writing poems, and we have to admit the possibility that Wheatley might really have meant...that her “owners” might have been better suited to bring up little Phillis than her own parents had been. Eww, ick, how could anything about slavery have been good? Slavery as practiced by the English colonists in North America was an abomination. Still, some say that “All things work together for good...”

Islam stopped most Arabs selectively killing girl babies, and many North Africans practicing body mutilation rituals that killed many young people. Catholicism stopped Aztecs sacrificing freshly killed human hearts. Protestantism stopped desperate, destitute “Auca” people fighting the rest of humankind. Protestant Christian missionaries likewise stopped “witchcraft” and witch hunting among the Damal people. Humanists...should try to control their envy. They may mean well, but blather about the beauty of primitive wood carving hardly compares with getting bereaved men to console rather than murder their wives.

Were other effects of contact between Stone Age people and missionaries less salutary? Yes. Where the sincerely benevolent missionaries went,the greedy traders always followed. But that's not the Gibbons' subject in The People Time Forgot. Should it be? Would people like the Damal have been any less bait for greedy traders if they'd not been hastily “converted”? Somehow I doubt that. Time was doomed to catch up with the Damal. If greedheads sponsored missions in order to be able to draw up unjust contracts before local people had read enough to recognize the injustice, at least the missionaries offered the local people the chance to learn to read, to adopt styles that helped them blend into city crowds, to know what new technology was used for. Sometimes one suspects that those who act as if it were such a terrible thing to “convert” a Culturally Disadvantaged Person really resent the person's being even that much less disadvantaged.

In 1981 books like The People Time Forgot were still raising money for remote area missions. Today many of those efforts are being carried on by indigenous people who no longer need foreign teachers, although many still accept money from the U.S. or Canada; mission efforts are most needed in cities. However, The People Time Forgot is a primary document of history...

Fair disclosure: I first read this book with an older relative who was an active Republican. We talked about the historical fact that, although President Obama's stepfather was a rich urban Indonesian rather than a Damal or Fore or other remote area tribesman, the incidents described in this book come from the time and, in a general way, the place where the former President was growing up. We suspected that the Obama administration's rural policy, which we agreed was very bad, was influenced by his unusual perspective—growing up in a place where “rural poor" might have meant “confirmed cannibals”! I'm glad I didn't get around to posting this book online during the Obama Administration, that most of the people whose idea of “conservative political discourse” didn't have this piece of information to pick at in their childish way. The last thing anybody at this web site ever wants to do is blame people for growing up in “Third World” countries. But I will say that being in Indonesia in the 1970s seems to account for Obama's difficulty appreciating the American agrarian tradition. We salute people who've grown up in such interesting times as “the Third World countries” have had in the past century...but we say, with all due respect, those people are unqualified even to discuss rural North America.

About missionary efforts...there's still an active web site for www.cmalliance.org . When I checked, it noted that the Gibbons and Richardsons were missionaries. It discusses what their churches are still doing. Some countries still need missionary help, although the emphasis shifted rather quickly from "emergency medical treatment and basic literacy training" to "advanced medical supplies for teaching hospitals, advanced mechanical and computer skills training, and advanced English grammar and literature courses for people who want to publish writing in English." Modern missionaries are less likely to convert headhunters than they are to teach university-level classes, but the need for mission service still exists.

The People Time Forgot is a bargain at $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment. (It's available at that price because it's been widely distributed.) Feel free to add newer books (or older ones) to the $5 package.