Chimbu Erotic

The Chimbu, who mostly spell it Simbu today, are the people of the steep central highlands of Papua New Guinea, packed into the valleys of the Chimbu, Koronigl and upper Wahgi rivers below Mount Wilhelm, the country's highest peak. The name is an accident of first contact. When an Australian patrol walked in during 1933, as the story goes, people greeted the gifts they were handed with simbu, an exclamation of pleased surprise in Kuman, and the outsiders wrote it down as the name of the place and everyone in it. Strictly, the Chimbu are the Kuman speakers around Kundiawa and the valleys to its north. Loosely, the word also covers neighbors across the province such as the Golin, Sinasina, Dom and Chuave, whose languages sit with Kuman in the Chimbu-Wahgi family. Tok Pisin handles dealings with everyone else.

What shapes Chimbu life is pressure on land. This is some of the most densely settled country in New Guinea, and sweet potato gardens climb slopes that look too steep to stand on, fenced against pigs and laid out to hold the soil. People belong to patrilineal clans grouped into named tribes, and land rights, marriage payments, compensation claims and old enmities all run along those lines. Leadership was earned, not inherited: a big man made his name by organizing exchanges and speaking well. The grandest exchange was the bugla gende, the great pig feast a tribe staged after years of building its herds, when hundreds of animals were killed, allies were repaid, and dancers turned out in plumes and shell. Men once slept in communal men's houses while women, children and pigs lived near the gardens. Family houses have largely replaced that arrangement.

Missionaries followed the patrols within a year, Catholics settling at Mingende and Lutherans near Kundiawa, and nearly all Chimbu now count themselves Christian, mostly in those two churches. Older convictions about ancestral ghosts and about kumo, witchcraft, have not gone away, and accusations after an unexpected death remain a real and sometimes violent problem. Coffee arrived in the 1950s and is still the main source of cash, but there is not enough ground to go around. Chimbu have been leaving for decades, first to coastal plantations, then to Port Moresby, Lae and Goroka, where they are known as energetic traders, public servants and politicians. Outsiders tend to know them for the skeleton dancers, painted head to foot in black and white bones, who appear at the Goroka and Mount Hagen shows. That is one small performance tradition in a society with far more going on.