Mander Erotic

The Mander are one of the smallest peoples in Indonesian Papua. Two things set them apart: a language of their own, and a piece of lowland country in the hinterland of Sarmi Regency, inland from New Guinea's north coast. Few people outside the regency know the name. Inside it, the Mander are one of a group of very small communities around the Tor River, and each of those communities keeps its own language.

Their language is also called Mander. It belongs to the Tor branch of the Tor-Kwerba family. Tor-Kwerba is one of the many Papuan language families of New Guinea, which scholars have not shown to be related to each other. Mander's closest relatives are spoken nearby, by neighbors such as the Berik, Kwesten, Bonerif and Itik. Go toward the coast and things change. The villages around Sarmi speak Austronesian languages, which are not related to Mander at all, so the Mander live near the line between two separate language families. Indonesian is used on top of both, along with the Papuan Malay you hear in markets, schools, offices and churches. Mander has very few speakers and counts as endangered. Like its Tor neighbors, it is under steady pressure from the national language.

Religious life is Christian, mostly Protestant, the result of missionary work across northern Papua over the twentieth century. The church is a fixture of village life, but it exists alongside older duties to clan and to customary land. In Papua that land is held by the group, not by individuals, and it is still central to how families understand where they belong. As elsewhere in these lowlands, food starts with the sago palm, along with gardens, river fish and game from the forest.

The big turning points came from outside. In 1944 American forces landed on the coast near Sarmi and fought the Japanese there and on the offshore Wakde islands. Dutch rule over western New Guinea ended in 1962, and after a short United Nations administration the territory passed to Indonesia. In 2002 Sarmi was split off from Jayapura Regency to become a regency of its own, which put the Tor communities under a government based in Sarmi town. For a people this small, the real question now is whether they carry on: whether children keep speaking Mander at home, and whether the land stays in Mander hands.