Motu Erotic

The Motu are a coastal people whose villages line the shore around Port Moresby, and they were there long before it became a capital. Together with the Koitabu, their inland neighbors and frequent in-laws, they are the customary owners of the land the city stands on, and that fact still drives local politics and land disputes. Motu settlements run along the dry southern shore of Central Province, from Boera and Porebada in the west through Hanuabada and Tatana to Vabukori and Pari in the east. Hanuabada, whose name means big village, still stands partly on stilts over the water, a short drive from the downtown office towers.

Motu is an Austronesian language of the Oceanic branch. That sets it apart from the Papuan languages spoken by the Koitabu and many other inland groups. The language split once matched a working partnership: Motu men fished and Motu women made pottery, while the Koitabu gardened and hunted, and the two peoples intermarried and came to share villages. The colonial police carried a simplified form of Motu across Papua, and that form, long called Police Motu, became Hiri Motu. It is still one of Papua New Guinea's official languages, even as Tok Pisin crowds it out in the capital.

The institution that defined the Motu was the hiri. The Port Moresby coast lies in a rain shadow with a long dry season, which makes it poor country for growing enough food. So Motu men loaded clay pots onto lakatoi, big sailing craft made of several dugout hulls lashed together under crab-claw sails, and sailed west to the Gulf of Papua. There they traded the pots for sago and for logs to carve new hulls, then came home months later when the winds turned. Tradition says Edai Siabo of Boera made the first voyage. Every September the Hiri Moale Festival puts lakatoi back on the water in Port Moresby.

Outside contact came early and at close range. The London Missionary Society settled among the Motu in 1874 and its missionaries translated scripture into Motu. Most Motu today belong to the United Church, and church life sets much of the village calendar. When Britain declared its protectorate over southeastern New Guinea in 1884, it did so at Port Moresby, which put the Motu on the doorstep of every government since. Some older practices are coming back into view. Women's tattooing, once applied in stages from girlhood to marriage, is being revived. And toea, the Motu word for a prized shell armband, is now the name of the smallest unit of the national currency.