Word: guinea
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Since the 19th century, when the first European colonists reached New Guinea, the island has had a small but fervent population of cargo cultists. They build mock airstrips on mountaintops and wharves along the seashore in hopes that they will bring the material prosperity enjoyed by the plane-and ship-borne white man. Last week the white man brought to the eastern half of the island* some cargo that a good many cultists might find to be of doubtful value: independence. As Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Britain's Prince Charles stood at attention with...
...more than 90 years of mostly benevolent foreign rule by, in turn, Germany, Britain and Australia. Except for a few years during World War II, when Japanese troops overran much of the island, Australia had governed Papua-the island's southeastern quadrant-since 1906, and adjoining northeastern New Guinea since World War I under League of Nations and U.N. mandates. Prodded initially by the U.N. and by its own dislike of the colonial image, the Whitlam government fairly rushed the reluctant colony into self-rule (in 1973) and now full independence...
...size (181,000 sq. mi.) and population (almost 3 million), Papua New Guinea is roughly equivalent to New Zealand, but there the resemblance ends. The population is scattered among more than 700 tribes, each of which has its own dialect. Most of the people hack out meager livings as subsistence-level farmers in remote rural areas. The country has no railroads and few paved roads, relying for transportation on bush pilots and 476 air strips...
...them, led by forceful Josephine Abaijah, 32, who is the only woman in the 100-member Papua New Guinea Parliament, trumpets independence for the southern region of Papua. A more serious threat to the new nation comes from separatists on the outlying island of Bougainville. Coal-black farmers and miners who disparagingly refer to lighter-skinned mainlanders as "redskins," the Bougainville secessionists argue that their island has stronger ethnic and geographic ties to the nearby Solomons, a British protectorate, than to New Guinea. A break with Bougainville would cripple the new country; the island is the site of Papua...
Bear Hug. So far, the separatists have waged only a war of words, and Prime Minister Somare does not seem to be worried by them. A bearded former journalist and teacher who orchestrated his Pangu (Papua and New Guinea Union) Party into leadership of the ruling coalition in the Port Moresby Parliament, Somare often journeys back to his tribal area on the north coast of New Guinea, where he likes to "suck a couple of stubbies [short beers]" with betel-chewing friends on the white beach. A powerful man, he once broke up a brawl in the legislature by bear...