Black Powder, White Magic: European Armaments and Sorcery in Early Mekeo and Roro Encounters

Abstract

Actions speak louder than words", they say -especially if you are holding a gun.As a Euro-American I take this to mean there is something self-evidently coercive about the use and effects of firearms beyond their ability to wound and kill.And, as a social scientist, I recognise that the same is usually held to be true with regard to the deployment of "physical force" generally.Where non-Western people's responses to tokens of Western culture such as money, Christian missionisation, literacy, Hershey bars, Adidas tennis shoes, rock music and the internet seem necessarily variable and unpredictable, owing at least partly to the choices afforded by people's pre-existing cultural schema, physical force by definition allows little scope for subjects' volition.In this chapter, I question the role that physical force, primarily in the form of guns and firearms, played in Pacific Islanders' experiences of Europeans in the earliest phases of the colonial establishment of British New Guinea at the end of the nineteenth century.While there might be some interest in examining these claims in relation to the long history of Western political philosophising, I am interested here in the initial meanings that physical force assumed in the particular form of firearms and explosives and specifically for the Mekeo and Roro peoples -Austronesian speakers living on the coast and sub-coast at the western margin of the Central Province of Papua New Guinea, some 150 kilometres to the northwest of Port Moresby.I suspect these meanings were instrumental in setting many of the parameters distinctive to subsequent interactions with subsequent colonial agents.Did guns and explosives have the same meanings for Mekeo and Roro, to whom they were directed, as for the Europeans who deployed them?If not, what were those meanings?For I do not accept that they were at all self-evident, either to Mekeo and Roro or to the Europeans.And, if Mekeo and Roro understandings of guns and armaments differed from the colonists' presuppositions about the compulsive character of physical force, what might this imply about villagers' responses to the colonial presence and their own agency?Eventually, how might the subsequent history of Mekeo/Roro-European encounters be re-read?Also, given the salience of guns

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