Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

So we forgot, leaving the truth for the morrow.

The next few days became increasingly difficult for us as the PNG government moved quickly to restore its grip on the island. Two airlifts of troops were followed by police reinforcements, and the Civil Administration was strengthened with the arrival of a senior government official and extra staff, together with a judge and two political officers to enquire into the cause of the insurrection. Screening of personnel began immediately, and all whites, other than mining company employees, had their passports confiscated. In our case, we not only became for the time being prisoners-at-large in Bougainville, but were subjected to endless questioning as a result of a statement made by Shelvankar.

It was from this statement, passages from which were read out at various times when I appeared before the Court of Enquiry, that I learned the full seriousness of Jona’s position. In no sense was he Hans’s partner; he had simply borrowed money from him. As managing director of the Holland Line, a private limited company of which he and Perenna were the sole shareholders, he was responsible for the fact that it had been operating so consistently at a loss over recent years that its sole asset, the LCT, had become totally committed as security for loans the company could not repay. As a result, he had been forced to agree to the cargoes Hans had arranged through Shelvankar, and in the case of the voyage from Sydney to Anewa and the lifting off the Queensland beach of the two truckloads of automatic weapons that had made the establishment of the Bougainville-Buka Republic possible, he had known very well that he was becoming involved in something highly illegal.

All this came out in the first two days of the Enquiry, so that on his return from transporting troops and police reinforcements to Buka, Jona was arrested, and the LCT impounded. Later he was released on his undertaking not to leave Bougainville. I thought at the time stronger action might have been taken against him if it had not been for his sister’s part in persuading the Chimbu workers to parade their strength and so save the lives of the hostages. Also, something quite unexpected occurred the day after his return. This was the death of Sapuru.

He wasn’t executed. Nobody had arranged his assassination. His body was quite unmarked. And I can vouch for that as I saw it in the hospital when I visited Perry, who had been roughly handled trying to escape back to Paguna. And it wasn’t a heart attack, or cancer, or any identifiable disease; it was sorcery. Witness after witness swore to the fact that he had just lain down and died. And the doctors found nothing wrong with any of the organs. Rumour had it that it was a case of pay-back, that Tagup was a great sorcerer and could call upon spirits more powerful than Sapuru’s island ancestors. Logic, on the other hand, suggested that it was probably a case of extreme dejection following the failure of his coup, a complete moral and physical disintegration resulting in total lack of the will to live.

But if that is the explanation, something occurred immediately afterwards that is totally beyond rational explanation. However, I didn’t know about it at the time. All I knew was that Sapuru had died suddenly and mysteriously, and that Eddie Wurep, the senior government official, had ordered a post-mortem to be carried out in the presence of Joseph Nasogo and one or two other Buka islanders who had worked at the government HQ. This was to forestall any rumours that he had been eliminated for political reasons. The pathologists were from the hospital in Arawa, a black doctor and a white surgeon assisted by two black nurses. A government medical officer was also present.

By then I was told it was generally accepted, even on Buka, that responsibility for his death did not lie with the police or with any government agency, that nobody had physically assaulted him. But what he had died of, neither of the medical experts was prepared to say. I made a point of talking to them afterwards, and both of them admitted they had experienced cases like this before, cases where a man — it was men, rather than women — had just lain down and died for no apparent reason. Sorcery? They agreed it was a distinct possibility, though the word ‘sorcery’ was mentioned with reluctance as something that by their training and profession they should have outlawed completely from their minds.

The white surgeon was a New Zealander, and he took me to his home in Arawa, where he gave me a drink and to make his point clear produced an encyclopaedia. This bracketed sorcery with witchcraft, and under Witchcraft in Australia and Melanesia it said that, as in Africa, death or illness was seldom thought to be due to natural causes, adding that the chief function of sorcery was to discover the person who had caused the illness or the death. Vengeance must then be taken on the enemy. This it referred to as payback and said it could be done by pointing a stick or bone. When, saturated with the sorcerer’s curses, it was pointed at the victim, belief in its potency does the rest. And of Melanesia, in particular, it said, Belief in the possession of supernatural powers by certain men is universal and these powers are feared and sought by all.

That evening Tagup came to the motel to say goodbye to Perenna. He was flying to Port Moresby and on to Goroka in the morning. Dressed again in his white shirt and shorts, the silver Councillor shield glinting over the breast pocket, he looked very different from the near-naked fight leader who had pranced and taunted and brandished his axe at the head of the black howling ranks of his Highland people. In twenty-four hours he would be over 5,000 feet up in his grass-thatched house, with his wives and his many grandchildren, wearing nothing but a few broad blades of grass. No, he said, smiling in self-derogation, he was not really responsible for Sapuru’s death. But he had warned him that a death wish had been put upon him by a man he had tried to harm, a man who was injured and was a kiap. ‘He knew at once,’ he said, looking directly at Perenna. And he added that an old curse, one that had not been powerful enough to destroy a man like Sapuru, who was himself a sorcerer, until after he had been defeated, could well have brought about his death when his vitality was at a low ebb and the will to live so reduced that he had become vulnerable.

That I think is the nearest anybody will ever come to a solution of the mysterious death of Daniel Sapuru, the two-day President of Bougainville-Buka. Shortly after that, Perenna and I had our passports handed back to us, and we were told we were free to leave whenever we wished. By then we were into the second week of August. The LCT was still in Kieta Bay, empty except for a police guard. The three RPLs were anchored nearby and up for sale. The government had confiscated all Hans’s property, together with that of the Buka Trading Co-operative. Everything, land, trucks, ships, was being sold to provide compensation for the cost incurred by the government in reestablishing their authority in the island. Jona and Perenna had been informed that the LCT was being held as the property of Hans Holland and would be sold under the terms of the compensation decree already issued, unless they could repay all loans made to the Holland Line by Hans Holland before the end of the month. And it was made very clear that this concession, and the leniency shown to her brother, were in recognition of the part she had played in saving the lives of the hostages and bringing the insurrection to a speedy and bloodless end. Unfortunately, the concession as it applied to the LCT was of little help to us. The amount outstanding now totalled 38,000 kina , which was the equivalent of just on A$47,000. This was almost exactly what enquiries through the kind offices of the mine management indicated the ship might fetch for scrap in the open market.