In the United States a driver involved in a serious accident is expected to remain at the scene until police arrive: if he leaves and doesn’t report to the police, he is viewed as fleeing, and that itself is considered a crime. In Papua New Guinea, though, as in some other countries, the law permits, and police and common sense urge, the driver not to stay at the scene but to drive straight to the nearest police station. That’s because angry bystanders are likely to drag the offending driver from his car and beat him to death on the spot, even if the accident was the pedestrian’s fault. Adding to the risk to Malo and his passengers, Malo and Billy belonged to different ethnic groups, which in Papua New Guinea is often a recipe for tension. Malo was a local resident from a nearby village, but Billy belonged to a group of lowlanders originating many miles away. Many lowlanders who had migrated to the area for work lived near the accident’s site. If Malo had stopped and gotten out to help the boy, he might well have been killed by lowlander bystanders, and possibly his passengers would have been dragged out and killed as well. But Malo had the presence of mind to drive to the local police station and surrender himself. The police locked up the passengers temporarily at the station for their own safety, and escorted Malo for his own safety back to his village, where he remained for the next several months.
The ensuing events illustrate how New Guineans, like many other traditional peoples living largely outside the effective control of systems of justice established by state governments, nevertheless achieve justice and peacefully resolve disputes by traditional mechanisms of their own. Such mechanisms of dispute resolution probably operated throughout human prehistory, until the rise of states with their codified laws, courts, judges, and police beginning 5,400 years ago. The case of Billy and Malo contrasts with a case that I shall relate in the next chapter, a case also resolved by traditional means, but ones opposite to those used in the case of Billy and Malo: by revenge killings and war. Depending on the circumstances and the parties involved, disputes in traditional societies may be resolved either peacefully, or else by war if the peaceful process breaks down or isn’t attempted.
The peaceful process involves what is termed “compensation.” (As we shall see, that usual English translation of a New Guinea term is misleading; it would be impossible to compensate for the death of a child, and that isn’t the goal. The term in the New Guinea lingua franca of Tok Pisin is sori money, meaning “sorry money,” and that translation is more appropriate, because it correctly describes the money as being paid out of shared sorrow or apology for what has happened.) The case of traditional compensation following Billy’s death was related to me by a man named Gideon, at that time the local office manager of the business employing Malo as driver, and a participant in the ensuing process. It turns out that traditional New Guinea’s mechanisms of justice have goals fundamentally different from those of state justice systems. While I agree that state justice offers big advantages and is absolutely essential for resolving many disputes between citizens of states, especially disputes between strangers, I now feel that traditional justice mechanisms may have much to teach us when the disputants are not strangers but will remain locked in on-going relationships after the dispute’s settlement: e.g., neighbors, people connected by a business relationship, divorcing parents of children, and siblings disputing an inheritance.
A ceremony
Because of the risk that Billy’s clansmen might seek to retaliate against Malo and Gideon and other employees of their company, Gideon told the staff not to come to work on the day after the accident. Gideon himself remained alone in his office, within a gated patrolled compound, only a hundred yards from the house where Gideon and his family lived. He instructed the security guards to remain alert, not to let strangers in, and especially to be on the look-out for any lowlanders and to keep them out. Nevertheless, in the course of the morning Gideon glanced up from his desk and to his horror saw three large men, recognizable as lowlanders from their appearance, standing outside the back window of his office.
Gideon’s first thought was: either I smile at them, or I run. But then he reflected that his wife and his young children were nearby, and that running might save only his own life. He managed a smile, and the three men managed to smile back. Gideon went to the back window of the office and opened it, recognizing that that could immediately prove fatal but that he had no choice because the alternative was worse. One of the three men, who turned out to be Peti, father of the dead boy, asked Gideon, “Can I come into your office and talk with you?” (This and most of the other conversations that I shall relate took place not in the English language but in Tok Pisin. Peti’s actual words to Gideon were “Inap mi kam insait long opis bilong yu na yumi tok-tok?”)
Gideon nodded, went to the front of his office, opened the door, and invited Peti to come in alone and sit down. For a man whose son had just been killed, and who was now confronting the killer’s employer, Peti’s behavior was impressive: clearly still in a state of shock, he was nevertheless calm, respectful, and direct. Peti sat quietly for some time, and finally said to Gideon, “We understand that this was an accident, and that you didn’t do it intentionally. We don’t want to make any problems. We just want your help with the funeral. We ask of you a little money and food, in order to feed our relatives at the ceremony.” Gideon responded by offering his sympathies on behalf of his company and its staff, and by making some vague commitment. Immediately that afternoon, he went to the local supermarket to start buying the standard food items of rice, tinned meat, sugar, and coffee. While in the store, he happened to encounter Peti again, and once again there was no trouble.
Already on that second day, the day after the accident, Gideon talked to the senior member of his staff, an older New Guinean named Yaghean, who was a native of a different district but was experienced in New Guinea compensation negotiations. Yaghean offered to handle the negotiations. On the following day (day 3) Gideon convened a staff meeting of his company to discuss how to proceed. Everybody’s main fear was that the extended family of the dead boy (his more distant relatives and clanspeople) might prove violent, even though the father had given assurance that the immediate family would cause no trouble. Encouraged by Peti’s calm behavior during their two encounters, Gideon’s first inclination was to go straight to the lowlander settlement himself, to seek out Billy’s family, to “say sorry” (formally apologize), and to attempt to defuse the threat from the extended family. But Yaghean insisted that Gideon should not do this: “If you yourself, Gideon, go there too soon, I’m concerned that the extended family and the whole lowlander community may still have hot tempers. We should instead go through the proper compensation process. We’ll send an emissary, and that will be me. I’ll talk to the councilor for the ward that includes the lowlander settlement, and he in turn will talk to the lowlander community. Both he and I know how the compensation process should proceed. Only after the process has been completed can you and your staff have a say-sorry [tok-sori in Tok Pisin] ceremony with the family.”
Yaghean went to speak to the councilor, who arranged for the next day (day 4) a meeting involving Yaghean, the councilor, Billy’s family, and the extended clan. Gideon has little knowledge of what went on at that meeting, other than Yaghean’s report that they talked at length about how to handle the issue, that the family itself had no intention to resort to violence, but that some men in the settlement felt strongly for Billy and were still stirred up. Yaghean told Gideon that he should buy more food for the compensation ceremony and funeral, and that agreement had been reached on a compensation payment of 1,000 kina (equivalent to about $300) from Gideon’s company to the family. (The kina is the national currency of Papua New Guinea.)