Papuan Girls Sold

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31595, 5 February 1968, Page 3

Papuan Girls Sold

(From Our Own Reporter) TIMARU, Feb. 1. Tradition died hard in New Guinea, and many parents preferred to sell their daughters for bride money than educate them, said a former Timaru woman, Mrs W. McClintock. Nevertheless, times were changing, and recently girls had been given the chance of an education, Mrs McClintock said.

Mrs McClintock, who is on leave with her husband from the Kabiufa Seventh Day Adventist College in the up lands of New Guinea, is happy to see this whittling away of prejudices. She said that the parents, uneducated themselves, did not understand the value of education for their daughters, whose place, they believed, was in the fields tending the crops.

Some parents, however, were placing education before the bride price and, of about 400 pupils at the school in 1967, 80 were girls. The school offers primary and

secondary education and runs training schools for teachers and for theology students. Mr McClintock is principal of the teachers’ training department, and his wife teaches music methods, the theory of music and songs which can be used in the schoolroom. Mr and Mrs McClintock, who previously taught at the Timaru Central (Seventh Day Adventist) School, educate their four children by correspondence lessons from Australia and by sending them to Australian schools to complete their secondary education. Mr McClintock and his wife returned to New Guinea on Sunday to teach at Kambubu College, on the island of New Britain.

Mrs McClintock said that in the highlands of New Guinea a bride cost about $2OO, but a bride could fetch as much as $lOOO in Papua. Money was the chief means of exchange, although in some parts shells, razor blades and pigs were used in the bartering, of brides. Salt was not offered as much as it had been in the past, Mid Mrs McClintock. She said she was amazed at the number of women with mutilated fingers. Near Kabiufa, when a child died it was the custom for its mother to take an axe and chop off a finger from one of her own hands at the first or second joint as an expression of sympathy.

Mrs McClintock Mid there were many older women with the joints of three or four fingers missing. A young girl who attended the college was without a finger. Her sister had died, and the mother—as custom demanded—cut off one of her fingers at the first joint Then she had removed one of the surviving daughter’s fingers so that the disease which resulted in the death of the other girl could be avoided.