WITH THE HEAD-HUNTERS

Waikato Times, Volume 109, Issue 18283, 21 March 1931, Page 3

WITH THE HEAD-HUNTERS

“REALLY DECENT FELLOWS.” RELIGION VERY COMPLICATED. “And how did you get on with the head-hunters 7" “Oh, they’re really awfully decent fellows," said Mr T. Inglls Moore, B.A, (Sydney), B.A. (Oxford), exProfessor of English at Manila University, novelist, and ex-musio critic of the Manila “Bulletin.” After seven years of roving round the world, pickup scholarships, lecturing and writing he returned to Sydney last week. He spent two and a half years in the Philippines, where he was in close touch with the head-hunters. The last head was taken about ten years ago, but there are always possibilities. "While I was there a Flllipino killed three others,” he said. “He was squaring an old debt. The grandfather of the three deceased had failed to pay for a pig 40 years before, so the head-hunter collected from his descendants. They have long memories, and so family feuds thrive; but they have no regard for truth. Their knowledge of family history goes back 14 generations. “This length of memory was brought home to me when I taught in the University. There were -6000 students, and I gave them English literature Elizabethan literature, writers like Cervantes, Moliero, Dante —stuff that they hfid not had before. They spoke good English, but thought In Filipino. They have their women students there—very charming, and much more Intelligent than the men. Self Conscious. “Their religion is very complicated. They have more gods than the ancient Greeks. At one of their religious festivals, the head priest made me sit next to him and drink rice wine with him, cup for cup. “The natives have an inferiority complex. For 300 years they were kicked by the Spanish; then America came along and gave them self-gov-ernment overnight. They are like a boy wearing his first pair of trousers —very self-conscious, very corrupt in their politics, very grateful for sympathetic treatment by whites who have no race prejudices. I had none, and I suspect that is why I gol on so well with the head-hunters."