Religion: The Cargo Cults

Australian patrols venturing into the central highlands of New Guinea just after World War II found that their arrival set off a tremendous religious movement. The natives killed all their pigs—principal sources of food and symbol of social position—in the belief that after three days of darkness, “Great Pigs” would appear from the sky. Imitation radio antennas made of rope and bamboo were set up to receive news of the millennium, when black skins would turn white and all the harsh demands of life would miraculously disappear.

This was no isolated phenomenon. “Cargo cults” (“cargo” is pidgin English for trade goods) have been observed repeatedly in the islands of Melanesia (including New Guinea, the Solomons and the New Hebrides). All of them share the belief that black men will acquire the white man’s magic to materialize goods from overseas without doing a lick of work. British Sociologist Peter M. Worsley writes of the cargo cults in the May issue of the Scientific American, and lists and locates 72 of them.

Central belief of the cargo cults is that the world is about to come to a cataclysmic end, after which God, ancestors, or some future hero will appear and establish a new order of things. In World War II, both sides benefited from this. G.I.s landing in the New Hebrides before taking Guadalcanal found the natives preparing airfields, roads and docks for the cargoes they thought were coming on magic ships and planes from the King of America, the potent Ruseful (Roosevelt). The Japanese were received by the Papuans of Dutch New Guinea with joy as harbingers of the new dispensation, but when it did not materialize, the Japanese had an uprising on their hands that had to be put down by force.

Secret Signs. The Melanesians took readily to European missions in the 19th century and expected Christianity to bring the “cargo.” When this seemed indefinitely postponed, they began to believe that the white men were cheating them.

“White men did not work; they merely wrote secret signs on scraps of paper, for which they were given shiploads of goods . . . Plainly the goods must be made for Melanesians somewhere, perhaps in the Land of the Dead. The Whites, who possessed the secret of the cargo, were intercepting it and keeping it from the hands of the islanders … In the Madang district of New Guinea, after some 40 years’ experience of the missions, the natives went in a body one day with a petition demanding that the cargo secret should now be revealed to them, for they had been very patient.”

Modern Politics. To capture the secret, cargo cults usually contain some ritual imitation of European customs which may hold the clue to the white man’s magic. Sometimes believers dress in European clothes and sit around tables with bottles of flowers on them, sometimes they pretend to write on pieces of paper. Many of the cults seek to bring on the new by destroying the old; they deliberately violate the ancient taboos of their people, kill their livestock, stop cultivating their fields. “Sometimes they spend days sitting gazing at the horizon for a glimpse of the long-awaited ship or airplane; sometimes they dance, pray and sing in mass congregations, becoming possessed and ‘speaking with tongues.’ “

But the cargo never comes. Then, instead of abandoning the cult, they tend to form splinter groups, organized around a “purer” faith. As long as the islanders’ social situation remains unchanged, says Worsley. the cargo cults persist, but with the development of modern political forms, they begin to wither away. “In Melanesia, ordinary political bodies, trade unions, and native councils are becoming the normal media through which the islanders express their aspirations … It now seems unlikely that any major movement along cargo-cult lines will recur.”