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Philip Cass
After the Second World War missions in Papua New Guinea faced new imperatives driven by the reaction of the Australian administration to UN directives. As a result the administration decided to use English as the sole language of education. These changes led to the closure of Tok Ples schools and the end of Tok Ples as the primary language of education for indigenous people. Most significantly, however, Tok Pisin came into its own as a lingua franca. These factors combined to shift the role of language as an identifier from a purely village or regional level (Tok Ples) to a national one (Tok Pisin) Subsequent educational policies have reversed this situation. This article argues that for a country with so many languages the temporary sacrifice of a few indigenous languages was justified. Implicit in the paper is the argument that Tok Pisin should be treated as a language indigenous to PNG and that attempts to suppress it or dismiss it by metropolitan administrations and missions failed completely because it was a language that grew out of the people themselves.
As the result of pressure brought about by the United Nations in the 1950s and 1960s, the Australian administration in the then Territory of Papua and New Guinea decided to adopt English as the sole language for education in territory schools. This recommendation was intended to hurry the development of an educated native elite which would serve as the core leadership of an independent PNG. The changes in education policy which were adopted by the administration should be seen in the context of earlier Australian decisions about its role in the territory. The then Australian Minister for Territories, Sir Paul Hasluck, had already outlined the objectives of the Territory administration as being, among others, to:
‘…achieve mass literacy, that is to say, to attempt to teach all native children to read and write in a common language.. [and]…when, in generations to come, they may be required to manage their own affairs to a greater degree, they may feel a common bond among themselves as people.’
The significance of Hasluck’s statement is that the idea of national identity, of creating a national consciousness among 1000 tribes, was already linked, however unconsciously, with literacy and education by the 1950s. Until then, the identity fostered by such education as there had been through the mission schools, had been with a particular mission or region. The administration’s hope of establishing English as the national language failed, for while it produced the elite desired by the UN, it has remained a language of the elite. What nobody seems to have anticipated is that it would be Tok Pisin, the much reviled language of the plantation worker and haus boi, which would become the lingua franca.
The decision to use English as the sole language of instruction in schools was, in terms of the UN demands, perfectly rational. With up to 1000 local languages, there was at this stage no effective lingua franca that could serve in both the Australian territories. Tok Pisin prevailed in some parts of New Guinea, but was regarded with suspicion elsewhere. Motu was widespread in Papua and might eventually have provided a national lingua franca. English was widely spoken only in Milne Bay.
Because of Australian neglect of Papua and New Guinea before the Second World War, in most places not only education, but health services, shipping and in some cases trade for natives was solely in the hands of the missions.
The first missions to reach Papua and New Guinea in the 19th century were, naturally, concerned with local language issues and of necessity used Tok Ples languages for evangelisation and initial communication. The local language thus used became identified with membership of a particular mission, or lotu, and can be regarded as having been used as a Tok Lotu. In some areas there was one dominant language, while some found themselves in an area with one dominant or at least widely recognised language, such as Kuanua on the Gazelle peninsula or Dobuan in Milne Bay. In rare cases a mission might choose a range of local languages and then export them to other language areas, as the Lutherans did on the north coast with Kate, Gaged and Jabem. The Divine Word missionaries in the Sepik, however, found that because of the linguistic diversity of the area they could find no common language and ultimately settled on a policy of using Tok Ples for evangelisation and contact, but used German in the mission schools. After the First World War they were forced to abandon German and decided to use Tok Pisin, thus giving it the status of a lotu language.
The Australian administration faced a completely different task after the Second World War. If they were to have any chance of uniting the territory it had to be through language. The only way to implement this policy was to use English as the sole language of education and this meant teaching in any other language had to be actively discouraged. The administration placed pressure on the mission Tok Ples schools through a policy of subsidies, new teaching standards and inspection regimes. The administration refused to subsidise mission schools which did not have properly qualified staff and since these were generally the village schools where Tok Ples was used, it meant the end of these schools and the end of the missions’ financial independence from the government.
There was debate then, as now, about whether the administration’s policy made sense in terms of education and whether children learn best in their own language for the first few years and then switch to English or whether they should they use English all the way through. What is certain is that for the purpose of establishing a universal language of instruction and rapidly creating the national elite demanded by the UN, that the administration believed that Tok Ples had to be temporarily sacrificed.
By insisting on the use of English as the only language of instruction, the administration effectively eliminated Tok Ples as a language by which people could identify themselves through the lotu. Being able to speak English meant being able to leave the village, work for the Australians, to travel and generally to leave the influence of the mission, thus eliminating at a stroke the role of the mission as the chief identifier outside the clan and family system.
To travel meant coming into contact with people who spoke other languages and thus the need to speak Tok Pisin fluently. I would argue that Tok Pisin became for many people a new identifier language, a process expressed most succinctly in the term wanpisin which can now be found as a replacement for wantok. If before a person identified themselves through their Tok Ples or Tok Lotu, then we now find people identifying themselves through the dialect of Tok Pisin they speak. The Australian administration’s one language was later compromised by the introduction of Tok Pisin and the re-introduction of Tok Ples as languages of instruction, but in its initial implementation, the one language policy can be seen to have unwittingly opened the way for the development of Tok Pisin as a lingua franca.
A lingua franca for work
The missions fought the changes vigorously, not just from a pedagogical standpoint, but because they saw the move as damaging the relationships that were framed by the school, the local church and the community . However, all the missions had to contend with the fact that the population movements caused by labour recruiting meant that people had to learn Tok Pisin to be able to work and converse on plantations in other districts. When they came home they brought Tok Pisin with them, just as the Tolais returning from sandalwood ships and the Samoan plantations had done in the 1880s. Tok Pisin provided a ready made lingua franca, but many missions remained opposed to it on the grounds that it was not a real language or capable of expressing complex ideas.
The different missions approached the question of Tok Pisin in different ways. Even when a mission ostensibly devoted its energies to working in Tok Ples and maintaining them as lotu languages it still used Tok Pisin for general communication. Some missions which had been instrumental in transliterating local languages began preaching in Tok Pisin as a matter of necessity as early as the 1940s. The movement of plantation workers meant that there were Methodists and other Protestants in Rabaul, for instance, who could not be ministered to in their own Tok Ples. They were catered for with Tok Pisin services and a book of Tok Pisin hymns was produced. Tok Pisin services were held for indigenous workers from other districts, but until these were established workers from New Ireland and Nakani attended Kuanua services at Malakuna village.
In the 1950s Tok Pisin services continued to be held for Rabaul workers. Lutheran and LMS missionaries in Rabaul held services in many languages for workers from around the country, such as Toaripi for LMS people. The Methodists held Dobuan services for workers from Milne Bay. Methodists , LMS, and Lutherans worked closely together and the Methodists often preached in LMS and Lutheran services through interpreters or in Tok Pisin. Close co-operation with other Protestant missions had wider effects. By the 1960s the Methodist bookshop/printery in Rabaul was buying Tok Pisin material from other and selling it alongside its own Kuanua literature. As the Methodists moved towards the creation of the Uniting Church in 1965-67, the mission used explanatory literature in both Kuanua and Tok Pisin. By the 1970s Tok Pisin was being used as language of debate in Synod and from 1972 minutes were recorded in Tok Pisin, not English.
The Lutheran mission in PNG placed just as much emphasis on the use of lotu languages as the Methodists, but also used Tok Pisin to preach when necessary. The official acceptance of the language did not occur until 1956 and even then care was taken not to endanger the existing policy of using the three Tok Lotu, Jabem, Graged and Kate, for purposes of evangelisation. Once the Lutherans (reorganised as the Evangelical Lutheran Church of New Guinea in 1956) had accepted that Tok Pisin was acceptable for official purposes, it was used for other purposes as well. The three church newspapers became bilingual and the Lotu Book appeared alongside Tok Ples publications.
The significance of this should not be underestimated. The Lutheran and Methodist missions had been the first people to produce newspapers in New guinea, and certainly the first to produce written material for the indigenous population. By making Tok Pisin material available at a time when the number of Tok Pisin speakers was growing, the churches were, wittingly or not, tapping into a new market.
ELCONG’s response to the changes in the administration’s language policy was reluctantly pragmatic. While fighting to retain vernacular education through its village Bible schools, it established a Tok Pisin school system. The loss of the vernacular school system meant that increasing numbers of students became illiterate in their own language (or at least their lotu language) and so the church was forced by circumstance to communicate with them in Tok Pisin. Lutheran records show the majority of Tok Pisin materials being created from the mid 1960s, such as a pastors’ refresher course in 1964. However, there are records of a few earlier documents such as a Tok Pisin/Kate pamphlet on the relationship of the church to the secular world (Zurewec, 1958). Lists of Tok Pisin documents from this period include Sampela Litugi bilong Lotu (Amman, 1967). However, the records still show most work being produced in this period as being in Kate, Jabem and Graged. The earliest school materials in Tok Pisin date from 1967, but most are from 1969. Most ELCONG publications are now printed in Tok Pisin. The publication of the Nupela Testamen in 1969 was what gave Tok Pisin respectability. Produced in collaboration with the Catholic SVD mission, it was also a manifestation of the growing ecumenical spirit in PNG.
Having been so intimately involved with the media since their earliest days it was only natural that the mission churches should recognise their obligations to the contemporary media. The most tangible expression of this is Word Publishing, a company whose major shareholders include the Anglican, Catholic, Uniting and Lutheran churches. Word publishes, among other newspapers, Wantok, the country’s only Tok Pisin newspaper.
Origins of the Wantok newspaper
To trace the origins of Wantok, we have to go back to the earliest days of the Catholic Divine Word (SVD) mission. As we have already seen, the SVDs were forced by circumstances of history and geography to accept Tok Pisin as a lingua franca. It became the official mission language in north east New Guinea from 1931. Before the Second World War broke out some catechital literature had been printed. A Tok Pisin newspaper, Frend Bilong Mi was also published intermittently by the mission, but it was no longer lived than any of the later commercial or administration Tok Pisin publications.
As the SVDs began to expand into the Highlands in the 1930s, it became clear that the policy of adopting Tok Pisin was beginning to pay off. Bishop Leo Arkfeld asserted that resistance in the Highlands to imported Tok Ples had been strong and he stressed the flexibility of Tok Pisin as a language that could be carried from one language group to another. However, not all the SVD missionaries were enamoured of Tok Pisin. Fr Ernst Montag complained in his memoirs that:
‘Pidgin was a synthetic language, one that was composed purposely to suit the primitiveness of the aborigines. The vocabulary is meagre. Many words have several meanings. Just this gives rise to the possibility of misunderstandings and inaccuracies.’
The possibility of misunderstandings and inaccuracies existed because there was no standard orthography. Although Frs Kirschbaum and Meisner had produced Tok Pisin dictionaries, the fact that different pronunciations and loan words obtained in different districts, made it difficult to pin the language down precisely. The first real attempt to produce an academically acceptable dictionary was Fr Frank Mihalic’s Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin in 1971. And yet even Mihalic initially saw Tok Pisin as a transitional stage towards the widespread use of and literacy in standard English.
‘I am looking forward to the day when Neo-Melanesian and this book will be buried and forgotten, when standard English and the Oxford dictionary will completely replace both.’
By the second edition he admitted that Tok Pisin had not gone away:
‘Despite his admiration for and use of English, the New Guinean does not identify with it. English to him is and will remain a status symbol, a prestige language... It will always be his first foreign language of choice. But it does remain a foreign language. It is never really his, whereas he feels that Pidgin is.’
In the second edition spellings were revised to conform with usage in the Nupela Testamen. It was decided to standardise the Tok Pisin orthography using the north coast dialect as a ‘high Pidgin’ because Madang Pidgin was held to be the least affected by Anglicisation.
Mihalic’s greatest achievement was to bring to fruition an idea that had begun with Bishop Adolph Noser and been supported by Bishop Arkfeld, that of beginning a Tok Pisin publication for PNG. Wantok fulfilled a long standing commitment by the mainstream churches to the media in PNG.
Quite apart from Mihalic’s sheer obstinacy Wantok’s success was probably due as much to the fact that it emerged at a time when a critical mass of Tok Pisin had developed. Some correlation could be drawn between the growing number of students at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s and the growth of the paper. Official figures showed more than a quarter of a million students enrolled in primary, secondary, technical and tertiary education in 1971. Despite this, English did not take hold as a lingua franca. This could be due to the fact that Tok Pisin proved adequate for the needs of the bulk of the population who felt no need to become fluent in English and who were in any case regularly and exposed through schools and various formal and other media to written Tok Pisin. School leavers literate in Tok Pisin appear to have been regarded as a primary market for Wantok. In the paper’s 100th edition Mihalic wrote:
‘Planti student I pinisim praimeri skul tasol, na bikpela lain gen I save lusim haiskul long Fom 2. Tru, ol I no inap ritim gut ol buk na niuspepap long tok Inglis. Wantok I wok long helpim ol dispela lain na ol narapela bikpela manmeri tu long ritim na raitim tok pisin. Nogot edukesen bilong ol I pundaun nating. Wantok I wok long givim ol kain kain nius I laik kamap insait long PNG - bilong gavman, bisnis, na ol misin bai ol pipel I save gut long kantri bilong ol.’.
This is not the place to give a complete history of Wantok - Fr Mihalic will hopefully do that himself, one day - but the Tok Pisin newspaper that began life at the Wirui mission in 1970 serves to illustrate two important points. Firstly it shows the correctness of adopting Tok Pisin as a lotu language and it shows that Tok Pisin has developed as a lingua franca in a way that English never could. It also showed that the question of lotu languages was utterly redundant. The extent to which Tok Pisin had become a lingua franca and the way in which had begun to play a role as a unifying agent was exemplified when journalist Kumalau Tawali quoted Professor Lynch at UPNG as saying that because the government and media did not use Tok Pisin they were failing to keep people informed and only informed people truly participate in development. ‘The result is inevitable: We make little progress as a nation. It’s as important as that.’
Today Tok Pisin is the national lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. It is still changing: Although creolised in Port Moresby, it is still in a state of flux elsewhere, but it would be hard to argue with the sentiment that ‘without it, there would be no unity in this land.’ This is not to say that Tok Ples itself is redundant. The Australian administration eventually allowed some government controlled Tok Ples village schools and after independence the PNG government adopted a policy of allowing Tok Ples to be used as the initial language of education. If the role of Tok Ples in uniting a lotu had passed, they remain powerful signifiers of group identity, as witnessed by the survival of Kuanua on the Gazelle Peninsula. The loss of Tok Ples as lotu languages should not be mourned.
The real issue is whether or not the primary role of language in a developing country is to divide or unify it. Languages can be reclaimed, national unity cannot.
This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Society of Oceanists’ conference, Leiden University, the Netherlands, in June 1999. As with any paper about the media, languages or the Pacific, it is necessarily a work in progress.
Glossary
- ∑ Tok Pisin - The lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. Closely allied with Bislama (Vanuatu) and Solomon Islands Pidgin.
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- ∑ Tok Ples - Literally ‘the talk of the place.’ With its 1000 or so languages, language populations can range from 2000 to 200,000, so a Tok Ples might be confined to one village or valley. Conversely, it used as a trading language it might be understood more widely.
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- ∑ Tok Lotu - I have used this term to mean a local language given a special status by a mission as the language of evangelisation and primary communication within the mission community. The Tok Lotu became the language by which adherents of a mission were identified, particularly if it was not their own Tok Ples.
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- ∑ Lotu - A Polynesian word used to mean church, mission or Gospel as required.
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- Bibliography
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Philip Cass is Principal Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Teesside, United Kingdom. Born in PNG, he has worked as a journalist and academic in Australia and the Pacific. He taught journalism at the University of the South Pacific before taking up his present position. He was awarded an MA by Central Queensland University in 1997 for his thesis ‘The Apostolate of the Press: Missionary language policy, translation and publication in German New Guinea.’
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