Afek

A skull hung in a string bag against the rear wall of a house at Telefolip, high in the Star Mountains of western Papua New Guinea, in the cold thin air where cloud sits on the ridges most of the day. The bag was one of two. Nobody outside a narrow circle of initiated men was told exactly what was in either of them, and the men who knew did not agree with each other, but the reputation of that skull was constant across a region hundreds of kilometres wide: it belonged to the Old Woman who made the world usable. She had walked through the valleys when they held nothing but spirit people, she had left the ground behind her fit for gardens, and she had ended her journey by dying in the place where her head still rested.

Her name is Afek. The Telefol call her that; the Tifalmin say Afekan, the Faiwol say Karigan, and other Min groups have other names again, which is the first thing to understand about her. There is no single authorised version of her story. Knowledge of Afek was parcelled out through grades of initiation and split between two ritual moieties, each barred on principle from what the other held, so that even an old man who had passed every stage possessed only a section. The full account exists nowhere except as the sum of what the whole region separately remembers, and the pieces contradict each other. Anyone who tells you the myth of Afek is telling you a district’s share of it.

What the shares agree on is a route. Afek came from the northeast, out beyond the headwaters of the Strickland, and crossed the Sepik into country that would become Telefol land. She was travelling carefully, laying traps behind her against pursuit, and one of the tellings makes her the child of a cassowary, which in these mountains is a bird of enormous ritual weight and not a decoration on the story. A man disguised as a dog got past every trap she set and tried to force himself on her. She broke his skull with her black palm club, then regretted it enough to bring him back briefly and send him home. At the narrows of the river she had built a bridge that gave way under him. He fell, called the two banks together, and hauled himself out.

After that she went underground. The Min hold that a system of roads runs beneath the mountains linking one ritual centre to the next, and Afek used them, surfacing at Bultem in Wopkaimin country, at Afintembli among the Atbalmin, at Bongelabip among the Ngalumin, raising a cult house at each and dropping back below ground to travel on. She started a bridge over the Ok Tedi at Moyansil. The same roads carry the dead: from the east they enter at Telefolip, from the west at a cave called Wimtem, and both streams converge at Bultem, beyond which the land of the dead lies under Mount Fubilan. That mountain was mined into a pit for its copper and gold beginning in the 1980s, which is a fact the region has had to think about.

The making of things happens almost casually inside the journey. She killed two men from enemy country and carried them home to cook, and while she was down at the river rinsing the intestines the fire got away from her and burned off the forest, which is where the grasslands around Telefolmin came from. She found a rat and his sister in the new grass and chased the sister into the water, where she turned into a frog. She turned the Om River back on itself, filled the swamp with river sand, drove out the sago growing there and planted taro in its place. Each day in the forest she opened her legs and gave birth to the animals, one kind after another, and they came when she called them. She gave birth to taro the same way. Her brother Olmoim, who had followed her out from the northeast, watched all of it from cover.

The watching is what ruins him. Afek had already made him into a proper man, cutting his overgrown penis back to size, putting him through the initiations, dividing the cult house between them so that he held the arrow moiety and its work of hunting and killing while she kept the taro moiety and its work of growing. It was a workable arrangement until she learned he had spied out both secrets, the animals and the crop, and knew what only she was meant to know. She killed him with a spell. His body would not rot on the platform, so she made maggots to do it, and he went down the underground road to Bultem, where he found a stone adze of the kind that afterwards came north through Min hands as the region’s most valuable trade good. The maggots caught in his hair on the way back became nassa shells. Death, trade and the two halves of ritual life all arrive in the same short passage.

The animals she bore are the ancestors. When there were enough of them she gave them separate languages and separate customs and sent them out to the territories they hold now, which makes the whole political map of the Mountain Ok a piece of her biography. Some Min are uncomfortable saying out loud that their forebears were marsupials. Most of the old men will say it anyway.

She built an expiry date into the arrangement. By the Telefol reckoning her epoch was to last twenty-seven rebuildings of the Telefolip house, twenty-seven being the base of a counting system mapped onto the body from the left little finger to the right, after which the earth turns over and floods. Genealogy and oral history put the count somewhere past halfway. Her powers were never limitless: she made land and food and ancestors out of her own body, and she could kill with a word, but she was mortal, she made mistakes she had to patch, and everything she left behind was physical enough to be broken. That last vulnerability turned out to be the real one. An evangelical revival in the late 1970s destroyed men’s cult houses across Telefolmin country and the senior house at Telefolip survived only because its villagers refused, after which the state gazetted it as national cultural property in 1982. Christians burned it anyway, in 2001. A photograph taken the following year shows a skull lying in the ash.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Afek?

Afek is the founding ancestress of the Mountain Ok or Min peoples of the Star Mountains in Papua New Guinea. She travelled through the region making it fit for human life, gave birth to the animals who became the ancestors of the Min, brought forth taro, and founded the men’s cult centred on the house at Telefolip.

What did Afek create?

Afek created taro, the animals of the region, the grasslands and the ritual order of Min society. She turned back the Om River and filled its swamps with sand to plant taro where sago had been, and she divided the cult house into an arrow moiety concerned with hunting and warfare and a taro moiety concerned with gardening and growth.

Why is Telefolip important?

Telefolip is the senior cult house Afek founded, and the Telefolmin held ritual seniority over the whole Min region because they were the ones who maintained it. It was held to govern the fertility of taro gardens across the area, and one of the relic bags kept inside it was said to contain Afek’s skull. The house was declared national cultural property in 1982 and was burned down by evangelical Christians in 2001.

Is there one complete version of the Afek story?

No. Knowledge of Afek was distributed by initiation grade and split between two ritual moieties that were each excluded from the other’s material, so no individual has ever held the whole account. The versions told by different Min groups contradict one another, and the complete story exists only as the sum of what the whole region separately remembers.

Who was Olmoim?

Olmoim was Afek’s brother, who followed her from the northeast and was given charge of the arrow moiety after she put him through the initiations. He spied on her and learned the secrets of the animals and the taro, and she killed him with a spell for it. He then travelled the underground road to the land of the dead and brought back the stone adze that became the region’s chief trade item.

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