Kilibob

Also Known As: also Kulbob on Karkar Island, and Kilibop; the elder brother he quarrels with is Manup or Manub. On Yomba Island, before it sank, Bilbil tellers say the pair went by the older names Anut and Yewe. In the Schouten Islands the brothers change their names as they travel, and around Madang the two names are sometimes swapped outright
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Papua New Guinean Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A younger brother born irregularly in the bush, forewarned by animals and endowed with the making-power his elder brother lacks, who cuts islands off the mainland with an arrow and builds a vessel out of the tree he was hiding in.
Role in Mythos: He is the culture maker of the Madang coast, the source of canoes, crafts, trade routes and the uneven distribution of wealth between peoples.
Relation to Humans: He is held to have shaped the shoreline that villages still live on and to have handed out, or withheld, the goods and skills that separate one people from another. Along that coast he is also expected back, and every ship that has appeared on the horizon since 1871 has been measured against that expectation and found wanting.

The arrow missed the bird and kept going, over the trees and down into a garden where a woman was weeding in the heat. She picked it up out of the crop rows. What held her was not the shaft or the bound point but the design running along it, and when the young hunter came down looking for his arrow she asked him to put that same design on her. He cut it into her thighs. He did it reluctantly, and in some tellings the two of them went further than carving. Either way her husband found the marks, and the whole rest of the myth comes out of that afternoon.

The husband was Manup, the elder brother. The hunter was Kilibob, and before the story is finished he will have used that same bow to shoot the islands loose from the coast of New Guinea.

Where the pair came from depends on who is asked. Around Madang the creator is Anut, and among the Seg people he is Dodo, and it was he who brought the two of them into being. Karkar Island is the birthplace most communities accept, though the Seg and the Milguk inland of Yabob each claim it for their own ground. John Z’graggen, collecting versions across the Madang District through the 1960s and 1970s, found the frame underneath steadier than the names sitting on top of it. The elder brother is born in the village in the ordinary way and grows up married. The younger is born out in the bush and born wrongly, by a second wife or by no natural process at all, and that irregularity is the entire difference between them. It is why the animals talk to him. It is why he knows what his brother means to do before his brother does it.

Manup tried three times to kill him. The first attempt was at the main post of the house, in the pit dug to seat it, where a man standing at the bottom can be finished by the weight coming down. The second was open war. The third was the tree. Kilibob had gone up into it and would not come out, so they took axes to the trunk, and as the wood began to give he swung the whole tree around, this way and that way and every direction at once, before it went over. Branches, leaves, roots and the man inside them went into the water together and the surface closed. Nothing was left floating.

What surfaces afterwards is not a fugitive. Down there he took his own tree apart and built a canoe out of it, or a ship, depending on which stretch of coast the story belongs to. Then he walked into his brother’s sleep and told him where to stand. Manup came down to the shore and found the younger brother he had tried three times to bury, riding a hull complete with outrigger and mast, and put out his hand to shake. He did not get it shaken. In some versions Kilibob simply sentences him: to gardening, to raising pigs, to sickness, to work that never finishes. In others he is more generous and it comes out worse, because he offers a choice. Bow and arrow, or shotgun. Canoe, or dinghy. Taro and yam, or rice and tinned meat. Manup took the first of each pair, and the tellers put it down to stupidity, and the entire modern arrangement of the world follows from that morning on the beach.

Then Kilibob left. He had been keeping livestock and pale-skinned people shut inside lengths of bamboo, and somewhere on the voyage he split them open and let them out. He cut a passage through to open sea. As he travelled he knocked islands off the mainland, some tellers say with his arrow, some with the steering paddle. Then the canoe went over. It is still there. Karkar Island is the capsized hull, and Bagbag lying beside it is the outrigger.

Maia Awak of Bilbil, interviewed in 1976, told the same voyage as pure marksmanship. Kilibob shot the islands into place. He made Yabob One and Yabob Two, and then he came along to Bilbil, and the arrow broke. He went on to Siassi and shot Siassi and Arop, then Rabaul, then Australia, where his spears ran out. “He only made the islands,” Maia said, and stopped. When they were all in place there was nobody living on any of them yet.

The names do not hold still. Travelling east through the Schouten Islands the brothers change names as they go. Around Madang the two are simply exchanged, with no reason given, except for the one reason Z’graggen was offered: that the people had swapped them deliberately in order to mislead Europeans. Several of the real names were entrusted to him in friendship and whispered somewhere safe, because for the old men a name was not a label but the loaded part of the thing. Others refused to recite the myth at all on the grounds that they could no longer remember the names, and he watched men die with them still unsaid. Some communities on that coast, asked about the story, answer plainly that it is not theirs.

Which brother fathered which people is the part the record will not settle. Z’graggen’s synopsis makes the elder the founder of New Guinea culture and the younger the founder of European culture. The reading current around Madang, set down by Nancy Sullivan, runs the other way, with Manup the ancestor of all Europeans and Kilibob the ancestor of all Papua New Guineans, the first withholding from the second. Both cannot be original. It may not matter much, since swapping them is a documented habit of the myth rather than an error in it.

Nobody has described his face.

His power is manufacture, and it is oddly literal. He does not command the sea or the weather; he makes objects and then the objects change the world. A tree becomes a hull. An arrow becomes a coastline. A length of bamboo turns out to have been holding pigs and people. Even the knowledge is handed over as a thing: house plans, canoe plans, food plants, cooking. He works by dream and by advance warning, told what is coming by animals, and the elder brother, born the ordinary way and helped only by ordinary human beings, can never catch up to that.

The limits sit in the same place. For the whole first half of his own story he is prey, driven from a post-hole to a battlefield to the top of a tree, saved less by strength than by knowing in time. He cannot stay anywhere. Every version moves him further along the coast and then out of it, to Rabaul, to Australia, to the land of the white man, always with the good things loaded aboard. And he is only ever half present. Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, coming ashore at Bongu in 1871 and again in 1876, was taken for a spirit and given a spirit’s name, and he in turn called Madang the land of Anut. The Germans who arrived in 1884 were held up against the same expectation and failed it, and by 1904 the Yam people around Madang were planning to kill them all. Writing in 1983, Z’graggen still found informants who expected Kulbob back, and what they expected him to bring was prosperity of the European kind.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kilibob?

Kilibob is a culture-making deity of northeastern Papua New Guinea, known especially around Madang and on Karkar Island, where he is also called Kulbob. He is the younger of two brothers, the elder being Manup, and he is credited with cutting the region’s islands loose from the mainland and with the origin of canoes, crafts and trade. Different communities disagree about which brother founded which people.

What is the story of Kilibob and Manup?

Kilibob’s arrow lands near his elder brother’s wife, she asks him to carve its design onto her thighs, and Manup takes the marks as proof of adultery. Manup tries three times to kill him, finally by felling the tree he is hiding in, and Kilibob plunges into the water with it. He resurfaces having built a canoe or ship from that tree, refuses his brother’s handshake, and sails away making islands.

Why is Karkar Island connected to Kilibob?

Karkar Island is widely accepted as the brothers’ birthplace, and in several versions it is also the wreck of Kilibob’s canoe: the island is the overturned hull and neighbouring Bagbag Island is the outrigger. On Karkar itself the pair are usually called Kulbob and Manub.

What does Kilibob have to do with cargo cults?

In many tellings Kilibob offers his brother a choice between local and European goods, Manup chooses the local ones, and that choice explains why manufactured wealth ended up with Europeans. Because Kilibob is also expected to return, arriving Europeans were repeatedly measured against that prophecy, from Miklouho-Maclay in the 1870s to the German administration after 1884, and the disappointment fed the cargo movements of the Madang coast.

Why do the names Kilibob and Manup keep changing?

The names shift from area to area, the brothers rename themselves as they travel east through the Schouten Islands, and around Madang the two names are sometimes simply exchanged. One explanation collected by John Z’graggen is that people swapped them on purpose to mislead Europeans. The names were also treated as secret and powerful, so some elders declined to say them at all.