TRAVELS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA in 1950 proved to be no more than an oriental interlude; a project undertaken in pursuit of a journalistic livelihood. Even before departure I had made firm arrangements for return. In Guatemala I had been ensnared by the fascination of the great Maya past, and by the stubborn survivors of their race: the Indians forming one half of the population to this day. I hoped on my return to be able to include Mexico in my travels and to visit all I could of the monuments left behind by a succession of great civilizations. There was a further chance that here, too, a few Indian tribes might have been able to retain the old culture in remote mountain places. At the back of my mind the hope was born that one day I might even come to write a book on these countries which, despite the assault of our century, had not yet been overwhelmed.
I went to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam for a total of some three months, spending the most interesting, yet in a way most depressing part of this period in many journeys in a nebulous area of South Vietnam marked on the map as Les Populations Montagnards du Sud Indo-Chinois.
Legally Indo-China as a whole was a French protectorate in which subject populations enjoyed certain rights. This however was an enclave of undiluted and absolute French authority in which a variety of tribes having only recently emerged from the Stone Age were ruled if necessary with a rod of iron.
Although the capital, Ban Méthuot, was only 125 kms as the crow flies from Saigon, to reach it overland meant traversing one of the least explored areas in South-East Asia, using in my case a track only opened up by the Japanese troops some six years before. In Ban Méthuot I received the maximum hospitality and co-operation from Monsieur Doustin, Acting Resident, who claimed to be very bored at being stranded in the middle of a largely impenetrable jungle. He passed me on to Doctor Jouin, head of medical services of the province, and Vietnam’s most distinguished anthropologist, and to two genial, if pessimistic, young French colonial servants; Ribo who administered 118 villages, and Cacot an inspector of schools. They were about to set out on a tour, and volunteered to take me along.
I spent most of my first day in Ban Méthuot with Doctor Jouin, who was one of the most interesting and impressive men I have ever met. He was white-haired and gentle, his face permanently illuminated with the Buddhistic peace generated by complete absorption in an urgent and valuable task. He had managed to delegate his medical responsibilities and now spent at least twelve hours a day working to learn and record all he could of what he believed to be one of the most attractive civilizations on earth, before it disappeared completely, as he said it was certain to do. In the beginning his task had seemed simple enough, and in any case he had not intended to probe too deeply. But then he had made exciting discoveries and had been lured on into unknown country where the horizons continually receded. Every attempt to clear up some limited aspect of his subject had uncovered endless others. And now he found himself in a trap. He had committed himself to labours which could never be finished, and time and the conditions of the country were against him. The Moï tribes, having survived in their present location for at least 2,500 years, were about to be destroyed by our merciless century. It needed a dozen workers like himself to occupy themselves with the still enormous volume of material available, which was melting away and in a few years would be lost for ever.
There were supposed, Jouin said, to be about a million Moïs, belonging to some thirty tribes, distributed over the mountainous areas of South Vietnam. The exact number was unknown as a few remote valleys had not even made their official submission. Whatever it was, it was dwindling rapidly, as in the areas most affected by Western penetration some villages had lost half their number in a single generation. They were a people of Malayo-Polynesian stock, related to the Dyaks of Borneo, the Igoroths and Aetas of the Philippines and the various tribes inhabiting the hinterlands of such widely separated parts as Madagascar and Hainan Island, off the coast of China. Above all, for the purpose of this account, it is of interest to record the present view that it was from these areas of South-East Asia that the Polynesian islanders of the Pacific set out on their great voyages of discovery. The Bahnars, Rhades, Jarai, Nonos and Bihs we visited had remained in all probability as the Tahitians’ ancestors had been before they sailed out to discover the Pacific over 1,000 years ago. The Moïs hunted with the crossbow, being particularly noted for their skill in the capture and taming of elephants, which they sold as far afield as Burma. The doctor had been able to identify the area of their culture’s diffusion through the sap of the Ipoh tree in the poisoning of arrow tips.
Doctor Jouin considered them one of the most handsome and best-formed of all races, and found that a certain mental liveliness, and a pleasant happy-go-lucky temperament accompanied this attractive physique. They gave little thought for the morrow and, except where under extreme pressure, led gay and sociable existences much occupied with gluttonous feasting and the consumption of rice spirit. This hearty manner of living depended upon, and was proportionate to, the tribe’s inaccessibility. Unless compelled to do so, the Moïs refused to work for wages. They were art collectors and wealth consisted in the possession of gongs, drums and jars, some of which were of ancient Chinese or Cham origin and of great value. Most interesting of all, the doctor thought, was the Moïs’ unique racial memory. Their great speciality was the oral saga, recited over countless generations without the slightest modification. This, despite great interpretational difficulties arising from words and phrases that had lost their meaning, constituted a treasure-house of information relating to the remote past.
I was interested to learn from the doctor that from the sheer multiplicity of their rites, all of which required alcoholic consumption, the intriguing side-issue emerged that respectability and drunkenness were allied. The upright man provided evidence of his ritual adequacy by being drunk as often as possible, respected by all for his piety, and a pattern held up to youth. The words nam lu (as I was to experience), uttered in grave welcome to the stranger in a Moï village and meaning let us get drunk together, carried all the weight of an invitation to common prayer. Moï villages were one of the few places in the world where the domestic animals, dogs and pigs and hens, having fed on the fermented mash from the sacred jars, could be seen in a state of helpless intoxication. Conviviality (and this, too, I discovered for myself) was the rule, a norm of polite conduct. Passers-by were begged to join in Moï orgies of eating and drinking, and it was bad taste—and worse, offensive to the spirits—to eat and drink less than provided by the fearsome hospitality of the hosts.
‘And they’re a doomed race?’ I asked the doctor.
‘Beyond hope of recovery.’
‘Why should that be?’
‘Because their economy works on a knife’s edge, and the order’s gone through that every man must work 50 days a year as a coolie on a plantation. Saving up for a rainy day doesn’t come into their calculations. It would be irreligious. They’ve no reserves. Besides which the missionaries have moved in.’
‘The missionaries?’
‘They’re in with the plantation owners. Part and parcel of the same thing. Sabatier1 was always able to keep them out until we went under in 1940. Now he’s gone and when we took over again they came in. Get Ribo to tell you what happened to the Bihs.’
I stayed for several days with Ribo and Cacot in Ribo’s bungalow on the nearby Dak Lac. There were Moï villages belonging to several tribes on or near the lake and we visited most of them, being invariably submitted to the amiable ritual Dr Jouin had described. In one case there were serious matters to discuss, but for the Moïs sociable drunkenness came first. There was a formidable possibility, too, that our hosts would insist upon offering us food, and I was warned that I must consume with what pretence of relish I could manage anything that happened to be served, as failure to do so would involve my friends in social, even political, disaster. ‘It could be anything,’ Ribo assured me. ‘They catch rats here and preserve them for several weeks in sections of bamboo. Luckily for us they only bring them out for the most important feasts.’
The village, Buon Plum, was to become a model settlement, and object lesson to all its neighbours, and Ribo who had arrived to announce this project to the assembled notables asked for the ceremonies preceding the palaver to be cut to a strict minimum. These entreaties appeared to have no effect; we were led up into the common room of a long-house that could have been 50 yards in length, where my friends’ misgivings deepened at the sight of the lined-up alcohol jars with their drinking tubes in position, and boys had already been dispatched to fetch water from the nearest ditch to top up the levels.
There was no way out. The Moïs had a way of measuring the amount each participant sucked from the jar and no business would be conducted until this befuddling minimum had been consumed. When we had fulfilled our obligations the villagers joined in, led—since the Moïs were matriarchal—by aged and socially powerful women. While we drank, the Moïs summoned their household spirits with a frenzied beating of gongs. It was correct at this point to spit copious libations to them through the loosely woven bamboo floor, and these were received with acclamation by eagerly guzzling ducks which, attracted by the din of the gongs, had placed themselves in position directly under the jars.
After an hour or so of this, when all present were considered to be adequately mellowed, Ribo hauled himself to his feet to deliver his speech. He began by pointing out to them that, since the first census had been taken twenty years before, the population of the village had declined from eighty-six adult males to forty. Ribo told them they were being killed off by malaria and went to great lengths to prove that this was so, and to explain the measures that should be undertaken to combat the disease. Unfortunately for him, as he had previously explained to me, the model village project, in which he had been compelled by his superiors to involve himself, was little better than a charade. Why should these people who had occupied the areas where they now lived for at least 2,500 years have so suddenly fallen victims to malaria?
It was a case where the rice wine worked well for us all, including the Moïs. They held each other upright, smiled and nodded their agreement, assuring Ribo through his interpreter that they would grow vegetables and fruit to raise the money to buy mosquito-nets and quinine, and agreed that all would be well. Afterwards the interpreter took us aside. The men sent to work for the statutory fifty days on the rubber plantation had not returned, and the Moïs feared that they had been forced or tricked into signing on for a further five years, in which case the villagers knew they would never see them again.
These were the hard facts of life in colonial Vietnam and no one realized them more bitterly than Ribo and Cacot, both of them liberals, much attracted to the teaching of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialism and the philosophies of post-war France of the Left. They had taken their degrees in philosophy, politics and social studies at the Sorbonne and come out here with high hopes in their hearts, to face the naked truth of French colonialism at bay and fighting for its life. France had to have rubber at whatever cost and while I was there in Bon Méthuot a deputy arrived from Paris charged with the mission of stepping up its production. The Moïs on the nearby plantation worked a 13-hour day, and it was general knowledge that they were flogged or even tortured if production fell behind. Those released from the plantations were sick men who came home to die. The Resident told the official from Paris that at the rate things were going the whole Moï population would be exhausted in five years, pointing out that many of them had been conscripted into military service. With the outposts of the advancing Vietminh only thirty miles down the road from Ban Méthuot, the deputy’s unreasonable order was to take all the conscripts out of the army and send them to the plantations.
Buon Choah, principal village of the Bihs, spoken of by Dr Jouin as the most interesting family branch of the Moïs, was only a few miles down the road and this and all the other Bih settlements had fallen under the control of Mr Jones, one of the eleven evangelist missionaries who had disembarked with the first of the French troops to return to Vietnam after the defeat of the Japanese.
Monsieur Doustin, the Acting Resident, had spoken of him with cool distaste. At their first meeting he had politely hoped that they would be able to work together, to which Mr Jones had blandly replied that he only needed the cooperation of God. Mr Jones had soon demonstrated his total independence of Doustin’s authority. Doustin had received orders from Paris to see that he was appropriately lodged in Ban Méthuot and he had requisitioned the largest villa there—considerably grander than the Residence. Jones was provided with two cars, and the latest executive Cessna aircraft.
He then set to work on the conversion of the Moïs, making a start with the Bihs. Their only previous contact with Western religious belief had been through the ministrations of a charming but ineffectual old Roman Catholic missionary, one of a number who had been withdrawn by the authorities after averaging less than two converts per head over a period of five years.
Making enquiries Jones found out that the Bihs still retained ancient burial customs which they shared with the Horas of Madagascar. For two years the dead were exposed in open coffins in the trees. After that the bones were taken down and thoroughly cleansed, and before burial the skull was carried round the fields by an old woman of the family, and offerings were made to it. This rite, Jones told Doustin, he had decided was the cornerstone of the Bih system of beliefs, and he asked for it to be suppressed. When Doustin declined to do so, Jones went over his head to the Quai D’Orsay and received their backing. Police arrived from Saigon and stood guard over the missionary while he pulled the coffins down from the trees and had the contents thrown into a common grave.
Conversion had been instant. A Bih spokesman told Ribo that their spirits having deserted them they were resigned to extinction. The Bihs had paid their rice tax punctually, supplied their menfolk to plantation or army without protest, but had ceased to produce offspring. We had been spotted on the outskirts of Buon Choah, and had probably been taken for evangelical missionaries, for by the time we walked into the village an extraordinary spectacle was taking place. Women were scrambling in lines down the stepladders of the long-houses, like cadets coming down the rigging of a training ship. They formed up in two rows—one on each side of the path, dressed in navy-blue calico blouses and skirts, and standing fairly smartly to attention. The chief came hurrying to meet us carrying in one hand the usual diploma of meritorious service to the Japanese (who the Moïs could not tell from the French) and in the other a copy in English of the Gospel of St Mark.
Ribo asked them if all the Bihs had become converts and the chief told him, every one. Where were the gongs and the jars? Ribo asked, and he was told that they had been removed. ‘By the missionaries?’ ‘By the missionaries.’ ‘Some of them were hundreds of years old. They were priceless,’ Ribo told us.
‘At least tell the women to take their missionary blouses off while we’re here,’ Ribo said to the chief.
The chief rapped out a word of command and the women began to strip to the waist. In a few seconds the reception parade was ready and we made our way to the chief’s house between two score or so of freely and splendidly displayed torsos. Cacot supposed that in the circumstances we would be spared the necessity of drinking more rice-wine, but Ribo disillusioned him.
‘Not a chance of it. Be sure he’ll have a jar hidden away somewhere for use in emergency.’
And he had.
I went to see Mr Jones, realizing immediately how far in the four years since my first encounter with Mr Fernley in Chichicastenango the evangelicans had progressed. In Chichicastenango Mr Fernley had held the thin red missionary line. Here Mr Jones was in reality in command. He was a large, spare, basically happy man, never deserted by a confident smile, and devoid I would have said of the slightest shadow of doubt. Every action he took was covered by justification, and explaining his activities in Bon Méthuot he smilingly pre-empted criticism. One or other of the French he had come into contact with must have commented on his lavish lifestyle, and he was ready for that. Referring to the luxurious appointments of his villa, Mr Jones went out of his way to assure me that they were normal by French colonial standards. He added the information that he had imported several tons of canned food—enough to last his family for the length of his tour—‘to avoid imposing a strain on local resources’. In reply to my inquiry after the progress of his labours, the pastor said they were making headway under some difficulties. He supposed I would have heard that the whole Bih tribe had recently conducted a ceremony in which he had presented them with a harmonium and they had witnessed for Christ down to the last man, woman and child. He put a book into my hand. It contained, said the title page, thirty hymns, a section on prayer, an explanation of twenty-six religious terms, a short summary of the Old and New Testaments and a Church manual with the duties of preachers, elders, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, dedication, the marriage service, churching of women, and the Apostle’s Creed. All this was written in Rhades—the principal Moï language—despite the fact, he said, that about one-third of the words employed in the holy text were missing in local tongues.
I asked him how he viewed the fact that up to a half of his converts had been carried off for forced labour on the rubber plantations, and that this naturally prevented them from attending Divine Worship.
Mr Jones was ready for this, too. He was concerned only with the natives’ spiritual welfare and their material conditions were of no interest to him whatever. A thought occurred to him and he brightened. One thing that could be said in favour of the plantations—which he saw as much maligned, surprisingly even by the French—was that a man working there was at least put out of the way of temptation. He had already mentioned the matter of biblical instruction for the plantation’s coolies and the owners had made no objection to his conducting a short weekly service for them, and this he proposed to do.
Jones was completely unselfconscious, in his simple fanaticism, as he spoke with modest pride of his close and daily contacts with the Almighty and the free discussions on a range of subjects that took place between them. All his actions were designed with the single end in view, to use his own phrase, ‘that God should get more glory for himself,’ and God responded by easing Jones’s missionary work with the provision of regular small miracles. He mentioned a recent one in which he had to fly back to the States and God’s providence had delayed a plane for an hour and a half, which otherwise he would have missed.
Towards the end of this encounter his wife came in. She was a strapping woman with big hands and feet, brisk almost impatient movements, a sun-bonnet of a kind I had not seen for many years, and a woman’s version of the pastor’s imperishable smile. She described the errand on which she had just been employed, involving the baptism of several converts in an area where control was divided between the French and the Vietnamese enemy. She had gone there contrary to the advice of the French, and had carried out the baptisms in an inflatable child’s paddling pool with the sterilized and consecrated water the missionaries carried in their specially adapted jeep wherever they went. On the way back she found that a Vietnam patrol had sneaked in and blown up a bridge, leaving her and her car stranded across the river. The experience had not bothered her in the slightest, for the Lord ‘in his faithfulness’ had instantly provided a boat. She had left orders with the Moïs for the bridge to be repaired, and next day she would go back for the car.
When I left the Moï area I had been hoping to be able to find my way across country to the west to Stung-Treng in Cambodia and was passed on by Doustin to his colleague Monsieur Préau at Pleiku, the next town along the route. Monsieur Préau, saying that he would be glad of the excuse to get away from it all for a couple of days, gave me a lift in his Citroën through jungle tracks to Cu-Ty, about a third of the way. Excluding Kontum it was the last village in central Vietnam where the French had a representative of any kind—in this case a huge grinning villain, a Moï Henry VI, whose name, Prak, meant money. He was supposed to have committed three murders, possessed five elephants, a number of wives, and a jeep given to him by a planter who was supposed to pay him ten piastres (40p) for every man supplied to the plantations, in addition to the government bounty of a half a piastre per head.
We sucked up the minimum of rice wine in his long-house, into which—an interpreter whispered—Prak, spotting our arrival, had ordered a quart of French brandy to be tipped. Préau, yet another liberal, oozed guilt as he passed on the deputy from Paris’s demand for the supply by the Jarai tribe, of which Prak was chief, of another 300 able-bodied men. One of his servitors wound up his gramophone and put on a samba and Prak staggered round the common room to the rattle of maracas, before settling again for a fresh intake of rice wine. Leering ferociously, he agreed to do what he could. We were then taken to inspect the village school where the children had so far been taught only controlled breathing exercises and to say ‘Bonjour Monsieur. Merci Monsieur.’ Préau asked what the chances were of getting through to Stung-Treng, and Prak told him none at all. Bandits had taken over Bo-Kheo, the next village along the road, where a good deal of shooting had been heard on the previous day. ‘What could you expect?’ he asked. ‘All the menfolk have been conscripted.’
On our way back Préau asked a favour. Would I agree, if invited, to have dinner with Mr Wheelock, the evangelist pastor at Pleiku? When I asked what on earth for, he said that Wheelock complained of his loneliness and was always on the look-out for someone to talk English to. Besides this he had just returned from Kontum, for which Préau was responsible, and which was the last of the Moï villages to the north. Kontum was now virtually cut off—accessible only by air, and only Wheelock in his light plane could slip in and out at will. Préau said that he was anxious to obtain up-to-date information about the situation there. He found Wheelock hard to approach, and contact between them was made all the more difficult because, although the missionary claimed almost to have completed the translation of one of the gospels into the local Bahnar language, he spoke little or no French.
The expected invitation was received and accepted. Pleiku was a smaller and less important town than Ban Méthuot, in reflection of which Mr Wheelock’s living style was less imposing than that of Mr Jones. He was tall, spare and restless and in constant motion, as if in an attempt to burn up energy. He came from Amarillo, Texas, and had worked there in oil until he had been called ‘to assist in the finishing of God’s unfinished work’. Unlike Jones who had referred continually, with his unquenchable smile, to his belief of being shielded by the Almighty’s special protection, Wheelock, appearing naturally prone to indignation, seemed inclined to reproach God for abandoning him in this place.
In a way it was not to be wondered at. There had been a touch of Alpine Switzerland about Ban Méthuot with its deep, protruding eaves and decorated gables, intended to convince those who lived there that they were enjoying a cool climate. It possessed an eight-hole golf course, a cercle sportif, a nursery playground, and a good restaurant. The war remained not quite real—an excitement if anything on the periphery of comfortable lives. Pleiku was very different. There were no distractions, but instead food shortages, frequent power failures, and night alarms. On the evening of my arrival enemy infiltrators had ambushed and killed three French soldiers in a jeep within a few hundred yards of the place centrale, and no one had dared an attempt to recover the dead before dawn, by which time the corpses had largely been devoured by the tigers infesting the area. Pleiku was not a place where small, reassuring miracles were so easily experienced.
Wheelock clearly detested it, saying something to the effect that its only possible advantage was its liberal provision of the adversity by which the Christian virtue of fortitude was strengthened. The lighting came and went, sometimes being so dim that I could hardly make out the details of the pastor’s face across the table, and gecko lizards scuttled about the walls, stopping from time to time to utter their powerful startled outcry. A plague of moths had put the air-conditioning out of action. Wheelock apologized for the locally grown, earth-flavoured rice, forming the basis of the meal, saying that priority shipments of war supplies to Pleiku had put an end to deliveries of the canned food on which he normally lived. He was worried, too—justifiably in my opinion—about the water supply, believing it to harbour dangerous organisms that even resisted boiling, and as soon as one sterilizing tablet had ceased to release its minute bubbles in the flask standing between us he was ready with the next.
The pastor admitted that he did not much care for the French who reminded him of what he had read of the pagan Romans of old. He was less than enthusiastic, too, about the Moïs among whom he laboured—even those who had agreed to become converted. When the first arrived he had been pleasantly surprised at their eagerness to possess crucifixes, which he had handed out in all directions only to discover that what interested them was the technique of what they saw as a new and possibly more effective form of animal sacrifice. He had cut off the supply when he found that one had been tied round the neck of a buffalo he had been unable to prevent them from slaughtering in their ritual fashion. Like Jones he felt that as soon as they had gone through the motions of conversion it was better for them to be out of harm’s way. In Pleiku they grew tea on the largest plantation in Vietnam, on which a thousand Mïs toiled—a steadily increasing number of them becoming what Mr Wheelock called ‘my Christians’. He spoke with approval of the plantation’s Algerian owner—who, Préau informed me, was notorious for the tortures he inflicted on his workers, and who had supplied all the furniture for Wheelock’s house.
The time had come to ask Mr Wheelock for news of Kontum, and his expression of repressed anger strengthened. ‘Kontum is primitive,’ he said. ‘Just primitive.’
Weren’t all these places primitive in their way? I suggested. What could be more primitive than Pleiku, with a native civilization on the edge of obliteration, and a raw Western replacement that had not yet found its feet.
‘Kontum offers nothing to gratify any of us,’ the missionary said. ‘Pleiku is growing towards the light. Kontum remains in darkness.’ He suggested I should visit Kontum and discover for myself how truly backward it was.
We talked on and I found that Wheelock was describing an almost completely unspoiled community—perhaps the last of its kind—that I had hoped so much to see, and I knew now I never would. The long-houses (described by Wheelock as the natives’ evil abodes) were, with their majestic, steepled roofs, the longest and most spectacular in Vietnam. The Bahnar subdivision of the Moï peoples had been among the last to be subjected to French rule, and by some happy freak of soil and weather it had been thought inadvisable to establish the usual plantation in the vicinity of the villages to batten upon their manpower. Wheelock said that he had wanted to build a mission house at Kontum, but the Bahnars had declined to co-operate, and the French were too busy with their war. A few Bahnars from Kontum had been sent down to Pleiku to the tea-picking estate, but had been rejected as unsatisfactory.
‘Why was that?’ I asked.
‘They were communists,’ Wheelock said. He agreed that they had never heard of Russia or Karl Marx. It was something bred in them, and ineradicable, like original sin.
And what form did their communism take? I asked, and the missionary said that they were crazy about sharing. If, for example, fifty of them inhabited one of their evil dwellings, they divided everything by fifty. Each man or woman owned a fiftieth of the house itself, and a fiftieth of each pig they kept. If a man went out and shot a jungle fowl with his crossbow, it had to be divided up into fifty parts. By Wheelock’s understanding this was communism carried to its most unacceptable lengths.
He seemed to brighten up at the memory of an incident of his stay with the Bahnars. The basic reason for the trip had been to visit one of his Christians there who had been put in prison for failing to notify the French of the presence of the Vietminh in the vicinity of his village. Quite casually Wheelock added that this Christian who had been locked up for three months, couldn’t use his arms yet. I asked him why, and Wheelock said, as if it followed as a matter of course, that they’d been disjointed in the interrogation. Were there any more than his Christian involved? Why yes, about eighty had been arrested of which he guessed that no more than twenty had been strung up:
It seemed hard, I said: if the Bahnars informed on the Vietminh to the French, the Vietminh burned their village. If they failed to report the Vietminh presence the French wrenched their arms out of their sockets.
Mr Wheelock shrugged his shoulders. ‘It must be that affliction comes,’ he said, ‘but woe unto him by whom affliction cometh.’ He sipped his chlorinated water and grimaced. ‘Whatever happens they are all doomed to disappear shortly from this earth.’
I understood that he was speaking of the Moïs in general, and I was sure that he was right.
1Sabatier had been Governor of Indo-China until the Japanese occupation.