1,488 words / 11:35

Archeological evidence suggests that at some dim juncture 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, migrants originating from Africa arrived in what is now known as Papua New Guinea.

Ever since their arrival — and I’m gonna be completely frank here — they haven’t accomplished much worth writing home to mom about.

The modern nation of Papua New Guinea — I use the words “modern” and “nation” with cruel irony — stubbornly remains one of the most backward, dysfunctional, primitive, and resolutely prehistoric countries on the planet. The woolly little mud-covered dancing fossils who live there have had 50,000 years to get their shit together, yet they’re still a sad and hopeless mess.

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Some people refuse to evolve. Or maybe it’s worse: They couldn’t evolve even if they wanted to.

Barring the Sentinelese, is there a group of losers on the planet as stubbornly evolution-averse as the ratty, benighted, contemptible Papua New Guineans? They are technically Melanesians with a sprinkling of Denisovan DNA, but ever since coming out of Africa, they’ve essentially been a stillborn race. You know the routine: You can take the African out of Africa, but you can’t take the Africa out of the African.

Papua New Guineans look black, but uglier. They aren’t quite as hideous as Australia’s aborigines; it’s more like they resemble native Africans as drawn by a sadistic cartoonist.

The word “Guinea” is said to be derived from the Portuguese word Guineus, referring to black people south of the Senegal River. Over the years, “Guinea” has become a toponym that roughly means “land of the blacks.”

In a book published way back in 1601, Portuguese geographer António Galvão wrote about Papua New Guineans:

The people of all these islands are blacke, and have their haire frisled, whom the people of Maluco do call Papuas.

Like so many places primarily peopled by frizzy-haired blacks, Papua New Guinea is one of Earth’s most undeveloped shitholes — only Burundi has a lower rate of urbanization. Its capital city of Port Moresby is ranked the planet’s second-most-dangerous national capital, behind only Caracas. But as bad as the cities are — they’re basically giant, waterlogged landfills teeming with insects, feces, and guns — at least they have amenities such as electricity and even an occasional cell phone. For the most part, as scruffy as they are, your urban-vermin gangsters known as “Raskols” don’t wear bones in their noses and eat human flesh like the rural “trad” Papuan madmen are wont to do.

Assuming that one doesn’t literally lose their head in the process, one needs to head out past Papua New Guinea’s cities to enter a long-lost world that time forgot. When one ventures out into the wild highlands and valleys and jungles and rain forests and swamps — usually via a clunky propeller plane, since there are said to be only three functional roads in the entire California-sized country, and half the time these rugged thoroughfares seem to be blocked by mud or avalanche debris — one encounters an ancient breed of proto-humanoid that hasn’t evolved ever since his distant forefathers first stepped their squishy, dusky, stinky toes on a mega-continent known as Sahul back before sea levels rose and forever split Australia and New Guinea in two.

Occupying the eastern half of a giant, floating dinosaur turd known as New Guinea, the geological skidmark that locals abbreviate as “PNG” is a lawless land of cannibals and headhunters, of feral urban gangsters and bloodthirsty mountain tribesmen. It’s where people eat human brains and then go slowly mad from the sort of incurable neurodegenerative disorder one gets from eating human brains.

Papua New Guinea is of the few destinations on Earth where you’re not merely paranoid for fearing that the locals may wind up eating you. Where one tribe has a charming custom of strangling a widow to death shortly after her husband dies so hubby’s not lonely in the afterlife. Where dozens of suspected witches are killed every year, because it’s a country where the people are dumb enough to think that not only can you actually be a witch, but that you should also be killed for being one.

In 1961, Michael Clark Rockefeller — son of Nelson, grandson of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. –disappeared somewhere in Papua New Guinea. His body was never found. The consensus is that he was eaten — either by sharks or by cannibals. Wild rumors persist of him being speared, beheaded, scalped, dismembered, and eaten by crazed tribesmen who then had gay sex, drank each other’s urine, and joyously poured Rockefeller’s blood over their bodies.

As of 2024, PNG has the world’s second-highest crime rate. It has been ranked the most dangerous place on Earth for womenkind. Life there is a non-stop tropical rape festival, where one in every two ladies will be raped in their lifetime, where a full quarter of all men in one survey admitted to having raped a stranger at least once, where half of reported rape victims are under 15, and where 13% of rape victims are aged six or younger.

Authorities say that last Sunday morning, starting at about 4 AM and lasting until 5 in the afternoon, gunfire erupted in the remote highlands of PNG’s Enga province between two warring tribes. One group was headed to a rival village to avenge a woman’s death when their enemies ambushed them. Photos circulated online of corpses stacked in piles along the highway. When the smoke had cleared, authorities confirmed there were “at least 64 people” killed. They later downgraded the death toll to 26, which is quite steep, but we’re dealing with black people here, and math is not their strong suit.

The sounds of automatic rifles ringing in the jungle highlands is merely a high-tech update to an ongoing and insoluble tradition of tribal bloodletting that has proceeded uninterrupted for the past 50,000 years.

Last month, back in the cities of Port Moresby and Lae, “at least 15 people were reportedly killed during rioting and looting that left the country’s two biggest cities in flames.”

So Papua New Guinea is falling apart both in the cities and the jungles — not that there was ever much holding it together in the first place.

But does anyone care? Should anyone care? Would you even have known about this if I hadn’t brought it to your attention? I daresay that the entire island of New Guinea could sink into the Pacific, and hardly anyone would notice.

I proposed the question “Why is Papua New Guinea so primitive?” to ChatGPT, which quickly scolded me:

Describing Papua New Guinea as “primitive” is a broad and oversimplified characterization that doesn’t fully capture the complexity of the country’s situation. Papua New Guinea (PNG) faces various challenges, including geographical isolation, rugged terrain, linguistic diversity, limited infrastructure, and historical factors such as colonialism. . . . Additionally, framing discussions about PNG in terms of “primitiveness” can perpetuate stereotypes and overlook the complexities of its history and contemporary realities.

Less than a year ago on Quora, someone posed a similar question: “Why is Papua New Guinea more primitive than its neighbours Australia and Indonesia?”, only to be scolded much as I was, but this time by humans:

It is not accurate to refer to Papua New Guinea as “primitive,” as this term can be seen as pejorative and insensitive to the country’s diverse cultures and histories. . . . One key factor is the legacy of colonialism, which has left a lasting impact on the country’s economic and social structures. . . . The country has struggled with high levels of corruption, weak rule of law, and limited institutional capacity to deliver basic services and promote economic growth. . . . It is not accurate or helpful to describe the country as “primitive,” as this term is based on outdated and insensitive notions of cultural superiority.

Sheesh, there are plenty of words I could have used that are far less kind than “primitive.” A phrase that leaps to mind is “hopelessly stupid.” But these days, you can’t get very far in the civilized world if you insist on referring to the uncivilized as uncivilized.

In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond had the audacity to call them “intelligent”:

From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.

That’s the dumbest and most dishonest thing I’ve ever read in my life.

They look black, they act black, and they do the sorts of things that groups of blacks do when left to their own devices. What’s wrong with calling a spade a spade?

If I was a Papua New Guinean, I’d be ashamed of myself. On second thought, if I was a Papua New Guinean, I’d be proud. And that’s why I’m not a Papua New Guinean.