This passage in a letter by missionary’s wife M.L. Van Balen-Michaux to the women’s support society for the mission in The Hague is typical of how the missionaries of the Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging (uzv), situated at the north-east Bird’s Head peninsula of Dutch New Guinea, described their purchases of enslaved children. Such narratives were readily circulated in missionaries’ journals, such as the popularised Het Penningske, directed at Dutch youth where the same event is narrated. The purchase is described as a success already:

The Dutch Protestant mission of the uzv started in 1862, when missionary Johannes Lodewijk van Hasselt and later on his wife Wilhelmina van Hasselt-Mundt joined the first two German missionaries who had arrived at Doreh in 1859. Van Hasselt settled his post close by at Mansinam, a small island opposite Doreh on the border between Cenderawasih Bay and the Bird’s Head peninsula of New Guinea. The area stood under the competitive influence of the Resident of Ternate, who was appointed by the Dutch colonial administration, Dutch trading companies active in the same region, and local raiding and trading peoples from, among others, the islands of Biak and Numfor.⁴ The entire mission comprised a handful of mission posts on the coasts or islands in the same region, mostly consisting of the missionary, his wife, their own children and five to sometimes more than twenty Papuan foster children, youth and weak or old adults.⁵

From the very beginning, the missionaries had bought children and some vulnerable adults who had been locally captured, traded or enslaved. These so-called ‘saving’ practices went hand in hand with legitimating discourses and narratives in which the parent(s) and their communities were deemed inadequate or dangerous or made invisible altogether. Missionaries and their wives circulated an abundance of letters and reports among their supporters, telling stories of Papuans⁷ capturing and trading adults and children, of threats to kill people who were old, sick, disabled or accused of witchcraft, of complex negotiations in which compensation in (child) ‘slaves’⁸ was asked for crimes or mishaps, or about children ‘sold’ or given away among Papuan groups. Meanwhile, the actual children’s past before enslavement was cut off from their accounts almost completely. Missionaries’ reports tended to highlight the loving care with which the children were welcomed in their households and downplayed the services and labour the children provided.⁹ In both Het Penningske and the Berigten van de Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging (buzv), the mission’s official journal, it was strongly suggested that purchasing enslaved people, mostly children, was the only way to save at least some of them from the miserable or life-threatening situation they were in.

As many (gender) colonial historians have argued, such narratives, discourses and practices together served much larger imperialist goals than ‘saving’ the children only, as they justified colonialism as humanitarian, allowed white women a political or public role, raised money and offered the opportunity to discipline the bodies and minds of a new generation of colonised people along Western, Christian and capitalist lines.¹⁰ According to historian Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and anthropologist Danilyn Rutherford, complaints of local administrators and missionaries about violent local practices were a crucial incentive to bring Dutch New Guinea under further ‘ethical’ control, as the colonial administration feared that these would damage the Dutch international reputation as coloniser.¹¹ Indeed, one of the solutions to local violence and slavery practices uzv missionaries repeatedly mentioned was ‘direct colonial administration’. This happened with the instalment of a permanent governor at Manokwari near Mansinam in 1898, after which the missionaries’ practice of purchasing children themselves changed into a collaboration between the administration (taking enslaved children away) and the mission (fostering them).¹²

Even within uzv missionary circles, critical questions had arisen in 1894, when some called the purchase of children ‘slavery in disguise’ (‘vermomde slavernij’). The uzv installed a commission to examine the situation. The key issue was whether the children, transferred to the mission, actually remained enslaved and thus were not free to convert to Christianity. Remarkably, one of the ‘mitigating’ circumstances mentioned was that ‘otherwise the missionaries couldn’t find servants’.¹³ Internationally, these discussions are remarkably different from Protestant views on ‘redemption’: in Africa, Protestants were generally opposed to it, because it would only raise the local demand for enslaved people.¹⁴ Contrastingly, Catholic missions profited from presenting their cause as a way to save children from slavery.¹⁵

These discussions notwithstanding, missionaries in Dutch New Guinea continued to buy children until 1898, when the governor was installed. Because of the general contempt they expressed for ‘primitive’ Papuan culture and society and their view that Papuans did not ‘raise’ their children at all, the children were not just ‘saved’ from misery, death or slavery, but also from living in their own society and – even more important – from heathenism. This is a clear example of what Karen Vallgårda in Imperial Childhoods aptly described as the ‘construal of imperialism within Europe and North America as a project of white adults saving brown children from brown adults’.¹⁶

This article aims to look behind this construal. After all, the fact that there were children available for missionaries to acquire cannot be denied, and still begs the question of how it was possible at all. What were the circumstances under which hundreds of children became available to the missionaries to purchase between 1862 and 1898 on the north-east coast of the Bird’s Head of New Guinea? How had they become a commodity? As stated in the introduction to this special issue, it is crucial to unpack the structures and practicalities behind the seeming self-evidence of child separation. It will be argued that the children appeared on the fault lines of different value systems: they became dislodged from their own communities due to imbalances between local gift economies, after which they started to circulate in a market economy concurrent and in competition with a ‘charity gift economy’.

The fact that uzv missionaries ‘ransomed’ children they considered ‘slaves’ is not unknown but hardly further explored.¹⁷ Anthropologists and historians of the Bird’s Head and Cenderawasih area in many cases describe it as accepted fact that (in the past) the people they studied were involved in slavery: capturing, trading, adopting or exploiting people, including children.¹⁸

Much of the literature on early modern East Asian slavery systems in general is concerned with the concepts of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ slavery.¹⁹ ‘Open’ systems are associated with people buying off their debts or guilt by selling themselves, whereas ‘closed’ systems often involved trading and transport. Enslaved people in ‘closed’ systems became completely dependent on their owners, as they were cut off from their original societies, whereas ‘open’ systems still offered possibilities for a ‘return’ or a gradual assimilation into society over generations. Matthias van Rossum suggests a more gradual model of open and closed slavery systems, which seems useful to obtain a better understanding of local slavery systems and the impact of redemption by missionaries in late-nineteenth-century north Dutch New Guinea as well, as we will see.²⁰

Weak polities, competition and warfare among Papuan peoples as well as their alleged racial difference from East Asians made Papuans a ready target for slave-raiding and -trading. Muridan Widjojo meticulously described how Papuan Biak-Numfor clans, settled on islands north-west of the Bird’s Head, provided the sultanate of Tidore and the voc with (enslaved) Papuans raided from the Bird’s Head coasts and inlands.²¹ Thereby, slaves transferred from a partly open system (among Papuans themselves) to a closed system. Anthropologist Jelle Miedema offers an overview of later developments, and describes how during the nineteenth century, the sultanates of Ternate and Tidore – formally representing Dutch rule – also organised their own hongis (fleets) to demand tribute from these coasts and their hinterlands, including slaves.²² His studies offer the best historical insights into slavery in the Bird’s Head region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but precisely the late nineteenth century is missing from this long-term overview. One fundamental point all these studies implicitly make clear, however, is that the term ‘Papuan’ itself is problematic. The originally Malayan term was created and used by outsiders, pointing to a physical feature of all peoples of the island of New Guinea: their curly hair.²³ This racialised distinction might help to explain why they were readily traded as slaves by East Asians in an open system, but it does not help to understand how Papuans came to capture and sell other Papuans – to that end we need to understand distinctions and frictions among the Papuans themselves.

Both Widjojo and Miedema show how the demand for slaves under voc and Dutch indirect colonial rule via Ternate and Tidore stimulated local Biak-Numfor raiding cultures to capture people, who in some cases had already been enslaved before their capture. Yet, the demand for slaves as tribute ended around 1860, so how do we understand the developments after that time? For the period between 1859 and 1898, the accounts of a handful of missionary posts offer the only information available based on long-term contact between Europeans and local people. To understand their accounts, it is worthwhile to show where they were situated (see the map below).

Reading these sources critically against the background of anthropological studies of a range of different peoples in the area of the Bird’s Head peninsula, Cenderawasih Bay and Biak-Numfoor helps to create a critical distance to the missionaries’ framing of the events. But this reading strategy will also illuminate the specific situatedness of the anthropologists, who after World War ii tended to study communities from within, which led to a much better understanding of socio-cultural-economic value systems of a particular community, but tended to obscure insights in relations between different communities.

This article aims to understand colonial governmentality not so much from the rationale of the colonial mission to transform colonised communities through their children, but from the logics of the Papuan people themselves. Therefore, I start by reconstructing children’s positions within different gift-kinship systems on the basis of anthropological studies. Then the reasons are analysed why children might have been cut off from those gift-kinship systems, or how they appeared on the fault lines between different peoples. The subsequent section shows how both the Western-driven boom in trade in birds of paradise and the missionaries’ purchases of children amplified these fault lines. When children thus became commodities, they appeared on yet another fault line: between a market economy and a ‘charity gift economy’.

New Guinea is well known for its huge number of different cultures and languages. The Bird’s Head is no exception.²⁴ However, anthropologists studying the Biak-Numfor people and the very diverse groups living in the Bird’s Head and Cenderawasih Bay all describe gift-economy systems, in which gifts circulate to establish, maintain or reaffirm relationships. To give someone something creates the promise of a future return gift and thus a social connection. Among the circulating gifts, brides and bride wealth were the most important, linking horizontal social relations to generational relations. The bride represented an enormous wealth, for which the family of the bride-takers often paid life-long return bride wealth.²⁵ Gift circulation thus created kinship and strong networks of other social relationships. Not the gift or food itself, but the indebtedness it created is what was valued most. Only circulating gifts were considered ‘alive’: by giving them away almost immediately after receiving them, they created new indebtedness and thus new relations. That is the power of gifts.

An anthropological study by exception focusing on the position of children is Gilles Gravelle’s analysis of the Meyah, an inland people very close to the Van Hasselt missionary post on Mansinam.²⁷ Gravelle described the Meyah kinship system by showing how it was woven into a boy’s life from birth onwards:

In this patrilineal society of the Meyah, the relationship of the male child with his father was very important. The father had to teach him all the knowledge and experience he needed to survive in a complicated world: how to hunt, cultivate the land, maintain relationships, the history of conflicts and how to avoid (further) enmities, who was indebted to his father and how to prevent offending certain spirits. Finally, ‘[i]t is of utmost importance that he develops a close relationship with as many of his father’s relatives as possible’.²⁹

Just as among most New Guinean peoples, the relationship between the male child and his mother’s brother was of almost equal importance. Yet, it was slightly different, because it was a gift-giving and gift-returning relationship and, therefore, more important in creating social relationships. At a young age, the boy would stay at his uncle’s house for months; the uncle would provide food, take him to the gardens, make small bows and arrows for him and treat him affectionately. At a later age, the uncle would teach him stories of the spirit world and traditional songs and help collect the bride wealth. At the age of 18-20, the boy was expected to return all this by helping in the gardens, building houses and providing wild meat.³⁰

Turning to the peoples on the coast and islands who were generally more involved in travelling, trading and raiding, anthropologist Gerrit Jan Held offered the most information on the upbringing of children through a detailed description of the many ‘rituals of life’ or Saira on the island of Waropen in Cenderawasih Bay. After rituals of initiation and during pregnancy, rituals were held at childbirth, the first moment of ‘taking the child outside’, cutting the hair and fitting the first leg-rings, the return from (the first) long voyage, the feast for the perforation of the nose (initiation), name-giving, filing the teeth and tattooing.³² While other peoples living in the inlands, islands and coasts in the area differed from the Meyah and Waropen peoples in many respects, they were probably similar enough to assume that children were raised as intensely and carefully as Gravelle and Held described, to grow into a person in their clan’s network and learn skills necessary for future subsistence.

The descriptions by Held and Gravelle of how children were raised stand in sharp opposition to the uzv missionaries’ repeated remarks about Papuan children. According to them, Papuan children were not treated as children, nor raised or educated.³³ Moreover, where the later anthropologists stressed the importance and strength of kinship and social ties through the circulation of goods, the early missionaries only saw goods and people robbed, raided or killed, and interpreted the circulations of people, deeds and goods as acts of revenge or demands for compensation rather than as gifts. How can we account for that seemingly unbridgeable difference?

To my mind, the different positions of the missionaries and the post-Pacific War anthropologists is crucial here: whereas the missionaries were situated outside and between different communities in the area, most later anthropologists were situated within and concentrated their study on one community. What did anthropological studies offer to understand relations between different peoples in the area, instead of within them? What were the boundaries of gift-circulating communities?

According to almost all studies on gift and kinship in the Bird’s Head region, (originally) foreign goods played an important role in wealth and bride wealth.³⁴ Kain timur, for example, ancient fabrics from Timor and further west imported from the south coast of the Bird’s Head since the sixteenth century, had become the central part of bride wealth in the north of the Bird’s Head peninsula, so much so that it was also used as a general term for bride wealth.³⁶ Circulating among the Moi, Kebar or Karon inland people, kain timur cloths became more valuable, the more hands they had passed through and the older they were. Through their circulation, social ties and networks were reaffirmed or established. But logically, at one point in time these fabrics were not gifts: they had been imported through trade or barter. Moreover, ‘inflation’ of kain timur over generations among inland people like Moi, Kebar, Karon as well as competition at ceremonial gift parties among Biak and Biak-Numfor clans at the coasts were built into the system, so that new imports continued to be needed.³⁷ The exchange of foreign goods between ships and coastal peoples and between coastal and inland peoples involved much less peaceful relations than internal gift-kinship relations. After all, exchange and robbery did not create social ties but rather mark difference.³⁸ Therefore, historical anthropologists who concentrate on the changing relations between peoples can tell much more about slavery and the selling, capture and adoption of children. Their accounts help to link the anthropological studies to the uzv missionaries’ observations, so that the latter start to make much more sense.

Valérie Lécrivain’s historical-anthropologist study of Melanesia and the eastern part of New Guinea, bordering precisely on the region under study here, proved very helpful in this context. In a rare instance of inquiry into the existence of slavery prior to the arrival of Western missionaries and traders, she offers three potential answers to my question of how children might have become available for the missionaries to buy. First, it was mostly the imbalance between wealthier coastal and poorer inland peoples which led to the capture, trading, exploitation and sacrificing of people. This imbalance was greatly enhanced by the arrival of Western traders and firearms during the nineteenth century. Second, to be cut off from one’s own (network of) people – either by being ‘given away’ by one’s own people (often under pressure) or by being forcefully raided – actually meant being ‘socially dead’ and created complete dependence on their new owners. This can be distinguished from people captured who were waiting for a ransom paid by their own people. Finally, children could have been either sold or captured; in both situations it was possible that they were adopted as kin within a family but also severely exploited for labour or sex or traded on.³⁹ These core elements describe fairly well what can be reconstructed from available studies of the area to the west of the area Lécrivain described, the Cenderawasih Bay, Biak-Numfoor and northern Bird’s Head area, even if Lécrivain herself did not think so.⁴⁰

In a discussion with the Korano (local representative of the Sultanate of Tidore) of Andai with missionary Willem Hendrik Woelders, they had the following conversation (in the words of Woelders):

According to the Korano, the trade in slaves was not ‘Papuan culture’, but something introduced with the profit from trade with the recent arrival of European, Chinese and Ternatean hunters and traders. Indeed, the capture and trading of children can be more precisely placed in the historical context of the enormous boom in the trade in birds of paradise between the 1870s and 1900s, a development that has escaped Miedema’s attention. While there had already been some demand for these birds in the context of natural science collections before the 1860s, after that time and in particular with the quickly increasing European demand for feathers for fashion only, the trade and hunting technique changed profoundly. Because it was no longer necessary to preserve the entire bird, guns could be used to shoot them. Dutch trading companies from Ternate as well as Chinese traders organised the trade at the coasts of the northern Bird’s Head, via Ambonese hunters, who in turn hired local hunters. Firearms were distributed without much control, and the results were reportedly devastating.⁷⁵ Missionaries sent warning messages, and in 1906 the substitute Assistant Resident of Dutch New Guinea, J.W. van Hille, wrote: ‘That there are still inhabitants in New Guinea is certainly not thanks to the hunt for birds of paradise’.⁷⁶ As murder and incidents causing death led to demands for compensation, these killings were probably one reason why children increasingly started to be used as commodities.

The already asymmetrical power relations between Biak-Numfor clans on the northern Bird’s Head coast and inland people became even more imbalanced. Telling is a conflict between the missionaries and the Biak-Numforese coastal clans about a new mission post. Guru Petrus Kafiar was meant to start a mission post at Arfoe, in the inlands between Amberbaken and Doreh. However, the people from Doreh, controlling the trade at Amberbaken, strongly resisted and threatened him with murder. They did not want ‘that the inland people would get any wiser! Then they would sell their birds for high prices to strangers instead of to the Numforese’.⁷⁷

The missionaries’ main concern about the booming trade was that it prevented them from disciplining coastal people to work the land: with their profits coastal Papuans could buy slaves to do that, or buy food from the inland people.⁷⁹ However, the missionaries also discussed the booming trade in relation to their own problem with regard to ‘ransoming’ enslaved children. As Van Hasselt-Mundt wrote in 1892:

By purchasing children, the missionaries augmented the demand for them and thus their price. Furthermore, the missionaries often purchased sick, wounded, starving or disabled adults and children.⁸¹ To show their Christian-humanitarian motives to their supporters at home, they accentuated these purchases while downplaying those more straightforwardly purchased to help them out, but there is no doubt they actually did buy people they considered ‘of no use’.⁸² Ironically, they thus helped the coastal tribes make a profit out of captured people who were useless for their purposes, such as gardening, hunting birds of paradise, and marriage. It appears that the Papuans actually came to understand that the missionaries could be forced to buy when they made things even worse. Under the eyes of the missionaries, they let adults and children starve, beat them or threatened to kill them.

For example, in 1889, people from Kwawé offered missionary Woelders a woman for sale, which he declined. Four days later they returned: ‘Kicking and hitting they chased her, constantly shouting: “Walk a little faster. If sir doesn’t buy you, we will drown you tonight”’. Woelders ended up paying.⁸³ In 1891, Van Hasselt wrote that Biak people ‘bring starved people for sale, and say that both adults and children have been sold by their families because of the famine. The sold people themselves say that that is a lie. They have been lured by nice talk, and left without food during their travel’.⁸⁴ Could it be possible that in these cases the sellers had maltreated the enslaved to motivate the missionaries to buy them?

Involuntarily, no doubt, the missionaries thus augmented the prices for such maltreated, starving, ill, old or disabled people and helped increase the imbalances between coastal and inland peoples even further. At the same time, in their own Protestant charity gift economy, the misery of the ‘poor lambs’ was a valuable selling point.⁸⁵ The international market thus amplified the fault lines between coastal and inland Papuans, producing captured, ‘socially dead’ children for purchase. The missionaries themselves could only buy them within yet another ‘economy’, a Western Christian-humanitarian want of colonial ‘good causes’, an economy in which redeeming children from slavery raised money. The stories circulating about (successful) ‘redeemed’ children in the mission journal and the gifts directly connected to the ‘redemption’ of children indicate both the fine-grained societal support in the Netherlands for these practices, as well as the financial gains.⁸⁶ These gift economies circling around children can be considered a cornerstone of politics labelled as ‘ethical’ or ‘humanitarian imperialism’ up until today, as also indicated in the introduction to this special issue.⁸⁷

This case study is, first, meant as an invitation to think more structurally about (post)colonial missions encroaching on local systems regulating relations between generations. Under which conditions and to what extent did parents, families, clans or communities allow their children to be partly or temporarily raised by strangers? The case presented here – in relation to both discussions of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ slavery and histories of child removal and adoption – urges us to systematically question the (im)possibilities of the child retaining its relation to family and community, as well as whether one could fully become a member of a new family or community.

Second, turning to the New Guinea case, the power dynamics producing children cut off from their original communities, to be ‘saved’ by the uzv mission, reveal a simple but radical insight: the term ‘Papuans’, always already a racialised term from the outside, prevents us from understanding ‘their’ agency, as differences between them played a crucial role. Bluntly put, when anthropologists keep to their one studied clan or people, while historians stick to the term Papuans, we all miss what missionaries unintentionally added to the picture: what happened on the fault lines between different Papuan groups.

Third, Dutch, Chinese and Ambonese traders and hunters apparently had no scruples in amplifying local differences as long as they profited. Ironically, however, missionaries with their Christian-humanitarian motives also ‘profited’ from these differences, as only on the fault lines did they have access to children who were vulnerable because they were no longer embedded in gift-kinship relations. Reasonably, they even added to the differences in wealth and power. Therefore, we might ask whether, just as exploitative or violent colonialism abused and amplified differences within and between colonised peoples, Christian and humanitarian colonial projects did.