A Year Without Touch

A year lived at a distance

There is one year in the life of a Kanum child that is lived at a distance. For a full year from birth, the child's uncles and aunts may not touch the child. Some may not even look at the child.

Marthen Ndiken explained that this period is a time of mourning and fasting for those relatives. Where elsewhere people mourn by cutting their hair, here they do not. Here people mourn by not touching.

That prohibition is kept in earnest by the child's mother. When the mother knows that the child's uncle is in a certain place, she will not pass that way. She will go around and take another path.

Only after the child turns one is the customary ceremony held. That ceremony is what is called pegang anak, the holding of the child.

The timing follows the harvest

Mama Norce Mahuze told how the ceremony is prepared and carried out.

The thanksgiving of the holding of the child is usually held in the harvest season, particularly the kumbili harvest, and most often in October, because by then the kumbili have all been brought in.

Preparation begins with food and place. Kumbili are made ready, sago is made ready, and the place is made ready. Since there are usually several children to be held at once, their ceremonies are joined into one feast.

Full customary dress

Those children, all one year old, are dressed in full customary attire from headdress to loincloth. There is a small noken, and there are beads hung crosswise. Marthen Ndiken added that for a girl the hair is plaited back with cord, and her betel pouch is decorated too.

The platform and the anggin flower

Once the date is decided, everyone gathers. At the place, cooking stones are made ready, along with bark and firewood for the earth oven.

Then a platform is built. That platform is decorated with coconut fronds and with anggin flowers, since anggin is what is customarily used for such ceremonies. Yet not every kind of anggin is used. Only certain kinds are hung there.

Among the decorations hang kumbili fruits already wrapped in bark. There is also taro, pulled up whole with its leaves and hung there. Marthen Ndiken named other decorations of the same kind, yellow palm fronds worked into rounds, fruits, and garden produce such as pineapple and banana.

Then the children with their parents, all in customary dress, sit upon the platform.

At three, the oven is opened

The oven is fired. At three o'clock the oven is opened. The tifa drum is struck. And only then is the child held.

Who holds the child is determined by kinship. If a sister has a child to be held, then all her brothers gather, those who hold the rank of uncle. And likewise in reverse.

The children cry

What happens at that moment was described honestly by Marthen Ndiken, and his description explains exactly why the ritual is needed.

The children are afraid. They cry. The reason is simple. They are seeing these people for the first time. The faces they are used to do not make them cry, but their uncles and aunts are strangers. As soon as they are lifted, they cry. As soon as their body is touched, they cry.

The uncles and aunts come out one by one, faces covered with a newly woven mat. The child is lifted, held at once, embraced, then handed on to the next. And so on until all have held the child.

A meaning stated calmly

The meaning of the whole was put by Mama Norce in one calm sentence. When that child was newly born, we as aunt or uncle did not hold that child. So this ceremony is the thanksgiving that says this child is now part of my family, and so I must hold it.

There is one element that carries a meaning of its own, the anggin flower. Mama Norce explained that the flower stands for the clan. In the Mahuze clan there is an anggin that stands for that clan, and that flower is the principal one used. Then the two accompanying clans join in there as well.

"Which means that we are not loosed from the one bond of the people," she said.

The Kanum people, she explained, consist of three great clans, the Mbanggu clan, the Ndiken clan, and the Nde clan. Mbanggu is the one that is Mahuze.

The rule about songs

Asked whether she could sing a customary song then and there, her answer is an important part of this knowledge. She answered that a customary song can be sung only when there is a customary ceremony. To sing it just so is not possible.

"There are rules for that."

The holding of the child at Wasur

The same practice also takes place at Wasur village. Alexander Kaize explained that the customary feast at Wasur includes the piercing of ears and the holding of the child. A first child may not have its body held by the uncle, and the uncle must fast beforehand until the appointed time.

Asked directly whether the process is the same as the one told by Mama Norce Mahuze, he answered that the process is the same.