Born from the Belly of the Earth

A word, not a place

There is another account of origin in the land of Merauke, and this one is told from a different position. Frederikus Mahuze speaks as chairman of the Customary Community Institution of the Malind Anim, and he begins not with a place but with a word.

That word is Anim Ha.

Why are we called Malind Anim, he asks. Because the Ha at the end of that word marks the true human being.

The order of creation

Its ground is the order of creation as he tells it. After the earth was created with all it holds, with its trees, its plants, and its water, there were first created human beings who could change form. Those beings who could change form are what is called dema. A dema can become anything. A dema can vanish and take another shape. That was the first human.

Only afterwards, he says, did true human beings begin to be born from the belly of the earth. Created from soil, given breath within the body, then brought forth from within the ground.

"That is Malind," he says. The term Anim Ha, the true human being, is according to him, used nowhere else.

The dog and the stork

The one who found the first human within the belly of the earth, in his telling, was the dog. The dog is the totem of the Mahuze clan, and it found them by scent. To that dog, he says, a particular gift was given, and that is why dogs are used the world over to track. He calls the dog the finder and the deliverer.

Yet the dog did not yet understand what it had found. So it asked the help of the Ndiken clan, whose totem is the stork, blue and white with yellow legs. It was the dog and the stork together that found the first human within the belly of the earth.

The ground as a mother

From that account of creation comes an explanation of land that the narrator holds to be the most important of all.

Because the Malind were born from within the ground, the ground is treated as a mother. "This land we regard as a mother to us," he says, "because we were born from it."

From this, he says, comes the difficulty that attends every transfer of rights over land. That difficulty is not administrative. It is a way of guarding a mother's dignity.

Dema, the ancestors, and the one who is worshipped

The narrator also sets out the relation between dema, the ancestors, and the one who is worshipped. Dema, he says, is not the same as God the Father. Dema was created. Dema is what is now called the ancestors. And when thanks are given, it is they who carry the request onward.

In customary speech, he says, God the Father is called Alawi, and Jesus is called Waliwu.

Those who could change shape

On totems that names Mahuze, Gebze, Ndiken, Samkakai, Balagaize, Kaize and Basik-basik. Explaining the power of transformation, he also names Kaize, who could become a cassowary; Samkakai, who could become a kangaroo, and Mahuze, who could become a dog or a sago palm.

In that age, he says, they could indeed do so. And that is what is meant by totem.