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PARTISAN REVIEW
wonders of modernity, especially the machinery and the
manufactured goods of the West . Those who believed this message
would gather, characteristically dressed in Western fashion, in great
numbers in the places announced for the arrival of the cargo and
engage in lavish festivities to welcome the event.
It
seems that this
religious configuration has outlived many specific disappointments
in that region of the world.
Analogies are always precarious, but it is impossible to read
accounts of the Cargo Cult without thinking of contemporary
Third-World rhetoric and of the settings in which this rhetoric is
customarily produced. There is the same expectation that the gifts of
modernity-if only they can be dissociated from the evil
machinations of the white man and placed in the hands of the
"ancestors"-are profoundly salvific . There is the same emphasis
on distribution, made
gratis
to those who have the proper faith, and
the concomitant failure to pay attention to the prerequisites of
production: the cargo appears miraculously, and all that remains to
do is to distribute it among those who deserve it. Anyone who has
participated in United Nations forums where current "North–
South" issues are discussed must recall those festive cultists, dressed
in the white man's clothes , feasting while awaiting the arrival of the
cargo that will change their lives. And there is the same ambivalence
of admiration and resentment, the love-hate relation with the West
and
all
its works . Here is what a cultist told a missionary in 1933,
cited by Guenter Lewy in his magisterial
Religion and Revolution:
" How is it we cannot obtain the origin of wealth? You hide this
secret from us . What is ours is only rubbish, you keep the truth for
yourselves. We know that all that is the white man's work is
forbidden to us. We would like to progress, but the white man wants
to keep us in our state... . The white men hide from us the secret of
the Cargo ."
"Road Belong Cargo" was the name , in Pidgin English , given
to the means, mostly magical, by which the gifts were to arrive.
Third-World rhetoric today speaks of different roads and it uses
different pidgins (mostly a sort of vernacular of various strands of
Western leftism). The imagery of the cargo has not changed much .
What is more, the political legitimacy of the latter-day prophets
depends on their claim to have found the correct "Road Belong
Cargo," and this fact has more than a little to do with the urgency of
the rhetoric. It is too easy, though, to be supercilious about all this .
It
