The origin tradition of Sambe and Kunalini is a well-known and popular tale told throughout Enga. The basic plot of a hawk kidnapping a baby, raising it as his son, and luring a wife for him is a common one in Enga and surrounding cultures. However, the details of where he gets the baby, from which area he lures the wife and how he teaches his son to be an agriculturalist are specific to the Sambe-Kunalini origin tradition and probably have some relevance for history:
Long ago when the Laiagam area was all bush, there lived a hawk. It usually flew around Laiagam and Sirunki looking for food, but one day went to Kandep to hunt for possums.
Meanwhile in Kandep there lived a man with two wives, both of whom were pregnant. He decided to take a long journey to a distant pig killing ceremony. Before he left, he told his wives that if one of them gave birth to a baby boy, to abandon the baby and leave it to die, but if one of them gave birth to a girl, to take good care of her. After saying this, he left.
Shortly after he had left, one of his wives gave birth to a boy and the other to a girl. The mother of the baby boy was going to abandon him at birth, but the other woman told her that she should keep him because there would be lots of work to be done in the future. The mother of the boy was frightened because she had given birth to an unwanted child and thought that if she disobeyed her husband and kept the baby that he might kill her. While they were discussing what to do, the husband arrived. He saw the baby boy and told his wives that they could keep him over night but must abandon him in the morning. The two women took their babies and went to sleep feeling heart broken.
In the morning they took the baby boy far into the thick bush to a cave rock shelter surrounded by large rocks. They hung the baby in his net bag inside the rock shelter and went home. The hawk, who had come to hunt possums, heard the baby crying and thought that it was the cry of a kepa possum. It sat on the branch of a tree and listened carefully to hear from where the sound came. He went in the direction of the sound and found the baby crying in the bilum. He picked up the bilum in his claws and carried it back to Papiyuka. There he gathered some dry leaves and made a bed under a kindole tree and lay the baby boy in it.
When he had put the baby to sleep, he hunted for possum and fed the baby with meat. He brought up the baby on meat from wild animals, food from gardens and pork stolen from pig feasts. When the boy was old enough to work, the hawk flew to people’s houses and stole the necessary tools for gardening such as stone axes and digging sticks and taught his son to garden. Another time he flew to a sing-sing, a traditional dance festival, and stole the finest kundu drum for the young man.
When the child grew up and was old enough to get married, the hawk realized that he would have to fly a long way in order to find him a wife. He decided to fly down to the Laeapo area (Lai valley) to see if he could find any women. When he arrived near Lenki, there were some women working in a garden. He flew over the garden as if he were hunting for worms and landed on a sweet potato mound. One of the prettiest girls saw him and threw her spade at him. When the spade struck him on the wing, he pretended that he was badly hurt and sprawled out on the ground with both wings spread. The girl ran towards him with outstretched arms and tried to grab him, but just as she reached him, he escaped to the next mound, leaving her with a handful of feathers. He continued doing this, and she chased him right through the thick bush all the way up to Papyuka.
When they reached Papyuka the hawk lured her into the men’s house and locked her in. The young man came home and when he entered the house, he was very excited to see the beautiful young girl sitting there.
“Who are you and how did you get here?” He asked. She told him how she chased the hawk all the way from the Lai valley to here and how it disappeared when she arrived. They got married and bore two sons, Sambe and Kunalini.
(Markosa Aiakale, Sakalini Kalopoe clan, Mulisosa)
Further discussions with Sambe tribesmen confirmed that the baby came from Lopote in Kandep and the wife from the Yakani tribe at Lenki near Wabag. The Lopote Sambe have their own version of the story of the kidnapping of the baby, but one which also fits into the general origin tradition. According to Lopote Sambe, a woman named Ambitipawanana who lived prior to the tenth generation was working in her garden when a hawk swooped down and carried away the net bag containing her baby. He brought the child to Laiagam and raised it as his son who became the founding father for the Sambe and Kunalini tribes. Three to four generations later some of the descendants of the child returned to Lopote to establish the Sambe clans located there today.
From further interviews with Sambe and Kunalini elders, it becomes apparent that in the tenth to twelfth generation, Sambe and Kunalini clans were distributed over the land between Lopote in Kandep and Laiagam, interspersed with other tribes. In the Laiagam area, Sambe clans were limited to the western side of the Lagaip. We were not able to get good information on Kunalini clans since their history has been disrupted by their dispersal. The origin tradition is said (by some) to mark the time at which Sambe clans first settled to make more permanent houses and gardens as described metaphorically in the origin tradition when the hawk teaches his son to become a gardener. To commemorate settlement and lay claim to the land, the sites of the Sambe Kepele fertility rituals were placed on the places where Sambe, his wife and two of his sons, Tiangane and Kaimuli were buried. The hawk is said to have been buried near a large rock at Papyuka.
Early on in their oral history, Sambe occupied the land near Papyuka and upstream on the western side of the Lagaip. Kunalini occupied the area downstream near where Laiagam station is located today. Both had hunting land in the high country which extended into the Kandep area. Sambe and Kunalini lived together as brother tribes until a war broke out between them. We were not able to determine in exactly which generation this fight occurred, because different people gave us quite different information on this matter. However, most agree that it did not take place less than five generations ago and not more than eight generations ago. This disagreement may be because the war continued over some generations and is collapsed into one event in historical traditions. Here is one account of the conflict:
After the birth of Sambe’s sons and daughters, most of Sambe’s children lived upstream from Laiagam and Kunalini’s downstream near where the station is today. They had a men’s house at Papyuka where their forefathers had settled. During the day they went out to their own areas to make gardens but at night, they came back to Papyuka to sleep.
One of the dogs belonging to a Kunalini man usually killed many possums in the bush at Yoposa and ate them before the hunters could retrieve them. Therefore, Kunalini made a collar of kuima bamboo sections to put around the dog’s neck, so that the owners could hear the wood rattling and know where the dog was.
One day when Kunalini went hunting, his dog got lost in the bush. When he arrived at Papyuka, he told the others to please bring the dog down to his house in Laiagam. Later the dog came from Yoposa following Kunalini’s trail and arrived at Papyuka. There was a little girl sitting playing with a stick and when the dog came up to her, she grabbed it and took off its wooden collar. The dog ran away and went on to Kunalini’s house. Kunalini was upset that the dog had lost its collar so the next morning he went up to Papyuka and asked his brother who had removed the collar. The girl’s father told Kunalini that his little daughter had done it. Kunalini went into the men’s house, picked up a piece of firewood and spanked the girl with it. The man was in tears when he saw his little daughter beaten so, and ran into the men’s house, picked up a piece of wood used as a head rest and gave Kunalini a hard clout on the head.
The fight escalated and Sambe and Kunalini men around the men’s house took sides. The Sambe men got their bows and arrows and started to fight, chasing the Kunalini men back down to their land in Laiagam. The fight continued and many Sambe and Kunalini men were shot. Kunalini felt sick and tired of fighting his brother tribe and decided to leave the area. There were two groups of Kunalini at that time, one at Koypa to the south-west of Laiagam and another where Laiagam station is today. They agreed that if the Koypa group left for Kandep that they would first light a fire on Pipibelo mountain as a message that they had left and that if the Laiagam group left for Sirunki that they would light a fire on Monape mountain.
That night one could see the lights from the fires on both mountain ranges, as Koypa Kunalini left for Kandep and Laiagam Kunalini for Sirunki. The next morning Sambe got their bows and arrows, dressed in full ceremonial dress and Tiangane and Malataini went the Koypa way and Laipyane and Kaimuli took the Kanake way to Laiagam to fight Kunalini. To their surprise, nobody was left to fight except for some Kunalini who were left near the Keta River. The Sambe warriors coming on the north side of the Lagaip and those coming on the south met at Liopa and killed many of the remaining Kunalini men. The rest fled and scattered throughout the province.
(Waipa Lakapena, Sambe Kaimuli clan, of Kanaka, Laiagam)
As with most Enga tribal fights in the past and today, the reason given for the fight is trivial, and is only the final incident that sparks the fight after years of tension. In the Sambe Kunalini case, it is possible that Sambe was expanding and wanted Kunalini’s land. Whatever the reason, Kunalini did not do badly after their dispersal. This fact is shown by the fact that according to a census in the early 1970’s (Lacey 1975), the population of Sambe was 3800 and that of Kunalini 3000.
Kunalini’s Dispersal
Kunalini obtained land in other areas through ties with maternal kin and in-laws. The Laiagam segment of Kunalini was said to be descended from Kunalini’s wife (or mother) from the Aiele tribe in Sirunki. When Lyaini and Sakalini drove virtually all the Pumane and Aiele groups out of Sirunki and the Ambum they could not occupy all of the land gained. They allowed the descendants of Kunalini’s Aiele wife to take over their mother’s land in order to secure allies for future ventures.
Kunalini had two sons with his Aiele wife, Aimanda and Ainamenge. Aimanda and Ainamenge together had nine sons who spread out over Aiele land in Sirunki and the Ambum to make up seven large clans today. Two of Ainamenge’s sons, Kupini and Kii, were said to be troublemakers who stole pigs from their own clansmen. They were driven out of Kunalini to their wive’s places and today live near Monokama in the upper Ambum as part of the Kapupini clan.
The Kopya segment of Kunalini was made up of two of Kunalini’s ‘sons’, Kope and Kupini and a daughter, Kupa Andau. Kupini had suffered particularly heavy losses in the fight. Kope and Kupini left the Laiagam and moved to Lakate near Lawe. Some of the land they settled on was their own hunting territory, and the rest was obtained through marriage ties with the tribes of Bipi and Kuu. Their sister, Kupa Andau, married a Kuu man in Porgera. After a family fight over the division of a garden between the sons of the family, she returned to Muiene with her son Teke, whose sons founded the Kupai and Koneyame clans. Today they occupy land gained both from their Kunalini mother and Kuu father. The Kopya Kunalini continued their ritual traditions in their new homeland and established their own Kepele house at Komale not far from the Bipi house at Telyatesa.
Although the major segments of Kunalini today are in Sirunki, the Ambum and in northern Kandep, other smaller groups went to Maramuni, Mulitaka, and the Lai valley as Kunalini tribesmen fled to the land of their mothers or wives and built new homes. Kunalini today remains a very large tribe, which are dispersed in space but maintain their tribal identity through their common origin tradition.
Sambe Dispersal
Returning to Sambe history, the Sambe-Kunalini origin tradition explains in mythical terms the central position of Sambe and Kunalini as a link between the Kandep area to the south and the Lai valley to the east. However, it is not clear whether these connections began in the founding generations of oral history or whether they had existed for centuries before through the trade network. In any case, Sambe oral history suggests that ties with the east continued to develop throughout the span of oral history.
The first expansion to the east occurred when two of Sambe’s sons, Kaimuli and Laipyane, moved to the east side of the Lagaip. From there they gradually spread eastward into the Mulisosa area, claiming some, although by no means the greater part, of the land on which some of the valuable salt springs of the Yandapo were situated. Through the marriage of Sambe’s “daughter” to a descendant of the Apulini tribe at Wabag, Apulini groups moved into the Yandapo area to become Sambe’s friends and neighbors (see Apulini history). This created an extremely important link between the Lagaip and the Lai through which many cultural developments spread, including the Kepele ancestral cult which spread to the Wabag area, trade of sacred plants for the Sangai bachelors’ cults, and the extension of the eastern Tee ceremonial pig exchange cycle into the Lagaip. Moreover, Kaimuli clan of Sambe was a host tribe for a series of Great Ceremonial Wars.
CLANS AND LOCATIONS
Kunalini
Since Kunalini is so dispersed, we were not able to get the exact names and places for all the clans except those in the Ambum and Kandep. It appears however, that only the Ambum/Sirunki and Kandep groups are independent Kunalini groups and that all others are smaller fragments that became integrated into the groups to which they moved. The following list gives only a rough idea of their distribution:
Sirunki/Ambum Kunalini
| Clan | Location | Nearest school or aidpost |
|---|---|---|
| Aimanda | Tambitanes | Tambitanes |
| Timitimi | Mulange | Anditale |
| Kaia | Pindaka | Anditale |
| Tangaipu | Pote | Anditale |
| Tambioka | Tsikiro | Tsikiro/Anditale |
| Pyalale | Lake/Tambitanes | Tambitanes |
| Mailyo | Monokama/Tambitanes | Monokama/Tambitanes |
Kunalini clans which are part of Sakalini Kapupuni
| Clan | Location | Nearest School or Aidpost |
|---|---|---|
| Kii | Komaini | Monokama |
| Kupini | Kupini & Tambitanes | Monokama & Tambitanes |
Kandep Kunalini
| Clan | Location | Nearest School or Aidpost |
|---|---|---|
| Kope | Walupima/Yapuma | |
| Kupini | Walupima/Yapuma | |
| Kupai | incomplete information | |
| Koneyame | Sanaipa/Walupima | Walupima/Taitengesa |
Other Kunalini clans are found at Maramuni, Mulitaka and the Lai valley, but these have become part of the tribes they joined.
CLANS AND LOCATIONS
Sambe
| Clan | Location | Nearest School/Aidpost |
|---|---|---|
| Tiangane | Papyuka | Papyuka |
| Tiangane Kone | Lopote | Kitipiso (Kandep) |
| Tiangane Pumbuti | Bunono | Walupima (Kandep) |
| Malataini | Yango | Yango |
| Laipyaine | Tambusa | Tambusa |
| Kaimuli | Wanepap | Wanepap |
Lote, Pyaini and Yandapo Apulini are often considered as Sambe because they married Sambe’s daughters. For the location of Lote, Pyaini and Apulini clans, see the sections on these tribes. Tiangane, Malataini, Laipyaine and Kaimuli have grown so large that they can be considered tribes in themselves. For sub-clans of these groups and their locations, see the Sambe genealogy.