The Matsès, part two

By Jack Krayenhoff

(In the previous installment I was flying to the Matsès, a isolated tribe of Indians in the Peruvian jungle. The main purpose was to ascertain if there was syphilis among them. It was 1983, and my wife and I had taken a year out from my Victoria practice to be the doctor of the Wycliffe Bible Translators in that country.)

The plane landed very smoothly, but there was one thing the pilot had not predicted. The heavy rain just past had turned the top layer of the landing strip to something like butter, and the landing scarcely slowed the plane down. To my horror, I saw the rim of the forest quickly coming closer and closer. I don’t know what the pilot did, but perhaps five yards before the end of the runway and the onset of the trees the plane stopped.

Soon, we were surrounded by Matsès that is. They were cold, covering their trunks with crossed arms, for even in the jungle the rain brings cold. Nevertheless, they were eagerly awaiting the treat Harriet, the missionary, was bringing: buns. Wisely, she gave them to the chieftain to distribute. The females were not included in the distribution; they stayed at a respectful distance.

In the village, our first stop was the house of the missionary to have lunch. This consisted of a treat: roast monkey. The natives had specially hunted and prepared it. Under these conditions, we felt it would be wrong to raise objections, and we started eating it. We had to admit: it was good.

After lunch, we had a brief time to look at the people. The men had tattoos around their mouths; they represented hairs of the Jaguars. The women had slivers of bamboo stuck in their nostrils. When it came to imitating a Jaguar, they had it over the men. It occurred to me, however, how impractical the bamboo slivers were when hunting in the bush, and that this was the reason why the men preferred tattoos.

The big surprise was the size of the houses. They were not huts, but honest-to-goodness buildings with a large roof, constructed with poles to resemble a saddle, and with banana leaves to keep out the rain. On the main floor were several apartments, each for a woman with her own children. This was necessary to live polygamously, because the men were in the custom of raiding villages of other tribes, killing the men and taking the women with them. Arriving home, they would donate an apartment to her, to raise her own family. I asked Harriet how this system of new wives affected the previous wives. Did it cause severe jealousy? Not that she was aware of. Polygamy being the custom, they did not expect anything else. Rather, having to raise two or three children from the father, they were relieved to be given a break. The important thing was that they were not ditched but were continued to be looked after even after they had ceased to bewitch her man.

But it was time to see what the sickness was. One mother came carrying her seven year old daughter who had a fever and whose tibias markedly bent forward. Were these “sabre-sheath shaped tibias?”  Only an analysis of the spinal fluid could tell; pinta, a harmless skin disease, would cross-react with the serum but not with the spinal fluid. So I did a spinal tap on eleven adult women who were symptom-free but could carry the spirochete because they came from villages that were possibly infected. All of them underwent the procedure without fear, simply because Harriet told them it was OK. The samples were sent to the laboratory in Lima.

On leaving the tribe, I had acquired a lot of admiration for Harriet. The habit of killing the neighbours she had discouraged without causing undue resentment among the men; this was a major accomplishment, as the source of new women was dried up. The other habits could wait till later, if they were truly unscriptural. The main thing to achieve was making them ready to receive the good news of Jesus.

On the whole, I had a considerable respect also for the Matsès. The story of murdering the neighbours suggested a brutish attitude of the men, but this was not at all true. The treatment of women, with a beautiful house with apartments for each wife, was exemplary. In fact, the Old Testament, for example, with David providing two hundred Philistine foreskins to Saul by way of a price for his daughter, did not make David a brutish man. I foresee a very good future for the Matsès.