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[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

I just finished "Cannibals are Human: A District Officer's Wife in New Guinea" by Helen McLeod.

It's a very interesting book about the wife of an Australian district officer who was trying to curtail inter-tribal warfare between PNG highland tribes during the decades when PNG was an Australian mandate.

The woman herself is quite admirable hiking 100kms in the highlands mostly barefoot and covered in leeches. It also describes the state of tribal warfare as it stood, in objective terms, without being too derogatory or dismissive. It emphasizes the truly vast differences between regional tribes, their farming prowess, and the existential threat that looms over all of them from centuries of war. It also doesn't wrap everything up in a neat bow at the end. The Australian governance wasn't perfect, the influence of western technology and medicine was paradigm-shifting and both good and bad, independence was a shitshow, but the author considered it a painful necessity.