Primitive Art

By Brad Darrach

THE GENTLE TASADAY

by JOHN NANCE

465 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$15.

Dafal found them. Stick-thin and lemur-eyed, he was the Daniel Boone of southern Mindanao, a solitary Filipino who wandered an unexplored 600-sq. mi. tract of rugged mountain jungle. One day in the early '60s, he followed a trail of strange footprints. Three small brown men, naked except for loin pouches made of leaves, were digging up a large root with a sharp stick. When they saw him, they fled like monkeys. Shouting reassurance, Dafal gave chase until the men stopped in a stream bed, trembling.

Fresh Air. The aborigines, who called themselves Tasaday (pronounced Taw-sawdai), did well to tremble. The most primitive human beings so far discovered on this guilty planet had turned to face the 20th century. There was culture shock on both sides. The Tasaday discovered evil; the rest of us discovered good in a form so pure it seemed almost incredible to a civilization that had long since abandoned Rousseau's conception of the Noble Savage. Biblically reminded that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," assured by anthropologists that Homo sapiens is descended from a killer ape, shocked by recent accounts of a primitive Ugandan culture based on sadism (TIME, Nov. 20, 1972), modern man is inclined to sniff suspiciously at any breath of air from the morning of the world. But this air is genuine and fresh.

In The Gentle Tasaday, the story of these unspoiled aborigines is told for the first time with energy and detail by John Nance, an American reporter stationed in Manila. With critical judgment, eyewitness authority, literary gracelessness and barreling narrative excitement, he has made a ragged classic of popular anthropology.

It took ten years for Dafal's stories about the forest people to reach the Filipino commissioner for minorities, a hard-working young millionaire named Manuel Elizalde Jr. Alarmed because logging companies were cutting roads through the Tasaday retreat, the official ordered Dafal to bring the tribe out for a meeting. Stone axes in hand, they stood like figures in an Erich von Daeniken fantasy as Elizalde descended from the heavens in his helicopter. They immediately dubbed him Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday (Big Sacred Bird of the Tasaday).

With the help of Blit interpreters, whose language is distantly akin to Tasaday, communication slowly began. The primitives had no weapons, no agriculture, no art, no religion, no words for bad, enemy, war or kill. For good and beautiful they used the same term, mafeon. They loved the jungle; open country was "where the eye sees too far." Happiness flooded their lives. They laughed and hugged and nuzzled by the hour.

After several meetings, Elizalde and Nance flew into the secret valley of the Tasaday. High on a cliff, in a cave about 50 ft. wide and 30 ft. deep, small groups sat talking by several fires. Children climbed a smooth rock and laughed as they slid down. One boy flew a pet butterfly on a string, like a kite. The floor of the cavern was regularly swept with branches, but no improvements had been made.

The valley was an Eden filled with useful plants and watered by a rushing stream. Usually, the men gathered food and the women looked after the children, but the roles were often reversed. Every adult, male or female, had an equal voice in the decisions of the group.

The strongest individual was a woman named Dul; the most imaginative was Balayam, a prehistoric poet. Asked to define the soul, Balayam said softly, "The soul may be the part of you that sees the dream."

Of the 25 Tasaday the visitors counted, several had medical problems: goiter, hernia, bronchitis. But even though the Tasaday diet seemed low in calories (1,000-1,500 a day), there was no malnutrition, no tooth decay, no malaria, no tuberculosis. During the three years covered by this book, only one Tasaday died, apparently by accident.

Sharp Looks. Women were a dilemma for the Tasaday. Forbidden by custom to intermarry, the men had found wives among the Tasafeng and the Sanduka, two similar forest tribes. But these groups had recently disappeared. Impulsively, Elizalde imported a girl from a tribe outside the forest. Balayam wooed her with tenderness and sensibility. The whole tribe celebrated the wedding by gathering around the couple and murmuring, "Mafeon, mafeon."

By far the biggest problem in the Tasaday's life was the outsiders who had come barging into it. Several dozen scientists and journalists and film people passed through. Everybody asked questions (Scientist: "Do you talk to rocks?" Balayam, startled: "No, do you talk to rocks?"). Finally, the Tasaday rebelled. "We will go back to the stump of our feelings," one of them said firmly. Another told Elizalde his people were tired of the "loud voices and sharp looks."

They never understood all the dangers implied by those looks. After President Ferdinand Marcos established a 46,000-acre forest reserve around the Tasaday, eight heavily armed Ubu killers, possibly in the pay of logging interests, invaded the forest. At the foot of the Tasaday cliff, guards drove them off. The Tasaday only blinked vaguely. They had no word for violence.

With all its problems, progress seemed to please the Tasaday. They liked the steel knives that made it easier to get palm pith, the flashlights that helped them hunt frogs on dark nights. In the Big Sacred Bird they found a focus for feelings that other societies have directed to God.

Inevitably, the day came when even God was not enough. Stirred by the inquiring spirit of their visitors, they reached for the forbidden fruit of knowledge. One night, speaking for all the Tasaday, Balayam told Elizalde that "it might be good to just have a look outside the forest." Elizalde gently put them off. They will not be put off forever. A paradise is being lost, but perhaps it will be well lost if the world learns the tribal commandment the Tasaday brought with them out of the Stone Age: "Let us call all men one man."

. Brad Darrach

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.