Murik Lakes Kakar Spear-New Guinea Art-Oceanic Art-Louis Ledoux
It would be hard to overemphasize the cultural importance of the figurative barbed spears from the Murik Lakes called kakar. Louis Ledoux makes several mentions of them in his unpublished manuscript. “Kakar, group name for all the spears that will ‘kill’ the child within the man in conjunction with the penis being pierced. Shown to male initiates “if I should die he belongs to you.” This is for Sakara and Kaiebe who are one blood through your mother’s side. It is a spear—kakar.” (Ch. 3, p. 69).
Prior to Ledoux’s arrival, a renegade missionary named Heinriech Luttmer had convinced a number of Murik villages to denounce the kakar and had broken them over his knee. The more moderate Catholic priest Joseph Schmidt had taken these fragments to his attic to store them but knew they were in danger of being burnt. Ledoux took “some twenty fragments, so that I could bring them to Kaup and piece together a few good ones out of the debris for museums” (Ch. 5, p. 144a).
Ledoux himself was accidently stabbed in the knee walking into his storeroom by a Kakar spear he had collected. Shortly after he had to make the 11-mile walk from Kaup Lagoon to Murik and his leg painfully seized up. He didn’t want the locals to know what had caused it but surreptitiously asked if the spears, in general, were poisoned. They were not, he was told. Knowing that local men, after contact with dangerous ritual objects, would bathe in the sea to remove the potency, before bed that night Ledoux slipped into the ocean and swam. The pain disappeared within hours. P. 22. Ch. 6.
In 1973, three years before he was to become Papua New Guinea’s first prime minister, Michael Somare, himself from Murik, and Uli Beier wrote the one article on Kakar spears. They note that for the people of Darpoap (village within Murik Lakes), people speak of “kakars not as objects or images but as people. The kakar had to be asked if they were willing to come down and show themselves to Somare and Beier. What the kakar does is fight” and provide an immunity in battle. Before going to war, black soot was scraped from the kakar and eaten with coconut milk to absorb some of its ancestral strength.
This present kakar spear fragment was collected by Louis Pierre Ledoux in 1936, dates to the late 19th/early 20th century and stands 45 ½” (115.5 cm) in height. It is No. 17 in my catalog “Three Collections of Oceanic Art.”