The entry of a different culture with its emphasis on economic exploitation and competition and material consumption resulted in profound changes in the native culture. Many indigenous people, influenced by Western values, ideas, and goods, became dissatisfied with traditional communal ways of living. Abram and Cain, two boarders in a mission school, exhibit the colonized perception of social justice at the inequitable distribution of wealth between native people and the colonizers. But the story also satirizes their ignorance and irrational resistance to colonial oppression through the low comic elements of the plot.
In using the symbol of cargo, the narrative is tapping anthropological material. To explain the sudden appearance of manufactured goods in their society, brought in by ship or air (cargo), some Papua New Guineans proposed that these objects were divinely delivered and created a cult of cargoworship relating these goods to presents from their ancestors. Abram and Cain's "mission," to discover how the colonizers, represented by the Reverend Father, have stolen cargo from their people, can be read as a form of resistance to the colonizing venture, carried out, in this case, by the Christian Church. Although their actions in tracking the Reverend Father's visit to the outhouse are seen by the more sophisticated reader as buffoonish and absurd, their motivations in seeking to redirect "the wealth flowing into the hands of the white Reverend Father" to their own people can be read on another level as a serious expression of the desire of dispossessed people to share in the world's plenty. Thus, the story's conclusion, with the pact between the four boys from enemy tribes, suggests the kind of political coalition that would finally succeed in gaining these native people their independence from European colonism.
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