A Matter of Cargo: Yali's Question

This article tells of how, while studying people in Papua New Guinea, a western anthropologist named Jared Diamond was faced with a crucial and difficult question that has surely already been asked numerous times in other ages in numerous other places, especially in Africa. The article says:

Yali was a political leader and a member of a “cargo cult” that sprung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing strips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets, islanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food, weapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that had been airdropped to troops fighting Japan.

One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

The article went on to discuss what this question really meant, with one of Diamond's colleagues arguing that it had nothing to do with the "nifty Western stuff."

What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had never treated them like fellow human beings.

I would take it somewhere else. Taking Yali's words to be stated accurately by the article, I would say he was mainly questioning why it had been seen fit to drop all that gear on New Guinea in the first place, as till then the people there had been doing well enough without it, and since then had not been doing quite as well, and instead even had to suffer ridicule from the same West because of the hunger for more to arrive from the skies, when in reality it signaled the end of the numerous New Guinea societies in their original states.

It isn't quite the same thing, but among the many vagaries that I happened to witness without making much effort to do so, once I saw a stage of this cargo thing in action.

When I was stationed on the island of Okinawa in 1954, only nine years after the disastrous battle there near the end of WW2, the main sights that struck me and that I saw over and over again were the mountains of "materiel" that the U.S. forces had stockpiled there for the invasion of the Japanese home islands that never took place. Now there were fields of those supplies and that equipment all over the place, slowly deteriorating in the tropic sun and the typhoons. And as I watched the largely rural and non-affluent, war-ravaged Okinawans quietly picking their way through and past it all, I wondered what they thought.

Having lived all my life in the strictly non-industrial Nation's Capital, I discovered that I had had no idea of how capable the U.S. was of manufacturing things, cargo, to an unimaginable extent But the more I learned and cogitated upon about that War, I came to think that it was precisely that American almost out-of-control ability to manufacture stuff that had been responsible for the Allied victory as much as anything.

Now all that "materiel" is long gone, and I doubt that the Okinawans spent much time praying for more to arrive. Since then they have rejoined -- willingly or not -- the Japanese, who had even before the War become renowned for their own ability to manufacture stuff by the megatons and spread it around en masse, though now, in their increasing sophistication, both the U.S. and Japan have eased up on that activity and have left it largely to more primitive societies, like those of Mexico and China. Except that they--

Meanwhile, and so it goes.