Opinion: protecting the Andamanese
Jonathan Lawley is the author of A Road to Extinction: Can Palaeolithic Africans Survive in the Andaman Islands?
Extinction threatens the oldest tribe of people in the world – the hunter-gatherers of the Andaman Islands, an archipelago in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Until the arrival of the first settlers at the end of the 18th century, these tribes, who hunt and fish with bows and arrows, numbered about 6,000. They survived undisturbed until the appearance of the first global navigators, men such as Marco Polo. Today, the tribes are spread throughout the archipelago, some completely isolated on small protected islands, others living on islands that are now home to thousands of mainland Indian settlers. It is an uneasy situation. To keep people away, the tribes (comprised of the Jarawa, Great Andamanese, Onge and Sentinelese) have long developed a reputation for killing visitors, including shipwrecked sailors. Their fear and hatred of so-called civilization was shown to be well justified with the arrival of the British at the end of the 18th century, when disease virtually wiped out all but three of the original 12 tribes.
In 1857, the British established a huge prison to accommodate participants in the Indian Mutiny on a natural harbour in the region. Unfortunately, the site was adjacent to the traditional territory of the most hostile of all the tribes, the Jarawa, who started to kill prisoners and their guards.
In 1859 the Jarawa mounted a concerted attack on the prison and its satellites. Having overrun one of the latter, the attackers forced all of their captives to dance with them while a British warship in the harbour fired shells over their heads at more Jarawa attacking the main prison. Eventually, the tribesmen were beaten off and never again attacked in full force. However, they continued to raid crops and to kill escaping prisoners, despite attempts to deter them with punitive raids. After that, the British mostly just left them alone.
In 1867, another tribe – the Onge on Little Andaman – demonstrated its hostility to outsiders by killing the crew of the British ship the SS Assam Valley and then attacked the SS Arracan with its contingent of Welsh soldiers when it came to investigate. Landing boats became swamped as the Onge fired arrows at the floundering soldiers. Most were rescued thanks to the efforts of Canadian surgeon Dr Mellis Douglas, awarded five VCs for his efforts. After that, the Second World War brought brutal occupation by the Japanese, who bombed the Jarawa. Indian Independence then came in 1947, but government tribal policy remained unchanged.
Fast forward to 1991, when the extraordinary story behind the presence of African pygmy-like people on islands in the Indian Ocean started to be revealed. It was a Cambridge anthropologist, Erika Hagelberg, who discovered some Andamanese hair that had been stored in a dusty cupboard by another Cambridge academic, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, in 1908. DNA analysis revealed clear links with southern Africa. In March 2020, more DNA research by Vanessa Hayes in Australia revealed that the Andamanese came from the ancient swamplands of Botswana.
The scenario emerged of Africans, the very first human beings, making their way on foot to the land that is now the Bay of Bengal, before it became inundated by the incoming ocean at the end of the last glacial period.
Left alone, these tribes appear to be a healthy population, deeply connected to the natural world. In 2004, sensing the approaching tsunami, they were seen moving to higher ground while hundreds of settlers drowned.
Today, only the tribes which have always been hostile, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese, remain viable. In November 2018, the Sentinelese killed a US would-be-missionary who sought to bring Jesus to North Sentinel island. As for the Onge – only around 112 people remain in a small reserve. Now, the Jarawa in particular are threatened by a road that runs through their land. Despite being declared illegal by the Indian Supreme Court, the Andaman Trunk Road, which runs 230 kilometres through the three main islands (South Andaman, Middle Andaman, North Andaman) brings hundreds of tourists a day into the tribes’ traditional territory, as if into a safari park. Beyond this demeaning exploitation of people, it brings the very diseases that killed so many years ago. In addition to poachers and purveyors of drugs and alcohol comes Covid-19.
The question now is whether modern society has the imagination and humanity to recognise the importance of these humans and to come together to save them. Part of the problem is lack of awareness. Another is financial pressures on a sensitive and potentially embarrassed Indian government. Throughout the ages, human progress has been considered to arise from learning from different cultures and gaining new perspectives. The Andamanese turn this on its head. They have little to learn from modern man and everything to fear from us.