Narrative
The Erstwhile Savage
Hosea Linge · 1932
Synopsis
Ligeremaluoga, baptised Osea, tells his life, from Kono, the native village where he grew up, to his conversion to Methodist Christianity, his years as a pupil at the mission school and his work as a teacher and preacher, from villager to man of the mission.
Context
Written in Kuanua, according to the writer Steven Winduo, and translated into English by the Australian missionary Ella Collins, the book appeared in Melbourne in 1932 from F. W. Cheshire, under the title An Account of the Life of Ligeremaluoga (Osea), with The Erstwhile Savage on the cover. Its preface presents it as the first autobiography of an inhabitant of New Britain, and perhaps of the whole Pacific, and Winduo sees its author as the first writer of Papua New Guinea.
Who it is for
For reading the oldest book by a Papuan author, a testimony to the arrival of the missions in the Bismarck Archipelago.
Prizes and reception
Eric Johns devoted a book to him, Ligeremaluoga of Kono, in the series Famous People of PNG.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.