Telek's "Midal"

This is most odd. Keith's just got a new world music CD ("Gardens of Eden" from Putumayo World Music, 2001) and was playing it this morning when suddenly a phrase of a song leapt out at me.

It said "I am frightened for the children's future. I'm frightened they will lose their spirit." in Fijian, except the language of the song definitely wasn't Fijian and I definitely didn't understand anything else apart from that.

Checked it out and seems the song is called "Midal" and comes from Papua New Guinea and was written by a PNG fellow called George Telek.

Everything is wrong, huh! Fijians DO NOT come from Papua New Guinea and have no links with any of the PNG linguistic families ... and thus there's no chance of a Consonantal Drift ancestral language suddenly coming into focus ... yet suddenly there's this!

Can there BE anything more mysterious? This is obviously something I'm going to have to check out. Get back to you shortly.

10 minutes later: Amazing! In the past, this search would have taken me weeks, yet today, on-line it's taken me less than 10 minutes.

Telek is from New Britian, an island atop Papua New Guinea. AND he doesn't look even remotely Papuan. If anything, the fellow looks Fijian.

You know, I think we may have found ourselves the route the proto-Fijians took from Java to Fiji; they traveled over the TOP of PNG. And we may also have accounted for the missing 1000 years in their journey. They were here in New Britian.

I think another piece of my life-long puzzle, recorded in my post "Made in Indonesia.", has just fallen into place.

30 minutes later: I'm liking George Telek sooo much. I found a couple of his songs on youtube, and here's one that is so heart-breaking; his song, in Pidgin, asking for Indonesia to release West Papua. Have a look at it:



Doesn't it make you ache just looking at the pride and defiance on the faces of the West Papuans as they raise their "Freedom Flag", and knowing that the Indonesians came in and gunned them down. Heart breaking!

And just look at those faces. You tell me how Indonesia has the cheek to claim those people as fellow-Indonesians. They are sooo not the same people as the Javanese. TOTALLY! So the land the Indonesians cruelly claim as "always theirs" and known by the name Irian Jaya is definitely an illegal colony that deserves to be returned to the rest of Papua. Yes?

However, if you actually look past Telek's Papuan costume, you can see how much he doesn't look Papuan. He definitely looks Fijian. Look closely, you can see it, can't you!