16. IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH

They never wash intentionally; the forest, dripping from every leaf, and frequent immersion in water while out hunting, take care of the problem. One must admit under the circumstances their nakedness is hygienic. A small fire is kept burning beside each bed at night for warmth, a useful precaution which I found very welcome on the many cold nights which followed a very hot day. Deprived of the fires the Onge fall ill at once, a fact which I had ample proof on several occasions when I took the Onge with me out of Little Andaman; they were provided with beds and coverings in well-constructed houses, but although none of them complained about the absence of the fires by their beds they all developed feverish chills.

And yet in their own territory I have seen them lie soaking wet all night in one of their temporary forest camps or a communal hut with a leaking roof without any ill effects, simply because they had their fires beside them.

...their cooking utensils... are never washed... dogs rush for it, putting their paws right into the drum [a cooking vessel made of empty petrol drums washed up on the beach]... when they have finished licking, the drum is shining clean and ready for use, with no washing up to do! Clouds of flies descend on the drums, packing into a black swarm all over the bottom and sides, eager to finish off the dogs' work. Sea or river water is often only a yard or two from the camp, but no one would dream of washing anything.

Once the meat or fish is cooked, it is often hung in the roof of the hut, out of reach of the dogs. The fact that the roof is dusty and covered in spiders to foul the meat, does not matter; earth and sand get in the way of the teeth, dust and spiders do not. The Onge happily eat contaminated flesh and drink water from pools in which animal carcasses are rotting or dogs are bathing and drinking.

Despite their unconcern about hygiene, the Onge occasionally do sweep out the floor of their communal huts by pushing the accumulated debris under the gap between the floor and the roof into the open where it accumulates in a ring around the hut. When the old hut has become dilapidated, it is torn down and a new one constructed. At that time the ring of debris is smoothed out across the living area and the new hut is constructed on a slightly higher level than the old one. Over the centuries, a small hill, a kitchen midden, can accumulate in this way. The sweeping out of a hut has been described by the same observer:

The sweeping operations disturb clouds of fleas and tiny beetles... about 5 mm long, which always collect under... food refuse. Hordes of fleas, invisible in the dirt on the floor but multiplying busily, are also stirred up. Fortunately there are no lice on Little Andaman... and the Onge carry no lice in their hair.

None of these pests worry the Onges, who make no attempt to get rid of them. They leave mounds of filth around their huts or in their forest camps for them to breed in, and the light covering of earth or leaves which at best cover the Onges' faeces, deposited near the camp, was never any deterrent to breeding. The Onges never dig sanitary trenches or prepare any other form of latrines, even for their permanent sites; the forest is all concealing. However, they will never defaecate near, or in, a water course, even when the bed is dry, and when my men used the bed of a dried-up stream for the purpose the Onges protested to me, because the water would be contaminated. I was not disposed to contradict them.

This may not be the preferred life-style of a majority of the readers of this text or indeed of its author - but it is a life-style that has kept the Onge surviving happily until recently. For those who find the thought intolerable of leaving Onge standards unimproved, it should be pointed out that the Onge way has been that of our common human ancestors until less than 10,000 years ago and before that for many hundreds of thousands of years.



Such conditions, given an undisturbed and stable environment were clearly not deleterious to the Onge, surprising as this may seem to us. However, such conditions played a role in the rapid spread of new diseases introduced from the outside world after 1858 in the Great Andamans and again less than a century later on Little Andaman.