Struggle for Survival

An adventurous Briton crusades to save endangered tribes

After centuries of living in utterly primitive conditions, the Mentaweian Indians of Siberut Island off Indonesian Sumatra faced a battery of culture shocks. First they got hold of guns to replace their bows and arrows and began shooting every bird and animal they saw, destroying the very wildlife on which they depended. Then these pagan tribesmen were themselves harassed by Muslim police, who cut their long, plaited hair and took away their beads. Worse yet, Filipinos and Japanese who were imported to work Siberut's newly opened logging concessions began dragging Mentaweian girls aboard their boats as easy rape victims.

Enter a plucky upper-class Englishman. In the days before the sun set on the British Empire, his ancestors might have rattled a few sabers and issued an edict in the name of the Queen. But Robin Hanbury-Tenison, 42, re-established order in a subtler way. After studying the troubled tribesmen, he launched a program to teach them fishing and chicken and pig farming. That helped restore their self-sufficiency and, equally important, their selfesteem.

For England's most famous contemporary explorer, the peaceful intervention on Sumatra was almost a workaday mission. As head of an unusual London-based organization called Survival International, Hanbury-Tenison has been aiding endangered tribal peoples for a decade. By his reckoning, what happened to Sumatra's Mentaweians could have befallen almost any of some 3 million people in a dozen countries round the world who pursue simple lives as hunters and gatherers or as nomadic herdsmen.

For example, in Australia's Outback, the collision with civilization has turned many aborigines into drunkards. By 10 a.m. the main street of Alice Springs is littered with squatting aborigines waiting for the bars to open, their alcoholism bankrolled by government dole. Only a few years ago, the Cinta Largas tribe in Brazil was bombed and strafed from the air, and the survivors gunned down by hunting parties, all to permit loggers to clear the tribe's lands.

The protection of such people may seem an unlikely crusade for Hanbury-Tenison, a handsome, blue-eyed member of the English landed gentry who bears a resemblance to Actor Peter O'Toole and harbors a love of adventure. In fact, that love was his first. In 1958, after finishing up at Oxford, he and Roommate Richard Mason made an unprecedented westward traverse of South America, crossing some 6,000 miles of mountain and jungle by Jeep.

Three years later, while Mason was searching for the source of Brazil's Iriri River, he was clubbed to death by Kreen-Akarores Indians, who had learned to fear and hate strangers. As tragic as his friend's death was, it was also something of an awakening for Hanbury-Tenison. He went adventuring again, but soon found it pointless. He bought 600 acres of pasture land and moors in Cornwall, England, but saw little reward in the life of a country squire. Convinced he should help the tribal people he had seen, he joined in 1969 with Francis Huxley (son of the late Sir Julian Huxley), Viscount Boyd of Merton and Lord Butler of Saffron Walden to form Survival International.

As shaped by its founders, Survival is dedicated to finding out what tribal people need and speaking in their behalf. Missions must have the assent of the tribes-and scrupulously avoid disrupting native culture. Explains Hanbury-Tenison: "We would never go to a tribe and say, 'This is how you should solve your problems.' "

First to be helped were Colombia's 400 Andoke Indians in 1974. Employed on a rubber plantation, they had fallen heavily into debt in a sharecropper-type system that required them to buy their tools and provisions. Survival cabled $1,000 to the tribe, enough to buy it freedom. Then came the more complex Mentaweian mission, the digging of water wells for Bushmen in Botswana, and compilation of a dictionary for the Arawak Indians of Guyana. In 1976 Survival heard that the regime of the Paraguayan dictator, General Alfredo Stroessner, was torturing and killing the Ache Indians in a Nazi-style "final solution." Survival helped finance an on-the-spot investigation by Temple University Law Professor Richard Arens, who upon his return edited Genocide in Paraguay (Temple University Press, 1976), a bitter testimony to 343 Indian deaths and many hundreds of mysterious disappearances.

So far, Survival International itself has barely survived on shoestring budgets and small public as well as private donations. Now the Ford Foundation is providing a threeyear, $60,000 grant, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund is pitching in with $30,000. Saving threatened tribes will still be a hefty challenge, but Hanbury-Tenison is indomitably optimistic. Says he: "We're not really fighting a losing battle if the will is there."

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