An American missionary has been killed by Sentinelese tribespeople in the Andamans when he visited the island to convert them to christianty.
The American missionary who was killed by an isolated tribe on North Sentinel Island detailed his attempts to convert the tribal members to Christianity in his final diary entries before his death.
In the final journal entries by John Allen Chau before his death, he writes to his family, telling them, “You guys might think I’m crazy,” he says he wanted to “declare Jesus to these people.”
Chau, 26, a native of Washington, allegedly bribed fishermen in the area of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to take him close to the island, where he set off with a kayak to make contact with the tribe. The Sentinelese people have no contact with outsiders and have lived the same way for thousands of years.
In an entry dated Nov. 16, he said that he was writing while on the fishing boat in a cove in the southwest part on North Sentinel Island.
He wrote of making initial contact with the tribe and having to flee for his life.
“The islanders saw that and blocked my exit,” he wrote, discussing the first time he ran across tribal members. “One blocked (unarmed) while other (armed with knife).”
He said he “preached a bit to them starting in Genesis.”
One of the tribe members “shot me with an arrow — directly into my Bible which I was holding in front of my chest,” Chau wrote, saying he broke off the arrow on page 453 of the book of Isaiah.
“I stumbled back and I recall yelling at the [tribe member] for shooting me.”
He wrote that he ran away, with tribe members chasing him, and he “had to swim about a mile back to the boat at the mouth of the cove.”
After this he was killed.
The dark reason why the tribe killed him
There is a dark reason why this tribe are so hostile towards outsiders. They have come before and did terrible things to them.
Twitter thread is attempting to explain why the natives of North Sentinel Island reacted the way they did to Mr Chau’s arrival.
The majority of this explanation focuses on Maurice Vidal Portman, a Commander who had contact with the island in the 1880s.
According to the Twitter user, Portman was ‘erotically obsessed with the Andamanese, and he indulged his passion for photography by kidnapping members of various tribes and posing them in mock-Greek homoerotic compositions’.
Portman, the black sheep third son of some minor noble, was assigned by the English Royal Navy to administer and pacify the Andaman Islands, a job he pursued from 1880-1900 with the full measure of his own perversity. pic.twitter.com/SF00jYoFh3
— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) November 23, 2018
It is thought that Portman and his group located an elderly couple and a few children that they abducted. It’s alleged that the couple quickly died, potentially because they had no immunity from illness due to them living in isolation with the rest of the tribe.
The children spent a few weeks with Portman doing god knows what, after which he returned them to the island. Portman returned on a couple occasions, but the Sentinelese hid from him each time.
— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) November 23, 2018
Just imagine being a Neolithic person spending a few weeks in this guy’s rotating menagerie. pic.twitter.com/X7xfm9efDA
— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) November 23, 2018
Moving forward to the 1960s and 70s, when the Indian government attempted to make contact, the Sentinelese were hostile to outsiders.
Another example comes from 2006 when two fishermen were reportedly killed after drifting onto the island when their anchor detached while they were sleeping.
And their aggressiveness is not the mark of savagery. It just that their conception of outsiders is mostly framed by some foot-faced English pervert who murdered some old people and did weird things to their kids. So let’s do them a favor and leave them alone.
— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) November 23, 2018
This has lead those who previously believed in missionary work to abandon their belief in it.
“I’ve had difficult conversations with family members about Christian faith, traditional religion and imperialism, and through them that I’m often reminded that the strong religious arm of colonialism is still very much alive,” says Mwende Katwiwa writing for The Independent.