Ziwani’s podcast series Big Change: How Ordinary Christians Change Their World explores how Christians can drive significant change in society. In the second episode, Jonathan Wilson shares the radical transformation journey of the remote Yali tribe where he grew up – a gripping story of selflessness, courage and freedom. Jonathan is co-founder and Managing Partner at ThirdWay Capital, a venture holding company investing in and scaling small-to-medium businesses in sub-Saharan Africa. This summary was written by Lise-Marie Keyser, and you can listen to the full episode here.
Introduction
In the first article of this series, Jonathan briefly refers to the cultural transformation he witnessed firsthand while growing up among the tribal Yali community in Indonesia. In this second article, we delve deeper into the Yali story, and consider in more detail how these positive changes came about.
A forgotten people
Originally from the UK, Jonathan’s parents relocated to become part of the Yali tribe when he was about a year old. One of many tribes living in the high central mountains of Papua, they were, from the world’s perspective, a forgotten people.
But who were the Yali in the 1960s? “There’s this idea about tribes in remote jungles, living in blissful harmony with their environment,” Jonathan says. “Yes, the rainforest is stunningly beautiful, and there are many ways in which the Yali are highly skilled in that environment. But it’s also a very threatening environment. Besides malaria, tropical diseases, and deadly infections, there’s also natural disasters where entire crops or villages are suddenly wiped out.”
Furthermore, at the time, the local tribes were involved in constant revenge warfare. “This was a key dimension of their life, and they would practise cannibalism on their victims – in order to commit the worst possible offense to their enemies,” Jonathan remembers. Basically, “if my enemies killed my loved one, then I have a deceased ancestor who expects me to revenge their death. And so it just went back and forth, back and forth. They were very aware that life is brutal and short.”
Then there was also the experience of women in Yali culture. “Women were terribly mistreated,” Jonathan comments. “They had about the same social standing as livestock. They were simply ‘useful’ – bearing children, cultivating crops, and preparing food. If I was with other men and we were walking along a trail, for example, and a woman came walking along the same trail, she would turn her back out of respect so we wouldn’t have to encounter her face to face.”
“As a boy, I remember several times when all of a sudden the village would go crazy,” Jonathan recalls. “The men would be shouting and running after a woman who would also be running at full speed down the mountainside. They would be trying to stop her throwing herself into the rapids of a nearby river, because that would have instantly killed her.” It is estimated that at the time, about 10% of women in the tribe committed suicide.
First contact
This was the world into which two missionaries, Stan Dale and Bruno de Leeuw, entered in 1961. After having located the tribe via a small plane, Stan and Bruno hiked through the jungle to where the Yali were – inadvertently making first contact at the very moment when another tribal conflict was about to erupt.
The story of their arrival has become legendary. “On the day that Stan and Bruno arrived, villagers from one side of the valley were about to go into battle with villagers from the other side of the valley. All of a sudden two white men, with Christians from another local tribe, emerged from among the trees. The Yali were shocked! They had never seen humans like this. They’d never seen clothing. They actually thought these were ancestors coming back from the dead – because the Yali cremate their dead, and of course ashes are white,” Jonathan elaborates. “They thought their ancestors were asking them to make peace between these two villages. So they did. And that peace, which happened by sheer accident and misunderstanding, lasted permanently – because by the time the gospel had really started to take root, there was no need to go back to war.”
So Stan and Bruno lived among the Yali – learning the language and sharing the gospel. As they later explained in their own words, the Yali realised that their culture of living in fear of the ancestral spirits simply led to more misery, more violence, and more suffering. But the gospel was good news! It was life-giving. It was the message about a God of love who was offering forgiveness, offering inclusion into His family, and offering redemption from evil. They realised they were hearing about a way of life that could bring freedom and restoration to every dimension of their world.
Violent resistance
As more and more people embraced the gospel, however, it caused a strong reaction among those in positions of power – the shamans, war leaders, and tribal chiefs. In 1965 when two young Yali converts took the message with great excitement to a neighbouring region in the tribe, they were killed and cannibalised within a day. Stan followed after them, and within a day he was attacked too – shot with five arrows in an ambush.
Jonathan recalls the incident. “Stan had been a soldier in World War II. He was a tough guy, but he’d been shot in his legs and stomach, and somehow had to trudge through rivers and over mountains, through the night, to eventually make it back to his home village. By then there was an airstrip, so he could be flown out to have surgery in a more developed part of Papua. What totally bewildered the Yali though, was not only that Stan survived, but that he actually returned to the valley six months later. They had almost killed him, and they couldn’t understand why he would come back.”
Three years later, Stan was joined by an American missionary, Phil Masters, to survey a different part of the valley. “But the people in that area had been told,” says Jonathan, “that if Stan ever came to that area, they must take the opportunity to kill him, because he had too much support in his home village.” And that’s exactly what happened. Stan and Phil were taunted for hours before being killed by a group of about 200 warriors. (Phil’s daughter tells the story in more detail in this article.)
Then in 1975, Jonathan’s dad (John) and Bruno were also threatened by about 100 armed Yali warriors. “My dad was absolutely terrified,” Jonathan remembers. “But while he was praying next to the roar of the river in full flood, God spoke to him: ‘John, there’s going to be no more bloodshed from my work among these people. I have given you work to do and you’re going to live to see it completed.’”
God has spoken to us in our own language
What John didn’t know then, was how good his linguistic skills were. Together with Jonathan’s mom (Gloria), he codified the Yali language, and taught Yali men (and women!) to read and write. He eventually took on the translation of the Bible into the Yali language, published the New Testament in 1990, and the Old Testament a few years later.
What distinguished the Yali translation of the Bible was the fact that John trained and empowered Yali men to do the translating themselves. “He brought in a generator, then solar power. He bought laptops, and taught the Yali how to use them. He believed in their abilities and wanted them to have access to all the online tools that modern translators use. It was the first complete Bible published in Papua, and to this day, it is the only Bible where the majority of it was translated by the indigenous people,” Jonathan says with pride.
These were key moments along their journey of cultural transformation, because as the Yali later celebrated, “God has spoken to us in our own language’’. What is significant is that in the process of putting their own language into writing, they were also rewriting their own tribal culture in the light of the gospel. It literally changed everything.
We’ve become who we were meant to be
Jonathan makes the point that “God is always looking for those on the margins. He’s looking for those who aren’t being loved, who aren’t being reached – whether it’s the poor in a city or whether it’s a forgotten tribe that nobody cares about. But God cares about them. And He infuses His love into ordinary Christians, like my mom and my dad, who then travel halfway around the world to live in utter vulnerability among a remote people like the Yali.”
He doesn’t agree with the popular argument that missionaries were sent as agents by colonial powers to weaken indigenous cultures and entrench colonial rule. “Of course, there were individual exceptions. But by far the majority of men and women who became missionaries in far-off lands gave up their whole lives in order to serve strangers – because they were compelled by the gospel. They gave up comfort and convenience, they gave up their status in society, their opportunities for creating wealth, and their safety and security. They lived in constant danger, endured incredible hardship, and often died young.”
Why would someone pay such a high price? Because proximity is important. As Jonathan comments, “The love of God is lived out relationally. Yes, the gospel contains information – it contains truth that enlightens us and changes us. But it’s lived out in relationship. And as a result, it expresses itself culturally. So a Yali who becomes a Christian doesn’t have to start behaving like a Brit. They’re each going to look quite different.”
The Yali experienced a new force of life and love that flowed within their culture, reshaping it – while they remained distinctly Yali. So when they started treating women with respect, they didn’t resent this as colonisation, but celebrated it as liberation. In fact, they themselves describe their cultural transformation as “we’ve become who we were meant to be”.
“In this sense,” Jonathan argues, “Christianity is not a Western religion. It’s not a white man’s religion, as many people believe. It’s definitely not a Western imposition. I mean, how did Christianity even get to the West? It started in the Middle East.”
Everything in right order
The Yali realised that the reconciliation made possible by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross not only put them in right relationship with God, but also, over time, reordered their lives. Every dimension of their world was put into right order, into right relationship with the other dimensions of their world. And this included spiritual powers. “I remember the shamans,” Jonathan recalls. “I remember the sense of darkness in the village, the sense of demonic oppression. And over the years I saw a radical transformation in this dimension of the Yali culture.”
For example, a plateau in the area used to be no-man’s land. “It was off limits,” he explains, “because that’s where the spirits live.” But after the Yali became Christian, they decided to build a village on this land. Jonathan questioned a friend of his about it, “When you moved into this area, was it because you no longer believed in the evil spirits, or because you were no longer afraid of them?” The friend answered, “Oh no, the spirits are real. We just knew that now that we’re in Jesus, if we moved in, they would have to move out!”
And that is the start of big change. “In the Western world, even as Christians, we tend to talk about Christianity primarily as an intellectual concept, as a set of beliefs,” Jonathan cautions. “Yes, it is a set of beliefs, but these describe the eternal truth of a God who is reconciling everyone to Himself, and restoring everything to right order. It is His love and life that gradually reshapes both our inward lives and our outward culture – so that we can finally become who we were always meant to be.
