It was at the Adcol that he and his Bully Beef Club members started and laid the foundations for Pangu Party in 1967 with a view towards getting self-government and independence for Papua New Guinea. His outspoken political commentaries made his superiors to become apprehensive so they organized for a shift in his career from journalism to public administration. His inimical view and resistance to racism grew to a fervent nationalism that he inspired with bravado, charm and wit. He then took up training in public administration at the Administrative College (Adcol), now the Pacific Institute of Leadership and Governance in Waigani. He was attentive, listening and learning the ropes of the trade. His journalism gave him a direct insight into the political machinations of his time. He returned again to Sogeri for further training between 19 and then switched in his teaching career to become a radio journalist where he moved back in Wewak and served as a broadcaster. It was there that he first encountered institutional racism through a dual salary system which discriminated locals. A songang was nourished.īy 1957, he had gone on to matriculate at Sogeri which gave him qualifications, of Melbourne standards, to become a teacher in primary and secondary schools. From Wewak he went further back to the east to receive high school education in Dregerhaffen where he was exposed to the cultures and languages of the Finschaffen area of Morobe. His first sense of foreign grammar and numerals were in Japanese.Īs the war came to an end, he went west to Wewak to attend a primary school in Boram. During the war, he was educated in a Japanese run school in his Karau village. Just before the onset of the second world war, the young Michael, had been taken back home to the littoral world of Murik Lakes, a tidal estuary where barrier beaches divide mangrove lagoons at the mouth of the Sepik River. It seem as though the ideas of width and breadth, meanders and corridors, origins and destinations were already there in anticipation of a journey to cut out and create a national destiny. In welcoming his appearance, the Tolai bestowed on him the name To Palangat which translates into an idea of firmness and fortitude, of a road and a pathway. His father Ludwig Sana, had been serving as an officer with the native police in Rabaul at the time. A gem of sorts, more precisely a philosopher’s stone, which is capable of turning base metals into gold and silver, was ushered into this line of a Murik pedigree. He came to Ludwig and his wife Painari Kambe on the 9th of April 1936 in Matupit in the East New Britain.
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