The Swagap are one of the indigenous peoples of

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. They are also known as the Insect Tribe. They speak the

Nggala language Ngala, or Sogap, is one of the Ndu languages of Sepik River region of northern Papua New Guinea. It is spoken in the single village of Swagap () in Ambunti Rural LLG of East Sepik Province East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its cap ...

(also called Swagap or Sogap), which is one of the

Sepik languages The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a language family, family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik River, Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than prese ...

belonging to the Ndu branch.

Homelife

The tribe lives in a village that sits above the waters of the

Sepik River The Sepik () is the longest river on the island of New Guinea, and the third largest in Oceania by discharge volume after the Fly River, Fly and Mamberamo River, Mamberamo. The majority of the river flows through the Papua New Guinea (PNG) provi ...

, named Sawagap. The tribe live off fish and other animals that they hunt in the jungle, but their chief source of income comes from crocodile skin.

Religious beliefs

They worship the

praying mantis Mantises are an order (Mantodea) of insects that contains over 2,400 species in about 460 genera in 33 families. The largest family is the Mantidae ("mantids"). Mantises are distributed worldwide in temperate ...

Discovery and outside contact

They were unknown to the outside world until the 1950s. More recently, they were the subject of a documentary by Donal MacIntyre in 2007, in which six members of the tribe, including their chief, Joseph, were flown to London as part of the special ''Return of the Tribe''.

Homelife

Religious beliefs

Discovery and outside contact

Sources

Further reading