Sougb

The Sougb are one of the four sub-groups of the Arfak people, highlanders of the Arfak Mountains in eastern Bird's Head Peninsula, New Guinea. They speak Sougb, a Papuan language of the East Bird's Head family, called Manikion or Mantion by their Biak neighbours, once a slur.

Arfak is a Biak word meaning people who sleep on fire, from embers kept under stilt houses against the mountain cold. The Sougb lived by swidden farming, hunting and forest gathering under clan leaders.

From the fifteenth century the coast around Dore Bay entered Moluccan and Malay trade networks, and Portuguese navigator Jorge de Menezes sighted these shores in 1526; the Bird's Head later passed into the sphere of Tidore. Sougb mountain homesteads stayed beyond the coastal sultanates, their massoy bark and other forest goods reaching the sea through middlemen.