Empire of the East (32 page)

At this point one or two Dani bystanders who had stopped for a chat could not resist shouting advice to the youngsters and then scrambling over the field to snatch the tools from the children’s hands and demonstrate how the work was properly done. This brought the junior master, furiously protesting, on the scene. He called the interferers ‘saboteurs’, using a fashionable newcomer to the national language, which was employed, Namek said, to denounce anyone disliked by a government servant on any grounds.

Suddenly, after adzes and clenched fists had been raised in fury, it all died down. The head, imperturbable as ever in true Javanese style, came down the steps, shook hands and handed out cigarettes to the disputants, and no face was lost. The children, who for five minutes had been an undisciplined mob, calmed down a little and settled with unabated enthusiasm to their jobs. It would take them a week, Namek said, to provide Megapola with a splendid new vegetable garden.

Ultimately this was to no purpose according to those who controlled the national thinking. Not only was subsistence food-production contrary to national policy, but it was bad for the producers themselves. There was a school of thought, attracting much publicity, that attributed the backwardness (as they put it) of ‘isolated’ tribes such as the Danis to what they ate. ‘Their lack of mental alertness, lack of concentration, and reduced intelligence’, as one of the government publications said, ‘is largely due to their eating habits, and their ignorance of the facts of nutrition and hygiene.’

Like Megapola, all sizeable villages in the Baliem are Indonesian — that is Javanese — in architecture and style. Except in the case of public buildings, houses are made of wood, devoid usually of paint and adornment, and in general aspect a little dull. Their occupants are outstandingly fond of flowers and squeeze little flower gardens into every hole and corner in an effort to brighten them up. The police do this in some style. Whenever the blow falls and they are told of the posting to Irian Jaya, there is a rush to the nearest garden centre to buy all the pot plants they can carry. The first thing I saw upon arrival in Megapola was the policeman at the post there watering his plants. Strident colours are preferred: cactuses exploding with fiery blossoms, scarlet salvias thrusting like bayonets from the earth, dahlias, canna. The schoolmaster had gone in for miniature decorative firs from Scandinavia, and had planted a copse of them round his door. Danis in from the country and faced with these displays, Namek said, would invariably ask what the plants tasted like and there are reports of their being stewed up for use as an appetizer with sweet potatoes. Nevertheless, while mystified by pot plants, the Danis fussed continually to beautify their traditional villages. They would tolerate no mess of any kind about the place, and there were flowers in plenty. These were invariably those of flowering trees transplanted from the jungle.

There was a tiny market here, only for the benefit of the Javanese settlers. On display were some of the most spectacular lettuces and celery I had ever seen, and carrots weighing a pound and over, eighteen inches in length. The Danis had been under pressure, Namek said, to grow these for the market, and did so, with some reluctance. They called them ‘silly’, he said. ‘Do you like these?’ I asked one of the market people. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We eat them sometimes for medicine. They have no taste.’

The most interesting feature of my association with Namek was that he was the only person who had spoken with nostalgia of the cessation of the almost continuous state of warfare in the highlands of Irian Jaya and who had actually fought and been wounded in a battle. In theory the warlike operations inseparable from the culture of all the mountainous region of New Guinea had been suppressed in the Indonesian area shortly after 1961, when the Harvard Peabody Expedition wandered backwards and forwards without hindrance through the ranks of the contending sides taking several thousand excellent photographs of the last of the major battles in progress. Nevertheless, local conflicts have continued to crop up regularly since then. In Endoman the principal topic was of the small war in the area shortly before my arrival. The year 1988 saw hostilities spread over several months in the South Baliem with a death toll variously estimated at between thirty and one hundred and forty. At Easter 1992 fighting broke out on the southern outskirts of Wamena itself causing possibly a dozen deaths. Such happenings receive no publicity, and it is unlikely that tourists ever come to hear of them.

In
Gardens of War
Robert Gardner, one of the leaders of the Harvard Peabody Expedition, writes:

The Dani fight because they want to, and because it is necessary. They do not enter into battle in order to put an end to fighting. They do not envisage the end of fighting any more than the end of gardening or of ghosts. Nor do they fight in order to annex land or to dominate people. The Dani are warriors because they have wanted to be since boyhood, not because they are persuaded by political arguments or their own sentimental and patriotic feelings. They are ready to fight whenever their leaders decide to do so.

It is an evaluation remarkably endorsed by the experiences of Namek, who, despite his hybrid culture, his fair degree of fluency in two foreign languages, his habitual use of Western clothing and his quarter share in a dilapidated car, had found himself spear and bow in hand on a mountainside near Kurima, the place of his birth.

Probably as a result of his partial Westernization, Namek had left his first wife and some land he cultivated in the Kurima area and had gone to live with a second wife near Elegaima in the North. Here, news reached him of a dispute in the old homeland over a piece of land claimed by two clans, to one of which he belonged. The quarrel, Namek said, was artificial. This land had remained untended for years. It was an agreed no man’s land overgrown with weeds and sapling trees and had been fought over many times before, only to be instantly abandoned by the side that had finally taken possession of it. There was no better confirmation of Robert Gardner’s dictum. A barren field was the perfect and instantly available pretext for war.

A formal declaration was issued by those Namek now referred to as the mountain people. The challenge was accepted by the valley people, a provisional date set for the battle, and a call-up sent out by both sides. Namek found himself in a quandary. He had been born in one of the valley villages involved in the dispute, and had married a woman who still lived in the village and was registered there as his wife. Although it was ten years since he had married his second wife and moved away to Elegaima, he was still caught up in a complex clan arrangement with the valley people of the South. It was in Elegaima that the equivalent of his call-up papers reached him. These his strong-minded new wife urged him to ignore. He wholly agreed with her. He had never seen the land in dispute, nor did he wish to do so, and his life had become remote from that of the clans of Kurima.

He regarded himself as possessing a calm, quiet temperament, and was in instant agreement with his wife’s advice when she said, ‘Perhaps they will come for you. You must go away and hide.’

Namek’s wife talked him into leaving the house for the period of the emergency and moving into a shack he had built in a vegetable garden in a spot well sheltered from casual view. He worked there comfortably enough for two days cutting an irrigation ditch before being overtaken by a feeling of anxiety of a kind familiar to Danis and attributed by them to ill-intentioned ghosts. Voices scolded him in the night, and the years spent as a child and adolescent in the mission had not been long enough to silence them. These he was obliged to accept as an ancestral summons to the battle.

On the evening of the third day he stripped off his Western clothes, fixed his penis gourd in position, grabbed his spear and bow and set off for the place near the Wauma Bridge in the south of the Baliem where the battle was to be fought. To be sure of avoiding capture by the police in his fighting trim he was obliged to skirt villages, and keep away from roads and tracks. The ghosts had been accurate in their monitory timing, for, having run for most of the night, he arrived at Wauma shortly after dawn — in time to report to the valley people’s Chieftain just as battle was about to be joined. His bow was tested, his spear measured for length, and a bundle of arrows issued to him. At this point the minor Chief in charge of these details happened to mention that his uncle was fighting on the other side.

What followed throws perhaps another flicker of light on the character, psychology and motives of ritual warfare. By now about three hundred men had taken up battle stations on each side: the valley people on the lower frontier, down by the river, of the area under dispute, while an equal number of mountain people were mustered some hundreds of yards away across the hillside above. On both sides the heads of families were receiving their last-minute orders from the ‘big men’ whose prestige had been staked on the outcome of the battle. The forthcoming fight would be at the furthest imaginable extreme from modern warfare in any of its guises: a delicate, light-footed exercise in feints and subterfuges, ambushes, surprise attacks and withdrawals carried out by young athletes moving at the speed of Olympic runners. In this moment of frenzied tension, among the shouted challenges, the Papuan catcalls, the threats, the cries of derision, when the impetuous young warriors had to be physically restrained by their comrades from suicidal single-handed ventures, Namek’s case had to receive consideration. He was permitted to cross no man’s land, find his uncle among the enemy, take him aside and formulate a plan by which they placed themselves in the battle in such a way that it was not possible to kill each other.

The extreme poverty of a shared vocabulary prevented Namek from sketching in more than the barest outlines of a battle which clearly reproduced in general pattern the one illustrated by the photographers in Gardner’s book. The camera depicts every stage of the similar encounter in Kabela in 1961, recording hand-to-hand combat, thrusts, the agony of the wounded, the fearful primitive surgery. Nevertheless drastic action is hamstrung by the rules. This is warfare in which men are killed, but it is also a game.

As at Endoman in the mock battle, bodies of men advance waving their weapons and leaping high into the air before hurling their spears and retreating. The effect is choreographic rather than belligerent, and little blood is shed. This is not warfare as we understand it. Arrows that are not feathered inflict only accidental damage. Gardner noted at Kabela that half the fatalities arose from infections in minor flesh wounds. The spear-throwing and bad archery appear as hardly more than military histrionics, but in the separate combats in which the warriors confront each other after adopting the postures of Japanese wrestlers, deaths sometimes occur. To kill a man is a costly business, involving the victor in feasts with clan members of his vanquished adversary, which in the end he will probably pay for with his own life. In such fights a weakened opponent was given a chance to survive. Rarely was a man speared in a frontal bodily area where the soul was supposed to reside. There were conventional manoeuvres in which he could be encouraged to turn away, or retreat, and then skewered in the buttocks or thighs.

It was such a manoeuvre that put Namek out of the battle, with a spear thrust in the back of the leg just above the knee joint. Although crippled and defenceless, no attempt was made to inflict further damage upon him. The old man kept ready to take the wounded in charge wrapped a cloth round his head to prevent identification by one of the ghosts attracted to such scenes by the scent of blood, then put him on a makeshift stretcher to be carried by nightly stages back to his home in Elegaima. Here after three months of treatment by native remedies he had recovered sufficiently to be back at the wheel of his taxi.

T
HE BALIEM VISTA
exposed its guests to a series of mild oriental experiences which the Javanese who stayed there probably did not notice, and the foreigner at first accepted as all part of the fun. Apart from these Javanese expatriates connected with local ministries or businesses, the losmen was frequented in the main by Dutch package-deal tourists who stayed four days and did the sights, such as they were, before their return to Jakarta — usually, by all accounts, in a state of physical and nervous depletion. There are many small things wrong with the Baliem Vista, the first being the interminable wait for meals which, when finally served, were almost certain to be not as ordered. The locks on the room doors jammed constantly in such a way as either to lock guests out or lock them in. In addition an obscene-looking tail-less tomcat pounded endlessly up and down the passages in pursuit of large marsupial mice, and having caught one would immediately present it to the first Dutch lady it encountered.

Among the small advantages the Vista had to offer was the pint of tea left at frequent intervals outside the room door. It was pleasant, too, as evening approached, to relax in the wide, glass-enclosed porch serving as a lounge, to watch the lively mix of street scenes, and the missionary joggers panting past at half past five according to their invariable custom. At exactly a quarter to six the moment awaited by all arrived — a transfiguring radiance illuminated the plaster facades and tin roofs and conferred upon Wamena a moment almost of dignity. Minutes later the day was at an end.

When I was there the Dutch group were in the charge of an extremely bright and beautiful Indonesian courier. She was compelled at this hour to listen to the complaints of tourists who had been upset by the sight and sound of pig-killing in a ceremony she had taken them to. They had been caught in heavy showers, tipped into shallow rivers by the porters who had carried them on their backs, chased by dogs objecting to their smell, had got flies in their eyes, and in one case a leech between the toes. There were more complaints about the long wait for dinner. One of the guests, on wandering through into the kitchen, had found it to contain one wok, one electric ring, and one cook to prepare dinner for twenty-one persons, each meal being cooked separately. He described this predicament to the rest of the Dutch who sat along one wall of the porch, with the Javanese along the other wall facing them. The Javanese had brought hundreds of family snaps in their luggage, and these were doled out and passed round to be admired, as the Dutch already knew, for hour after hour. Most of the people here could expect to wait several hours for their food. The Javanese threw up their hands in wonder at the family snaps and nodded and smiled incessantly, while a low murmur of discontent arose from the Dutch. Shinta, the courier, had studied the Yogyanese classical dance and had taken part in the Ramayana Ballet — performed on nights of the full moon at the Prambanam Temple near Yogya — with her head still full, as she admitted to me, of celestial visions of enchanters and demons and the divine thunderbolts hurled by the gods. An attempt to interest the guests in such things, in the long drawn-out pause until the first of them would be beckoned to table, failed, and they drifted away to the patio where the reception was better for the transistors pressed to their ears in an attempt to pick up the news on the BBC World Service. As soon as they could be interrupted she presented each of them with a leaflet headed
Let Us Smile Together,
which explained how visitors to Indonesia should best confront certain frustrations that might arise. ‘In all circumstances remain calm. Thus you will earn respect. It is typical of the national personality that there are six ways to say YES, but great efforts are made to avoid speaking the word NO. Let us smile together. Let us remember to say YES whenever we can.’