Empire of the East (34 page)

Suddenly the
nasi goreng
was there, overbrimming steaming platefuls, brought out of a kitchen now illuminated only by the fire under the wok. Obsessed by shallow philosophizing, I had overlooked the coming and going of the waiter. The candles burning down magnified the shadows huddled about us. Perhaps the management saw my American friends as being more valuable customers than the members of the Dutch package-deal groups who usually filled most of his rooms. At all events, although
nasi goreng
previously served here had been a simple affair, this time the ingredients were more varied, although in this light not identifiable. Edwina, sitting opposite, plunged in her fork and in the next instant plucked something from her lip, stared at it in obvious horror, dashed whatever it was away, let out a high-pitched, keening cry, jumped to her feet, and rushed from the room. Chairs went over as Sandra and Lucille followed her. I went round the table to examine the rice-bedaubed raggedness she had found in her mouth. This was recognizable as a moth that had fallen into the wok.

T
HERE WERE TWO CELEBRITIES
to be seen in the Baliem, the first being Da-Uke, built up in recent years as unofficial figurehead of the Dani people, although otherwise, in reality, of little interest except as son of the great war-lord Kurulu. The father had been described with respect by Mitton, Gardner, Heider, etc., classic observers of the Papuan scene, who saw a great deal of him at a time when he had already entered a robust old age. Dispassionately he embraced and perfected himself in the art of warfare inseparable by immemorial custom from trimming population to resources. Apart from his supremacy as a strategist, he was seen as possessing all the manly qualities. He was loyal, chivalrous, magnanimous and bold, a Papuan Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten, although in the end the fire-power of a modern army proved too much for him. By the time of the Harvard Peabody Expedition in 1961 the old man’s shadow empire was about to fall apart. The expedition observed the last of the great ritual battles, with members completely at liberty to potter about the battlefield, to photograph various phases of the action, the attacks, withdrawals and the wounds. Kurulu died, and his son Da-Uke took over, although there was no evidence that he had inherited his father’s remarkable qualities.

Kurulu had come up from nothing. He was a
kain kok
— a man of influence, of the kind typified by those who led the ‘old’ Sicilian Mafia, the ‘men of honour’ existing before the decline into total gangsterism after the sixties. The seizure by these men of secret power was traditionally unaided by birth, parental influence or inherited fortune. In the argot of the place and time, a Mafioso ‘made his own bones’ — a notable case of this grim self-conditioning being that of Minasola, an illiterate shepherd who held sway for some years from behind the scenes of a sizeable part of Sicily.

The Danis, too, in theory went it alone. At a man’s death his meagre possessions were divided up to be shared among members of his clan, and his sons started from scratch. This, and other aspects of an extreme form of democracy, came under the pressure of invasive cultures, first of the Dutch, then of the Indonesians. Effortlessly Da-Uke became a rich man and has continued to be one.

Kurulu’s custom had been to hold a great pig-feast every four years, designed to cement friendly relationships, win over opponents, and bring about reconciliations. It was also a convenient opportunity to celebrate marriages, carry out the rites for delayed funerals, and arrange for the initiation ceremonies of young boys. It was this last ingredient of the feast, just about to be celebrated once again, that offered the major attraction so far as I was concerned. Such rites tend to share a remarkable similarity throughout the primitive world, not only in tests devised to gauge the participant’s understanding of tribal morality, his physical resistance and his martial skills, but as a measure of courage, and resourcefulness when confronted with an unexpected emergency. In the Baliem the initiates were seized suddenly by the arms and legs and thrown into a bonfire. The temperature was carefully regulated by dousings with water to see that no serious burns occurred. Nevertheless it was regarded as the most important of the ordeals suffered, and the boy’s reactions were carefully watched. By its nature this had to be a secret affair, from which outsiders were debarred. Perhaps it was an indication of the way things were going that since Da-Uke’s accession word had leaked out that in the coming feast ways might be found of getting round the ban.

The centre of Da-Uke’s domain remained, as it had been in his father’s day, at Akima, a few miles north of Wamena, an area of wide green meadows with saffron ponds encircled by explosions of ferns. This immediate vista was backed by an amphitheatre of mountains usually feathered with white cloud. The road twisted round low easy hills, chosen on many occasions as a battleground upon which ritualistic manoeuvres could be comfortably performed.

Kurulu’s compound, now Da-Uke’s, was the only one permitted to retain a watchtower — once a feature of every village — on which sentinels watched every day from dawn to dusk for signs of enemy activity. It was under this rickety affair, outside the compound’s walls, that I was asked by one of the Chief’s men to wait until Da-Uke and his right-hand men had completed their toilet and were ready to receive me. Ten minutes or so transpired before one of the principal wives came out to lead me into his presence. She was wearing a jumper and a flowered skirt and walked rapidly towards me in military style, holding out her hand to introduce herself. She did this in such a way as to conceal the fact that a finger had been removed in a ritual amputation. In talking to me she averted her head, so it was not immediately evident that half an ear had also been removed. She was accompanied by a charming piglet that was also much spoiled and squealed piteously whenever she put it down. Her daughter, who trotted at her heels puffing a cigarette, was about six. I asked the mother her age, but she did not know. In Baliem this was to be expected.

The compound was the largest I had seen; a wide oblong with the men’s house closing off the far end and flanked, as usual, by a women’s house, a house for the boys, a kitchen, and in this case, exceptionally, two houses for the pigs. All these buildings were of identical structure and in immaculate condition, with recently renewed and carefully trimmed thatches. The wives had been placed in rank, seemingly in reverse order of age, at the compound’s entrance, presenting themselves erect, unblinking and staring straight ahead, as if for a military inspection. All were topless, the first few the possessors of firm and enormous young busts, but thereafter the years had taken their toll, and a cursory glance at the senior lady at the far end seemed enough. One of the younger wives had been in mourning and in consequence forced to promenade daubed with dried yellow clay for at least a month. Of the clay, little remained, and I suspected that around the eyes a few glittering spangles among the yellow detritus had been added by way of maquillage.

Da-Uke, regally corpulent, awaited at the entrance to the men’s house, decked out in feathers and shells. Standing on his right, his second-in-command had attempted to amend an essentially mild expression by fixing in the aperture in his septum the largest boar’s tusk I had ever seen. The bellicose effect of this was reduced by his brand new T-shirt bearing the lettering Natural History Museum of Chicago. Da-Uke was extremely affable, welcoming me with the polite phrase still in use among tribal patricians, ‘I prize your faeces,’ and wringing my hand over and over again in the way Western statesmen do in their meetings with representatives of unfriendly governments. Da-Uke was seen as having become very much an establishment figure. He had been invited to meet the President at Jakarta, had been lumped in with a delegation of high-ranking Somalis on a quick trip to the United States, and had recently been honoured by the Governor of the Baliem with the gift of a Toyota pick-up. In this he was said to travel wearing eye-shades, a blue blazer, and bracelets of intertwined pig’s scrotums to ward off the ghosts.

A polite interrogation of a standardized kind was now expected, but I had been unable to locate Namek that morning and so was obliged to make do with an interpreter who was new to the game. This man had attempted to squeeze through the language barrier by learning by heart a number of sentences that might fit into a routine of probable questions and answers. Such conversations, for example, were bound to open with a polite query into the number of wives a man possessed. I started off, and Da-Uke held up his hands with one of his thumbs tucked away out of sight. It was ‘less than two handfuls’, in other words, nine.

Next, I understood Da-Uke would expect to be questioned about his record on the battlefield. Without batting an eyelid Chief Yurigeng had claimed to have killed twenty-seven men. In Da-Uke’s case the question seemed to give rise to some uncertainty. ‘He say many,’ reported the interpreter, hugely impressed, but at that moment Da-Uke’s expression, probably as he remembered the government’s attitude to ritual warfare, was suffused with a dubious piety. There was a quick reshuffle of words and the hecatomb was reduced to a number of warriors Da-Uke had
seen
killed.

Thereafter the conversation became a matter of a sifting of verbal clues in a search for meaning. What came out of it was that Da-Uke had an obsession on the subject of fetiches. These are objects of the kind a child would collect — stones of unusual shape, fossils, or the remains of animals displaying some genetic freakishness — and are generally supposed among Papuans to enshrine magic power. Fetiches are not worshipped, at most held in respect and regarded as ‘lucky’, but they were banned by Protestant missionaries, who burned, buried or simply threw them away by the thousand. It was a course of action that often determined what brand of faith a convert would accept. The Catholics tolerated fetiches. Notables like Da-Uke were allowed to keep them and they are still regarded with a mixture of awe and affection throughout the Baliem. Here, the Danis, in so far as they have any religion other than ancestor worship, have largely remained at least nominally Catholics.

Da-Uke was immensely proud of his fetiches and it was his belief that such collections as his could be promoted to become a major attraction of the Baliem Valley of the future, which he saw as being in the main devoted to tourism. With much effort and occasional lapses into total incomprehension the interpreter managed to get across his special introductory offer to me. Normally, he said, he charged two million rupiah (approximately £700) for allowing visitors to see his ‘sacred’ objects, but in my case, as a special concession, this would be reduced to fifty-thousand rupiah (approximately £17). I did not take him up.

The second, and more interesting notability I managed to see was Chief Obaharok, who in 1973, while already the possessor of two handfuls of wives, claimed briefly the attention of the world’s press by taking as his eleventh the American anthropologist Wyn Sargent, then forty-two years of age and the mother of a fifteen-year-old son, Jmy, living in the United States. When asked his opinion of the new marriage in the course of a press interview, Jmy said, ‘My mother knows what she’s doing.’ Of this verdict Wyn wrote in her autobiography,
The Headhunters,
‘no mother ever felt so proud as I did when I read my son’s words’.

Apart from the interest inherent in details of the wedding ceremony, this book provides first-hand information about the resistance put up by the Papuan people, who had been internationally assured after the departure of the Dutch of their right to self-determination, on their discovery that the promise had been a delusory one. Ironically, Wyn Sargent’s presence in the Baliem Valley followed a pressing invitation issued to her by none other than President Suharto in person, who seems to have been a fan. He received her in the Disneyland Hotel, Anaheim, California, and the picture offered of this meeting of the cultures is a homely one. Suharto sat stocking-footed in the Presidential Suite … ‘the little muscle between his brows was pinched up because his feet hurt’. He and Madame Suharto had just returned from a peregrination of many miles round Disneyland. ‘West Irian,’ said President Suharto, ‘West Irian is the place you should go.’ She did, and appears bitterly disillusioned by what she found.

Wyn Sargent was working in the Dani area in 1972, during the troubled times of the establishment of imperial authority. She was quick to take sides.

When I learned of the brutality and maltreatment inflicted upon the native population by the government police, schoolteachers and military, I was overwhelmed with a desire to help the Dani. The people had been beaten, burned and sometimes broken, their pigs as well as their money stolen, their women raped, and many had been subjected to forced labour. I wrote letters to government officials requesting the return of stolen goods, a stop to the beatings of the people, and the granting to the Dani of the rights and liberties enjoyed by all other human beings.

At this point Kurulu is heard of again. Obaharok, whom she only knew by reputation, had formed an alliance with three other chiefs she had come to know and respect ‘to resist the increasing domination of Kurulu’, but when it appeared that the alliance was gaining the upper hand in the conflict that followed she accused Kurulu of calling in the Indonesian military. From all we know of Kurulu’s character and motives this seems hard to believe. Thus for Wyn Sargent Obaharok became the people’s champion. She met him and seems to have been overwhelmed by his physical presence. ‘Obaharok wore a ring beard on a face that told the truth, and his eyes reflected great friendliness because he had a desperate desire to make everyone he knew happy. Behind that face and those eyes was a mind that was filled with honesty, wisdom, charity, courage and heroism.’

Obaharok undertook a short-lived private war against Indonesia.

To show the great might of the man, Obaharok in July 1972, outraged at the sometimes murderous methods used on his people by the police and military officials, tried to put down the whole Indonesian government. He simply could no longer bear to see the physical sufferings of his people at the hands of those who were supposed to be ‘helping’. But Obaharok’s bows and arrows were no match for the government guns fitted with live ammunition and realistic counsel prevailed.