Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (14 page)

The next day was the funeral proper. In Tarung, Mama Bobo’s veranda was buzzing. People appeared with drums and gongs, and a great deal of energy went in to weaving a curtain of palm fronds. Around mid-morning, Mama Bobo’s grandson Billy appeared, leading a magnificent white buffalo. Billy had bloodshot eyes, heavily lidded, and smooth skin, slashed across with a great scar; he was handsome. His charge, a precious albino buffalo, was fatted and newly bathed to its natural reddish pink, and they made a fine pair.

The men got to work. They wrapped yellow silk around the beast’s horns and fashioned a rising sun over its brow. Then they fixed the palm-frond fringe to one silky horn-tip, draped it under the buffalo’s throat, and swept it up to the other horn-tip, framing the animal’s head. The effect was to emphasize the magnificent span of the buffalo’s horns and thus the generosity of its donor. Billy got out the pig fat and massaged the buffalo until it shimmered in the noonday sun.

When they had got it looking in tip-top condition, the men of the clan lined up behind the buffalo. They were wrapped in ceremonial waist- and head-cloths, belted with their best swords. Each had a cigarette drooping from his mouth, each had a drum or a gong in hand. Their music advertised the Bobo clan’s act of generosity as it paraded the three kilometres through town to the death-village. They could have taken a back route through the rice fields that lap around between the vast megalithic tombs on the outskirts of Waikabubak, but no, they drummed their way through the crowded market and along a main thoroughfare. In the streets, people gawped and scurried out of the way to let the procession pass. Wow! Look at that fine beast! That family is really something! Behind, minibuses and motorbikes were snarled up, resigned to the hurdles that adat ceremonies so often throw in their path.

Bobo had hired ‘transport’ for the women of the family. We all piled on to a flatbed truck and trundled through the rice fields to avoid the traffic jam, then waited for the men in the cool bamboo grove beneath Mama Bobo’s birth village. One of the giant graves at the foot of the hill was surrounded by a sort of scaffold of newly cut saplings, arranged so that they could be used to winch up a carved capstone that must have weighed several tonnes. ‘That’s where she’ll go,’ whispered Mama Bobo. ‘With my parents.’ I was surprised; normally a wife would be buried with her husband, and rich husbands like Bobo’s brother would have started a new vault for their own family. And indeed he did have a new vault, and the other three wives would be buried with him. Wife number two had chosen to spend eternity with her parents-in-law because she didn’t want to be cooped up with hated Best Brocade. ‘It was all decided a long time ago,’ Bobo said. And she would say nothing more.

When the whole company arrived and the men had had a smoke break, we marched into the ceremony. Mama Bobo held my hand as we climbed the hill; she was electric with excitement. At the last minute she skipped up to head the procession along with handsome Billy and his fine buffalo. Our grand entrance was carefully timed for maximum impact; by the time we arrived every grave-top was crowded with people, every veranda weighed down with guests. Hundreds of people had a ringside view of Mama Bobo’s munificence.

Bobo gave a little speech, then a representative of her birth clan gave a little speech, then our delegation all filed up to the headman to pay our respects, each in our turn. I was slotted in after Mama Bobo and the clan elders, but before some of Bobo’s younger sons – a position of some honour. I watched everyone rub noses with the headman and did the same in my turn, wishing I wasn’t sweating so much, suddenly aware of how much rice alcohol the men were consuming. My offering, a carton of cigarettes and a couple of kilos of coffee and sugar, was spirited away with the rest of the gifts, and it was back to the slaughter.

Already, a cream-coloured horse lay in the clearing, its glassy-eyed head parted from its body with a wide gash to the neck. The horse had been the first to go, so that the old lady would have a smooth ride to the afterlife. One pink-horned buffalo was down, and another, this one garlanded in red, had just appeared in the ring. A young man leapt forward, whipped out his machete, and slashed at the beast’s jugular. The man on the tombstone next to me let out a disgusted jet of betel juice that blended prettily into the horse blood below: his comment on a botched sacrifice. A furious buffalo now stamped and snorted, only partly held in place by a tug of war between a team holding ropes tied to one back leg and one front leg. After another few swipes, the buffalo dropped to its knees and the blood-bubbles at its throat sputtered to a halt. The young killer made himself scarce. His incompetence had brought shame on his clan; later he would have to pay a fine.

By mid-afternoon the space between the tombstones was a little crowded. In a lake of blood lay one horse, seven buffalo and a single Brahmin cow (slaughtered halal, for Muslim guests). Even in death, Mama Bobo’s was the finest of them all. High above the pointy roofs of the village, birds of prey circled.

Now the butchering began. The men of the clan unzipped the animals’ skins, then carefully unpeeled the beasts to reveal carcasses shiny and pink as giant worms. Bellies were slit open and organs scooped out. Steaming mounds of half-digested grass piled up on banana leaves.

As the sun sank, a Moulin Rouge of flayed buffalo legs kicked their hooves at the gravestones; a horse’s head lay abandoned in the square like something off the set of
The Godfather
. On the flat tops of the tombs, a clutch of gongs, a horse-skin drum and a mound of glistening liver made for a macabre still life.

The meat was parcelled out at the direction of a clan elder who consulted an exercise book in which every gift and contribution had been carefully noted. I was rewarded not just for the gifts I myself had brought, but for my association with my clan’s gifts: today’s buffalo and the two pigs that went to feed guests during Granny’s tea parties earlier in the week. That meant I got a mass of meat hung about with a trail of coveted guts.

Outwardly, the gift of a buffalo is a mark of respect to the person who has died, and to his or her clan. Its splendid horns will be nailed to the front of the clan house, perhaps displacing some earlier, lesser sacrifice. To that extent, it’s a gift that keeps giving; it visibly contributes to the honour of the clan for evermore. But in truth, Mama Bobo’s trophy buffalo wasn’t just about respect. It was about revenge.

Nothing, but nothing, in Sumba is really a gift: it’s always an exchange. If I ‘give’ you a fatted buffalo, you are immediately in my debt for a beast with horns at least as long. It’s a debt you absolutely must repay whenever it falls due, that unpredictable time when my granny dies, or my husband does, or I do. If you don’t have a buffalo to spare, what then? You do whatever you have to. You can call in debts from other people, or deepen your web of obligation by borrowing. If payback means taking your kids out of school, selling your rice fields, or just stealing a buffalo in one of the cyclical cattle raids that dot the calendar of Sumba, so be it.

By ‘giving’ such a generous funeral gift, Mama Bobo was essentially storing up trouble for her late brother’s brocaded fourth wife. As with the obligations surrounding marriage, this web of ritual exchange has an important cultural function. The warp and weft of these mutual obligations means that anyone can draw on the collective resources of the clan in times of need or trouble. It’s a sort of elaborate insurance scheme in this parched corner of Indonesia, a place with no fertile volcanic soil, a place where the land can be unforgiving. And it seems to be a fairly effective way of ironing out inequalities in wealth over time. Daily life inside a one-skull house is not all that different from life inside a twenty-skull house.

Some people are clearly wary of getting tied into a web they can’t escape. In cross-cultural experiments, psychologists have found that people who come from gift-giving cultures similar to Sumba’s are most likely to reject generosity from strangers, because they fear the burden that will inevitably follow.
*
Mostly, the trouble comes when these ancient cultural obligations rub up against the demands of a modernizing world. In the closed communities of yesteryear, adat was a stepping stone to respectability and social prominence. But many younger Indonesians have much broader horizons than their parents did. Satellite TV, the internet, cheap airfares and scholarships sponsored by the local government have drawn back the curtains on a larger Indonesia and a wider world.

The main pathway to that wider world is education. And the High Priest in Tarung was probably right when he suggested, while celebrating the failure of family planning programmes, that education and adat are incompatible. I met many young people in Sumba who had to drop out of school because some adat obligation fell due. What agony, to have to lead a prize buffalo into a ceremony and slit its throat, knowing full well that you are watching your hopes for the future drain away with the blood that seeps into the dust between the graves. When I ask young people if this makes them angry, they shrug. ‘Adat is adat. What can you do?’

The government believes that it would be easier to meet the aspirations of these young people if their elders stopped hacking up the family wealth every time someone dies. As long ago as 1987, the Suharto government in Jakarta tried to draw a line in the blood-soaked sand of Sumba: no more than five buffalos could be killed per ceremony. But the people of Sumba were a long way from Jakarta; the ruling never really took hold. More recent efforts by local politicians to restrict the slaughter have fared no better because they all cheat when it comes to their own family ceremonies and, indeed, campaign rallies.

When I was lost on a floodplain somewhere near the great sweep of Wanokaka beach on Sumba’s south coast, I ran into Pak Petrus, a farmer who owned a substantial eleven hectares and who was one of the elders of his community. I needed directions, he needed a lift, one thing led to another and I ended up staying with him and his wife for a few days. One evening, we were sitting chatting with some of his friends. Pak Petrus wanted to know how much my salary was. I must be very rich indeed to be able to just go off and travel as I pleased! I laughed. ‘Rich? With just one of the four buffalo you slaughtered at your last ceremony, I could travel for six months,’ I said. ‘And
I’m
the one who’s rich?!’

Petrus and his friends were thunderstruck. He repeated this observation to everyone we subsequently met; each time, it led to much discussion and a great shaking of heads.

Later, after speaking to a West Sumba businessman, I began to guess at the source of Petrus’s amazement. I had asked the businessman why almost every single shop in Waikabubak is owned by someone who is ethnically Chinese. ‘It’s the capital thing. In my clan, we count our capital in cattle, not cash. But however many hundred head of cattle you have, that won’t buy you a single bag of cement.’

The assumption underlying the government’s ‘stop the slaughter’ approach is that cattle and cement are interchangeable. Kill fewer buffalo, sell some of the survivors, buy a tractor or build a hotel. Make money. Buy another tractor. Get rich. In a word: capitalism.

But it doesn’t yet work like that. In Sumba’s sticky culture, there are two quite separate types of capital. Financial capital – money, cement, shops – can be turned into buffalo, tombstones and other forms of cultural capital. But it’s a one-way street. Cultural capital is the property of the whole clan, living and dead. You contribute to it, and it assures your place in the world. You can’t sell it off to pay for one child’s education, a new generator for your workshop or an Indomaret franchise. When I implied that Pak Petrus could turn a buffalo into six months of travel, I might as well have suggested privatizing air and selling it to buy a gold-plated toilet.

It’s not just in out-of-the-way Sumba that Indonesians choose to meet the expectations of adat before taking care of their personal needs and desires, before getting rich. Look at Bali, which has one of the most ‘modern’ economies in Indonesia, and one of its stickier cultures. Bali was the last bastion of the Hindu courts that once dotted Sumatra and Java, and it has inherited their traditions of pomp. Now hardly a day goes by without a miniaturized version of those court ceremonies. For every temple festival, every tooth filing, every torching of the funeral pyre, people knock off work, get dressed up, beat the gongs of adat. These festivals are a big part of Bali’s attraction, bringing in three million foreign visitors in 2012. But they also make life difficult for people trying to run businesses in tourism. I heard the frustration from a foreign hotelier in Bali: ‘Some Russian punter is happy to spend half a day snapping pictures of shapely brown girls with piles of fruit on their head, but if you tell him his laundry’s not done because the staff had to go to the temple, he’ll go ballistic.’

Bali does celebrate one ceremony-free day each year. That’s Nyepi, the Day of Silence, when no one does any work at all.

Whiling away one rainy afternoon on the veranda of Mama Bobo’s in Sumba, I had pulled out my giant map of Indonesia. It was a kid-magnet; within minutes a dozen small heads were craning over the map, and sticky fingers were grabbing, pointing, smearing. ‘Where’s Sumba?’ I ask. Uhhhhhh . . . After some he-said she-said disagreement, one of the older kids pointed out where we were. And my home, in Jakarta? That one stumped them. They mixed up cities and islands, islands and provinces, provinces and countries. One child made Malaysia into a province of Indonesia: founding father Sukarno, who always looked at Malaysia with hungry eyes, would have been proud.