Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (24 page)

Starting with my paternal grandparents, we reached a grand total of three: my father, my brother and myself. Pak Jopy didn’t know how to react to this absence of family; it was as though I had confessed to having been abandoned at birth and suckled by wolves.

The clan is a real, physical entity, tied to bloodlines that are meticulously remembered. It’s especially important in this age of micro-democracy, where some ‘big families’ can produce enough votes for a seat in a district parliament. But the clan can also be metaphorical; networks of people bound together not by blood but by geography, by schooling, by gang membership, by occupation. In the Suharto years the papers were always full of the glorious social works carried out by the
Keluarga Besar
ABRI, for example, an organization of the armed forces and their families.

In both cases, the
keluarga besar
, the clan, is the circulatory system through which patronage flows. And patronage is the lifeblood of Indonesian politics and of the economy.

At the heart of the clan there is usually a Big Man (who is, occasionally, a woman). The clan pumps votes and (especially in the case of a metaphorical clan such as a youth organization) foot soldiers through the veins up to the Big Man. This allows him to maintain a position of power which gives him access to the oxygen of cash, of
proyek
and of jobs, which he pumps back into the clan.

At the district level, the Big Man might represent the Notabulen family over the Ingtatubun family, or the interests of Ohoiwait village over those of Elat. In national politics, they would be expected to deliver things for the whole district, maybe even the province. But everyone pulls out the stops for their real, descended-from-Oma bloodline clan.

One evening Pak Jopy and Mama Ona were telling me about their daughter. She had passed the civil service exams and snagged a coveted teaching job, fair and square. One morning, when Jopy was in Tual, he got wind of the fact that the letter assigning teaching posts was to be released later that day; his daughter was posted to Waur, a small Catholic town not too far from Ohoiwait.

This was not good; it’s hard to build a career when one is stuck in a village in a relatively isolated island such as Kei Besar, far from the district office where the bosses who control promotion now sit. Jopy went straight to the department of education and complained, but the officer in charge shrugged: people knew the letter had been signed and that it would be made public in a couple of hours; it was too late for changes.

‘Luckily, we have a relative who is an MP in Jakarta. I spoke to him, and he spoke to the guy in the district office, and it was fixed.’ The announcement ceremony was rescheduled, the list was rewritten, and Jopy’s daughter now teaches in a school in Tual. ‘Cool, eh?’ said the proud father.

A bit later in the conversation, I was telling a story about paying cops off to let me through a roadblock. ‘I guess that makes me a corruptor,’ I said. Ona and Jopy laughed. And then: ‘It’s a bit like the story of your daughter. In England, there are people who would think of that as corruption.’

There was a stunned silence; for a long moment, the air grew heavy. And then Mama Ona stood up and started clearing plates. ‘Shall we go to church?’ she said.

In retrospect, I’m sorry I made that comment. Not because I embarrassed my impeccably kind hosts, but because I was wrong. It may sound like sophistry, but I have come to make a distinction between patronage and corruption. Indonesians make the distinction all the time in their lives and their voting patterns, though not, interestingly, in their language.

Indonesians love to talk about corruption, which they usually abbreviate to KKN, for
Korupsi, Kolusi, Nepotism
. Once, I was sitting with a group of young lads watching soccer on TV. Archrivals Malaysia were beating Indonesia in a Southeast Asian Games match. When Malaysia scored again, one of the lads shook his head in disgust and said: ‘I wish there were a World Cup for corruption. Then at least we’d be sure to win.’

But an awful lot of what people are talking about when they talk of KKN is the patronage that is made inevitable because of the way Indonesia organizes its democracy and its bureaucracy.

‘Democracy’, translated as the election of national and local leaders and the legislators that oversee them, is relatively new in Indonesia. But there’s an awful lot of it. Indonesians directly elect their president, their national MPs, their provincial governor, their provincial MPs, their district head (the bupati or mayor), the district MPs and their village head. Participating in seven separate elections in any given five-year period, Indonesians have developed a keen understanding of the way their democracy works. And everyone agrees on one thing: the country’s radical decentralization and democracy have made patronage/corruption both more necessary and more widespread.

It’s expensive to become bupati. First, you have to pay a political party to back you. Then you have to pick up all the costs of campaigning; costs I heard about but didn’t really believe until I spent a few weeks in a campaign office a bit later in the trip. Unless you are massively wealthy, paying for all the electioneering will mean borrowing money. And that means payback. It’s hideously difficult for the losers; admissions to mental hospitals are reported to rise after every election in Indonesia and several heavily indebted losers have killed themselves.

The winner, now the bupati, can’t pay his debts out of his salary of US$600 a month (it almost always is a ‘he’ – at last count there were only eight women among Indonesia’s 500-plus bupatis and mayors). Instead he repays with a permit to mine, an appointment to this post or that, a contract to build a new hospital or a blue-roofed passenger terminal. ‘By the time they get elected they’ve got so many debts that they can’t
not
be corrupt,’ people would explain, over and over again.
*

A lot of this payback is not actually illegal, any more than it is illegal for an American congressman to propose fracking-friendly policies after some oil giant has contributed liberally to the Political Action Committee that helped fund her campaign. Jobs go to cousins in the same way as internships in Britain’s House of Commons go to that pretty daughter of a friend of Daddy’s. But even legal patronage does often make for bad policies, bad appointments and bad roads.

During my rainy Christmas in Ohoiwait, I had come to feel almost sorry for Indonesia’s Big Men. Once they’ve made it big, even without the direct support of their clan, they are expected to ‘give back’ indefinitely.

Pak Jacob, whom I heard about as soon as I arrived in Ohoiwait, had definitely made it big. He had been born in the tiny Maluku village on the clifftop, but had left to seek his fortune more than twenty years previously. Now Jacob heads the city parliament in Jayapura, where he has served several terms as MP. Jayapura is capital of Papua, physically the richest province in the country, one that provides unusual opportunities to its politicians.

Pak Jacob would be arriving in Ohoiwait the next day, I was told, his first visit home since leaving all those years ago. He would be honoured with a Hokhokwait ceremony, which welcomes a villager’s bride when she firsts sets foot here. Jacob was actually on his fourth bride, but that didn’t matter, she was the first to make it to this hilltop hamlet, and so it was she that would get the welcome. The village hummed with anticipation.

The following morning, I could see that the ladies of the village were putting on their best to welcome the Big Man. This threw me into a bit of a wardrobe tizz; I had to negotiate my whole social calendar of Christmas visits with only two decent sarongs which doubled as bed sheets. I smoothed out the one I had slept on the night before, put it on, and joined the trail of ladies down the steps to the lower village.

We made our way along the road to a riverside spot where the fertility spring wells up. The Big Man had sent provisions ahead; minibus louts unloaded slabs of Coke and Sprite, boxes of biscuits, trays of eggs: I noticed that the malnourished Mohican-to-pigtail fashion had reached even this far outpost of the realm. Then the minibus disappeared to pick up the Man himself. We waited. The ladies of the village hoiked up their pink and purple silks and squatted on flat stones in the river, scrubbing their betel-blackened teeth with sand. From the high banks opposite, naked boys bombed into the water.

When the blaring of horns announced the return of the bus, we all scrambled into position. The drummer started beating out a rhythm, the senior ladies hovered with a red silk cloth, and as the bus drew to a halt the whole company descended on the bride, a frightened-looking teenager who had clearly not been told what to expect. The red silk was pinned around her chin and pulled over her to hide the shabby beige housedress she was wearing. ‘Tsk tsk,’ clucked the ladies. ‘Imagine letting your bride come to the village in a duster!’ ‘Duster’, from the Dutch, is the word Indonesians use for a housecoat; something one might wear while slopping around at home or while doing the cleaning, not when visiting the in-laws for the first time.

The girl was led to the riverside for the fertility rituals; somewhat superfluous since she was eight months pregnant. Then the procession started: a pink umbrella was twirled above her head and we fell into formation behind her, shuffling, twirling our hands and chanting. Every hundred yards or so, some unknown female relative would accost this pale Javanese girl, thrusting at her sometimes small banknotes, sometimes pieces of fruit, but always the betel-nut and lime combination that signals honour but turns the stomach of those unaccustomed to it.

We danced through the lower village and started the steep hike up to the site at the centre of the upper village where the sacred stones and Dutch cannons sit. The sun came out for the first time in days. The teenage bride, waddling up the cliff followed by an excited crowd of people laughing, clapping and chanting in a language she didn’t speak, looked like she wanted to cry. A village elder blessed her, then she waddled back down.

Her husband, more than two decades her senior and with a belly as big and round as hers, remained impassive through this whole ordeal. He did not seem the talkative type; indeed he and his wife did not address a single word to one another in any of their three public appearances in the village. I shook his hand in the reception line after the blessing, but we didn’t chat.

After the trek up and down the hill, the pair sat uncomfortably on the floor of Jacob’s mother’s house, backs to the musty wall. The Big Man’s mother threw herself into her son’s lap, sobbing loudly. He sat motionless until she transferred her grief to her daughter-in-law, snivelling into the girl’s long, straight hair, burrowing into her lap. The girl did some there-there back-patting and looked disconcerted. She smiled only once, to reassure two pale, Sunsilky-haired stepdaughters six or seven years younger than herself, the product of one of the earlier Javanese wives.

As abruptly as it had begun, the wailing stopped. The couple were forgotten and the party began. There were canned soft-drinks and prepackaged assortments of store-bought confections. These treats, rarely seen in the village, were taken as due now that there was a Big Man in town. Everyone grabbed for them with abandon, stashing them away to take home and fortifying themselves with more ordinary village fare: the cups of sticky tea and slabs of homemade cake that issued in waves from the back kitchen.

The dancing began, the women swaying and twirling in stately rows, changing direction with each ululation. Men kept time with drums, elders sang verses of traditional songs, and everyone had a joyous time. At a certain point it all got noticeably more joyous; the ululations trilling with energy and white envelopes being waved overhead. The Big Man had given the dancing ladies two and a half million rupiah between them, US$270, just because.

On Christmas Eve the stepdaughters turned up at church in matching electric pink. One wore a satinate flamenco dress, the other a lacy wedding affair. Both had pink-feathered fascinators on their heads, as if they were going to a society wedding; both wore miniature high heels. They came in late and flounced up the aisle to the front row with a ‘look at me’ imperative. The village girls flapped around them like moths around a flame. The father followed behind, still impassive.

His expression didn’t flicker when the church warden read out the contributions the church had received from various members of the ‘Big Family of Ohoiwait’. Pak Bram had sent a contribution from Tual. So had Pak Ayub, another member of Oma’s clan who was now head of the Department of Social Affairs and Employment for Central Maluku. There were many others who had made Christmas donations to their home village: 150,000 here, 300,000 there. The visiting MP had outdonated them all by a factor of ten.

I wondered what it was like for him being back in this out-of-the-way place, a place with no air-conditioning, with no red-plated SUVs, with no fawning staff, hotel dinners, TV interviews. A place with no phone signal, even. He had come because his father had died recently; now he was technically head of the family. But he showed not a shred of pleasure at rediscovering the place where he grew up.