Empire of the East (37 page)

The major insurrection in the central highlands took place in 1977, when Danis armed with spears and bows and arrows planted stakes in the runways of Wamena airfield and took on Indonesian commandos, but were still bombed and machine-gunned from the air. Many villages such as Sugokmo suffered aerial attack, in which traditional Dani dwellings were burned to the ground, to be replaced eventually by the government’s standard ‘healthy houses’.

Sugokmo village was down by the river seen through a screen of casuarina leaves, backed on its mountainside by great, smooth viridian rocks appearing to have been balanced, as a result of some ancient cataclysm, in a position from which one day they would come crashing down among the houses. It was full of life: men digging ditches for the fun of it, Namek explained, and others filling them in, friendly and intelligent pigs trying to ingratiate themselves with us, women at work in their gardens, and children galore. An Indonesian official had lived in a house of a better kind, leaving a gardenful of dahlias at their last gasp, and his Dani neighbours were in the act of tearing them out at the moment of our arrival.

There was a smell of money about this place, suggesting that some of its menfolk had drifted away to Wamena to pick up odd jobs. Mess strewn everywhere established its claim to a progressive attitude: a seat stripped from a plane wreck, matching the one in the Excelsior Café, flattened soft-drinks cans, an engine block about to submerge in the mud. One or two football shirts were in sight, and when we tried to talk to a group of villagers, someone went to find a spokesman who put on a miner’s helmet before joining us. This man had worked for years for the Americans at the Freeport Mine and had picked up the best English I had heard spoken in Irian Jaya.

A row of government healthy houses had been built close to the river, all of these apart from one appearing to be empty. With our arrival on the scene this occupied house became the centre of scurrying activity. The man with the helmet explained that this was the officially tenanted house. He seemed to suspect me of being an inspector, but when Namek told him I was no more than an inquisitive foreigner, there was a cordial invitation to look over the place. Inside we found a woman with a pair of teenage daughters bustling nervously around in a pretence of occupying themselves with household jobs, and a pig that had trotted in after them was hastily kicked out. ‘The deal is this,’ the man explained. ‘If a family takes on one of these houses the village is officially settled and we’re left in peace. Some of my friends have three wives and two handfuls of children. Even to get them in here they’d have to be packed like freight on a plane. We keep a few odds and ends in this place and the women take it in turns to cook a meal or do the washing. If it looks like someone lives here that’s all that matters, and so far we’ve got by.’

A few square yards of garden went with the healthy houses. The old-style
honais
with their low, thatched roofs and divisions by which ample space was shared between families had been shoved into the back of these, screened as much as possible among bushes and trees. In this way Sugokmo was slowly returning to what it had been when Archbold, flying over the valley in his sea-plane, had expressed such astonishment and delight at what he saw.

Why are we here, I wondered. ‘What happened at Sugokmo?’ I asked.

‘You asked me about nineteen seventy-seven. You want I show you these places. In Hetegima too many people die. Also Kurima.’

‘In nineteen seventy-seven.’

‘Yes, in that year. Next we go to Elegaima where I show you something. I tell you the story of this place.’

We set off again, but there was a stop at Kulagaima where Namek had learned en route that something was afoot. The Chief’s compound here was even bigger than Da-Uke’s. He had twenty wives, said Namek, and, despite Dani restraint reputedly practised in sexual activity, forty-two children, of which a favourite son was accepted as the finest archer in the Baliem. He was about to demonstrate his skill in a noteworthy fashion, for Namek had now ascertained that there was to be a grand feast at which he would be called upon to kill all sixty pigs with a single arrow apiece shot through the heart. The Chief, who had contributed handsomely to the dedication of a new Catholic church in the vicinity, received us outside the men’s house. He was a man infused with the dignity of power, a conservative with correctly blackened forehead and cockatoo feathers curving down from behind ears close-cropped in token of some old bereavement, and to my great satisfaction he invited me to the feast. His principal wife came into view puffing on a long cheroot, a pretty woman thirty years his junior whose grubby silk pantaloons in this supremely traditional setting hinted at new directions in which the Baliem might be heading.

Kulagaima, displayed in light filtered through the casuarinas, with its children gathered to swim among the leaves afloat in its wide, green pond, was the best of the valley. Elegaima, tucked away in the low hills to the north, was bare and arid. Here there were no people, no houses, only an abandoned and derelict mission, and the yellow river corkscrewing among black fields at the valley bottom.

‘What are you going to show me?’ I asked.

‘Now you will see,’ Namek said.

We left the car to fizz and splutter and walked through the coarse grass a half-mile down to a wood. This was unusual because all the lower branches of the trees, which would normally have been vulnerable to villagers in search of firewood, had remained intact. Numerous small birds sheltered among the trees, having taken up residence, it was to be supposed, in what they had come to regard as a safe haven. At our approach they swarmed away like bees. ‘Is this one of those wusa woods you told me about?’ I asked.

‘This is wusa,’ he said. ‘Here I come to hide with my friends when the planes are in Wamena, but they find us when we come out for food. Four planes drop bombs, then when planes go, seven helicopters come. So there are twenty of us killed. They take me to Wamena and hold lighted cigarettes against my body.’ An agonized rolling of the eyes accompanied the memory. ‘I am the enemy,’ he said. ‘So they burn me.’

‘So you have no reason to be particularly fond of the Indonesians,’ I said.

There was a moment of silence while he mustered the sentences in English. ‘They torture me,’ he said, ‘also I am blaming the Indonesians for other reason.’

‘And what is that?’

I sensed what was coming. It was the common complaint of Dani that the Muslims — as most of the Indonesians were — prefer to carry out ritual ablutions in running water.

‘Everyone shit in river,’ he said.

It was arranged that I should arrive at Kulagaima for the dedication ceremony of the new church at 7.30 a.m. This I did, discovering that by this time the carnage was already at an end. Wherever I looked I saw pig-flesh on display, as inoffensive as the orderly prime cuts in an up-to-date butchery — and in this case on beds of freshly picked leaves. Girls had been stationed armed with palm fronds to fan away the blue dragonflies the meat attracted. The two Franciscan Fathers in their vestments hovered in the background, seeming at first when I presented myself to be a little reserved, and it was hard to avoid the suspicion that they might not altogether have been happy at the presence of a Westerner at a church function of this particular kind.

The killing of the pigs had taken place in the garden of the new church, scrupulously tidied up for the occasion, and housing a simply knocked-together grandstand. What was strikingly different on this occasion from the routine of pig-feasts was that the womenfolk were not only permitted to be present, but were involved in various stages of the procedure.

The opposing sides, amounting to perhaps twenty or thirty warriors, veterans of the 1988 war who it was hoped would be finally reconciled at this time, faced each other across the garden with the meat piled between them. What I found strange and in some way significant was that none wore ornaments: no shells, feathers or boar’s tusks were to be seen. At one moment a brief altercation began, arms were waved and jeers exchanged, but this subsided at the Franciscans’ approach.

The dedication service had been lengthy and the feasting that followed appeared likely to occupy much of the day, but a brief interlude of calm offered an opportunity to speak to the two Franciscans. Fathers Lieshout and Peters, by now the oldest European inhabitants of the Baliem, had arrived as young men in 1963, and had thus been witnesses of the many dramatic and sometimes bloody events that had transformed the life of the valley since that year. It was evident that their congregation was totally devoted to them. I could not help wondering if they could have been the same pastors whose converts in the early days could with difficulty be persuaded to leave the mission church, due to their belief that beneficial influences were absorbed through its seats.

Their presence on this occasion was benign and tolerant in the extreme, and I took the opportunity to sound them out on their attitude to what may seem the excesses of the Van Stone style of Evangelism. ‘We didn’t burn the fetiches or destroy the sacred stones which are the symbols of their ancestors,’ Father Lieshout said. ‘That is not our task, but I know there are other churches who have another attitude. Some books say that Dani culture is bad, and only from the time the Gospel came in they became good people. We do not accept it. We did learn and we still learn a lot from these people. How to live together with other people that we forget already in Europe, we can find it here.’

On the subject of warfare he was adamant. ‘War we cannot accept, and this is a ceremony of reconciliation. There is a problem. When they kill a man they take something, say his arrow, or some hair. This symbolizes the dead man. They also call it aduarit, and they use it to exert influence via the dead men on their enemies. This is what we are working for — for the return of the aduarits they have taken. Only when this is done will there be lasting peace.’

The Father managed a cautious smile. ‘Now it is quieter. First the big men were shouting threats. Now they will eat together, everybody is feeling better. They are talking in a reasonable way. Perhaps someone will give back an aduarit. If that happens it would be a good thing. That would be a good thing. That would be a real success.’

This was the stage when shallow pits were being dug. Large round stones were collected to line them, and brushwood and branches carried in from the nearby forest for use in the cooking process. I was fascinated, once again, to observe the ingrained Dani taste for organization and order displayed in these operations. Thus there were teams dealing with each separate activity; stones and combustible materials were collected by specialists of both sexes, who rushed to their work in all directions, leaping over walls and across ditches with the greatest possible verve and a continuous excited outcry.

With the pits lined with stones and the meat on them in position, the men drew back and the girls took over, arranging more stones over the meat, followed by a covering of brushwood and then branches for the pits, and transferring hot stones from one pit to another, using for this purpose split sticks employed as tongs. As the pits heated up, small explosions of grey smoke hurled stones into the air. Every explosion produced outcries of pretended alarm from the girls, and when one was struck with some force on the arm, the time had come for the men to take over.

It was also time for the girls to dress for the party, and with one accord they dropped everything and were off, athletes all of them, leaping the low stone wall of the church enclosure, dashing through the long grass of an uncultivated field into the trees of a spinney, and out of sight. I had observed that when not engaged in gardening drudgery they took every opportunity to burn up energy, and seemed quite unable to keep still.

Their passion for neatness, too, was remarkable. Muddy patches had appeared on the earth of the enclosure ravaged by so many feet, and a word of command sent the team racing to the fields in a hunt for dried grass to cover these, while a finer sort of grass mixed with some fragrant herb was spread over the grandstand seats.

Visitors drifted in, including a party of notables from a nearby village, all in conspicuously long penis sheaths, and with furled umbrellas hanging from their arms. What Namek called a ‘silly man’, dressed in an army battle blouse and officer’s peaked cap, had wandered into sight, grimacing and saluting, and was treated with utmost courtesy by all present. Namek’s second wife, a pretty twenty-two-year-old, brought a touch of class to the proceeding, her ample bosom constrained in a tight brassière, worn with pleated skirt, green football socks and trainers. She had come with the girls who had done most of the dirty work so far. They were back now from their titivations, all in brassières, their bare skin wherever in reach covered with a festive scribble in many colours, and three pairs of dark spectacles between seven of them — the remainder having painted white spectacle frames round their eyes. Myself apart, the Franciscan Fathers remained the only foreigners.

Now the men had entered into intense, competitive action. It was at a stage of the cooking process before the fire was damped down by a thick cap of new grass and left to smoke, when all was flames and fury. Explosion followed explosion with heavy stones shot out in all directions, sometimes a distance of twenty yards before hitting the ground. Young men — still referred to in Dani terms as warriors — were on display in minor tests of courage. What was required of them was a maximum exposure to risk, and this was done by an unhurried approach to add more fuel to the fire, then, in the manner of a showy bullfighter who turns his back on the bull, a stylish and leisurely retreat to safety. In this way, once in a while, a warrior was brained, and we saw two men struck by stones, although they were able to keep their feet.

Nothing could have exceeded the excitement and with it the charm of this scene. The new church and its garden enclosure were overtopped by a majestic limestone cliff. From this it appeared that a recent earthquake had sheared away several thousand tons of its mass, to reveal a sparkling new surface in a precipice brilliantly striped and stained by vegetable juices released by the forest trees. Under this background the Dani girls touched up the coloured curlicues painted on foreheads and cheeks, examined the results in fragments of mirror, and chain-smoked long, thin local cigarettes. The men, in their best festive paint, attacked the enemy of the moment — the fire — cavorting, posturing and gesticulating defiance to cries of derision or applause. Shepherded by parents and friends, just out of range of the stone bombardment, irrepressibly smiling and overwhelming in their charm, the children of the tribe wandered on the lookout for susceptible strangers, like myself, to nestle up to.