Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  ‘This Bugis journey, on sailing prahu, may be very difficult, very dangerous, now,’ he warned us. ‘Two people you must know. First, the General, so he can protect you, if he likes your filming; and, second, Chinese trader friend, Tan Hans Yong, who has family in the Aru Islands where Bugis used to go. But much better you try film funeral of Puang Sangalla of Toraja people. I just hear it begins, maybe one month now.’

  If anyone knew when this unique event might actually happen, it was Werner, for it was he who had dramatically cured the late king of tuberculosis in the 1950s, thereby becoming a much-loved honorary member of the tribe, and the recipient of all the latest news and gossip from Torajans visiting the lowlands. This was tremendously exciting news for us, but it also confronted us with the dilemma of attempting to make two films with a budget and film stock barely sufficient for one. This would mean spending very little on food, saying goodbye to our ‘emergency contingency fund’, and shooting a usable-film ratio of six to one, as opposed to the more realistically recommended 12 or even 15 to one.

  Werner’s ‘General’ turned out to be the commander of the armed forces in southern Celebes – a figure whom we would normally have done our utmost to avoid, given his political power and our absence of filming permits, but he turned out to be an exuberantly friendly man who never asked for them. He spoke numerous languages, had travelled widely abroad, and was delighted by the prospect of our filming either the Toraja or the Bugis, though he expressed some misgivings about sailing any distance with the latter. He then astonished us by lending us a jeep, with its driver, Abu, for as long as we needed it.

  ‘First go and find out what’s happening with those crazy priests up in Torajaland,’ he told us. ‘Then you had better start exploring the coast for the villages which still build, own and crew these prahu. Be careful of them, though; they’re not used to foreigners,’ he finished ominously, as Abu, a villainous-looking Makassarese Ali Baba, was ushered in to meet us. He entered the room with the pop-eyed, lock-jawed expression of one who was expecting to hear a death-sentence from his commanding officer, but he cracked into smiles of various kinds when he heard we were to be his protégés.

  The General rose from behind his enormous mahogany desk, without visibly gaining in stature, and came out on to the veranda to see us off. ‘Just remember,’ he shouted at us, ‘let me know what’s happening in Torajaland; don’t let Abu too close to those Toraja ladies; and bring back my jeep!’

  ‘Tanah Toraja’, or ‘Torajaland’, could only be reached via a hazardous 14-hour jeep-ride, a journey which was not enhanced by the sensibilities of our zealous Abu. Never before had we experienced a road code which considered any living things trespassing on the tarmac to be absolutely fair game. Even before we had left the outskirts of Makassar, Abu grinned into my face and asked, ‘In your country, chickens fly?’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ I replied, puzzled by the question.

  ‘Well, Indonesian chickens fly – look!’ he said, accelerating towards a group of hens pecking at some minor accident on the road ahead. Those that weren’t instantly flattened proved to be the first genuinely air-worthy chickens I had ever seen. One of them even took off to perch indignantly on a rooftop a good 60 yards away. Despite our strong protestations, this was to be the pattern of ‘flight or slaughter’ for the whole journey. Human pedestrians faced the same treatment, but knowing the rules they were quicker off the mark.

  It was even more frightening when we reached the cooler highlands, where at night people would huddle on the road for warmth, barely visible and apparently asleep, yet able to leap dexterously out of our path at the last moment. Narrow and deeply potholed, the road coiled without any protective barriers next to vertiginous drops to the valleys below. Happily there was little other traffic – and most of that appeared to be oxidizing in heaps at the bottom of the chasms either side of us. Occasionally we encountered a bus or truck hurtling down towards us, slamming on the brakes at the last minute to edge past us with inches to spare. We were never passed from behind. Abu was an army man in an army jeep, to which he was wedded as intimately as any Indian mahout is wedded to his elephant.

  As a Makassarese, Abu, along with the other lowland seafaring tribes such as the Bajos and the Bugis, was one of the first drivers on the island. In less than a generation the pirate peoples who were notorious for forging themselves and their sailing craft through impossible conditions had acquired the ability to command undreamed-of tonnage and horsepower with their big toes. They also brought to the road some eccentric sealore of their own. It is their custom, even on their largest ships, to show no lights at night – on the principle that it is better to see than to be seen, and that it is easier to see in the dark without the distraction of lights. When night fell we were appalled to find that the same principle had been carried over to the highway. During a bright moon, headlights were kept off – otherwise they remained on only when driving on the road alone. When another vehicle approached to within 50 yards, both would turn their lights off, and pass each other in total darkness.

  Six hours into the journey, and several thousand feet higher, we stopped at a small village to quench our thirst and refuel the jeep from rusty milk-cans. I was afflicted with diarrhoea – and directed to the communal latrine, which consisted of eight holes in the ground surrounded by a large enclosure of bamboo walls. About 80 villagers followed me inside and waited expectantly… so I struck out for the hinterlands. About a quarter of a mile later they were still with me, and it became clear that choosing between dignity and entertaining the village was no longer an option. They made no effort to withdraw, or temper their gaze or remarks, and I struggled to maintain the sort of meditational dispassion which I’d observed in my cat on its box.

  When we took off again we found ourselves climbing ever more steeply through jungled mountains. The road became narrower, the drops either side more precipitous – and we sought to engage Abu in conversation, more to dilute his fanatical sense of destination than to practice our halting Indonesian. He responded with exuberant gestures – which in no way reduced our speed and which left his hands free of the wheel for long intervals. His pantomime became most articulate when we at last reached the two vast geological features which mark the gateway to Torajaland. They are known in the Toraja language as ‘Most Holy Penis’ and ‘Most Sacred Vagina’ – though they would more accurately translate into a lighter vernacular. Half a mile away on our left towered a rounded granite outcrop, about 1,000 feet high; against the opposite mountain, to our right, lay an exfoliating fissure, fringed with forest, about three football fields long. Both features resembled their names to a baffling degree but, despite this, Abu was moved to expound upon them with such fervent body language that we nearly plunged into the ravine and terminated our lives at the very lip of the sacred symbol of where we had begun them.

  It was here that the Toraja believed their first ancestors had descended from the Pleiades in starships to populate the verdant valleys into which we now descended. This was indeed another world from the coast. Misty green valleys shot through with rushing vodka-clear rivers; emerald rice-paddies fringed with golden stands of bamboo, and primary forest towered over by soaring escarpments of granite. Through the greens and golds rose the curved and painted outlines of Toraja architecture. Houses and rice-barns, on elephant-leg pilings, rose with vivid panelled eaves to a high taper either end. They were built with neither nails nor pegs, but merely slotted and lashed together with great precision. With their narrow base and expanding gables and roofs, they combined apparently ludicrous instability with extreme tensile strength.

  The people looked different, too – more akin to the Cambodians or Siamese than to the Malays of the coast. Some anthropologists argue that they came from China, or in boats from Burma, or even from the Himalayas. None of them seemed to set much store by where the Toraja themselves say they came from. Certainly no one set any store by when they said they would conduct their final funeral rites. For these h
ad to coincide, we discovered, not only with the metaphysical and astronomical indices, as interpreted by the Toraja priests, but also with the more secular calendar of the government, which had demanded the presence of several high-ranking Javanese officials for the final events.

  We bore a letter of introduction from Werner Meyer to Puang Ranteallo, son of the late king – whom we at last tracked down in an astonishing arena. The road, such as it was, had come to an end and the last 12 miles to our destination were strictly by four-wheel drive through yard-deep mud, and over streams alarmingly bridged with thick bamboo trunks simply laid next to each other, so that they separated between our wheels if we took them at anything less than a rush. Abu piloted us with all the aplomb of a sailor surging through dangerous surf, and finally brought us to an entire circular village of some 60 three-storey houses, all shaped like space-arcs.

  An entire village to be torn down after the funeral. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  This village had been built solely for the duration of the festival, for the thousands of funeral guests who were expected to arrive on foot from the far corners of the kingdom. The festival village encircled the Rante, or ‘sacred place’, which was a smaller circle of some 40 ancient stone megaliths, many of them still upright and very much resembling a Druidical circle of Celtic Europe.

  We tracked down Ranteallo in the most elegant of these structures, which he was sharing with some 30 family members, guests and slaves. We were warmly invited to stay with them for the duration of the festival, and were conducted to the top floor for a rather formal preliminary audience with Ranteallo and his elders. We had been warned by Meyer that he was a man under pressure. Recently converted to Christianity, bearer of the burden of funeral arrangements, father of nine, Ranteallo was the recipient of the rawest deal of his perhaps 800-year lineage. It had fallen to him to inherit not a heaven-born dynasty in an earthly paradise, but the staggering debt of correctly bringing it to an end.

  We found him sitting regally cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by elders chewing tobacco, their mouths rouged and swollen with betelnut juice. We were still fairly new to the local etiquette, so we sat in silence for a long while. For the first time I really felt myself become part of a tribal circle, accepted as an elder simply by being a foreigner. Yet as time wore on and still no one spoke I itched to ask questions.

  At last I ventured, ‘Can you please tell us what’s going on?’

  The hush grew deeper. Perhaps they hadn’t understood. Lorne asked again. The prince at last leaned forward on the verge, we assumed, of uttering some revelation – but instead blocked his right nostril with his index finger and noisily expelled from his left an impressive length of mucus which plummeted precisely through a small hole in the floor.

  It was but the first of a host of cultural discoveries. To the Indonesians, we found out later, one of the quainter of our many vulgarities is our predilection for depositing the contents of our noses in embroidered cloth and carrying it around in our pockets with us. These water-based peoples find our use of lavatory paper pretty funny, too. ‘Cutting down forests to wipe your behinds with,’ they call it. ‘Our forests, too!’ the more politically minded would point out.

  We were billeted on the top floor, together with the royal family and about 20 retainers. An open balcony and a low sago-thatch balustrade ran right the way round the single room and at night, when the resilient bamboo-strip flooring became everybody’s mattress, the family groups, in a transparent gesture towards privacy, divided themselves from one another with colourful cotton sarongs suspended on a fragile network of strings. People would roll over in their sleep and finish up ‘next door’, and our own diminutive cubicle was the nightly thrashing-ground of disembodied limbs belonging to our snoring neighbours. The whole arrangement was on too small a scale for our size, and on one occasion, while making a nocturnal visit to the bushes, Lorne stumbled through the main string, snapped it and brought the curtain up (or rather down) on the whole assembled company.

  But in the daytime our top balcony gave us a grandstand view of the arena in which the final events would take place. Everything below, we were sure, was exactly as it would have appeared in centuries past apart from one major anachronism, a bright yellow construction crane, which was attempting to plant the last monolith in the stone circle.

  Ranteallo explained that a stone had been raised at the death of every Toraja king, and indeed queen – though no one remembered their names beyond a few generations. His grandfather had been sent to the stars in 1912, when they still knew how to raise megaliths ‘the old fashioned way’, which Ranteallo ruefully confessed to us was damn well more than he could do for his father now. For months they had been trying with divets and tackle to hoist the appropriate two-ton stone upright and into its hole.

  ‘Never mind,’ Ranteallo said, brightening. ‘What’s the point of living in a new, Christian age, if we don’t use its technology? We borrowed the crane from the local department of road construction.’ It certainly looked more suited to planting telephone poles than megaliths – despite the fact that the closest phone was in Makassar – and throughout the ensuing month its groans and screams would punctuate the festivities.

  Slightly inset from the circle of houses was the ‘death-house’ itself, where the king’s body, with the queen and her two attendants would be brought to observe the rites from their residence half a mile away.

  We had read that the Toraja hunted heads until as recently as the 1920s, but they were feared by their neighbours less for their ferocity than for their magic, part of which was their unnerving reputation for being able to cause the dead to walk. Toraja warriors had to die in their own Rante, or village circle, if their souls were successfully to return to the stars. Should they die beyond the Rante, then their shamans, the stories went, could quicken their corpses long enough for them to walk home under their own steam, even without their heads. Various anthropologists had remarked on this zombie tradition – but in Makassar Werner had given us a supplementary twist to the story.

  The occupying Japanese forces had apparently been so terrified by the Toraja that after a few peremptory massacres they had left them to themselves. On several occasions, according to Werner’s informants, groups of Toraja resistance fighters had been taken into the forest by the Japanese, machine-gunned, and left there as a warning to others. Later in the evening their horrified executioners had reported encountering them again, in serious disrepair, shambling in single file back through the forest towards their Rante.

  Werner had delivered this anecdote with the same wry chuckles that accompanied his more orthodox information. He had gone on to remark that the Toraja combined various features which were rarely found together: they had hunted heads, believed in a celestial origin, practised a primeval megalithism, built sophisticated architecture – and produced a unique written (or, rather, carved-and-painted) language, which very few scholars can read. The houses all displayed these picture-glyphs, resembling the whorls and yantras of Tantrism, which, reading from the ground up, told the entire history of the tribe, the clan and the individual household.

  Some of the finest of these were on the walls of Puang Sangalla’s house, where Ranteallo took us the following morning to meet his dead father, and barely alive 87-year-old mother. It was a formal introduction. We had been warned first to make our obeisances to the dead king before we even acknowledged his long-suffering queen.

  The interior measured about eight feet by twelve, and was occupied by two ‘lesser widows’, a fat and contented black cat, the corpse and the queen. Five feet from her sleeping mat the dead king lay on a low trestle, swaddled in red velvet decorated with very old beaded embroidery. Beneath him a bamboo pipe extended towards a bowl of Ming porcelain into which his body fluids drained. Though by now he had largely desiccated, the odour of death was still unmistakable. Next to the bowl were his bottle and plate which visitors refreshed with palm wine, betel nut or chewing tobacco to keep his soul from feelin
g neglected. For the last four years the widow had been forbidden to leave her husband’s side, and her legs had so deteriorated that (it being considered lèse-majesté to crawl) she had had herself carried about her diminutive space by her ‘slaves’, the ‘lesser widows’.

  Tradition required not only that she rot in constricted shade with the disintegrating corpse of her husband, but that she also eat a special diet for the entire period, which excluded any rice at all. She accepted our brief presence with disinterested dignity – as if she herself were now as symbolically dead as her husband was still symbolically alive.

  The ‘lesser widows’ had an easier time of it. Slavery still existed here, but not at all in the form we were accustomed to in our Western history books. Theirs is not an unhappy lot – even though they must contend with the customary appellation of ‘chicken dropping’. The Toraja acquire them through inheritance, but they are still ‘free souls’, and often become richer than their masters – since they are not so rigorously required to re-distribute their wealth. A nobleman’s son will have a ‘slave’ of his own age assigned to him from birth, who will later attend school with him in Makassar, and sometimes even university in distant Jakarta.

  In the 1960s the government sought to reduce the animist religious confusion in the nation – and centralize its own authority – by abolishing the practice of all but five officially sanctioned religions. These were Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and, since Bali was already so internationally attractive precisely for its rich blend of animism, the quickly invented category of ‘Hindu-Balinese’ religion. This would have effectively made Toraja religion illegal had it not been for a young Toraja ‘slave’ who had studied law while attending to the needs of his lord at university. He had brilliantly and successfully argued that the Toraja religion was one and the same with whatever ‘Hindu-Balinese animism’ might be – and thus Toraja religion was permitted to survive.