Toraja

by Nigel Barley

  To get away from the heat and dust, I thought I might as well take a boat ride to an island a friend of mine had recommended. I was in terror of meeting the English Club. What had shaken me most was that the receptionist at the hotel had revealed herself to be a member. My movements would be closely watched. I caught a trishaw down to the harbour. The driver was given to garrulity.

  ‘Toraja?’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t go there. They eat human flesh you know.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Everyone knows.’ That everyone hates the people ‘next door’ is about as close as you get to a universal in anthropology. This is strange in that the subject has always tended to assume that social interaction promotes solidarity within a people. The trishaw was equipped with electronic chimes that played ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’. We sailed around the main square to ‘bring us figgy pudding’ and arrived at the quayside to ‘and a happy new year’.

  Tickets were on sale at the end of the pier, the prices doubled to mark the festive nature of the day. We set off in a small boat whose engine did not produce the expected noise but a series of quite discrete explosions like a senile incontinent. A child watched me with fascination and clutched my knees in sudden sticky affection. ‘Tall!’ it said. Mother and father laughed. From across the water came a dull boom as if the sound of the engine were echoing back. It had an oddly familiar ring that was hard to place. The boat swung broadside to accost a jetty and the sound suddenly gelled as the engine died. ‘Oh baby. Erg fuddle tin fat swug. Oh yeah.’ Oh Lord, it was the pop-group from the boat.

  On the boat, they had been constrained and confined. Here they could spread themselves and let rip. A system of rasping loudspeakers conveyed their hymn of joy to the furthest reaches of the island. Not that those reaches reached very far. It was a small, crook-backed lump of sand dotted with temporary booths that sold sunglasses, gassy drinks and inflatable toys. A band of Chinese children were fishing for used condoms and lining them up on the beach beside the greasy water. A child emerged from the water covered in blood from a shark attack. But no, not a shark attack. A doting parent had daubed surface cuts with mercurochrome to produce this effect. A sign on the beach read, ‘Beware much scrap iron’. After a swift turn round the island, the pop-group waving and playing louder in friendly greeting, I returned to the jetty waiting for the next boat back. A man with no shoes was fishing for prawns, patiently disentangling them from the rank growth of seaweed. We went through the usual questions.

  ‘You should,’ he said, ‘meet my sister.’

  In Africa, I would have known exactly what he meant but these were a proud people renowned for Muslim zeal. Possibly this man was a member of the English Club.

  ‘Why?’ I enquired nervously, expecting the stare people bestow upon the insane or foreign.

  ‘She is a tea-towel lady.’

  ‘Tea-towels. You mean she sells tea-towels? Batik?’

  He laughed. ‘No, no. She is a fanatic, very religious. She now wears a tea-towel on her head and refuses to go to the university. She will die with no husband. But you would find her interesting. She speaks good English.’

  ‘Are you from Ujung Pandang?’ Behind him a Buginese fishing boat putted past, its huge upcurving prow towering above the rest of the vessel. ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘you are Buginese. I can tell by your fine, long nose.’Anthropology teaches you to make such links. They are called interpretation. He was delighted.

  ‘Quite right!’

  I found myself wondering whether Buginese refer to the prows of their ships as ‘noses’ or vice versa. There was an article somewhere on the symbolism of the Buginese vessel. I would have to look it up. But my friend had further data to offer.

  ‘People here think a big nose means you have a big member. That’s why women like them.’ He blushed and covered his nose, a gesture of embarrassment I had seen elsewhere.

  A boat of much perter snout arrived and we said goodbye. I embarked with a group of young fathers, bursting with pride in their progeny. Fathers and children hugged each other rapturously. To even look at their offspring made them almost explode with joy.

  On the shore were two Australians, bleached and scorched from Bali, hairy-kneed and bare-footed. Although it was still early, they were very drunk as if in satire of cultural stereotypes, even waving bottles in fulfilment of their roles. The Indonesian fathers clutched their children tighter and hissed words of warning, needlessly for the tourists were discussing their bowels with the relish of tea-drinking mums talking of their plumbing.

  ‘A bloody turd, mate,’ roared one, ‘the sort that just sits there and looks up at you. First I’ve dropped in bloody weeks.’ They began to discuss whether copulation or defecation were the greater pleasure. They had obviously been long abroad and were habituated to the boldness that comes from being incomprehensible to the world at large. I ducked my head and tried to creep past shrouded in the fog of their scatological absorption. But it was not to be.

  The boatman pointed at them, indicated me and shouted loudly, ‘Look, friend!’ It was probably the only English he knew but it was enough to make sure I was noticed. He nodded and grinned in the certainty of having done me a good turn. The Australians grinned too, lurching against the young fathers who hustled their children off, eyes smouldering. The tourists immediately recognized me as one of their kind, wishing to while away my time in beer-swilling mateship, examining in depth what it was that was wrong with the Indonesians and commenting pointedly on the people on the jetty. It took me nearly an hour to get away, leaving them shaking their heads over my Pommie bastard stuffed-shirt lack of warmth. Little boys squealed with delight as they threw their empty bottles into the harbour.

  Tourists are the ugly face of every people. Is it the worst people who are tourists or does being a tourist bring out the worst? There is a nagging doubt that you are just the same as them, that – at least – you are perceived by locals as being the same. Tourism converts other people into stage properties that can be photographed and collected. I am not sure that at some level ethnography does not do the same. I have known anthropologists who regarded ‘their’ people as little more than laboratory animals, objects important to our own arrogant purposes, to be discarded or put back in their cages when they proved tedious or unduly bothersome. Yet, somehow, I felt there had been real human contact. People had been genuinely kind and helpful, put themselves out when there was no need, even made me behave a little better than I would have expected. A not unhappy thought with which to leave for the area where real ethnography was to be found. I somehow felt that Ujung Pandang was too hot for me.

  The Ethnographic Frontier

  ‘Touriis!’ The child removed its finger from the nostril it had been industriously mining and pointed it at me. Then, taking advantage of the outstretched hand, it opened the palm and said, ‘I ask for sweets. Give me money.’ It was the first time I had heard what was an indissoluble union of ideas – tourist-sweets-money – cried at puttypersons by almost every child in Torajaland. Not that I had reached Torajaland proper as yet, I was on the coast in the town of Pare-Pare, poised to ‘plunge’. The first Europeans took four hundred years to get from the coast to the mountains. The bus nowadays takes only hours but it still seems a long time.

  My mendacious guidebook had vaunted the charms of the town but what had made me get off the bus was a building marked ‘Museum’. It was the usual dowdy town, built alongside a dusty road where Chinese traders sold Japanese goods at inflated prices. A little way apart was the administrative area where civil servants maintained the integrity of the republic. To one side was a small port where rice was being loaded into Japanese ships. It is in small towns that one becomes aware of the enormously high proportion of Indonesians who are children. The investment in schools is tremendous. It is as if every third building is a school of some sort. There are three shifts in some schools every day, so that a treble tide of spotlessly uniformed children washes back and forth along main roads seemingl
y all the time. ‘Hello Miss!’ they shouted cheerfully.

  I was billeted in a small inn built out over the water with little cubicles made of cardboard for rooms. As well as permitting everyone to hear what was happening in everyone else’s room, their flimsy construction meant that it was possible to follow the vociferously prosecuted card game that raged nightly in the front hall. A complaint would have been unreasonable since an invitation to join in was always extended in the friendliest manner possible.

  The best entertainment in town seemed to be next door in the tennis club where bureaucrats played with fierce determination to an incredibly high standard, attended by a host of urchins and judges, all of whom uttered loud cries of vicarious triumph or outrage. From dawn to dusk, they warred across the net, nostrils flared, snarling and guffawing.

  The only other distraction was the arrival of a large German tourist who intimidated the management with his spade-like beard. Whenever he sat on a chair or bed, it would crumple beneath him. Curiously, the owner regarded this as very funny.

  ‘See,’ he would say, holding up two sections of a chair, ‘he has done it again.’

  Another curiosity was the bathroom. As is usually the case in South East Asia, the source of water was a cement tank from which water was to be enthusiastically splashed over the body. The receptacle was shared with the bathroom next door, the wall coming down like a curtain into the water. It was also the home, however, of a large black goldfish of phlegmatic demeanour. When it saw that someone was in occupancy on one side, it would swim, averting its gaze, to the other side. If both sides were occupied, it was forced into a fearful oscillation. The owner was amazed that the hirsute German doggedly refused to use the bathroom except when both sides were empty out of consideration for the fish. He seemed to think that Europeans had a religious detestation of fish as Muslims do of pigs.

  * * *

  Visiting the museum was more difficult than had been foreseen. I embarked in a trishaw and set off with a driver of great antiquity. There is always a certain delicacy and ambivalence in such a situation. People stare. But are they thinking ‘See! There is that lazy puttyman riding on the back of that poor elder, who is old enough to be his father’? Or are they saying, ‘See! It is good that he has hired that old man instead of a younger one who would be faster’?

  The trishaw driver himself spoke as one about to go out of business. The government was about to abolish trishaws in town and replace them with taxis. But why? Who knew why the government did things. He would have to go and live at the charge of his son who had little enough land as it was. He had saved for years to own his own trishaw instead of sharing the takings with an owner. Now, how could he sell it? He would have to take it apart and sell the wheels, one by one. It was a devastatingly depressing picture – the old man selling first the wheels, then the saddle, then the bell, with ever-decreasing profit.

  He pedalled slowly south on the tarmac road, the whole frame of the machine heaving from side to side with the effort applied by the legs. Motorized traffic burred past us honking indignantly. Fellow-pedallers rang their bells to express the community of their endeavour. To either side of the road, the concrete blocks of commerce gave way to fine, wooden houses on stilts, shaded by palms, simple and spacious with a hard, bare, somehow masculine quality as if disdaining flounces. People stood in chest-high concrete or wickerwork enclosures and poured water over themselves or leaned over balconies, contemplating the world through a haze of cigarette smoke.

  The museum was locked and deserted save for an idiot boy. It seems an immutable rule of nature that museums are always manned by an idiot youth in the way that departmental secretaries in universities are always madwomen. The trishaw driver was outraged on my behalf, demanded to know the whereabouts of the custodian, negotiated a new contract to take me there and set off railing against the world in general.

  We went to a building loud with the flags of the Republic, were introduced to an extremely polite group of gentlemen and required to fill in the inevitable visitors’ book. Only then was it made clear that the man with the key had returned to the museum and could now be found there. After elaborate, friendly farewells, we returned to the trishaw. As I re-embarked, I suddenly became chillingly aware of a wind around the buttocks. I had ripped my trousers from stem to stern on the trishaw canopy and lay open to the world.

  Going round a museum with one’s behind always pointing to the wall, is an exercise fit to be set to a future Prince of Wales. It is excessively difficult.

  The museum was dedicated to the royal house of the town and revealed it to have been wealthy enough to import the worst trade goods from East and West. Cheap Chinese plates jostled Dutch vases and extraordinarily bad carvings from across the sea in Borneo. The collection was lived in and among by the curator and his wife. He was a very gentle and soft-spoken man. She bore a striking resemblance to Bette Davis in her later roles as a beslippered, whisky-voiced slattern.

  The curator’s taste ran to tales of wonder. He spoke of a cannon that fired, unprimed, to announce the death of a member of the house. He had sought to transport it to the museum but it always returned unaided to the top of the hill. He had heard stones scream and seen ghosts in ancient dress. The ordinary-looking knives in that cupboard over there were magic. Once drawn, they could not be sheathed until they had tasted blood. Bette nodded silent agreement or intervened to mend the tale.

  A donation was solicited and given. Bette smoked endless cigarettes with gestures of world-weary cynicism and scuffed around in tatty slippers. As befits one leaving royalty in torn trousers, I bowed out backwards.

  Across the road stood a sign, ‘To the beach’. A stony path ran off between the palm-trees, threading between wooden stilt houses, balconies bright with sarongs hung out to dry.

  Here at last was the beach of my familiar tropic isle fantasies. It was suitably fringed with coconuts, wooden fishing boats riding at anchor. The sea was calm and blue, unruffled by waves and merely toyed with the sand. A child appeared. It yawned, ‘Give me money.’ I delivered a little homily on the nature of shame that it listened to stonily. There was a man crouched at the sea edge doubtless engaged in some act of old sea doggery. I approached, greeting on my lips. Becoming suddenly aware of an alien presence, he swung round with a look of horror, literally girt up his loins and made off at speed, splashing through the tepid water. It was all too clear what he had been at. I now knew what the toilet arrangements were here.

  I fled in the opposite direction and became aware of another man playing peek-a-boo between the trees. I would not make the same mistake twice and sternly looked the other way. It was his turn to creep up on me.

  ‘Good day,’ he bellowed.

  ‘Good day.’

  ‘Two hundred rupiahs please.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Tourist tax.’ He whipped out a peaked cap from behind his back and held out a receipt, grinning bashfully like a swain offering flowers.

  ‘Do not bathe over there. There are sea urchins.’ I did not understand the word so he engaged in an elaborate mime of a man stung on one foot.

  ‘The water here is good?’

  ‘Very good. It is warm because of that.’ He indicated a stone breakwater.

  Children were swimming around like turtles in big, black inner tubes, shouting ethnic insults at each other.

  ‘Chinese got no nose.’

  ‘Buginese face like a goat.’

  No remarks were made about puttypersons. I paddled experimentally, trouser legs rolled up. I should be wearing a knotted handkerchief on my head but they would not know about that. The water was deliciously warm like a restorative footbath. Turning back towards the shore. I saw why. The breakwater housed a large iron pipe. It was the town sewer and I was paddling in warm effluent.

  But even in so apparently unprofitable a place, there were signs that Indonesia would prove a fertile field for ethnographic enquiry. I went to a small shop that advertised crab soup.


  ‘No crab soup. No crab,’ said the waiter.

  ‘Why no crab?’ The beach was aswarm with fishermen, boats, shells of molluscs.

  ‘I don’t know. We always say because of the full moon. I don’t know why. If you want to ask the fisherman he’s in the kitchen.’

  Sure enough, there he sat drinking coffee, a tiny wizened man, burned deep brown by the sun, his skin hanging in loose folds at all the joints as though it had been borrowed from someone considerably larger. I asked about crabs and the full moon.

  ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘There are no crabs at the full moon. They are all menstruating.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said a cook, laughing. ‘Crabs are all male, they don’t menstruate.’

  ‘It’s the light,’ said one of the waiters. ‘Crabs don’t like the light. They go and hide in the deep water so you can’t catch them.’

  ‘Not so,’ said another cook, sitting down. ‘It’s like this. The moon pulls on the sea and makes waves. Crabs don’t like the rough water so they go and hide under rocks.’ The entire restaurant had by now come to a halt. It was a refreshing change from my last people in Africa who were deeply conservative and resisted speculation about the justification of ancestral wisdom.

  The fisherman shook his head in perplexity. ‘Wah!’ he said. ‘What it is to be educated, to have read books. You see, I’m just a simple fisherman. We don’t know anything about all this. We can’t even go fishing when it’s the full moon because all our wives are menstruating.’ It seemed the point at which I had come in.

  Back at the hotel, I was suddenly impatient of delays and determined to leave at once for the mountains where the Toraja were to be found. The term apparently means little more than ‘hillman’ and is from the Buginese. Doubtless, therefore, it is an ethnic slur-word and the present confusion about who is and who is not a Torajan probably derives from the fact that they traditionally had no such name for themselves. I would start with the town of Mamasa. I went to the bus station.