‘I really hadn’t thought about that,’ he replied. ‘I put my trust in the Lord. I’d advise you to do the same. Who are you here for?’
‘For my nearest and dearest,’ I said as unironically as I could. ‘And you?’
‘For my brother,’ he answered, evidently in all seriousness.
The villages, in which the arrivals from Java will be swallowed up, sometimes have a communal television set on a wooden podium, which people congregate round in the evenings to watch the only channel, showing news, pictures of military parades, medal-giving ceremonies and ritual dancing. As they do so, there’ll be someone clearing vegetation, or running a flag up a flagpole or getting a boat ready, and in the meantime explaining who Lorne Greene is – who’s still wearing his white padded ranching jacket and playing ‘Pa’ in Bonanza – or other big beasts of old television who they don’t know about in Borneo, despite the fact that so many non-native species have become widespread or even endemic. Then again, even Lorne Greene has gone extinct in the meantime.
Television advertising was banned here by the authorities several years ago, in order to prevent it from stirring up ‘false needs’. In the shops in their new villages, the settlers still came across all the shiny images of product marketing, but alongside were primarily basic commodities, natural products and nondesigner foodstuffs like fruit, tubers, hens’ eggs and green goose eggs, dried fish, packets of spices and in the display cabinets the lavish red-gold of the Kretek, clove cigarettes. On the walls were stuck a few pages torn from calendars, showing scenes of Tenerife or Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Outside the airport, I’d shared a taxi with a young man who spoke a little English. Though he was only twenty-two years old, he proudly confided in me, he was no less than the leading leech researcher in Indonesia. That evening , he invited me over to the house of his father, who as a Shari’a court judge wielded considerable authority locally and yet, when evening fell, was also so friendly and forthcoming as to have some food taken out to the fifty or so children who’d turned up to see ‘the white man’. Whenever we peered out over the window ledge, we could see them sitting there patiently in the twilight, waiting for us to make an appearance.
When I explained to the family over dinner that I really wanted to take a boat trip to Palangkaraya, they spread out a map, and we traced the route with our fingers, down all the many rivers, the branches where they divided, and estuaries, along the whole network of arteries through the tropical rainforest until, at the end of all these capillaries, we finally found the node called ‘Palangkaraya’.
The following day, they hire a helmsman and an engineer, and I find myself stepping aboard a boat. A number of times during our journey, we see snakes and crocodiles several metres long push themselves off the banks into the water. Even so, whenever a water plant fouls the propeller, the boatman doesn’t hesitate to jump into the murky stew of the river armed with his machete and plunge down several times in order to cut us free, while the engineer keeps watch on deck to check for any predators approaching. Formerly the enemies of the jungle primates, the snakes and crocodiles are now themselves endangered. Their major enemy is also that of the orang-utan: man.
Back on the river, snakes slither though the roots of trees left exposed by the low water. On some trees, you can make out markings left by tribes living somewhere in the bush to demarcate their territory. Some of these peoples even inhabit the tree canopy, while others have set up home in clearings or nearby tributaries. They follow animistic religions. Up to the 1950s, there were also supposed to have been cannibalistic tribes on Borneo, who had a penchant for hanging human scalps outside their huts to ward off demons. And there are persistent stories claiming that similar things have occurred even in the most recent past.
But in Palangkaraya, the capital of central Kalimantan, which was only founded in 1957, you can make photocopies and buy all sorts of technology. There are no fewer than four cinemas here, though the street lights have long since ceased to function. The town has a large hospital, but just one surgeon for all those who spend days travelling here in dugout canoes to have an appendix operation or to get a serious wound treated. There are banks, but none that will accept cheques or dollars. And there are computer specialists and corresponding members of scientific journals, but it’s not uncommon to find that they’re the same people whose faith observance includes ritual sacrifices and trance dances.
The last governor of the region, who to all intents and purposes had the rank of prime minister, stipulated in his will that his coffin should be made from the wood of a ‘heart-tree’, that is a tree which had had a human heart inserted into its roots when it was planted. Local people memorize the location of such trees in the jungle, and when I first visited Palangkaraya in the late 1980s, barely a year had passed since the great statesman’s wish had been fulfilled.
After the government declared that the lifestyle of the Dayak people was ‘outmoded’, the headhunters have vanished into thin air too. While it’s true that even as late as the 1970s, many indigenous people would not divulge where cemeteries were for fear that the headhunters might dig up the dead and steal their skulls, it’s also the case that on many occasions in more recent times, animal skulls were substituted for the real thing in the hope that the sleeping spirits would not notice the deception. In any event, skulls buried beneath the four main posts of a house are believed to help a person choose a bride, and are supposed to represent the spirits who will serve the deceased in the underworld.
A woman anthropologist who had come to the rainforest with the sole intention of picking up the trail of these ‘maneaters’ was discovered one night in a native’s hut in an extremely distraught and confused state; she had wrapped herself in a curtain and was naked and terrified. She had nothing to say on the subject of cannibals.
I stayed in Palangkaraya for a couple of days. Every evening in the village square, not far from the cinema, a storyteller plies his trade. He arrived in the afternoon by boat, and is wearing tattered clothes, animal skins and several amulets, one on top of the other. When he spreads out his blanket and starts describing the animals that will now emerge straight out of the ground and start walking about among the crowd, the crowd shrieks in terror, like it’s living the experience at first hand. Given that the cinema is only a stone’s throw from here, the soundtrack of whatever film it’s showing forms a constant backdrop to the storyteller’s tales. Above the entrance to the cinema hangs a sign with the legend: ‘polite, orderly, quiet’. But this doesn’t stop the ‘Rambos’ and ‘Rockys’ from muscling their way into our little world here.
Here, where several hundred languages and dialects are spoken, but not a word of English and only rarely even the sterile official language of Indonesian, where counting was concerned I at least managed to get by with a smattering of the latter. But when I asked a guy who worked on the quayside what time the boat was due to leave, and he stretched out the five fingers of his hand and told me ‘Empat.’ I was confused – Empat means ‘four’. So, I replied by saying ‘Lima’ and holding my five outstretched fingers to him to indicate ‘five’. No, ‘Empat,’ insisted my interlocutor, holding up five fingers as before. And I countered with my five again, shouting ‘Lima.’ Two hands, two sets of five fingers held up to each other but with two different results. Ultimately I found out what was going on: the inhabitants of Borneo don’t count the thumb as a complete finger. So you hold up two full hands to signal the number eight; in my attempts to translate, I’d gained an entirely new insight into the human body.
The next day, the storyteller from the village square appeared again, with his blanket and, after setting candles all round the perimeter, started to tell us all about the animals once more, the animals under the blanket. If he so much as lifted a corner or wafted the edge of the blanket a little, a huge scream went up from his audience. But when I stood up to leave, most of the children latched on to me and even hung around outside when I disappeared into my guest house and waited
until I reappeared on the street. I whiled away some time reading the Bible in the dark with my torch; but I felt disillusioned when I realized quite how many of its moral tales hinged on rates of exchange.
I switched off my torch and asked myself: would I have got on better with my reading of the Bible if I’d done a bit of preparation beforehand? Maybe I should have listened to my neighbour on the plane and allowed him to tell me about the Love of Christ? But on the other hand, when was it ever the case that communication could be sustained indefinitely? Nothing – not my Swiss neighbour, not alcohol, not the Bible nor a dictionary – can save the traveller from his ultimate isolation, I thought, and slumped into a sleep filled with bad dreams.
The next day I went to visit three missionary nuns, who were sitting at a table underneath a strip of flypaper and eating a very spartan meal. They told me how their Indonesian housemaid, when she first arrived, would always genuflect with her hands clasped in prayer before the flypaper, because she thought it was some Christian relic that she was expected to venerate.
The sisters knew a great deal. Geologists, they report, have devised a scale for the quality of soil which ranges from one for infertile sandy beaches to ten for the soil on Java. On this scale, the soil of Central Kalimantan was only ranked as a two – an incomprehensible result for anyone who knew about the cornucopia of fruit on sale in the markets here or who had travelled for days by boat through vegetation whose biodiversity was only matched by a few coral reefs. Some 1.7 million species of animals and plants are thought to inhabit the tropical rainforest. Less than half of these are known to science, leaving aside all the research that still remains to be done into the enzymes, drugs and medicines that could be derived from them, all of which will be irrevocably lost if this habitat is destroyed.
Borneo’s rainforest does not owe its fertility primarily to the soil. Rather, it has far more to do with what’s up in the air, namely the green forest leaf canopy, and in the countless symbiotic relationships between plants and animals. In dead trees forty metres above the ground, grasses and flowers grow out of the abandoned nests of orang-utans. Seeds, rotting fruit, excrement and decaying vegetation all mulch down into a compost, which produces new microcosmoses with a highly vulnerable internal balance.
The nuns also told me about the Palangkaraya Road. In the wild heart of Borneo, there are paths and dream paths, but no roads. The settlements in the dense wilderness of maquis scrubland and tropical rainforest, and the scattered villages on the broad green rivers are only connected to one another either by waterways or the precarious flights provided by local airlines. So when, in the middle of the jungle, in the immediate hinterland of Palangkaraya, thirty kilometres of asphalt suddenly appear, this becomes a great object of interest and curiosity for former headhunters and other forest dwellers who paddle around the periphery of civilization in their dugouts. Indeed, just such a stretch of road was built many years ago by ‘the Russians’, for what reason no one here can remember anymore, given that Tangkiliang, its ultimate destination, had always been an utterly insignificant place.
The Palangkaraya Road, they explain, leads right through the area of tropical rainforest that has been scarred by slash-and-burn deforestation and which is still smouldering even now. The road allows people to get really up close and personal with the forest.
And it’s true: at any given moment the primeval forest of Borneo is on fire in several places. The plumes of smoke hang like scraps of clouds between the mountain peaks or drift yellow-grey over Joseph Conrad’s melancholy rivers. Sometimes smaller planes are prevented from flying for weeks on end by the smoke. But anyone who’s already taken four weeks travelling by boat to the airstrip isn’t about to turn round and go back, so they simply set up camp there and wait.
At the quayside it smells of oil and sawdust. From the outskirts of the town, Palangkaraya is smouldering in the humid heat from the smoke of the fires all around. On the one road out of the settlement, there are supposedly only six cars. They’re never locked. After all, if one was taken, where else would it go?
So, I set off on foot, in the heat, with nothing in my pack except the confidence that there will be some provisions for sale on the roadside, someone selling water for instance, or a banana, or maybe at the end of the road a ride back into town. Plumes of smoke drifted over the cracked asphalt; some flowers had even started pushing their heads through the road surface.
The settlers burn the bushes next to their huts with the same abandon that they set light to parcels of land measuring several hectares alongside their fields. Everything that the inhabitants have cleared themselves belongs to them, and anyone who has observed how many days it takes to fell a hundred-year-old woodland giant with just a stone axe understands the feeling of gratitude experienced by new inexperienced settlers when they move into areas cleared by logging companies to lay claim to a piece of farmland using slash-and-burn methods. The high level of humidity in the atmosphere and the marshy terrain underfoot gives them a sense of security from flying sparks accidentally spreading the fire.
However, in 1982, when the rainy season took an unusually long time to come, the marshes dried out and the forest fires destroyed an area of rainforest the size of Taiwan. This, the largest fire ever recorded in history, was only finally extinguished with the onset of the rains in 1983.
It was a year before the Indonesian newspapers began reporting this catastrophe. They had been alerted to the fire by foreign news agencies. Nowadays the government has charged pilots of small commercial aircraft with the responsibility for looking out for forest fires. Some people maintained that the great fire of 1982–83 was never properly put out, and soon afterward the next great conflagration, this time shortly before the turn of the millennium, duly broke out.
Even so, the diversity of the plant life here is intoxicating, and the variations and peculiarities in colour and form beyond all measure, even just on the verge of the road here; they bear witness to the richness of a natural world that basically thrives on parasitic conditions.
For instance, the orang-utan is the only animal that is at the same time both strong and inquisitive enough not only to harvest the heavy durian – a fruit that is a delicacy both for the native people and the great apes here – but also to carry it several metres back to their own nest, where the kernel, excreted into the droppings that remain in the nest, or thrown down from the treetops, has a good chance of surviving and germinating a new plant. If Pongo pygmaeus – the orang-utan – dies out, the kernels of the durian will just drop beneath the same trees every time, and so this legendary tree of Southeast Asia will also be threatened with extinction in this region.
A similarly symbiotic relationship has grown up between the resettlers and the lumber industry. No sooner have they descended upon the forest clearings than the settlers burn and scythe down all the low brushwood and scrub, so completing the clear-felling process that will also degrade their own living environment in the not-too-distant future.
The settlers in Central Kalimantan know that before their very eyes a type of forest is being destroyed which can never regenerate, and which in the long term cannot really be replaced by replanted monocultures or even by the establishment of a national park, but they are least best placed to afford any ecological scruples. On their laboriously cleared and tilled fields, they cultivate the most undemanding of all plants: pineapples and dry rice. The pineapples are often planted directly into the ashes. The fruit only grow to the size of a fist, and they flood the market; as a result, the price they fetch is low. The soil doesn’t yield more than one harvest in a year.
The government supplies the seeds for rice growing. If a rainy season is delayed for too long – and climate change has made the seasons less predictable here, as well – people consume the seed stock and hope for a new handout. But, after two harvests all the nutrients in the soil have been exhausted anyway, and the ground is left fallow; nothing will grow here now except for the coarse Alang-Alang grass, which eve
ntually covers the ground with such a dense mat that nothing else can penetrate through for ages. Only after about fifteen to twenty years will bracken and trees start to take root here again, and if the area is left undisturbed for over a century, a kind of secondary forest might develop, which would at least bear some resemblance to the original rainforest.
But the farmers simply move on. As I travel the road, I can see them walking along carrying all their worldly possessions. A pickup truck rattles past, too, overloaded with the belongings of these eternally disappointed, eternally mobile settlers. They find new parcels of land, join together once more to form ‘Transmigration’ settlements, and after two years dissipate to the four winds again. The occasional model village comes into existence, like Bukitrawi on the Kahayan River, for instance, a settlement that the government is eager to hold up as an example of the programme’s success; after all, it has a primary school, a health clinic with six rooms, and a couple of shops. The women there beat out their wet laundry on the jetty, while below kids in rubber car tyres play in the river near the sewage outfall.
Anyone who can’t make enough of a living from farming comes down to the river during the dry season, when the water level is low, to pan for gold. Even the most successful of them only manage to get barely one-third of a gram a day, for which they’re paid the equivalent of half a cinema ticket.
I’ve already been underway on the road to Tangkiling for hours when a girl on a large black Dutch bicycle draws up alongside and keeps pace with me. She stares at me with undisguised curiosity, as if she’s waiting for me to collapse at any moment. She’s called Gugah and is fourteen years old, and every morning she cycles for three hours to get to her school in the town. She has to set off from her Transmigrasi village at the crack of dawn when the paths across the fields are still shrouded in darkness. The smoke from the slash-and-burn farming swallows the pale sunlight and is often so dense that you can only see a few metres ahead. From three o’clock in the afternoon onward, the sun is only visible as a faint disk behind a wall of haze. So, for six hours a day, Gugah rides through a ragged, almost desolate landscape. But because the teachers at the only school for miles around are paid very badly, and frequently months late, it’s not uncommon for the pupils to have made the journey all for nothing, since it’s more lucrative for the teachers to till their land or pan for gold.
The Ends of the Earth Page 17