In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

‘Fishing?’

  ‘No. I am smashing up the coral. It is for the lavatories of rich people. They are crazy. They polish it up and stick it on their walls. Rich people are not prepared to come to the beach to crap. The beach must come to them. Look, there goes the Korean.’

  It was the manager of the Korean noodle factory. Every morning he practised golf on the sand while his top employees were forced to carry a tree trunk up and down the beach in an athletic display, giving gung-ho cries. It was not the Indonesian way and they were bitterly ashamed.

  ‘I am from Bengkulu,’ said a man striding resolutely into the gale. ‘We have lots of words from English in our dialect, kubod, pokit, stokin, trai, all from English. And when we sit on the selokan at night, we call it vranda.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘Me? I drive a bus to Padang.’

  Further along the beach the army, clad in shorts and drenched T-shirts, were standing up to their knees in the water and practising shivering kung-fu. I declined the offer to join them. An immaculate recruit, cropped hair, pressed trousers, sat on the beach watching them.

  ‘You are not from Bengkulu?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m from Java. But I’m not in the army either. I’m a fake. I’ve got lots of friends in uniform so I’m going round Indonesia. As long as I have this haircut and wear these trousers no one minds. I can sleep and eat in the barracks. After a couple of months I’ll be off to Padang.’

  Empires of the Imagination

  ‘It was near Simawang that we first found feltspar, granite, quartz and other minerals of a primitive formation. They were here mixed with a variety of volcanic productions in the greatest confusion, strongly indicating that this part of the country had at some distant point been subjected to violent convulsions. Dr Horsfield got specimens of these, which he gave in charge to some coolies who attended him; after the day’s journey he wished to examine the collection; the men produced their baskets full of stones, but on the Doctor’s exclaiming that they were not what he had given them, and expressing some anger on the occasion, they simply observed, they thought he only wanted stones, and they preferred carrying their baskets empty, so they threw away what he gave them, and filled them up at the end of the day’s journey, and they were sure they gave him more than he collected.’

  – T. S. Raffles

  The bus had been advertised as air-conditioned and possessed of a toilet. It had neither of these features; instead it had large cockroaches that ran over your feet and sneered at you from the windows. It had the standard cast of characters – crying babies, embittered army men with bundles wrapped in newspaper, fat Chinese ladies who stood for long periods in the aisles and made ingress and egress impossible with their rumps. To all this, they had added something new, karaoke.

  The fat Chinese ladies were addicted to it. They simpered and whined Chinese pop numbers that sounded like Norwegian entries for the Eurovision song contest. Their menfolk clapped rapturously and puffed ecstatically on cheroots. My neighbours, not having spent years learning to be disturbed by noise as have Westerners, wrapped themselves round each other with an elaborate matching of convexities and concavities and fell immediately asleep. It was hours before I could nod off fitfully.

  ‘They ees a huss in Noo Orleen

  They core the rising sun …’

  It was pitch dark and the singer was at first invisible. As my eyes accustomed to the gloom, I saw that he was a bony little man in a civil service shirt, with the dramatic gestures you see in the films of Bung Karno’s speeches. He should really have been Japanese.

  It was bitterly cold, with thick mist swirling in and out of the lights. We were up in the mountains and creeping down towards the coast, brakes groaning arthritically. No matter how alien and exotic the daylight scene, darkness, in that it draws on the inner world of the imagination, returns it to the familiar. It was impossible not to see the lights in the houses as shining from the mullioned windows of Sussex cottages. The trees, thrown up for a second in the headlights, were manifestly the oaks and pines of English hedgerows. Then the first fingers of dawn began poking about in the forests, picking out the huge, carved ancestral houses of the Minang people. The dam was breached. Indonesia flooded back in.

  The man next to me was asleep with his head in my lap. He stirred, opened his eyes astonished, grinned and sat up, giving my thigh a ‘thank you’ squeeze. He looked out of the window and yawned.

  ‘Nearly home.’

  ‘You are not from Bengkulu then?’

  ‘No. I’m Minang. I was in Java, in Semarang. A Dutch woman wanted to pay my university fees. I didn’t tell her I left school years ago. My business was going bust, so I took her money and ran.’ It was said in an offhand way, without shame or boasting, a thing among men, a matter of fact.

  He dug in his bag, pulled out two oranges, gave me one. We sucked on our oranges as the Chinese women, blearyeyed, staggered down the aisle, already reaching for the karaoke microphone to sing a duet about the beauties of Surabaya. They had brought their own backing tape with them.

  ‘We here [Minangkabau] found the wreck of a great empire hardly known to us by name and the evident source whence all the Malayan Colonies now scattered along the coast of the Archipelago first sprung, a population of between one and two millions, a cultivation highly advanced and manners, customs and productions in a great degree new and undescribed. I can hardly describe to you the delight with which I entered the rich and populous country of Minangkabau and discovered after four days’ journey through the mountains and forests this great source of interest and wealth.

  ‘To me it was quite classical ground and had I found nothing more than the ruins of an ancient city I should have felt repaid for the journey …’

  – T. S. Raffles

  * * *

  ‘I am looking for Yet and May.’ All over the East, people have aromatic, polysyllabic names shortened to the form of splat, thud and ouch. In their full glory they were classical, circumambulatory, Sanskrit appellations, though their owners were Minangs, therefore Muslims. We were at the university, or more precisely, at a drink-stall near the university where I had been told these two friends of a friend might be found.

  A wall of dark eyes considered me. I felt like a mouse surrounded by cats. Everyone looked shifty.

  ‘We do not know where they are. If we see them we will say you were looking for them. What is your name? Why are you looking for them?’ I explained, invoked known names, produced photographs of group outings promised but never sent, showed books requested but unable to pass the Indonesian postal service.

  Two young men looked up from their Scrabble board. They were playing in English.

  ‘We are Yet and May.’ They spoke quietly. ‘Come and play Scrabble.’

  We played. Yet read English. May was an anthropologist. I was able to pull a few sharp moves with words of doubtful – possibly only anthropological – existence, technical terms of the trade. May backed me up. Yet finally drove me from the board with ‘expostulate’ on a triple-score square. It was clear they played a lot. They were apologetic.

  ‘We have to play in English. For Indonesian, all the letters are wrong and there is no x and v’s are impossible and there are nothing like enough k’s …’

  I could see a paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice projecting from Yet’s back pocket.

  He gave me a cigarette and settled to formal introductions. ‘You have arrived from where?’

  ‘Bengkulu.’ I explained about Raffles.

  ‘We, too, have only recently returned. We were in jail.’ Yet studied my face for response and was gratified at my surprise. ‘It was a minor matter, fighting with knives at a guest lecturer’s talk.’ He held out an arm decorated with a great X of sticking plaster, as in a children’s comic. Either scholarship was taken more seriously here than in England or other forces had been in play. I could not remember the last time one of my lectures had ended in a knife fight.

  ‘It was outsi
ders,’ he explained. ‘Come to make trouble.

  We don’t like it when outsiders make trouble.’ I tried hard to look like the sort of outsider who would never make any trouble.

  ‘How long were you in jail?’

  ‘Five days.’

  ‘And your – opponents?’

  ‘We had to share a cell with them. It was very awkward. I never want to go back in jail.’ He shuddered. ‘They make you eat out of the pail you use for slops.’

  ‘How did you get out?’

  ‘Our rector came and signed a piece of paper and we were released into his care.’ Their faces were blank, but studying my own. There was a different conversational idiom here. People were more circumspect. They gave less away till they knew what you were thinking.

  ‘You must have been glad to see him.’ May had been waiting for that and leapt in.

  ‘Not really.’ There it was again, he grinned the shit-eating grin and savoured his moment of contradiction. ‘He couldn’t be bothered to come before. He said he had to go to a wedding and that was more important. All the other students had to stage a demonstration with banners and everything before he would get off his arse …’ He was shaking with anger. ‘It was …’ He groped for a word and found only an English term from Jane Austen. ‘It was most unbecoming.’

  * * *

  ‘The houses are for the most part extensive and well built; in length seldom less than sixty feet; the interior, one long hall with several small chambers in the rear opening into it. In the front of each house, are two lombongs, or granaries on the same principle as those in Java, but much longer and more substantial: they were not less than thirty feet high and capable of holding an immense quantity; many of them very highly ornamented, various figures and flowers being carved on the uprights and cross-beams; some of them coloured. The taste for ornament is not confined to the lombongs; the wood-work of most of the houses is carved, and coloured with red, white and black. The ridge-poles of the lombongs, houses etc. have a peculiar appearance, in being extremely concave, the ends or points of the crescent being very sharp. In the larger houses, they give the appearance of two roofs, one crescent being, as it were, within another. The whole of the buildings are constructed in the most substantial manner, but entirely of wood and matting …

  In approaching Pageruyong, we had an excellent view of this once famous city … The entrance to the city, which is now only marked by a few venerable trees, and the traces of what was once a highway, is nearly three-quarters of a mile before we came to the Bali [meeting-hall] and site of the former palace. Here little is left save the noble waringin trees, and these appear in several instances to have suffered from the action of fire … Three times had it been committed to the flames by a remorseless fanatic; twice it had risen to something like splendour: from the last shock it had not yet recovered.’

  – T. S. Raffles

  It has now. Like everyone else, when the Minangs do not have enough history, they build some more. A gleaming new ancient ancestral house stands on the spot. Yet and May took me there.

  It is a couple of hours by bus into the mountains, a place of waterfalls and rich cultivation. It is easy to see why Raffles was impressed after the wilderness he found at Bengkulu. Everything here speaks of order, tradition, man’s shaping hand, regular hours put in, regular harvests confidently expected. Minangs never stop pointing out how clean even the towns are compared to Java. Minangs are very proud of themselves and Raffles would have liked that.

  There, by the side of the road, were the ancient stones Raffles inspected to find evidence of civilization. In the West, buildings are one of the infallible marks of civilization, though wood is less conclusive a claim than stone. Extraordinary wood buildings were all around him, but Raffles wanted the Minangs to rise to the level of having stone constructions, so he looked for them till he found them.

  The streets were full of erect, self-assured Minang ladies on their way down to the market. Yet and May greeted them all in tones and postures of deepest respect. Minangs have a proverb, ‘Men are like dust’. It is women who are the fixed points of the world here, not men. It is women who own the houses and the land. The whole of male life is an exile from the paradise of the house. Boys are born into their mother’s house, but from the age of six or seven are required to leave it every morning with the men and spend their time at the mosque – nowadays at school. For a man to be in the house during the day is either to be ill or a public scandal. He spends much of his time in the public arena of the coffee house, often talking about the problems of being Minang. I had never met a people so self-obsessed.

  At puberty, boys go off to make money by trading, so that Minang merchants are found all over Indonesia. You find them in the most desolate harbours, slumped in cheap lodging-houses, frequently afflicted by homesickness. The social problems of unruly youth are thus neatly exported and, in return, Minang culture provides a ready stock of wet-eyed songs about the glories of home to be sung in exile.

  On marriage, the exile is mitigated but eternalized. A man goes to live in his wife’s house, where he is always a guest and every evening he must ask permission to re-enter it afresh. It is not quite the matriarchy that it is often described as. After all, the women have brothers who are important in the affairs of the house and a child’s mother’s brother is rather more important in his life than his father. A father gets love but an uncle, respect; you can go hunting, all-men-together, with your father but never with your mother’s brother.

  Minang women, on the other hand, are held to be bold and domineering compared to most Indonesians. It is the teenage girls who whistle after the boys these days, not vice versa. If a man and woman are walking in the rain, it is the woman who carries the umbrella that shelters them. After all, an umbrella is a sort of house. Men seem strangely shy and tongue-tied, rather prone to seek comfort in the male-stressing austerities of Islam so that periodic bouts of fundamentalism shake Minang society like a domestic affray. The destruction Raffles witnessed was at the hands of one of these movements. Within Indonesia, a soothing, academic sub-industry devotes itself to the study of the conflict between patrilineal Islam and matrilineal Minang tradition and is structured in advance to prove, comfortingly, that there is no difficulty whatever in reconciling the two.

  * * *

  Yet stood in the palace at Pageruyung and churned out the standard ‘introduction to Minang culture’ lecture. I looked out of the window and saw two buses come down from the Christian Batak country – in Raffles’ day a land of cannibals. The first was named ‘Adam’, the pursuer ‘Delilah’, a very Minang ordering. May sat, leaning against a beam, and listened, saying nothing. But the native will seldom accept the anthropologist’s account of the world that he, himself, lives and feels in. He looked up at the ceiling dripping with its intricate layer-on-layer of carved leaves, flowers and tendrils, the shutters with their interwoven lianas of red-and-gold blossoms, the lush hangings in the alcoves where each daughter of the house received her visiting husband. And said nothing.

  Every house is to some degree a map of the culture that built it. In our solitary Western bedrooms is encoded that whole practice of expelling sexually mature children from the house that baffles most of the rest of the world.

  ‘No one lives here,’ May finally commented into thin air, ‘except perhaps a couple of old grannies, but if you come back and try to stay they always say, “No room. It’s full, it’s full.” That room’s for this daughter and this one’s for so-and-so’s sister. But it’s only full of ghosts. People don’t come and live here.’

  We wandered round the garden, full of shyly trysting lovers.

  ‘It’s a different matter once they’re married,’ said Yet eyeing them with an old man’s cynical wisdom. ‘Then the women don’t want to know you. Look, you must come to the house and meet my sister. She’s married, so everyone gossips if she leaves the house alone while her husband’s away. But you are a guest and the duty to look after a guest has priority. T
hat means she can get out to visit you as long as I’m there.’

  It did not sound as if Minang women were the terribly liberated creatures of Yet’s lecture. We set off down the hill back to the bus station.

  ‘Bullshit!’ cried May suddenly, kicking at a long skein of buffalo turd. ‘Bullshit!’ He stamped in another lying by the roadside. ‘More bullshit!’ He pointed at Yet. ‘It’s just not like that any more. All this Minang tradition crap has got nothing to do with my life. I lived in the house till I was fourteen and went away to school. No one cared.’

  Yet looked hurt. ‘What you’re leaving out,’ he remarked coolly, ‘is that you were brought up in Java.’

  ‘When I marry my girlfriend, we’ll live in town in my house. My children will grow up with me, not their uncle. Look,’ he said, pointing, ‘Look there. Round the traditional houses, you see those bungalows. They’re the houses built by the sons-in-law so they don’t have to go through all that Minang crap.’

  ‘Your girlfriend’s Chinese.’

  ‘She’s not Chinese. She’s a Muslim. Her mother was a Minang anyway.’ In sociology, discussions of fact always turn out to be discussions of terminology. It was only a matter of time before they got to the old chestnut of ‘What does it really mean to be Minang?’

  A crowd of tiny schoolboys, coming up the hill, stopped to watch these madmen who stamped in turds and shouted at each other.

  ‘Are you going to the palace?’ called Yet. They nodded. ‘Then you must all be little princes.’ They squealed with laughter. Yes, yes. Of course. That’s what they were. They were all little princes. The little princes started poking each other.

  ‘Princes are bullshit!’ shouted May, but his rage was undermined by giggling too and he and Yet staggered off down the hill, arm in arm like comradely drunkards. May pausing now and then to wipe his shoe with great deliberation.

  * * *

  ‘Politically the greatest results may accrue. At no very distant date the sovereignty of Minangkabau was acknowledged over the whole of Sumatra, and its influence extended to many of the neighbouring Islands; the respect still paid to its princes by all ranks amounts almost to veneration. By upholding their authority, a central government may easily be established; and the numerous petty states, now disunited and barbarous, may be again connected under one general system of government. The rivers which fall into the Eastern Archipelago may again become the high roads to and from the central capital; and Sumatra, under British influence, again rise into great political importance.’