Empire of the East (28 page)

Later the rain fell in brief torrents, a fence of water floodlit by the constant flickering of lightning. I was to discover in the morning that it had brought out the insects everywhere. Spiders with enormously long legs rushed about and rolled themselves into defensive balls in a hopeless attempt to escape Catan’s sprightly cockerel, and his harems of blond hens covered the
yegwa
roofs in the compound, scratching a version of lice among the thatch. One hour of sunshine was enough to dry the grass of the airstrip, but mist, from which only a triangle of peak poked through, still drowned the lower slopes of the mountain. The mist was always different. This morning it swirled and twisted like an animal caught in a trap. It was thick enough to oblige the birds to strengthen their piping, muffled in fog. Then it weakened and drifted away in sashes and tatters, leaving as always only a small smokiness in the thickest of trees.

The first of the warriors began to arrive, bounding into sight over the five-foot-high fence with the airborne agility of a
corps de ballet.
Their black bodies glistened with grease, penis gourds curved to the height of breast-bones, and each man carried a bow, a sheaf of arrows having various uses, and a spear.

A minor crisis now arose. It had been understood that those taking part should dress in traditional style, wearing no more than their customary ornaments, such as neckties of cowries, bracelets of graded boar’s teeth, trimmed white cockatoos’ feathers in the hair, armbands of selected shells, and sometimes a hat of the fur of some rare animal into which a few feathers from a bird of paradise might have been stuck. It was a prospect that excited the villagers, and all the participants had fallen into line with the arrangements, decking themselves out in a manner reflecting wonderful natural taste. Only a small handful had not understood what was required of them. These, grinning triumphantly, had tried to outdo their friends by turning up in Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny T-shirts, which Engen, who kept a tiny missionary shop, had recently added to his stock. When asked to remove them they showed disappointment but no displeasure.

There was a small problem, too, with Catan, who ran up against his wife Apina’s scornful resistance when he proposed to appear dressed, like all the rest, in a penis gourd. ‘I can’t bear to see him in one of those things,’ she said, shaking her voluminous posterior in disdain under its covering of a grass skirt. From this remark it seemed possible that he had taken to Western garments before their marriage. However, it was clear for the moment that Catari had ceased to think of himself as a minor official, and was determined to recapture the excitements of even make-believe combat; the track suit came off and the
koteka
went on. Now, suddenly, barefoot and traditionally priapic in feathers and shells, he had undergone a quite extraordinary transformation, a subtle, physical change, even right down to the shape of his elongated almond eyes. In this moment of exaltation, and the resurgence even of natural valour, caution was thrown to the winds. Having fitted a well-made arrow to the string of his bow, he jokingly pointed it at me. His expression was suddenly thoughtful. ‘Good you come here now,’ he said. ‘You come before missionaries’ time, we eat you.’ I could not be sure whether this, too, was to be taken as a joke.

According to the account of the happenings of eighteen months before, the battle appeared to the onlooker as much a ballet as conflict. With each man well separated from the next, and placed like the pieces on a chess board on the slope of the airstrip, the two sides formed lines and rushed to the encounter, merging and intertwining in symmetrical fashion with their opponents. In this manner, however rapid the movement, the combatants remained separate. There was no infighting. Racing at top speed the warriors waved their spears, shot their arrows high into the air, formed figures of eight, carried out their serpentine forays through the enemy’s lines, advanced and retreated. They took long shots at running adversaries they had little chance of hitting, and no one came under fire at point-blank range. And this was much what I observed, too, with a single casualty at the end of a prolonged skirmish, and the battle called off when it came on to rain. Something must have gone wrong with the arrangements in 1981 when so many had died.

Karl Heider of the 1961 Harvard Peabody Expedition wrote disparagingly of these Papuan archers. They had never learned to feather their arrows, so could not shoot straight, nor had they learned to shoot off volleys, taking pot-shots here and there at random in such a way that the arrows could be watched in flight and thus easily avoided. Heider, who had probably seen the film purporting to portray the efficiency of English bowmen at Agincourt, seemed to ignore the reality that the Yalis and the rest of them were not in the business of efficient slaughter, and indeed were even at pains to avoid it. Yali arrows had a simple bamboo point, and it normally took a number of them to kill a man. The redoubtable Bruno de Leeuw, cornered by the Yalis on a fetich-burning expedition, had collected five of them — one in the intestines — but simply yanked them out of his flesh and threw them away. The Yalis were not interested in conquest or extermination but in population control, and rival battles fought with not very lethal weapons were part of a programme which also banned sexual intercourse for three years after the birth of a child, thus contributing to the same end in a less spectacular way.

The mock battle merged into a victory dance, with little to distinguish the two phases, except that, with no arrows to be avoided, the dance was a simpler affair. The action was accompanied by monotonous chanting. Closing my eyes I could imagine myself at Highbury at a cup tie, for these primeval sounds were to me indistinguishable from the atonal baying of an excited football crowd exhorting their team to ‘come on, you reds’. Thus, and in an almost comparable situation, a triumphal outcry from the dawn of humanity was to be matched with one of our day.

Nipson nestled to the west of Endoman at the foot of the mountains in the next valley and had been pointed out by the pilot as we flew over it as a place of singular interest. As it happened I knew something of its history, for it had achieved a macabre celebrity in 1974 following a massacre in which a native Evangelist and his twelve assistants engaged in conversion of the local people had been killed and devoured. I would have liked to visit Nipson but abandoned the idea after Catan’s warning of a two-day walk through difficult mountainous terrain, with rivers to be crossed. I found it curious that he should have been the first to broach the subject of cannibalism, yet a discussion of the history of Nipson should clearly have been taboo, for he went on to say that it was a place of no importance which he had only heard of two years before.

The Nipson episode belonged to the final explosive stages of a war between tribesmen and the missionaries following over-confident missionary thrusts into new territory for the building of airstrips prior to the establishment of permanent bases. These lightning forays into
terra incognita
were undertaken by exceedingly adventurous young zealots with the backing of a government who recognized them as specialists in the pacification of tribals.

A widespread fury over the appropriation of tribal land was intensified by the missionary custom of destroying village ‘spirit houses’, and their contents, regarded as sacred by the tribal people. A typical incident in the course of the evangelical campaign is described in a missionary publication,
Lords of the Earth,
by Don Richardson. It took place in 1967 at the beginning of the great missionary drive, and Stanley Dale and Bruno de Leeuw, pushing blindly on into the unknown, found themselves in the village of Ninia. They discovered some flat terrain of the kind which, ‘with a little grit and three or four months of hard work could be coaxed into an airstrip’. But the co-operation of several hundred Yalis would be required, and they seemed undisposed to help. Their reluctance may have been due to the fact that, as usual, gardens and dwellings stood in the way. Stan and Bruno carefully listed the names of their owners, presumably for eventual compensation. ‘Lord, you knew,’ Bruno prayed, ‘when you created this valley, that this conflict of interests would arise. You could have provided a slope for an airstrip somewhere else, or you could have prevented the Yali from choosing this site for a spirit house. Since you didn’t, this conflict of interests must be part of your plan. Perhaps you intended to work through it.’

And it was with this assumption that the pair went into action, dismantling the village houses with the aid of the native converts they had brought with them. Stan and Bruno found the Yali’s stone-hewn boards to be of ‘excellent quality’, and promptly used them to begin new and larger dwellings for their own need. They were short of wood to finish the job. ‘No matter,’ Stan said. ‘We’ll dismantle that spirit house on the knoll tomorrow. It has to go because of the airstrip, in any case. And it will yield plenty of good large boards to finish our own dwelling.’

It seems incredible that hundreds of Yali, noted for their combativeness, should stand meekly by and watch the destruction of their village and their crops and do nothing to prevent this happening. Richardson explains why. Stan and Bruno, unlike their fellow Evangelists, had been at pains to study Yali culture and traditions, and had unearthed a belief that powerful ancestors would appear again on earth reincarnated as whites. It was a credence that was put to good use on this occasion. The Yalis looked on in bewildered dismay as those they took to be their illustrious ancestors Marik and Kugwarak wreaked their havoc. It has been suggested elsewhere that this imposture had served its purpose on other occasions.

Next year Dale, with a fresh partner, Phil Masters, set out once again to push back the missionary frontiers, trekking into the Seng Valley, one of the few remaining areas without an airstrip. Here, while in the process of measuring out suitable ground, they were intercepted, killed, and subsequently eaten. This act of cannibalism provoked the inevitable police reprisals in which a number of warriors were shot. Thereafter war with the missionaries escalated until the final holocaust several years later at Nipson.

A sharp-eyed chronicler of this period and these events was Robert Mitton, an Australian geologist who was in Irian Jaya between 1970 and 1976 investigating its mineral resources. Outside his professional geology Mitton interested himself in every aspect of the local culture, its history, botany and anthropology. The maps he made for his company were in demand by missionaries and government officials. He collected Asmat art for museums and took a crash course in medicine enabling him to undertake paramedical work among tribal people up to a time when, as a result of an illness which proved fatal, he was obliged to return to Australia.

Of the remote valley where Stan Dale and Phil Masters met their end, Mitton wrote to a friend in 1971:

Today we went into true cannibal country around Nipson and the Seng Valley. So aware of the fact was everyone that we carried a shotgun in the helicopter. The thought of me standing over Dave with a loaded gun while he did his geology was mildly absurd. Dave and I were dropped into a creek to take a sample, and the pilot, instead of hovering, left us for forty-five minutes. We were a trifle hypersensitive and when I looked up at one point I noted with an ‘Oh shit’ that we had company. Anyway, all the visitor wanted was to trade his stone adze. Later we became quite uncomfortable when the village across the river began to empty in our direction. Dave and I began to lay bets on the odds of their reaching us before the helicopter. With flare guns loaded with our last flare (the shotgun with everything else was in the helicopter) we sat down and waited. Fortunately the helicopter came first, but not until Dave had stated that ‘we could have been dead and defecated by the time it got to us’.

The geologists’ problems among the angry and now dangerous tribespeople continued. ‘Angurak was opened up and a strip begun by the Dutch Protestant missionaries. Not long after, a flu epidemic went through the area and many people died. The natives blamed this on the missionaries and passed out the word that if the missionaries came back they would be killed and eaten.’ However, the missionaries returned and were attacked. It seems to have been quite a battle. Once when a missionary plane came under attack and the pilot took off with arrows hitting the plane, ‘it then proceeded to dive-bomb the attackers while Kujit (the local missionary-in-chief) held them at bay with a shotgun. At the same time there was an attack at Angurak which resulted in eight attackers being shot. It will be interesting to see what happens next’.

What in fact happened was the massacre at Nipson in May 1974. As Mitton puts it: ‘the locals had had enough of the Good Word, burned down the missionary’s house, and ate his Biak preacher and 12 of his assistants. Fortunately for them the missionaries, including Kujit, were in the United States on leave’.

It was not all aggression and retribution. A month later Mitton noted that a Missionary Aviation Fellowship plane crashed near this spot. ‘Of six or seven people aboard only a ten-year-old boy survived, who was taken care of very tenderly for some days by the Seng people until the rescue party arrived.’

I
HAD COME TO ENDOMAN
in the expectation of discovering Stone Age remnants in an otherwise transitional society committed to the future of the Indonesian racial amalgam. This proved far from being the case. Catan, who said that no one had bothered to count the exact number of the inhabitants, thought, after a surreptitious use of fingers to aid calculation, that a figure of two hundred might be about right. Of these it was clear that five had moved with the times. They were Catan himself, his wife Apina, Mattius the headteacher who could not speak the language, Engen the native preacher who also ran what was called the shop, and an Indonesian with a soured and fugitive expression who drifted occasionally into view wearing as a badge of authority an American Air Force peaked cap. This was the government appointed Shadow-chief, of whom nobody took the slightest notice. Of the rest of the population it would have been reasonable to say of them that they were as solidly embedded in the Stone Age as they and their ancestors had ever been. One of the pleasant things in Endoman was a walk out of the village, when I would meet tiny men on the path, armed to the teeth, who just happened to be passing through, and we would exchange broad smiles, clasp hands and perhaps walk a yard or two together before going on our own way. Could it be that once they would have eaten me on the spot? I doubted it.