Empire of the East (36 page)

NL:
What was used to remove the fingers?

ACU:
A little stone axe. With this they chopped and no one held me.

NL:
But Acu, you’ve lost your ears. What happened?

ACU:
We are only allowed to lose six fingers, so when my grandmother died I gave an ear for her. I took a bamboo knife and with this I cut off one ear. The other I cut off when they stole my pig. This was a pig I loved, so I lost my ear.

NL:
But can you work with only two fingers on each hand?

ACU:
It makes no difference. I can work in the garden, cook and pick up small objects, and that is enough.

The staggering thing was that although Acu preferred not to take sides in the arguments over finger amputation, there was no doubt in an informal conversation that she approved of the custom so recently abolished. Danis had learned to be cautious in advancing an opinion on such topics, but Namek too, as soon as I got to know him a little, expressed approval for such aspects of the culture suppressed by Dutch reforms.

Over the question of Wyn Sargent she proved herself a staunch ally. Coming back to the subject she said, ‘She was very good to Obaharok. Wyn and I used to do everything together. We’d go to the fields and we’d work. That’s why I was sad when she left. I wish that Wyn Sargent was still here so that her relatives would come and visit her. When white people like you come to visit we feel very sad, because you remind us of Wyn Sargent.’

I
RAN NAMEK TO EARTH
in the Excelsior Café, and we sat together on seats wrenched from a crashed plane. The atmosphere was of that special bewildered emptiness so familiar in countries on the threshold of change from which purpose has been withdrawn, and nothing sucked into the vacuum to take its place. The attempt to brighten up the surroundings had underscored an entrenched bareness. A lizard that had clearly gone mad was scuttling in a distraught manner over the surface of a Fanta advertisement; the one-armed bandit had ceased to work, and a pool table attracted no players because the Dani guides and hangers-on who frequented the place still failed to understand the purpose of competitive games. Stray sounds emphasized a chronic silence: the scratch of a branch on the tin roof, the distant maracas rattle of a helicopter. A Dani tribal who had wandered in by mistake stood motionless in a far corner. He glistened from head to foot in the oiled silk of his skin, and a blue feather had been stuck in his penis gourd. After a while, perhaps from embarrassment, he emitted a deep sonorous giggle, then effortlessly, as if released from a spring, was carried at a bound through the window and out of sight.

We sipped sweet, lukewarm tea. I pushed a packet of clove cigarettes across the table and Namek took one with a flutter of the fingers, like a bird alighting on a twig. In the way of all the Danis moving into the new age, he was in a flux over the matter of clothing, and had dressed himself on this occasion in army service jungle fatigues — a miniature parachutist, short on aggression.

I had hoped to persuade him to tell me something of life as it had been for a Dani in the troublous period described in Wyn Sargent’s book, but the moment I broached the subject I felt the loss of contact. The direction of his gaze had shifted and he appeared to be listening. He raised a finger to his lips in a gesture valid in every part of the world. Ears were cocked, it signified, behind these thin walls. ‘Soon we go for a ride in car,’ he said.

He was here to meet someone who might or might not show up. Punctuality was unknown, not understood in the Baliem. Nevertheless time came more and more to establish its dominance. All the Dani guides now wore wrist-watches from which, even in Namek’s case, they had detached the hands. ‘We must wait a little,’ he said, ‘then we go.’

It gave me the opportunity to tackle him on the subject of polygamy, from which strenuous campaigns mounted both by the missionaries and the government had been unable to dissuade the Danis. Namek, possessing two wives, was a suitable informant. ‘How do you cope with them?’ I asked. ‘How do you keep them quiet?’

‘On Thursdays I take first wife out in taxi,’ he said, ‘on Sundays second wife for nice ride. I am giving sugar almonds from Holland to both.’

‘Do you make them work in your garden?’

‘No, I am Catholic. The Dutch father who adopted me say not to make wives work. This why I am driving a taxi, but now I need a new tyre.’

I asked him the routine question: if Dani men marry ten wives or more how can there be enough women to go round?

‘There are enough,’ he said. He nodded his head in vigorous emphasis. ‘A man may work until he has pigs to give. When he has pigs there is always wife.’ This was the routine answer.

We were interrupted as the door burst open with a crash, and a number of Dani guides, taxi drivers and hangers-on in football shorts and singlets of garish colours rushed into the room. They yanked in succession with peals of high-pitched laughter at the handle of the one-armed bandit, picked up cues to jab at the balls on the pool table, went through a joking pretence of sparring and digging each other in the ribs, and dashed out again.

‘Where do the pigs come from in the first place?’

‘The man he works for will give him pigs. Then the wedding may be arranged.’

‘Take the case of your friends who’ve moved into town,’ I said. ‘Surely they’re no longer into working for pigs? How will they manage?’

‘They will manage. Now they are working with Dutch tourists. These tourists say them, OK, so we give you money. You buy pigs.’

‘And do they do that? Has anyone actually bought pigs for cash?’

‘No,’ he said, and his small, negative smile, launched with a nervous uplift of the eyes, warned of a threat of muddle.

‘Why not?’

‘Because village big men will not allow. These are men saying yes or no. They say all pigs now being saved for five-year feast coming. Pigs not to be given for money.’

‘We’re back where we started,’ I said. ‘Your friends have the money but the big men are hanging on to the pigs. So what are they going to do? A pocketful of money, but no pig, no wife. They’re up the creek, aren’t they?’

‘Not up creek,’ he said. ‘Now there is pig shortage because of feast. After feast small pigs begin to grow. Soon big men will say, OK, let them take money for pigs. My friends must wait.’

‘Those big men of yours,’ I said. ‘What is the largest number of wives any of them has?’

Namek held up a hand. ‘I am counting by fingers,’ he said. ‘The one that has most wives has five handfuls. Maybe a little more. Every two years this man is taking one wife. Two houses he must build to hold them all.’

‘How old is he now?’

‘We do not know ages. He is very old. This man lives all day on a blanket outside hut. Friends come with brushes to clear from him the flies.’

‘And I suppose his latest wife is a young girl?’

‘She is young. He gave many pigs for her, and she put on marriage skirt for him for first time.’

‘It’s a problem for all concerned,’ I said. ‘Including him.’ This was dangerous ground. According to the anthropologists the Danis usually clammed up over matters of marital relationships. I took the bull by the horns. ‘We’re talking about sex,’ I told him. ‘This girl isn’t really married at all. Here’s an old man lying on a blanket all day and the flies crawling all over him. Where does the marriage come in? Doesn’t his wife do anything about it?’

His face had emptied. This was a Stone Age face again, straight out of the compound. The widest of grins, or a frown, and between these extremes of satisfaction and discontent nothing showed but a graven passivity. Early associations and influences had rendered Namek’s features susceptible to small invasions of expression, at the same time depriving him of the capacity to register deep emotion. I pressed on and a pseudo-European liveliness returned, and I knew I was in the clear.

‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘Yes, she does.’

‘So what happens?’

‘In compound nothing. Many woman are there cleaning up, cooking. Babies everywhere. Young women go out to work in gardens. Men are in gardens digging ditches. I would not allow my second wife working in gardens.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought they offered much in the way of privacy,’ I said.

‘There are sacred places with trees. These we call wusa. No one must enter to cut wood, because ghosts are in trees.’

‘I thought Dani ghosts were invisible.’

‘These ghosts not seen but shoot with arrows. I have seen one man wounded in this way. When people come close to wusa place they cover their faces. Men are digging ditch on one side. Women plant sweet potatoes on other side.’ I was the recipient of his nearest equivalent to a smile, with all the nuances of suggestion that an outright Dani grin could not contain. ‘So that’s how it’s done,’ I said. ‘What about the ghosts and their arrows? Doesn’t anyone ever get shot?’

‘This place is not wusa for blind people, or one leg shorter than other leg, or for people we call geruba, meaning they are not strong in the head. Ghosts sorry for this boy and girl.’

‘It’s a sensitive attitude,’ I said. ‘Is it generally known in the compound that this goes on?’

‘They don’t say, but they all know.’

‘Even the husband on his blanket, being eaten by the flies?’

‘Yes, he knows also, but he will not say. I tell this to you because you are a foreigner and soon you will go away.’

The tourist Namek had been expecting failed to appear and in the end he gave up and said we might as well go. He wanted to show me the place where he had been born, south of Wamena near the Megapola road sloping gently down towards the river. Mornings in the Baliem are burnished and luminous before slowly the skies turn sullen in the afternoon and the clouds build up with the rain. At this time the outlines of the Mountain Wall were scratched across the sky, and a distance of twenty miles had turned quartz to aquamarine.

This was the scene of one of Namek’s earliest memories. A helicopter — the first flying machine he had seen — had dropped out of the sky and smiling men had descended from it. They had handed out steel axes, knives and salt to the assembled villagers and one of the smiling men put a bar of chocolate in Namek’s mouth, which he took out and gave to his father. The newcomers announced that they had been sent by God, with the instructions to build an airstrip there. They explained how this was to be done, and set the villagers to work. Namek’s next memory was of the smiling man’s departure. The airstrip going through part of the village gardens was finished, and then suddenly the men were gone, and were seen no more.

It is to be supposed that these were members of the expeditionary force dispatched by Lloyd Van Stone, a Texan, claiming that he had received a ‘mandate from heaven’ to invade the Baliem and bring the Danis to God. Van Stone found Catholicism as introduced by the Franciscans unrecognizable as Christianity, burned several thousands of captured fetiches in a bonfire two hundred metres in length, and encouraged defection to his brand of faith by the distribution of goods such as those Namek had described. These lavish offerings were attributed by the villagers to successful ceremonies performed by members of the cargo cult. Namek was unable to explain why, after the missionaries’ departure, the village and its gardens had been abandoned.

There were police posts every five or six miles along the road, and a foreigner passing any of these for the first time had to check in for an inspection of his surat jalan, a routine questioning, and the entering-up of his personal details in the register. One of these posts was at the village Sugokmo. It had been built, as wherever possible police posts were, on a hillock with a good view of whatever was going on in the flat, surrounding countryside. The policemen were from Java, with supposedly little appetite for life in Irian Jaya, and here, once again, was a typical police-post flower garden. It had been raining at Sugokmo and the hill was covered in mud. ‘Don’t fall down,’ the policeman said when he had finished writing my details in his register, and he told a naked Dani who was polishing the plastic flower pots to look after me. This he attempted to do, but we both skidded and sprawled in the mud, a scene that produced uproarious laughter and put everyone in a good humour. Namek’s taxi always required a push start, and seeing this from their eyrie above, the two policemen, still grinning happily, came down to give a hand.

As reported by Wyn Sargent, the Danis had revolted and suffered repression immediately prior to her presence in the Baliem. In 1973 Robert Mitton commented on the harshness of the new regime:

The Indonesians aren’t particularly liked in the Baliem valley … they have resorted to violent suppression where their popularity is very low; Sengeh, Arso and the border areas. According to our pilot who has flown in the region there are literally no people left. Their villages have been totally destroyed and they are hiding in the bush, have fled to Papua New Guinea, or are dead.

In this way the Papuan people demonstrated a continuing resistance to the Indonesian presence and, being virtually without arms, suffered the consequence. The United States had backed Indonesia from the first as a potentially valuable ally against communism in South-east Asia. A moral problem arose, for the Western Allies had just emerged victorious from a war fought to put an end to territorial aggression by the strong against the weak. The dilemma was solved in a meeting between President Sukarno and Bobby Kennedy at which it was agreed that whether West Papua joined Indonesia or not, was to be an ‘Act of Free Choice’. By this time the Indonesian army had taken up its position in the territory under dispute. A referendum was announced, the votes to be cast by one thousand and twenty-five delegates selected under Indonesian military supervision. Their voting was unanimous, although it is alleged that a single dissenter was converted when a gun was pointed in his direction. West Papua passed under its new title of Irian Jaya into Indonesian control — a
fait accompli
upon which the UN hastened to confer its approval.