Empire of the East (38 page)

Sociability was governed by a gentle protocol which might have drawn inspiration from a vicarage tea-party of old. Having charged about in all directions on fuel-gathering and other such errands, the young settled themselves within the church compound in decorous rows, maintaining a drone of polite, smiling conversation with their neighbours, punctuated in the case of both sexes by ritual and constant exchange of home-made cigarettes. There are parts of the world where the stranger must resign himself to being stared at — even to drawing a crowd. Papuan good manners permit no more than a quick, investigatory glance before the head is turned away. Young people coming from isolated foothill hamlets to Kulagaima for this party were likely to have seen few white faces before, but nobody looked twice in my direction, and a baby whose face crumpled with consternation at my appearance was instantly snatched away to be comforted out of view.

There was a determination to avoid messiness in the handling of the pork. A new contingent of lady helpers, their skin patterned in abstract blue designs, went the rounds with rectangles of meat held on glossy plantain leaves serving as plates. Portions varied with age, sex and status. Village patricians received double helpings which they brandished in each hand with an air of triumph before consumption. Fingers and mouths were constantly cleansed of grease with extremely fine hay-scented grass placed within easy reach, and those unsatisfied with the result trooped off to scrub themselves with a brush hanging by a chain over a fresh-water ditch.

Having arrived late and thus escaped the great holocaust of pigs that had started with the dawn, I had settled at Kulagaima to the enjoyment of a stimulating day. Nevertheless the celebration was a hybrid one. Men who had been roped in here from a world of miracles and ghosts were reduced by the pleasant pettiness of the occasion to a pretence of grumbling over the division of pork. The Fathers had arrived at the best possible compromise, and amazingly, had come close to liberating the womenfolk for the day. Mitton and Gardner would have held up their hands in horror, taking the view that any breach in tribal custom weakens the culture that has enabled it to survive and presages its eventual collapse. They would certainly have disagreed with the Fathers’ peace-making, which was what the party was all about. ‘War’, Mitton said, ‘constitutes one of the major focuses of people’s interest and energy.’ He added: ‘An equal or even greater number perish from complications arising from the common cold, hence the death rate is not excessive.’ Gardner, too, found ritual warfare on the whole a good thing.

Nevertheless, the Franciscans worked away at peaceful solutions which the anthropologists claimed the people in reality did not want. It was hard to believe that an end to their labours was in sight when in Wamena town itself at Easter in 1992 a brief battle was fought. Arrows flew through the air over the heads of the tourists on package deals from the orderly cities of the Netherlands, who until this experience might have found Irian Jaya unexciting compared, say, with Komodo and its dragons.

We left the party and set off along a path leading over walls and through ditches to the Wamena road. A slope climbed to a fronded backdrop under mountains blending with clouds. At the top of this rise, parting the tall grasses as though they had been curtains, two women moved into sight. At this distance one appeared as painted yellow, and as they came slowly down the slope towards us I realized that one was a woman in mourning and the other her attendant. The mourner wore only a
yokal
and was smeared all over from head to foot in yellow mud. Her companion was dressed in shapeless, dismal Western cast-offs, and a head-covering cowled like that worn by some unfamiliar order of nuns, although at close quarters this turned out to be made of sacking. Both these women held themselves in a stooping fashion, as if burdened by invisible loads. They carried digging sticks with sharp four-inch blades, used equally to cut root vegetables from the ground, or to beat off attempted rapes.

My impression was that these women were hoping to see a little of the celebrations without drawing attention to themselves. Namek signalled to them and they ducked back out of sight in a clump of ferns, where a moment later we found them. Namek spoke to them, and the attendant replied to his questions. Her charge had lost a brother killed in a skirmish, which entailed prolonged and complicated rituals of bereavement. Instead of smearing herself with mud at the time of the cremation — which, having dried on her body, would be left there until it fell off — the close relationship in this case required the mud to be added to daily until there was reason to believe that the ancestral spirits were satisfied. While in this early stage of mourning, the girl would be regarded by her community as suffering from a contagious sickness, a kind of emotional leprosy which, while curable, might retain its hold for months. The duty of the friend or neighbour who had agreed to act as her escort was to persuade her to take food, and to protect her, by carrying out the proper magical procedure, from attack by ghosts of the kind that battened upon grief. Mud-smearing came into this, too, because it served as a disguise from such phantoms, who despite their supernatural powers suffered from defective vision.

At this juncture it appeared that this ghastly maquillage was in need of touching up. The girl’s breasts had been tied with cords to flatten them against her rib cage and the mud had flaked away from their upper surface, as it had at the elbows, ankles and wrists, through the flexing of muscles. These small defects seemed to be causing her concern, and her friend rummaged in her clothing to produce a pad of muddied leaves with which she dabbed at the exposed patches of skin, but with little improvement to the final result. Namek told me that the girl thought she was about twenty-five but such was the ageing effect of the mud that I would have believed her to be more than forty.

It was fortunate that the brother had been unmarried, for widows could expect harsher versions of the same treatment in such cases: more self-inflicted ugliness and more trouble with ghosts. Heinrich Harrer reports a kind of hysteria in his time, prompting widows to throw themselves from cliff tops into the Baliem Gorge, and this it was reported was still happening thirty years later.

It was an encounter that gave rise to a pause for reflection. Where we are saddened by death, the Danis are outraged. As part of the defences raised against sorrow, our funeral rites are brief and we have dispensed with all the old-fashioned theatricals of grief. As soon as possible the body is put out of sight, and we are left alone with our memories and a grave rarely to be revisited. Where a Western family will save up to send a son to a good school, its Dani equivalent in the past would make sacrifices to be able to mummify a father in the hope of keeping his remains in the house for five hundred years.

Namek was inclined to disapprove of the government’s ban on finger amputation. A single deft chop and the finger was gone, and with it, after a few hours, the pain of the amputation too. It acted as a safety-valve, relieved the mourner of ordeal by mud, and left her with something to show. Women who had lost fingers commanded special respect. He was convinced that a recent upturn in the number of suicides was in some part due to the ban.

We left the women to go on their way, but then turned to watch them through a screen of jungle tendrils and leaves. Once, as they supposed, out of our sight, they underwent an extraordinary change. They straightened up and their pace quickened. They still preferred to see rather than to be seen, for, descending the slope, they slipped speedily from the cover of ferns to the cover of bamboos, peering through stalks and fronds before skipping a few yards to the next vantage point — a kind of oriental ballet of evasion, with grief perhaps for a moment thrust out of mind.

B
ACK IN THE SPRING
of 1991 an item in a
Financial Times
someone had left on a train caught my eye. It recorded the success of an American mining company, Freeport Copper, which, following twenty years of what the newspaper described as almost unbelievable feats of engineering, found itself in possession of the largest copper mine in the world. The Ertzberg Mountain in the highlands of Irian Jaya, upon which so much technical innovation and engineering skill had been focused, was found to contain a uniquely vast ore body of copper, silver and gold. This, having been removed at the rate of twenty four thousand tonnes a day, left nothing of a once towering peak but an enormous hole. Now Freeport was reported to have hollowed out the neighbouring Grasberg Mountain, two kilometres away, found also to be practically solid ore. As in the case of Ertzberg, problems were to be expected with overburden. This, in the specialized language of great mining corporations, is the mountain itself and its usual components of peaks, crags and forests which inhibit access to the ore. The fact was that colossal peaks minus their ore were being removed from the scene, and their remains — the overburden — dumped into the nearest valley. Soon the site of Grasberg, too, would be no more than a hole in the ground.

More important, more perturbing, was the news that the Indonesian government, in recognition of its outstanding achievements, had granted Freeport exclusive rights to a new mining concession two hundred and fifty times larger than the existing one. This contract was for thirty years. Nevertheless an exuberant Freeport spokesman expected that his company’s operations would last well into the next century. The
Financial Times
article pointed out that the concession gave the company full access to mineral-rich mountains extending right across the country to the frontier with Papua New Guinea, and the reader was left in no doubt that Freeport would be extending its operations in that direction. To quote its 1991 annual report: ‘We have completed preliminary surface and stream sampling in our new 6.5 million-acre exploration area where more than 6,000 rock and soil samples have been collected from thousands of sites.’

If not actually secretive in its operations, Freeport Indonesia might be said to have enshrouded them in extraordinary reticence, and it is perhaps natural that the world should wonder why this should have been. There is hardly a remoter place on earth than this mine, once no more than a mountain of copper, which, before the building of the road, was accessible only to a mountaineering enthusiast prepared to tackle a long trek interspersed with dangerous climbs. Pancak Jaya (5,039 m.), lying a few miles to the south of the mine, is the highest peak between the Himalayas and the Andes, and similar, if slightly lesser, peaks cluster in the area. The sixty-three-mile road built up from Amamapare on the south coast, passing occasionally along knife-edge ridges joining the peaks, is considered a marvel of road-building engineering. It is strictly private, its privacy being guarded by various checkpoints, and it is traversed only by company cars.

In a letter of 3 June 1992 from George A. Mealey, President of the parent company, Freeport McMoran of New Orleans, to Randall Hayes, Director of the conservationist organization Rainforest Action Network, Mealey vigorously refutes a charge that his company’s operations are not open to scrutiny. Between the years 1990 and 1992, Mealey points out, there have been ‘at least 40 site visits’. There was a rumour that even journalists had been allowed to visit the mine. In my case the attempt to obtain the necessary sanction — organized by friends with long experience in this field — was prolonged and difficult, occupying four months in all. One was dealing not only with a company concerned with privacy, but the Indonesian government, with whom Freeport maintains a close relationship, and which shows signs of uneasiness at the presence in the country of foreigners other than bona fide tourists. Eventually a visit was agreed and a date fixed. I flew from Wamena back to Sentani, where I boarded a Boeing plane owned by the company for the flight to Timika, a hot little town on the edge of a swamp, where it was arranged that I should be met and driven up the celebrated road to the mining town, Tembagapura. Awaiting me at the airport was Greg Probst, the PRO, and John Cutts, in charge of the Tembagapura Community Development Project. John had been born an American Indian and adopted at the age of two by a missionary. Before being taken on by Freeport he had spent most of his adult life among tribal people of the area, and spoke four of their languages. Both these men radiated interest and goodwill, and if, as was generally supposed, the company had decided the time had come to improve its image, they could not have sent more convincing emissaries than these.

A small fleet of company cars were lined up in the airport park, all of them Toyotas with the modifications necessary to cope with extraordinary journeys. Strict rules on driving are unavoidable in the company territory, including rigidly maintained speed limits, the use of lights — which are left on most of the time — and gears to be engaged at various points of the uphill and downhill drive. The first checkpoint is passed through at the airport perimeter with a quick scrutiny of the car and its passengers, and a tick on the register and an exchange of cordialities. Company employees treat each other with the courtesy more normally to be observed with the members of the armed forces than those in civilian life. Every drive up or down this extraordinary road, with its extreme gradients to be tackled in frequently adverse weather conditions, is part of a small shared adventure. Inconsiderate driving becomes an impossibility.

The lowlands we passed through in the vicinity of Timika, seeming to be an informal part of the Freeport territory, were hardly distinguishable from any rather poverty-stricken landscape anywhere in the tropical world. It was hot, untidy, and prey to the lassitudes of resignation and undernourishment. Timika underlined the difference between the hot country and the highlands. In the Baliem, energetic tribespeople displayed their largely naked but well-washed bodies. Here, where life moved at a snail’s pace, they dressed in the shapeless international uniform of tropical clothes. This had been highlighted by charitable hand-outs of cast-offs. A girl wore a Victorian cape with a fancy-dress item of a gypsy’s flounced flamenco skirt, and a man in grubby vest and slacks went about in a Mexican hat. It was an area scattered with big-bellied babies, tousled chickens and yellow dogs, and the sun’s rays stabbed back from glossy leaves and the waters of the lagoons. There was hope in plenty for these people in the near future, John said, speaking with confidence and relish of company projects now afoot to better their lot. As things were, too much of the company’s food had to be flown in from as far away as New Zealand, and the Baliem had failed them in the hoped-for vegetable supplies. Now, with the mine’s continuous expansion, self sufficiency was the goal in view, and he pointed at clearances in the straggling and shadeless secondary forest where the new future for Timika was about to dawn.