When I first visited Sumba 20-odd years ago - in pre-democracy, pre-Ring of Fire Indonesia - it was a near unreachable destination. Hanging alone like a battered meteorite deep in the Indian Ocean between Indonesia and Australia, the island was known for its periodic ritual warfare, dazzling ikat textiles, and elaborate funeral rites in which hundreds of men dragged twenty-ton stone slabs for thousands of meters over hill and vale through the countryside.
In this age of mass tourism, Sumba is still a difficult island to reach but not like the dim and distant realm it was two decades ago when I was trapped on the island for two weeks with no incoming or outgoing flights. Only in the last five years has Sumba begun to attract the notice of Bali and Jakarta-based tour operators.
No wonder. Sumba is a little visited and undeveloped outpost in Indonesia’s arid southeast islands chain that gives a visitor a sense of being shipwrecked on an island of both great physical beauty and unparalleled anthropological and archaeological interest.
Though a nominally Christian island - you often meet men by the name of Josua, Mateos, and Lucas, and women named Maria, Christina, and Katerina. Sumba is actually one of the last strongholds of pre-Hindu and pre-Islamic religions. Yet a magnificent megalithic heroic culture flourished on the island well into the 20st century.
Sumbans practice mostly subsistence agriculture. The people of verdant West Sumba are mainly farmers, while the East Sumbanese raise cattle, buffalo, goats and Indonesia’s famous “sandalwood” horses. Commanding as much as 15 million rupiah, Sumba horses are believed to have the strongest ankles of any breed in Indonesia. Symbols of wealth and status, hundreds are exported each month to Java and other islands to serve as mounts and for drawing carts.
At the remote Tambolaka airport on the island’s western end, the flight from Sumbawa disgorged a planeload of small businessmen, missionary families, a few white-veiled nuns, myself and a smattering of French, Dutch and Australian tourists.
I rode through the countryside to the district capital of Waikabubak past clusters of stone slab graves along the highway, fields of galloping horses, steepled churches atop hills and house roofs a riot of Bougainvillea. On previous trips, I had seen loin clothed wild pig hunters carrying spears alongside the road with their dogs.
I took in the raw and unpeopled landscape of the island – no factories, no gas stations, no billboards, no supermarkets, just gardens, country markets and farmers. I noticed that Sumba’s famous top hat houses were even less in evidence. The traditional dwellings were being phased out everywhere and replaced with less-expensive cinder-block structures. The traditional grass-roofed rumah adat had become too expensive to build, both in labor and materials.
Tarung & The House Dedication
We set out for a walk the next morning in Waikabubak, a district capital so small that any point in town can be reached on foot in less than ten minutes. It has very much the feel of a frontier market town. Horses prance down the main streets and Sergeant Pepper Yellow Submarine-shaped buses, festooned and honking like psychedelic geese, rove the town looking for passengers.
Barefoot girls in ragged dresses carry baskets of spinach, ubi and bak choy on their heads. Vendors at the side of the street sell tiny mounds of peanuts, tomatoes and sirih for pennies. In the last two years since I was here, there has been a dramatic proliferation of motorbikes and the addition of an imposing new mosque.
We climbed a rocky limestone path leading up to the adat village of Tarung, a collection of dwellings stretching along a hilltop in the center of town. Though Tarung is considered the “tourist” village of Waikabubak, its austere appearance and customs differ little from hundreds of villages in the island’s interior, all built on high ground for defensive purposes. I knew it received outside visitors regularly because the dogs didn’t bark as much, the children didn’t run away, and women brought out small weavings for sale.
Throughout every level of the half-deserted village were funereal slabs of varying sizes, facing different directions. Corn, krupuk, and coconut fiber were drying on mats on top of the graves, memorials for the dead serving as utilitarian tools for the living.
Tarung’s paving stones were stained with splotches of bright red betel nut juice spat from the crimson mouths of both young and old. A few crones looked as if they were suffering from some horrible tropical disease. Sumba is still one of the few islands in Indonesia where even the young people use betel nut.
Further along the ridge, at the highest point in the village, I found most of the villagers attending a house dedication ceremony. An eagle hovered overhead, no doubt interpreted as a propitious omen. In the middle of the cluster of dwellings were the skeletal remnants of the village “skull tree.” In pre-colonial times, captured heads were hung in celebration on the bare, blood-soaked limbs the skull tree, always located in the village center.
Mana, or life-essence was imbued in the heads, thus the skull tree ensured fertility and was the main religious object of the village. In their attempt to eradicate headhunting, the Dutch cut down most of the skull trees in the early 20th century. But the skull tree lives on in Sumbanese ikat as it is a ubiquitous motif.
We huddled under the shade of the house eaves. Young girls carried stacks of glass plates and eating utensils and strapping boys struggled with bulging baskets of steaming rice. Dishes of rice and green vegetables were laid out on a large mat, in a great polka dot pattern, then served one by one to guests.
Slaves were once buried alive under the building’s main supports, but now pigs and kerbau were sacrificed. Men and boys squatted in the middle of the remains of two fly-blown buffalo that had been slaughtered earlier in the day, cutting up and apportioning the meat among the different households. Men shouted a family’s name and a runner would come up to receive their share of gristly meat hung from a piece of bamboo twine.
Walking down the path back to the main road, marveling at the heart-pounding atavism of this scene, I spied a cable creeping out from under a grass roof and followed it around the corner for 20 meters to a six-foot wide satellite dish.
E-mail : pakbill2003@yahoo.com
Copyright@2004 PakBill
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