Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (26 page)

Some of the obsession with civil service jobs may be a hangover from the chaos and hyperinflation of the mid-1960s. Salaries were worthless across the board, but government jobs at least came with something useful: rations of rice, cooking oil and sugar. At a time when poor Indonesians wore sackcloth in the marketplace, there was fabric, too, for uniforms. Perhaps that contributed to the uniform-mania that persists to this day. Indonesians love uniforms of every type. Civil servants, even ministers and bupatis, wear uniforms every day. Most central government agencies allow formal batik shirts on Fridays, and some local governments require a weekly showing of the traditional textiles of the region. The national red thread: an engraved name-tag, white on black plastic, and a little gold badge of office.

The bigwigs can morph between uniforms, depending on the occasion. ‘On the campaign trail, local politicians change clothes more often than Madonna during one of her concerts,’ the political scientist Michael Buehler said when I noted the uniform-mania. ‘The Governor of South Sulawesi is a bureaucrat in the morning, a boy scout at noon, a devout Muslim in the afternoon and a businessman in the evening.’ He simply chooses the uniform of whichever group he’s currently appealing to.

Civil service uniforms, mostly in dreary shades of beige, olive or blue, are splash-brightened by embroidered logos, one for the unit of government, another for the department. These have become such a feature of the Indonesian landscape that they have been copied by political parties, corporations, Vespa owners’ clubs. Even listed terrorist groups have embroidered flash-badges that assert their identity. People from the same village going on pilgrimage to Mecca will dress the same. At weddings, the families will share a look, not just the bridesmaids, but the parents and siblings of both bride and groom, their various spouses and kids: the whole clan.

The 1960s turned the civil service into a welfare state for the well-connected; no one was paid much, but then they weren’t really expected to do any work either. If they could use their position to squeeze a fee out of someone who did have some cash, all well and good. The ethos persists, though it’s now easier to top up your earnings legally. ‘My base salary is five million a month,’ one bureaucrat told me – about five hundred dollars. The gentleman worked for the Ministry of Agriculture and was trying to encourage people in the eastern islands to reduce their dependence on rice and go back to eating root vegetables. He had arrived from the provincial capital on a Thursday afternoon for a supervisory visit. He had gone to the district office on Friday morning but found no one there, so he settled into our guest house to wait until Monday or Tuesday, when someone might show up for work. At least five days’ travel money, for an hour-long meeting. ‘After all the allowances, I never take home less than ten million a month, even before considering any “extras” I might like to take advantage of.’ He made scare quotes with his fingers around the unspecified ‘extras’. From my own observations in the Ministry of Health, they could have included anything from kickbacks on computers to payment for phantom training workshops.

All of the increments that bring a civil servant’s salary up to a living wage are in the gift of that person’s superior. In other words, every department of government is a giant clan, a pyramid of patronage that cascades from the Minister right down to the cleaners. The patriarchal structure is reflected in the language people use to talk about their underlings:
anak buahku
, which incorporates the word
anakku
, my child.

I was always surprised to see how carefully the middle managers that I worked with at the health ministry doled out the things that legally earned their staff extra cash: sitting on expert panels, overseas trips, stints at conference organizing. They tried hard to make sure that each of their ‘children’ got a fair crack at the extras. On the one hand, this meant that training courses were full of people who were there because it was their turn, not because the subject matter was in any way relevant to their jobs. On the other, it was admirably equitable, a modern example of the sort of distribution you see at adat ceremonies – a slab of liver for this person, a snout for that one. Since the boss decides who gets what, they never get rumbled by their staff if they fill their own pockets a little too full.

A small fraction of jobs in the bureaucracy are awarded based on competitive exams. But most of the jobs that are not given out to political supporters get sold. The most expensive jobs are in the ‘wet’ ministries, the ones awash in money for
proyek
or services: Public Works, for example, and the Ministry of Religion which has a monopoly on organizing the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. But even relatively ‘dry’ ministries such as health can charge two years’ base salary under the table for an entry-level job. The result is a lot of incompetent bureaucrats. The minister in charge of the ‘state apparatus’ recently said that 95 per cent of Indonesia’s 4.7 million civil servants didn’t have the skills they needed to do their jobs.
*

Indonesians complain about this system all the time. Yet, in the newer districts of Indonesia at any rate, they do nothing about it because it delivers to so many people. I can’t think of a single family I stayed with anywhere in Indonesia who was separated from the bureaucracy by more than two degrees of kinship. Not the rice farmers in West Sumatra who invited me to stay because I helped them rattle tin cans to scare birds off their crops. Not the nursing-home orderly in Java who worked a nine-hour day and came home to cook for her in-laws. Not Pak Zunaidi in his stilt-house. Certainly not Pak Jopy and his family in Ohoiwait.

Ohoiwait had been a delightful place to spend Christmas: familiar and almost absurdly welcoming, the warmth spreading through the village like hot honey poured into porridge. But it was also quite hard work, all the church services and ceremonies, the being permanently on display, this strange beast from another world. I decided to take a bit of a holiday, and spend New Year in the Banda islands. Forts, cannons, a volcano rising majestically from the sea and stunning coral reefs: these things had combined to make Banda into a micro tourist destination. I would meet other foreigners, chat in English about familiar things. I would stay in a guest house; my host would not call other villagers in at six o’clock in the morning to watch me drinking ‘empty coffee’, coffee without sugar.

The Pelni ferry north from Tual arrived eighteen hours late, took many hours longer than the scheduled forty-four to reach Banda, and left me within walking distance of a guest house with a lovely wooden deck right opposite the volcano, Gunung Api. The first evening, I had the place to myself. I sat simply admiring the volcano as it loomed out of the water, its tree-clad slopes stroked to honey-green by the evening light. A breath of mist hung idly in front of the mountain; a fisherman in a canoe hollowed out of a kenari tree drifted silently by. His passage sent tiny ripples across the volcano, which was mirrored upside down in the mercury-still water. It was a moment of utter calm, smoothing away thoughts of the devastation that this very mountain had wrought through the ages.

The most recent eruption of any consequence was in 1988. I visited Banda a year later, and remember the seawater growing hotter and hotter as I swam into a cove at the base of the volcano. The gas bubbling up from underwater vents had turned the sea into a salty hot-tub. The British naturalist Alfred Wallace, writing 150 years ago, described a much angrier mountain, one whose tantrums caused earthquakes and tsunamis as well as lava flows. ‘Almost every year there is an earthquake here,’ he wrote, ‘and at intervals of a few years, very severe ones which throw down houses and carry ships out of the harbour bodily into the streets.’
*

The guest house was shouting distance from the town pier, from which small wooden water-buses left for the surrounding islands. I wanted to cross over to Lonthor, where the bigger nutmeg plantations were found. ‘Is there a schedule for the boat to Lonthor?’ I yelled across to the boatmen. ‘Of course!’ they yelled back. ‘When do you leave?’ I bellowed. ‘When the boat is full!’ came the reply.

A couple of hours later, I was padding around a forest of huge kenari trees, their buttress roots flying high above my head. Beneath these skyscrapers was another layer of more modest trees, droopy with a fruit that looked like a small yellow peach, hard as a billiard ball. A few of these fruits were split open in a scarlet grin, the dark nutmeg-shell barely showing through a web of crimson mace: a two-for-one spicefest. The mace, waxy and pliable when fresh, crisps up as it dries to a browny-orange, great for flavouring soups, curries and Christmas cookies. It is wrapped lacy around a brittle inner shell. Rattling around inside that is the nutmeg itself, a puckered oval whose principal use these days is as an ingredient in Coca-Cola’s magic formula. Between the trees people padded barefoot; they stabbed at fallen kenari nuts with cleft sticks, hefting them into woven rattan baskets on their backs. It was peaceful, but for the whining of mosquitoes that dive-bombed my ankles. So I escaped to a clearing, emerging into the platinum sunshine of midday in front of an old stone well.

‘Drink!’ The command came from a little gnome of a man with a quick smile who had been bouncing along a narrow path through the plantation; two giant baskets of nutmeg swung off a bamboo pole over his shoulder. ‘Is the water good?’ I asked. ‘Of course it’s good. It’s a sacred well! It’s only bad when it runs dry.’ Today the sacred well was full of clear, cool water. I drank.

We were standing halfway up the mountainside; opposite us loomed the volcano which sits at the centre of this group of tiny islands, once so improbably the beating heart of globalization. I mentioned to the gnome that I had last visited the Bandas just after the eruption of twenty-three years earlier. ‘Yes, 1988. That’s when the sacred well last ran dry.’ He explained that the water disappears to warn of impending disaster. Then, after a pause: ‘Actually, it went dry in 1998 too, just before the conflict.’ ‘The conflict’ in this part of Indonesia was a proxy religious war in which thousands died. I was mildly surprised that the sacred well would warn of political as well as natural disasters. But it made sense in its way: nature and politics had always been inseparable in this part of the world.

He invited me to see his
kebun
– that vague garden-to-farm word again. In this case, it referred to an area about the size of a football pitch which the farmer had fenced off inside the forest. There was a nursery of nutmeg seedlings, several adult trees groaning with fruit and one, its trunk serially slashed, that had almost no nutmegs. ‘That’s the male tree,’ said the farmer. ‘It’s not very productive, but it encourages the female trees to work harder.’ He cracked his gnomish grin. ‘Just like humans,’ he said. Then he hacked his machete into the trunk of the male tree. It oozed scarlet liquid. ‘Just like humans,’ he repeated.

By the time I got back to the guest house that evening, my prime location on the deck was occupied by a white man reading a book. Next to him sat a cold beer. I was nervous. There had been occasions in the last few months – peeing in the sand, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, eating chunks of mango off the point of my pen-knife, all the while scheming about how to keep my spot on the ferry after the next stop – when I’d realized that I had become a little feral. I approached my fellow guest. ‘What are you reading?’ I asked, by way of opening.

He turned the book to show me the cover.
The Wisdom of Whores
, it was called. I must have looked shocked. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. Long pause. ‘Are you enjoying it?’ I asked. ‘It’s actually very good.’ Phew. I confessed to having written it. He stared at me, looked at the author photo, looked at me again. It was hard to say which of us was the more surprised.

The guest house formed an odd little colony; John, who was reading my book, was an English teacher in a Korean school in Jakarta. Besides him there were a couple of prematurely retired Canadians who were keen divers and a Swede who believed that colonialism was a natural part of the human condition. There was a pair of bog-standard Finnish backpackers who talked a lot about money, a delightful young Dutch couple who were surprised by how much the historical narrative they found in Banda differed from the narrative in their childhood schoolbooks, and a German who became bellowingly confessional after his fourth beer. All this was topped off on New Year’s Eve by a dippy trust-fund blonde with a posh English accent and a beefcake boyfriend. The dippy blonde was dressed for a beach disco in Ibiza, a spaghetti-strap white jersey number cut very high on the thigh and very low on the cleavage. The look worked well early in the evening when she was draped over the beefcake on the guest-house deck, less well after midnight and many drinks, when she was draped over the local policeman at the village street party.

On the second of January the whole company went into a bit of a panic. It was rumoured, then confirmed, that all flights off the islands had been cancelled. They would have to wait for the next Pelni ferry back to Ambon, the provincial capital, a ten-hour journey to the north.