Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (29 page)

Fireflies, tanks and bullock carts are all I remember about the island from that visit in the late 1980s. Twenty-three years later, Halmahera had split into several districts, discovered nickel and generally come up in the world. Pak Piter described the transformation of his own village, Lelilef. Once a grubby hamlet of sago-palm houses and middle-school drop-outs, it had blossomed thanks to the presence of Weda Bay Nickel, a giant, foreign-owned mining company. Now, Piter said, it was a town of two-storey houses, there were cars on the roads, youngsters went to college in Java. Large foreign mining company as the hero of a development story – that was something you don’t often hear. I resolved to go to the Weda weddings, then visit the mine.

I arrived back at the same harbour as I had on that first visit. There was not a bullock cart to be seen. The sole army jeep of yesteryear had been replaced by nose-to-bumper SUVs. It was as if the car park of an expensive organic supermarket in a posh suburb of London or Melbourne had been air-dropped into Halmahera. They were mostly share-taxis, waiting to speed passengers to the extremities of the island’s stumpy spider-legs. I would never have imagined such a transformation.

I chose a car that was headed for Weda. We barrelled over newly tarmacked roads laid through hilly forests, we forded rivers around unfinished bridges, and eventually we cruised into a town that showed all the symptoms of being a new district capital. There was the divided highway, and the bupati’s office towering over the town from the hill above. There was the gleaming new plate-glass hotel, which would doubtless soon moulder into a funk of dank carpets and mildewed walls like the other members of the species across Indonesia. There were a few rows of Legoland houses, and electricity even in the daytime.

I had missed the weddings by a day. Behind the plate-glass hotel, the wreckage of the feasts was still in evidence. Under a white silky-nylon awning, on red carpeting covering the area of a couple of football pitches, catering staff from the provincial capital of Ternate fussed about, stacking up hundreds of chaffing dishes, wondering what to do with industrial-sized waste-bins of leftover rice.

Party Central was fenced off from the surrounding fields and building sites by hoardings displaying larger-than-life-sized Photoshop fantasies: one of the twins as a child in front of an antebellum mansion in the American South, the other twin, dreamy in satin robe overlooking generic modern cityscape. Interspersed among them were pictures of the Bupati and his wife in exotic foreign locations (not Photoshopped) and, in particularly strategic positions, massive portraits of the Bupati in uniform, with a checklist of achievements during his first term.

First on the list: ‘Building the infrastructure of government at all levels’. Another of his achievements: ‘Freeing up the protected forest of Gebe island for use by the mining sector.’

‘Ah, you should have got here yesterday, you could have come,’ said Vera, the owner of the guest house I stayed at. ‘It was a blast; we danced all night. I can’t imagine what it cost!’

In fact, a fair part of the cost, some 35,000 dollars’ worth, had been paid for out of the public purse. The Bupati was unapologetic about this. The loving couples had paraded across a series of trays filled with rice, symbolizing a long marriage without hunger. It was part of the local adat custom which neither Vera nor anyone else I spoke to remembered, and that was exactly the Bupati’s point. His administration was trying to promote local wedding traditions, he told reporters. It was only natural that the culture and tourism department’s budget for this programme should help support the biggest wedding of the year, one which was rescuing local adat from oblivion.

This revival of wedding adat burnished the Bupati’s credentials as a guardian of local culture with his guests. Among the 7,000 people he had invited were the provincial governor, the provincial chief of police, the military commander, three neighbouring bupatis and some of the bigger bosses from the nickel mine across the bay.

The Bupati tacked on some more parties, the better to entertain all these Big Men. The third day of frolics was dedicated to celebrating the birthday of the PDIP, the political party which was backing the Bupati in elections later in the year. The PDIP’s buffalo logo graced red-silk flags that flirted with the sea breeze in front of the hotel, outside every government building, outside the offices of other political parties. On the back of a flatbed truck, the local transgender or
waria
contingent gyrated to dangdut music, with the Bupati’s face stretched over their silicone breast implants. Though they had sexed up their T-shirts with punky slashes and safety pins, they were careful not to deface the Bupati’s image. Waria are simply part of the landscape in Indonesia’s larger cities, widely accepted as long as they don’t stray too far from the niches the community has carved out for itself: beauty salons, entertainment and sex work. On my travels to some of Indonesia’s more remote areas, I now discovered that waria are also to be found in every district town. They are often imported into smaller villages to do the make-up for weddings or to dance at election rallies. Back in the tiny whale-fishing village of Lamalera I had run into two waria who had crossed the island from the main town to help decorate a new church for its inaugural mass.

The one hundred or so young people in the marching band that led the parade in Weda had upmarket polo shirts on which the Big Man’s portrait was fringed by the slogan: ‘My Bupati, Your Bupati: Keep Going!’ The guest-house owner Vera drove past wearing a red T-shirt proclaiming ‘I’m a Big Fan of Aba Acim’ – the Bupati’s nickname. She pointed at me and tugged at her shirt, mouthing: ‘Where’s yours?’ I’d missed the hand-out.

Bustled along by a cheering crowd – ‘Five more years!’ – I marched past the Big Man himself. He stood outside his house flanked by loyal retainers, not a Big Man at all, it turned out, but a little round man with a squashed bald head, his metronome arm serially slapping high-fives into the passing crowd, his chubby face bisected by a grin of proper delight. The high-fivers in the crowd were equally delighted, as if they had just slapped hands with the Queen. In this town, at least, the Bupati seemed genuinely popular. Central Halmahera had been a district for eighteen years before Aba Acim, a Weda boy himself, became bupati in 2007. He promptly shifted the district capital to his home town; it was he that brought blue roofs and a posh hotel to this ‘scruffy village with muddy roads’.

The following day was the birthday of the district, as well as the fourth anniversary of the capital’s move to Weda. The 8 a.m. ceremony was compulsory for almost everyone in town, the civil servants, the schoolkids, the Family Welfare Union, the scouts and the cops, each colour-coded in the uniform of their tribe. All gathered around the town square, the cast, stage-crew and audience in the Bupati’s theatre of state. A rickety ferris wheel loomed incongruous above the serried ranks, a reminder of the carnival which would come to life after the solemnities of the day.

There was a marked hierarchy among the guests. The school children and lesser civil servants stood on the far side of the square, with no shelter from the rain that threatened. I sat on red-plush stacking chairs with the Family Welfare women, under an awning just outside the community centre, which was the beating heart of the celebration. Inside, on chairs draped in white satin, were the women of the Dharma Wanita, the organization of civil service wives. The schoolkids got nothing, we got a box of sticky cakes, the Dharma Wanita got a fried chicken lunch. The front row of armchairs was reserved for the biggest bigwigs; they got tins of Coke and Fanta to our plastic glasses of water.

There was an attempt at military precision. The ‘Commander in Chief’ of the ceremony kept barking orders over the tannoy system: ‘High-school students, two steps to the right. Arms up! Ready:
one! two!
’ And the high-school students measured off the distance between themselves and their neighbours with one arm stretched forward, the other to the right, and goose-stepped into place. ‘Trendy sunglasses:
off!
’ Sunglasses disappeared into pockets. ‘Cell phones:
off
!
’ No visible activity. After another five or ten minutes of waiting, the newly serried ranks puddled back into disarray and there was more barking.

At about 9.15 the inner sanctum began to fill with buzzing walkie-talkies and the military commands became more urgent. The Bupati’s twin daughters arrived in long satin gowns, baby blue with fuchsia sequinned tops, similar but non-identical, like the girls themselves. Their new husbands wore matching blue shirts with shiny fuchsia ties. There was a hum of anticipation, an ululation, and then a stream of dancers, culminating in a parade of white-clad figures in tall, cylindrical masks with vicious jutting noses, topped in the folded-napkin headgear of Halmahera. The effect was more than a little menacing. I asked Vera what they symbolized but she couldn’t say. ‘
Adat baru, kali
,’ she said, laughing. ‘Some new tradition, I imagine.’

Behind the ghosts came a large, bottomless plywood ‘boat’ carried by policemen dressed as local warriors – they couldn’t use the real kora-kora war canoes demanded by tradition because the new parade grounds were far from the beach. Inside the boat, curtained by palm fronds, shuffled the Bupati and his wife. Once the Bupati was installed on his throne in the community centre, the ceremony proper could begin. There was a little history of the district, a lot of gratitude for enlightened leadership, then a dizzying show of interwoven marching, drumming and snapping about of rainbow flags, all led by three towering majorettes in flowing gold lamé cloaks who marked time by stamping their sequinned maxi boots.

In their quest to justify new districts or to consolidate their power, local Big Men across Indonesia have been bathing themselves in ceremonies that they once shunned as the stuff of backward peasants. They scrabble in the attic for long-forgotten traditions, and if they can’t find them, they conjure up new ones. Sub-districts grind to a halt as local leaders disappear to the district capital for heritage celebrations that last a whole week. At each of these, vast fairgrounds mushroom with elaborate stalls representing every branch of government. ‘There’s no opting out,’ complained a nurse who was manning a health department stall in Aceh Singkil. ‘We’re overworked in the hospital as it is, but for a whole week we have to come here and put up bunting, give out leaflets, try and get more people to sign our visitors’ book than theirs’ – she jutted her chin towards the Family Planning Bureau stall opposite. Every sub-district has a stall as well, pimping the delights specific to their own tiny republic. Here I was offered a plastic cup of iced seaweed soup, there I was allowed to try spinning silk from local cocoons (‘Our moths are famous all around the world’).

These fairs are an orgy of competitive identity-creation. And yet, observed Ed Aspinall, an Australian researcher of Indonesian politics, in response to my musing on the reinvention of local traditions, these ceremonies follow the same pattern nationwide. ‘To me it’s the local cultural stuff that seems cheap and ersatz,’ he said. ‘It’s the bureaucratic impulse and template that seem deep and authentic. It’s
very
Indonesian.’

The giant nickel mine about which Pak Piter had been so enthusiastic was less than two hours by speedboat from the town of Weda. The project, covering nearly 550 square kilometres in Halmahera, was authorized by Suharto just before he resigned. Then the fireworks of decentralization began. No one knew if licences signed at the national level would be honoured by provinces or districts; indeed it wasn’t even clear which province or district this particular mine was in: Maluku when the deal was done, notionally North Maluku a year later, though the new province had no functioning offices, competent staff or clear district boundaries. As if that weren’t enough, the whole region was being shredded by a war between Christians and Muslims. It was hardly an ideal time for foreigners to sink billions of dollars into an unmovable industry.

The project was revived in 2006 when French mining giant Eramet bought a stake.
*
Then a group of Jakarta-based NGOs, run mostly by well-educated middle-class activists and with strong support from international lobbyists, protested because a large part of the area slated for open mining was also zoned as protected forest. They fretted that if there were rare bats in unmapped underground caves, they would be disturbed by the mining, and that indigenous tribes who live in the area covered by the mine might suffer. And they worried about the company’s plans to dump waste from the mines in the bay, an area rich with corals and fish. The NGOs said they were speaking on behalf of local people who were too scared of reprisals to give their names. When the NGOs organized demos, some locals then staged counter-demos in support of the mine.

When I went down to get the speedboat to Lelilef, the lads on the dock grabbed my bag and loaded it on to the Weda Bay Nickel company speedboat. Odd how, without changing a thing myself, I was pressed into different shapes in different parts of Indonesia, moulded according to the die cast by the foreigners who have gone before me. I clearly wasn’t a tourist: I was too old, I had too little exposed flesh, and I didn’t want to go to the beach. And I was alone, whereas tourists travel in pairs. ‘Don’t you have any friends?’ I was often asked.