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May 26 - July 6, 2017
Today’s Indonesia is home to one in every thirty of the people on this planet
Those images were firmly Javanese. In my mind at the time, as in the minds of most foreigners who think about it at all, Indonesia maps on to Java. In a way, that makes sense. Though it takes up just 7 per cent of Indonesia’s land mass, Java is home to 60 per cent of all Indonesians.
But then, with remarkable frequency, the initial reaction is followed with something else: ‘I wish we’d been colonized by the English, not the Dutch.’
In the Javanese heartland, the new colony could consolidate power simply by buying off squabbling aristocrats and turning them into bureaucrats.
The country smokes 223 billion clove cigarettes, or kreteks, every year, thirteen times more than ordinary ‘white’ cigarettes.
‘When Indonesian institutions have to line up at the gates of heaven, the post office will be let in first,’ one old postmaster told me, and I agreed.
different groups are essentially living at different points in human history, all at the same time.
the groom’s side will use a telltale dog’s heart to beat the price of the girl right down.
And she was right. Because really, who wants to pay one hundred long-horned buffalo for ‘modern’ girls,
Remarkably few Indonesians have chosen to settle in other countries.
A band plays swing tunes behind a little square of parquet flooring, and passengers (‘Couples only, please, dressed neatly and politely’ enjoins the loudspeaker) can twirl around under the disco ball.
villagers now discover that they have much in common with Indonesians across the land; it’s not just their own district head who is on trial for corruption, school rooms are collapsing in Sumatra as well
In the heavy air of noon, neither the discomfort nor the thudding music was enough to keep my fellow passengers from Indonesia’s national pastime: sleep.
Yes, nearly 60 per cent of the population is squeezed into the single island of Java, but that still left a hundred million citizens in other islands.
At a stroke, in the space of just eighteen months, the world’s fourth most populous nation and one of its most centralized burst apart to become one of its most decentralized.
Two-thirds of households in Savu don’t even make it to Prosperity Level I, the lowest of Indonesia’s four wealth classifications; they are, in the government’s delicious phrase, ‘pre-prosperous’.
When we arrived, the captain said he had no landing permit. I jumped overboard,
I texted the harbour master in Kupang. ‘Sabar, Bu’, came the reply: ‘Be patient’.
I had to negotiate my whole social calendar of Christmas visits with only two decent sarongs which doubled as bed sheets. I smoothed out the one I had slept on the night before,
At the turn of the twentieth century, a full century after the VOC trading company had been taken over by the Dutch state, there were just twenty-five ‘natives’ in secondary school.
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.
Daylight comes quickly to the tropics. Arriving before dawn in Ternate, the capital of North Maluku, I sat at a street stall waiting for it to get light. One minute I could see no further than my flowered glass of grainy coffee, the next, I was looking at the grey velvet outline of Mount Gamalama, the volcano which makes up most of Ternate.
Dangdut is an Indonesian pop music which combines vaguely Indian melodies with the dang-dut dang-dut beat of conical gendang drums, a sort of Bollywood–House Music mash-up.
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That eruption led to the tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004, that killed 170,000 Indonesians, mostly in Aceh, and that marks lives and behaviour to this day.
It takes a family about four days of cutting, scraping, washing and drying to harvest enough sago to feed themselves all year. ‘People around here never had to think ahead,’ said Edith. ‘We got lazy.’
Though it was not the boom town I had imagined, it was all very gengsi. Gengsi is showing off, keeping up with the Joneses – a habit that most Indonesians say they despise, and many engage in with great enthusiasm.
The police chief nodded. ‘But it’s okay, they’re hiring a shaman to catch it,’ he said. He explained how it worked. The Crocodile Whisperer goes to the shore where the person was eaten, and drives a sacred spear into the ground. That calls together the fraternity of crocodiles. Then the good crocodiles, the ones who haven’t done anything wrong, point out the naughty, woman-eating croc. The shaman catches the murderer, and the other crocs go back to eating fish and minding their own business.
He turned away. I suddenly guessed that although Mijak had grown up hunting and gathering in this forest with the rest of his tribe, the aspiring lawyer had no more jungle survival skills than I had. I wondered if you could will incompetence in certain tasks onto yourself, a sort of psychosomatic response to worlds you don’t really feel you belong to.
The next morning, the eldest girl came over and presented me with a steaming basin of rice. Sticking out of it was a twig on which was impaled freshly barbecued fish and a frog’s leg. It was one of the better breakfasts of the trip.
When we met his headman in the forest, Mijak had shown him every respect. Afterwards, though, he had grown despondent. ‘The elders talk on and on about adat,’ said Mijak. ‘But they don’t realize that Rimba adat is worthless out there in The Light.’
I suggested, half joking, that they go and speak to the Mayor about realizing that potential, about making Pontianak a model of energy efficiency. ‘Yes, we will!’ they yelled, in English. ‘We are the new generation. We can change the world!’
I greeted her, but she spoke virtually no Indonesian. Then I brushed off my rusty Mandarin and tried that. It worked; she brightened up instantly and became quite chatty. The noodle factory belonged to her son Ah Hui, she said, and she invited us in to look around.
‘Imagine if it happened to you,’ said a Maduran woman with a posse of three Hondas, which I was eyeing hopefully. ‘You’d be dead, but me, I’d lose the bike.’ Then, more seriously, she said: ‘You can’t trust anyone in this island. Not anyone.’
Outside the walls to the west is a maze of streets that smells quite different, of honey and paraffin. This is the batik quarter.
So Jokowi, the Reformer, had won three-quarters of the vote in Menteng, home to the Have Everythings who were doing nicely from the status quo. The people in the slums of Tanah Tinggi, on the other hand, had chosen Fauzi Bowo, a man who had steadily neglected the poor
Sound familiar?
during his twenty years in the upper echelons of the Jakarta administration, the last five of them as governor. It is with these people, the uneducated and the underemployed, the mothers who spend time keeping their toddlers away from used syringes, the fathers who make a living recycling bottles picked out of the garbage of the villas in Menteng, that the religion card seems to play well. This is in part because where the state fails, the mosque often picks up the slack. The preacher’s door is open to his congregation twenty-four hours a day. He provides small loans for emergency hospital
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in school. These gestures have lost currency among the growing middle class, which can take care of itself. But in poor parts of town, and in very rural areas, they still create a web of loyalty that ...
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Most Indonesians support the idea of religious freedom in general, but members of the great orthodox Sunni majority are not going to storm the barricades and confront a handful of fanatics who have shown that they are willing to maim and kill, just to defend the rights of minorities that they think are crackpots. They just don’t care that much. Like the Coordinating Minister of Legal, Political and Security Affairs, most Indonesians don’t really give a shit what other people believe.
Under a beautiful wrought-iron balustrade, a team of men unpack their pop-up restaurant, serving rich chicken soup to a stream of Chinese businessmen in SUVs; the street stall has its own director of parking. Semarang was more beautiful that I had imagined it would be, and more neglected.
A friend in Jakarta put me in touch with her cousin Evi in Semarang. The family owns a chain of fast-food stores specializing in Es Teler, a drink/dessert/meal that dumps avocado, jackfruit, coconut juice and a variety of gelatinous, wormy and blobby things onto a mountain of shaved ice to form a curiously intoxicating sugar-bomb.
Despite myself, I wanted to go to a nice, air-conditioned mall where I could drink a cappuccino made with fresh milk and no sugar. I wanted to go to the movies, and to spend time in a decent bookshop. I wanted to sit somewhere with free, high-speed wifi, talk to my friends on Skype, tweet, write blog posts, and do all the other things that young Indonesians do in the big cities of Java. But I couldn’t resist palm-sugar shopping.
It mirrored what I had found in more domestic situations elsewhere in Indonesia: the people in formal positions of power – the bupatis, the village heads, the religious leaders, the shamans – were all men. But it was usually the women who actually decided how many buffalo would be slaughtered, which rice fields would be sold off, which of the children would go to college.
Once the sultans had become paid functionaries of the Dutch and had no real politics to occupy them, descendants of rival princes codified all of their historical rivalries into tiny variations in the way a dancer bent her fingers back, or in the colour of batik that a prince of a certain rank was allowed to wear.
a culture in which everyone seeks only to serve their boss, and in which the unaccountable boss has only his own interests at heart.
‘Wah! It’s changed a bit since then,’ he said. The audience started shifting in force to the other side of the screen when the wayang went electric. Before that, when the light came from a large, flickering flame encased in a lantern, it had been much easier to imbue the shadows with life (and also rather harder to show off any on-stage glamour). ‘Now, the audience wants to see everything. It’s all about the showmanship.’
No, the city did something singularly un-Indonesian. It worked through incentives, rewarding people for doing the right thing rather than punishing them for doing the wrong thing. And it showed that incentives can work at the community level. Collectivist culture without the feudalism. Perhaps it should become Indonesia’s next Etc.
Though international observers rail at the cost of corruption in Indonesia, few give much thought to the role it plays in tying the archipelago’s mosaic of islands and disparate peoples into a nation. In Indonesia’s current Etc., patronage is the price of unity.
Indonesians are united, too, by an extraordinary generosity of spirit, a tolerance of difference. They welcome strangers like me into their homes and their lives, they go out of their way to help people in trouble. Arguably, they can be too tolerant, too slow to take a stand in defence of larger freedoms against a minority of crooks, thugs or self-serving leaders.
But Indonesia’s upsides – the openness, the pragmatism, the generosity of its people, their relaxed attitude to life – are ultimately the more seductive traits, and the more important.
