The West Java patch of land where time stands still

The West Java patch of land where time stands still

By John Aglionby

KADUKETER, West Java: There was no manmade fiber in sight as Mastina climbed up a sugar palm to collect the watery sap he would later boil up to make into sugar. His ladder was a single bamboo pole with clefts cut into it for his bare hands and feet; his buckets were bamboo tubes with straps made of bark strands.

Old holes in the tree were plugged with leaves to stop the sap running out and going to waste, and the filter to prevent muck getting into the buckets was a mesh of bark and thin strips of wood.

Mastina (most of the Baduy use only one name) makes few concessions to the outside world: his 15-inch metal machete, his cotton shorts, jacket and the sarong wrapped around his head are the only things he carries which are not derived directly from nature.

Welcome to the world of the Baduy, a tribe of animist farmers living less than 30 kilometers southwest but several light years from Central Jakarta's gleaming skyscrapers and political turmoil. The Dutch, Indonesia's former colonizers, named them after a nearby mountain and river.

The Baduy's list of taboos -- or customary laws as they prefer to call them -- is long enough to frighten off anyone used to modern living. Electricity, plastic, leather, oil, china, books, glass, writing implements, sport, four-legged animals (except for the odd dog and cat), ducks, fertilizer, irrigation, formal government, schools, hospitals, guns, wheels, watches, bricks and cement are just some of the items that are banned.

The foundations, doors and pillars of their homes are made of wood, the walls are a lattice of thin bamboo strips and the roof is layers of dried palm leaves. At least once a year "police" go round checking that people are not breaking the rules and bringing in forbidden objects.

"Our religion says that the rules should be like this," said Sai'idi, a tribal elder in Kaduketer, one of 68 villages in their 20 square mile area. "I learned them from my father, he learned them from his father and so on going back thousands of years."

Their religion, the neomystical Sunda Wiwitan faith, states that the Sunda people of West Java were the first people on earth and if they do not live as god originally intended disaster will strike. In the heart of the Baduy land there are sacred megaliths and the trees are never felled.

The tribe is divided into two -- inner Baduy and outer Baduy. The inner Baduy are more devout, adhering strictly to the rules -- although even they have swapped bark loincloths for shirts and shorts -- and all but off-limits to foreigners.

Outer

A little more latitude is shown in the outer villages; here a few people wear sandals and watches while bras, plates, cups, nails and carpentry tools are common. The occasional radio can also be heard. Life consists of work, food, sleep, religious worship and music played on tuned bamboo instruments and wooden drums.

Work for most people is farming rice, palm sugar, vegetables and fruit. Others oversee sugar-making or weave clothes and bark- fiber bags. Produce is bartered with friends or sold in the outside world in order to buy matches, cooking pots, cotton clothes and coffee.

They have survived as long as they have thanks to a mixture of authoritarianism, pragmatism and playing on superstitions.

"We have three leaders, called puun," said Sai'idi who is the most senior of the 12 deputy puuns. "One oversees the territory, another is in charge of religion and the third is for defense. No one questions what they say."

When one puun dies, the next is chosen after discussion between the two surviving leaders and their deputies. "God directs us by revealing in visions who should be the next puun," Sai'idi added.

"It helps that the culture is completely oral," said Rudi Badil, an anthropologist and journalist. "So when a puun says the long should not be shortened and the straight should not be bent, people do not question him."

Acknowledging they are Indonesian -- although they never fly the flag -- taking on some Islamic customs, such as circumcision, and allowing only Muslims into inner Baduy has helped, he believes.

"The majority of the surrounding people are Muslim so the Baduy have earned respect by respecting them and their ways," he said. "Things would probably be different if the West Javanese were predominantly Christian."

The Baduy were threatened with extinction in the early 1980s during Soeharto's 32-year rule. Government officials wanted to build schools, roads, offices and an electricity network in the area but the people refused.

A group of Baduy walked to Jakarta to appeal to Soeharto. A deeply superstitious man, he told them to plant poles along the boundary of their land and everything inside would not be touched.

"He said that if Indonesia was a tree then the Baduy were the roots of the tree," Sai'idi said. "If the roots are destroyed then the whole tree would collapse."

Since then the government has never tried to modernize the Baduy, or even forced them to vote in elections. However that does not mean that the tribe is immune from development.

A rising population and pressure on land pose the biggest threat to the Baduy's existence. Even though more and more younger Baduy are leaving the tribe, sufficient numbers are remaining to perpetuate growth. Most admit that if their traditional medicines do not work they sneak off to the nearest health center.

"When the Baduy marked their territory in the 1980s there were about 4,000 of them," Badil said. "Now the tribe is almost double that. The chances are high that something will have to give."

He has no idea when this could happen, though, and is optimistic that the culture will survive for several more decades at least.

"Not only are most of the Baduy committed to their religion, they are opportunists," he said. "They realize that people are willing to pay a lot more for their goods than those of their West Javanese neighbors so many are in no hurry to change. It might not be the purest motivation for remaining as they are but it does mean they will not die out that easily."

-- Guardian News Service