Headhunting in Kansas 1

                         Headhunting in Kansas

                                                   Sulawesi

   “The Bugis are a high-spirited people: they will not bear ill-usage...They

    are fond of adventures, emigration, and capable of undertaking the

    most dangerous enterprises.”

           Thomas Forrest, A Voyage from Calcutta to the Mergui Archipelago, 1792

Welcome to Kansas. That’s what the sign said, anyway. And underneath the cigarette packet on the poster, was its Indonesian slogan, ‘Langkah Pasti.’ Definite step.

Robyn and I had taken a definite step onto the Silk Air flight that got us here, and then we took another one, getting off in Ujung Pandang. It wasn’t called Ujung Pandang much before we got off the plane, and it wouldn’t be Ujung Pandang much after we left.

The island we landed on was a large orchid, suspended in the Southern Sea by one of its twisted elongated sepals, draped over the equator like a necklace. Its original Portuguese name, Celebes, had been displaced by the rich Lake Matano deposits that retitled it Sulawesi. Iron Island. But when they pitched up in 1511, the Portuguese found a thriving cosmopolitan entrepôt where Arabs and Chinese and Indians and Siamese and Malays and Javanese came to trade their metal hardware and textiles for gold, copper, pearls, camphor and spices- cloves, nutmeg, and mace, imported from the Spice Islands of Maluku. The Gowa and Tallo sultanates had become powerful enough to build a fortified sea wall along the coast, punctuated with a series of eleven fortresses.

The smell of clove Kretek cigarettes, and frying fish and chili sambal hit us, like the heat. If Toto had gotten off the plane, he would have been lunch before he cleared immigration. It definitely wasn’t Kansas.

More like the Latinesia archipelagos of Juan Fernández and Chiloé, Sulawesi had iconic sailing ships and terrible earthquakes. And stilt houses and volcanoes. Its history had come out of pirates and castaways, resulting in the treaty that shaped its evolution.

                                                   ARTICLE 3

   All rigging and tools, treasury, and every other articles without  

   exception, which have been taken from the Honorable Company’s ship

   Malvish (the Whale) cast away at Salyer, and from the Honorable

   Company’s Yacht or Barge, the Lioness, cast away at the island Don

   Douange shall be restored to the Honorable Company. In that

   restoration however the eight iron guns, from the Whale, said by the

   above Maccasar power to have been paid for, shall remain in their

   possesson, if it be proved that the sum of 4,000 Spanish Dollars has

   been actually paid for them to the late Commisioner Gaamo, on belhalf

   of the Honorable Company.

         R. Blok, Appendix to Volume I. Treaty concluded in the year 1667, between

           the Dutch Admiral Cornelis Speelman and the King of Maccassar. Beknopte

           geschiedenis van het Makassaarsche Celebes en Onderhoorigheden, 1817

The Dutch had negotiated this treaty with some of the most feared marauders and freebooters in the Pacific. Stories of their legendary ruthlessness found their way back to the homes of European sailors. Stories of the Bugis of Bone. Stories of the Bogeymen. You thought it was just a story...but it’s real.

The South Peninsula, separating the world’s eleventh largest island from Borneo, is only one of four large narrow rugged mountainous, long forested natural barriers that dominate three major gulfs, and almost five thousand kilometers of coastline. No point on the Sulawesi orchid is more than ninety kilometers from the sea, and tribal connections between its petals had traditionally been more accessible by boat, than overland. It was here, beside the verdant wet rice-growing plains along the western Strait of Makassar, that the fierce Buganese pirates boogied. They called themselves Orang Laut, People of the Sea. Around 2500 years BC, the Bugis began their southern migration from Taiwan down the Austronesian trail, like the Polynesians would do much later. But they weren’t Polynesians.

In 1605 their animistic Tolotang beliefs were converted to Islam and fifty years later, at the end of a long civil war, they were scattered, in a diaspora that took them as far as Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. They traded of the coasts of New Guinea and Australia, where they exchanged medicinal bark, and the skins of birds of paradise and mother of pearl, for knives and salt from the Yolŋu people, and other Melanesian tribal groups. They would sail the trades, and return laden with trepand, dried sea cucumber, before returning to Makassar on the dry season offshore winds.

By the time Joseph Conrad arrived on the 204-ton steamer Vidar, in 1887, hauling coal and resin from Borneo, Makassar was ‘the prettiest and perhaps, cleanest looking of all the towns in the islands.’ In Lord Jim, he wrote of ‘a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon.’ He wasn’t as ebullient about the outskirts of town. ‘They were a numerous and an unclean crowd, living in ruined bamboo houses, surrounded by neglected compounds...’ Which is just about where Robyn and I came in.