Tribe escapes the modern crowd

Press, 3 February 1986, Page 36

Tribe escapes the modern crowd

By 1 CITI

BHIMANTO

SUWASTOYO, of Agence France-Presse (through NZPA) Jakarta Barely 85 kilometres from Indonesia’s bustling capital, Jakarta, mountain tribesmen live in self-im-posed isolation in communities from which they could be banished if they break sacred law. “The Baduys still lead a very simple life, close to nature, rejecting all industrial artifacts and products, including money," said a district official in charge of registering visitors to the area.

The 4000 Baduy tribesmen in south-west Java have been allowed to continue their isolated lifestyle and strict nature cult religion through centuries of Dutch administration and in independent Indonesia.

Their ways include a certain appeal for children the world over: schools are banned from Baduy villages. "What are schools for, when a person who becomes smarter tends to cheat less smart people?” asked a Baduy village

chief. Their near-inaccessible region may help explain how the tribe has kept itself on Java island, which has one of the world’s highest population densities at 750 people a square kilometre. A bumpy, rocky road ends at the entrance to Baduy territory. From there, paths wind to the tribe’s 27 villages which are scattered over 5100 ha of mountainous terrain. The area is partly in dense jungle which is practically impenetrable during the rainy season. The Baduy trace their origins to a sixteenth-cen-tury Hindu king and his followers, who are said to have fled Muslim troops advancing into western Java.

“The neighbouring villages have always respected the Baduys’ wish for self isolation,” said a village chief whose region borders on Baduy territory, which he seldom ventures into.

Barefoot Baduy men, clad in their traditional garb, occasionally trek to the capital for a private audience with President

Suharto. Through an interpreter — the Baduy speak an archaic form of a West Javanese dialect — they will convey their chiefs’ requests for the President’s help in solving their problems in dealing with the outside world.

In response to the Baduys’ complaint that land grabbers had intruded into their territory, the President legalised the status of the tribe’s land. The Baduy were issued with 548 concrete poles to help mark the boundaries. Of the 27 Baduy villages, the three communities of “inner Baduy,” where the code of behaviour is strictest, are considered the most sacred.

Easily distinguishable from the tribesmen of “outer Baduy,” the men and women of Cibeo, Cikartawana and Cikeusik grow their hair long and wrap a piece of dark cloth round their waist, down to the knees for men and to the ankles for women.

The men always carry short machetes tucked in their skirts. In spite of their otherwise austere life, the women wear sev-

eral bracelets, rings on four fingers and large earrings. Community life within the confines of inner Baduy is rigidly governed by sacred law, which has remained practically unchanged for centuries. House furnishings, mirrors and nails are “buyut,” or taboo, to them, as are bicycles and all other means of transport.

Other features of modem civilisation missing from their villages are stores, clinics, and schools. There is no use of irrigation or writing systems, and barter is used in place of money. The Baduys lead a simple lifestyle, cultivating rice in their dry fields, fishing and gathering fruit and other food the jungle. provides. Apart from harvest and planting celebrations, their only entertainment is a long monotone chant which, handed down orally from one generation to the next, recounts the history of their tribe. Their religion is said to be based on the cult of nature, in which the soil plays a key rold, and on

the cult of the spirits of their dead.

The chiefs of the sacred inner Baduy villages, whose rank is transferred from father to son or to the nearest male relative, are thought to hold “unlimited magical power" and their word is law for the community.

They decide the punishment to be meted out to an inner Baduy villager who violates one of the , many hundred taboos. Banishment to one of the e outer Baduy villages is i sometimes the penalty.

The chiefs also decide which families must leave the inner Baduy villages for outer Baduy in order » to maintain a constant ; population of 40 families in the sacred inner region, as their custom die- . tates.

While the Baduys hold fast to their ancient traditions, a shred of evidence that the outside world exists could be detected in bne of their villages: three rubber bands adorn the wrist of an inner Baduy chief.