31st NovemberSulawesi, Indonesia
[Warning blog contains images of dead or dying animals]
After a few days in Makassar – a horrid city with few pavements and many open drains and where the only highlights were a Dutch fort, good grilled fish and a big supermarket that sold Gouda cheese – we boarded a bus that twisted and turned for many hours past trees full of ripening mangoes into the mountain-locked region of Tana Toraja.
Toraja is a fascinating place, where ancient animist beliefs sit comfortably alongside Protestant Christianity. It is justly famed for its stunning wooden architecture and for its unusual attitudes to the dead.
Our local guide, Yulius, told us that one family kept the corpse of an old lady preserved in their living room for 49 years before giving her a decent burial. She had died during the Japanese occupation in WWII and was eventually buried in 1991.
This is an extreme example of a common practice - in Toraja the dead are kept in the home as 'sick' members of the family until the preparations for the funeral are complete. Visitors must act as though the dead person is very much still alive, even down to asking their permission to leave the house. We were keen to get to visit one such household, but sadly the occasion never arose. A 'luckier' woman we met was invited into a living room with two corpses holding court.
Normally, though, the dead are buried within a few months or years of dying. It seems it was the old lady's rather outrageous demands that had held up her funeral for so very long. She had stipulated that enough buffalo to cover her rather expansive rice fields should be sacrificed on the big day – a shocking number that apparently ended up at over 200 and saw the local animal market in Rantepao (see pic above) emptied of buffalo. So much meat was produced that complete strangers were gifted chunks, when normally it goes to family, friends, neighbours and others with connections to the family.
Most Torajans take more modest numbers of cattle with them when they die: over the three to five days of the funeral, around 25 or so buffalo have their throats swiftly cut for the funeral of a noble, less for other sectors of society. That's not to mention the many pigs that arrive (often on the backs of motorbikes) immobilised on frameworks of green bamboo and quickly dispatched with a knife in the ribs to help feed the hundreds of people that turn up to mourn the deceased.
We were lucky enough to visit two funerals. The big, multi-day events have the air of a small festival and cost a small fortune. Even camera-toting tourists are made welcome and fed. Like buffalo, large numbers of people at funerals are thought auspicious, so no one is turned away. To house the many visitors, temporary buildings are erected – bamboo being skilfully used for nearly all aspects of the structures, with woven palm leaves for the thatch.
Sitting in the shade beneath the carved and painted Torajan houses with their soaring rooflines, which myth says mimic the boats that once bought the Torajans to Sulawesi, we saw slow-marching parades of mourners, choirs singing gentle, repetitive songs about the deceased person’s life, priest-led prayers and hymns, women pounding out rhythms with hefty poles on canoe-like tubs, and even bullfights.
These hugely popular tests of strength between buffalo rarely see a bull hurt; in fact, in most of the contests we saw, the smaller bull turned and fled at the sight of its bulky adversary, causing much danger for the spectators. I kept the boys up on the hill out of harm's way.
If it's not apparent by now, there’s one thing that unites Torajans, it’s a love for a handsome buffalo. These pampered animals that when sacrificed are believed to take the dead to the afterlife, are so adored they are no longer used as beasts of burden to plough the rice paddies. Heaven forbid; working an animal could damage its skin and hence lower its value - which might be as much as a small car. And although most are black or patched black and white, the colour most keenly sought by collectors is albino pink. These odd creatures look rather like light-skinned Brits who have caught too much sun, but in Toraja they fetch the best prices and are treated like (or better than) one of the family and are often celebrated with carved wooden heads on the fronts of traditional houses.
The region's stunning hilly scenery is great for trekking, although having kids limited the length of our walks, so we stayed in a Torajan house in the hills and took leaisurely strolls along country lanes. Around sharp limestone crags, clumps of giant bamboo soared skywards, huge boulders littered idyllic paddy fields, and traditional houses jutted proudly above the tree line – often with a collection of ancient standing stones and rock tombs to explore.
Many villages have these resting places for the ancestors cut into surrounding rock faces, or place wooden supports on the cliffs to keep aloft elaborate coffins that mimic the local houses, or resemble pigs or, of course, buffalo. Touchingly, relatives or friends may place a bottle of the dead person's favourite tipple or other treasured possessions outside the tomb as an offering. I felt a thread of connection with a man who had an English phrase book resting upon his grave.
Tombs are often marked with small wooden facsimiles of the deceased called tau-tau (see above pic), though increasing theft of these characterful and very sellable statuettes means they often have to be locked behinds metal grilles and framed photos are starting to replace them. In some villages, the grave area is literally littered with the skulls and bones of more distant ancestors whose names have now been forgotten.
And when babies die, they are sometimes buried in trees – so the wind can blow their soul to heaven, I was told. One village in the area is famed for a tree housing about 16 mini graves that looked like dwellings for pixies, which in a way they were.
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