by Carl Hoffman
In the village of Sjuru in 1947 and 1948, Zegwaard recorded “sixty-one known deaths resulting from this ever-present violence. Fifty-six of this total were headhunting victims who were eaten by their enemy and who gave their name, in death, to their ‘murderer.’ Thus Sjuru’s total population was reduced from 675 to 610 during this two-year period—an absolute decrease of 10 percent and annual decrease of 4 percent.”
Figuring the average for the villages of Sjuru, Ewer, Ayam, Amborep, and Warse for the same two-year period, Zegwaard extrapolated that “we can presume a population decrease approximately 2% to 3% per year due to death by violence.” This was one of the highest murder rates ever recorded anywhere. In the years in which Washington, DC, was known as the murder capital of the United States, its rate was less than 1 percent.
In 1952 Zegwaard opened a rectory in Sjuru, and the government soon followed by opening a police post adjacent, which it named Agats. The pacification of the Asmat began, though it was a long and slow process that would take more than twenty years. A handful of government officials and priests would voyage by canoe or motorized launch up the rivers making contact, using fishhooks, axes, and tobacco, to which the Asmat soon became addicted. For a people with nothing but wood, shell, and a few pieces of stone that came from the highlands, these objects were revolutionary pieces of technology. Felling sago trees, their primary source of food; hollowing out canoes; carving their shields, drums, bowls, and bisj poles—the most essential tasks of their lives—were done with stone. A piece of steel was as transformational as a tractor.
Though small in numbers, the whites had an impact hard to understate. They arrived in a place and among a people to whom the visible and invisible worlds were connected into one vast unity, a consciousness formed purely by the physical world around them—the jungle, the rivers, the sky, the mud, themselves. And for most Asmat, that meant their village, their hunting and gathering grounds, any neighboring villages, and their war territory. What they could see was the whole universe. Anything outside of that tangible immediacy had to come from the spirit world—it was the only comprehensible explanation. Those spirits were omnipresent, always jealous of the living, always wanting to return and make trouble. Upon a death in the village, women rolled in the mud, covering their bodies with it, so the spirit of the deceased couldn’t smell them, couldn’t find them. An airplane was opndettaji—a passing-over-canoe-of-the-spirits—and white men were superbeings who came, mysteriously, from the land beyond the sea, the same place the spirits lived. Arriving strangers meant an invasion of reincarnated souls, their ancestors who were never content with their fate and always wanted to return and were thus aggressive with the living. The Asmat greeted them with fear and often aggression, armed with spears and bows and arrows and skulls, to impress and scare these invading spirits, for the sight of their own hollowed-out skulls ought to make them fly away.
These new superbeings were also rich. Nails and steel ax heads were marvels of eye-popping value, made from the scarcest and most valuable resource the Asmat had ever seen. To see a whole ship of metal—it was unimaginable. The wealth! The creatures bearing these marvels possessed an immediate and awe-inspiring power.
For Asmat men, their wives were sacrosanct; violence would erupt, and whole villages be split, over adultery. Yet they also carried out papisj—the sharing of wives between male bond mates—a practice meant to be so disruptive, so bad, that it frightened the spirits, driving them back to Safan. Papisj happened under times of stress in a village, and almost without fail, the arrival of priests or government officials in those years precipitated the mass exchange of sexual partners.
In 1955 Zegwaard moved back to Merauke and was replaced by the Dutch priest Cornelius “Kees” van Kessel. He was tall and lanky, with a narrow face and a long, unruly beard. He had a deep wanderlust, and he’d dreamed about being a missionary since he was seven years old. At twelve, he entered the seminary, and in 1947 he was sent to New Guinea. Eight years later, he was posted to the southern Asmat village of Atsj, one of the most powerful and violent in the territory.
“The mission had no motorized vessel,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir, “so all the luggage was loaded in ten canoes. The jungle telephone worked very fast: on the Siretsj we got an extensive escort of all the leaders from Atsj. Close to the village the big armada made a special formation according to the Asmat protocol—apart from the calm splashing of the paddles no sound was made. But close to the village a cantor started a solemn song interrupted by a massive yell out of this whole group and echoed by the village. When we came in front of the houses the women threw lime into the air.”
Van Kessel built a house, traveled the rivers by canoe, and made sure he kept the cargo coming. And of course, he learned the language. “In each village I left one or two [axes], but in Atsj I gave out hundreds . . . to distract them from going headhunting. Daily I had to exchange food and art objects to still their hunger for knives and choppers, razorblades and fishing hooks and tobacco!”
Van Kessel was an unusual man. He had a huge heart. He was deeply pious, but that faith was built on the idea that men are good, that the world and life are beautiful and full of wonder, that God is a warm, loving presence who tolerates our human eccentricities and imperfections. He believed unequivocally in heaven. He loved cigars—his family in Holland kept him supplied with his favorite Dutch brand, La Paz. He didn’t think religion could be enforced, and he proselytized slowly. He believed in getting to know the Asmat, so he talked with them, ate with them, slept with them, and was slow to bring up his God. He was a striking figure, this gangly white man in shorts and sneakers, with a wild beard and the stub of a cigar between his lips. He was often streaked with white and ochre bands on his chest, arms, and legs, white feathers sticking from his beard, sometimes even a cuscus fur headband enveloping his bald head. He was a free, joyous spirit, and for this the Asmat loved him and his superiors mistrusted him. They were forever at odds. He chafed at authority, could only speak his mind. The files of the Order of the Sacred Heart are filled with letters from his superiors, wringing their hands over this ebullient child who would not be bridled. He was reprimanded for not baptizing enough people fast enough, reprimanded for speaking his mind and not following orders from officials in Holland who, he felt, knew nothing about the realities of the place and its culture.
Van Kessel was a priest for the best reasons, the right reasons, an optimistic romantic who, years later, would fall in love, leave the priesthood, and marry—and yet remain ever close to the Church, his faith never wavering. This divide between van Kessel and his superiors would have serious repercussions when Michael disappeared.
Slowly, the priests began inserting Papuan laypeople into villages as catechists, who could begin teaching the Asmat about Christianity and report back to the Church and the government about headhunting forays. Still, some villages were more receptive than others, and Otsjanep was particularly skittish. Its first contact with outsiders hadn’t gone well. In October 1953, a group of Chinese Indonesian crocodile hunters, employing villagers from Omadesep as guides, attacked a group of Otsjanep women fishing near the mouth of the Ewta River. The Chinese hunters killed six women and two children, four of them shot to death—Otsjanep’s first experience not just with Others but with Others carrying firearms. When Dutch official F. R. J. Eibrink Jansen visited Otsjanep in 1955 to investigate the Chinese murders, a classic story of cultural misunderstanding unfolded. Although Eibrink Jansen was arriving on the village’s behalf, he sailed up the river for the first official contact with Otsjanep with a heavily armed police patrol accompanied by a group of warriors from Omadesep. The men of Otsjanep saw the white Dutchman, the weapons, they saw their enemies from Omadesep, and they freaked; the police were surrounded in the narrow river by hundreds of screaming, lime-throwing, and well-armed warriors. Eibrink Jansen had the sense to back down, turn around, and retreat. “I could have mown them down,” he told van Kessel the next day, “but I would h
ave hit dozens of innocent people. So I decided to go back without even having been in contact.”
Two months later, van Kessel himself visited Otsjanep for the first time. “We were welcomed most heartily. But then we were unarmed and (of course) not accompanied by police.” He returned again on April 15, 1956, “was heartily welcomed,” and left two catechists, but they fled after twenty-four hours. “The village became wildly enthusiastic about the tobacco of the catechists, who misinterpreted the intrusive enthusiasm and made a run for it!”
THE KILLING THROUGHOUT Asmat went on. In September 1956, Omadesep killed another four from Otsjanep, bringing the number whose deaths had not yet been avenged to ten.
Van Kessel traveled to Amborep and found the village had just “beaten off an attack from Jasokor and Kaimo, and that Jasokor had something in mind.” He raced to Jasokor and found the village empty, save for his two catechists, “who told me in a laconic way ‘the people had just gone on a raid to Damen.’ So in a hurry I rushed to Damen, but too late: the houses were still burning and the villagers still lamenting their dead—eight men, eight women and eight children were killed and loaded into the canoes of Jasokor for the cannibalistic ritual.”
In the village of Ajam, in May, twenty-eight men and boys visiting from Japaer were slaughtered, and van Kessel himself was almost caught in the violence. “Rowing on the Asawetsj [sic] toward Ajam I came in a rain of arrows from a Jepaer [sic] armada. I traveled with three canoes of Atsj people and Jipaer [sic] ran after us. By throwing tobacco into the river I obstructed the speed of my pursuers (free tobacco works miracles!) and finally they stopped the persecution because we came close to Ajam where a strong police force was settled, so I escaped an uncertain fate, for Japaer was still loaded with feelings of revenge to anybody.”
Van Kessel kept a list of the violence. In 1955, 300 dead. In 1956, 120, including the four from Otsjanep killed by Omadesep and two from Otsjanep killed by Basim. In 1957, 200. This was in southern Asmat alone, and it’s impossible to know how many deaths he wasn’t even aware of.
In October 1956, van Kessel was joined by a colleague, Father Hubertus von Peij. He was twenty-six years old, a recently ordained OSC minister, like van Kessel. Von Peij, too, had heard the calling early, wanting to be a priest since the age of twelve, and he could have gone to Brazil, the Philippines, or elsewhere in Indonesia, but he chose New Guinea. He wanted adventure. “We heard the stories,” he said. “It was attractive to me.” After four months of learning Malay in Merauke, Zegwaard, his superior, escorted von Peij to Ajam, where he was to be posted. “Ajam was very bad,” he said when I found him alive and well and eighty-four years old in Tilburg, Netherlands, “and there was a lot of killing in revenge for the raids in the 1940s.” More than ten years might have passed, but as von Peij said, “They never forget. Ever.”
Zegwaard installed von Peij in Ajam and said, “So, I leave,” and he was gone. “I had no radio. No phone. I couldn’t communicate with anyone.” Von Peij stayed in Ajam for three years, and then spent another two in Atsj. He was much more conservative than van Kessel. While van Kessel looked like some wild man in the jungle, with his war stripes and the feathers in his beard, von Peij never went native and looked like what he was—a white missionary, always cleanly shaven and scrubbed, dressed in white shorts and a white T-shirt. He tried to visit every village in his parish once a month, placed non-Asmat Papuan catechists in them to “testify about what’s happening and if necessary tell the government.” He learned Asmat fluently. And like van Kessel, he was in no hurry to baptize anyone. “We had a lot of time, and they weren’t able to understand.”
AND SO, on that day toward the end of 1957, the men from Otsjanep hid in the scrubby green tangle at the mouth of the Ewta to avenge the murder of Dombai, Su, Kokai, Wawar, and Pakai, the men killed by Omadesep a day earlier. They were aware of the superbeings entering their world. They knew van Kessel and von Peij, accepting their occasional presence in their villages because, over time, they got to know them and wanted their tobacco and modern tools, and they knew the government men and the police who backed them up, but it’s fair to say that at that moment all of these people remained cloudy presences on the periphery of their lives. The Asmat of Otsjanep hadn’t changed yet. Their sense of purpose and the very balance of their world were built around war and headhunting and rituals. Now, here, waiting for the men from Omadesep, they were fulfilling their purpose as men. To attack. To fight. To restore balance in a dualistic world. If we could be inside their minds, if we could film what they saw, feel what they felt and be them, we might understand their need. The violence was the very fabric of their lives—it made them whole, constituted them, gave them identity and literally nourished them, helping the semen flow and the sago grow. And from it they created the shields and spears, the drums and masks and bisj poles, that was their language, their art, their symbolic and creative expression—ironically the very “art” beginning to attract the notice of Western collectors like Nelson Rockefeller.
As the last stragglers from Omadesep passed the river on their way home from the coastal fighting of the trip to Wagin, the men from Otsjanep attacked in force, hurtling down on them in swiftly paddled canoes. The exhausted men from Omadesep, with no canoes of their own, were vulnerable. Otsjanep shouted and screamed and clouds of lime burst over the water and bamboo horns sounded, and Otsjanep beat their canoes with the sides of their paddles. The warriors slaughtered their counterparts from Omadesep with arrows and spears, without remorse. The river ran red with blood. They beat the heads of their captives, dragged them back to their canoes, tied them onto crosspieces so they could be decapitated. Of the 124 men from the two villages who set out together to Wagin a few days earlier, only 11 made it home alive.
Van Kessel called it the Sylvester Massacre, because it happened at the end of December.
8
February 2012
KOKAI, THE FORMER HEADMAN OF PIRIEN VILLAGE, WEARING A TRADITIONAL ASMAT CUSCUS FUR HEADBAND, NOSE ORNAMENT, BAG, AND BOW AND ARROWS.
WILEM SHOOK ME awake at three a.m. I tiptoed around bodies sprawled asleep on the living room floor in the darkness, climbed into the boat, and soon we were under way with the outflowing tide. It was still deep night, a few lanterns flickering yellow on the opposite bank, but the sky was alive with a trillion stars, the full moon so bright that long shadows of trees spread over the river, easily a mile wide. And that Southern Cross, an arrow pointing south. We were all sleepy, silent, lost in our own reveries as the bats flew and dipped overhead, Amates passing around cigarettes for all of us.
After an hour the sky began to lighten, and we crossed to the opposite bank as waves grew and the longboat started bucking. The morning was gray, still without sun, as we entered the Arafura. The wind picked up, pushing against us from the south, and we followed a quarter-mile off the coast, crossing the mouth of the Betsj on the same route Michael Rockefeller had taken that fateful day. The sun rose, the wind and waves grew stronger, the boat rolled and water crashed over the gunwales, I went for my satellite phone, and we ran for shelter up the Aping River.
AT THE MOUTHS of rivers and small creeks are often one or two huts—bivouacs built as temporary fishing camps. Which is what I thought this group of huts was too. But drying out inside, as Filo boiled water for rice and I stretched across a floor of split bamboo covered in sweet-smelling palm fronds, Amates said this was a new, permanent village, broken off from Omadesep, which itself had broken from Biwar Laut long ago. “Why?” I asked.
“Woman trouble,” he said.
We ate, we smoked, we snoozed and swatted flies, and when Wilem decided the wind had died enough, we moved on, arriving at the Fajit River and the village of Basim in the early afternoon. Basim was spread out, had a handful of stores along the waterfront boardwalk. The day was burning hot, windless, and still. As always, we climbed onto a dock surrounded by silent, staring men and women and children in rags. Amates would mumble a few words and stride off, and t
he next thing I knew we’d taken over the schoolmaster’s house, four bare wooden rooms across from the elementary school.
At first, these villages felt as if they’d been stripped of something, as if they were waiting, empty, as if some reason for being was gone. Basim’s jeu was empty and crumbling, though magnificent in the way they all were—long and huge and tied together with rattan, nail-less. But there were no carvings anywhere, and if people weren’t out gathering sago or fishing, they sat around. Listless. Waiting. All except for the children, who played wildly, rambunctiously, loudly, climbing palm trees and covering themselves with mud and jumping off docks into the brown river. The sound of an Asmat village is the sound of a crowded playground, of children laughing and shouting and playing.
That night we were sitting on the floor when an older man walked in. He was thin, small, five-foot-seven and 140 pounds or so, with a prominent jaw, a big nose, and deep-set eyes. Veins popped from his neck and his temples. He had a hole in his septum. His polyester T-shirt was stained, spotted with small holes, and emblazoned with the image of a Papuan with shells through his nose and the word NOSESLIDE! A woven bag adorned with Job’s tears seeds and cockatoo feathers hung from his neck across his chest—a sign of his importance. He had quick, darting eyes and spoke fast in a voice that sounded like gravel rolling across glass, exuding a wildness I hadn’t seen yet in Asmat. “This is Kokai,” Amates said. “He is my elder brother, my papa, the headman from Pirien,” meaning that he was a chief in Pirien, a village named after one of the jeus in Otsjanep that had violently split to form a new village sometime after Rockefeller’s disappearance. “He has a new wife in Basim, so he’s here a lot.” Kokai sat down on the floor with us, Amates brought out a pouch of tobacco and rolling papers. It was too good an opportunity: I confessed to Amates that I was interested in some old stories from Otsjanep and Omadesep, especially about a Dutch raid on the village in 1958, in retaliation for the killings during the trip to Wagin. In fact, from Dutch government archives, I had the original colonial reports filed at the time, describing the events.
