Sumba is the southernmost island of the Indonesian archipelago. To the north is Komodo island, to the east is East Timor. Sumba is a living megalithic culture in a perpetual golden age, carving stone monuments out of the hillsides and dragging them through the valleys by brute force. Hilltop kampung (villages) rest above some of the more rare uncultivated valleys of indonesia. Christianity has made inroads, though the animist Merapu religion still reigns supreme outside of the towns of Waingapu and Waikabubak. The Sumbanese are a mixture of Papuan, Malay and Indian ancestry, and its sandlewood legacy lives on within its proud tradition of horses, and you will hear Sumbanese cowboys yelping in the hills long before you will see them, but you can be sure they are there. Pasola is a ritualized war, and now the only real tourist attraction on the island if you can call it that. It has been referred to as a veiled human sacrifice by British media. Electricity and outside music have begun to spread to the island, as well as roads and very limited electricity in recent years. In my time there, the two biggest hits, blaring out of cassette-players was “Everything I do I do it for you” and “Uptown Girl”.
I was given this cassette by a young man in Waikabubak who spent his entire afternoon wandering the town with me through villages and car-repair shops to try and find a cassette of Sumbanese music. It is performed on the 2 or 3 stringed Jungga, which acts essentially as a Sumbanese guitar
This is actually a cassette from Waingapu in eastern Sumba. It is the only duet album I am aware of. The two main cassette artists in Sumba are “Haling” and “Haeng”. the main female is Ataratu. This is the only cassette I was able to find featuring Ester. Last year, Haeng made his first casette featuring electric keyboard accompanying his music. Also, Sumba found its very first Dangdut artist! All that stuff is sitting in my archives, and I am trying to figure out what to do with it, but in the meantime, enjoy the only Sumbanese 2-person cassette in existence:
This is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote on my tape-collecting in Sumba:
Waikabubak is a little town in West Sumba, and similar to the rest of Sumba, it seems to look better on paper and film — and even in my memory — than it ever did when I was really there. I heard phenomenal tales of a tropical kingdom; the center of commerce and trade in the west; a town built in the midst of 3 traditional hilltop kampung (village), which to this day live for the most part as they have for hundreds of years- the men wearing an Indonesian all-purpose cloth covering the area between their waste and half way to their knees, each at all times carrying a foot-long Criss (indonesian dagger) housed in a fairly unflattering wooden ‘case’. The women wear a full skirt, no top, and no dagger. White, shapely teeth are not aesthetically pleasing, and so it is custom to file each persons teeth down to be perfectly flat and even. White teeth are not seen as attractive, but in any culture or place where betel nut is an essential part of social life, the mouth often appears as if it is simply a giant open wound of mashed bones sticking out every which way, and bright red lips and saliva that give the impression they are perpetually bleeding to death. Somehow the 21st century has moved in next door, and although it has long been a center for regional trade, it is now the regional technological center and link to the outside world- a place where the word “Indonesia” actually means something to people. It’s a town of only 3 or 4 thousand, living in wooden stilt houses, concrete urban complexes of homes on top of shops, football fields in which the kids carefully navigate their play around herds of water buffalo, and, as it’s Indonesia, rice fields and coconut palms lining every horizon. Christianity has made inroads, and there is a giant church on the main road into town, unlike any church I’ve ever seen- somehow incorporating Sumbanese megalithic architecture into 3 towers above what appears to be a very Islamic graduated entrance.
As I was saying, it was a place that looked amazing on paper, and the stories I had heard from an Austrian politician I met in Sulawesi were awe-inspiring, and I expected my the bus to drop me off in yet another Indonesian paradise. Slightly east of the frontier Kodi province, infamous for lawlessness and armed theft, and there are plenty of travel advisories for the area, it maintains a typical Indonesian semblance of order. All of Sumba has a vast and complicated history of inter-tribal warfare, which has only technically ended in the past generation, but which periodically bubbles up from time to time, as it last did in 1993 following a festival mock-battle. This constant warring is the reason kampung villages are situated on top of hills, as opposed to within cultivated flatlands. Waikabubak was certainly not a charmer for me, and like every other city in Indonesia, I approached it with my usual mix of caution and excitement, being unfamiliar with Sumbanese culture, and sticking out like a white, swollen thumb, being the only foreigner not in a hospital for malaria (a Canadian fellow named Jeff, interestingly) in what appeared to be the entire island. .
The markets were typically held in chaotic, sopping indoor-ish complexes with a few dozen tables arranged into ails, usually spilling out into the street, where the less ‘containable’ items were sold. As I approached, I would pass people selling dogs, young goats, and random tables selling multi-coloured random plastic objects which could be used as toys, tupperware, anything essentially. Usually small tables of people selling watches and assorted clocks, calculators, and kindof an all-purpose electronics stand. Elderly women would sit behind a dozen giant woven baskets filled with dried fish, snails, eels and things I didn’t feel the urge to inquire into. Pungent durian stands, and a wide variety of exotic and hairy fruits on display, all masked by the scent of durian and fish. There were intermittent food vendors, usually specializing in one or two dishes- nasi goreng (fried rice) nasi campur (rice and whatever they could find to go with it), and if I was lucky, Rendang (a Sumatran dish of water buffalo meat cooks in coconut milk and chilis). In Waikabubak there were also two men in their 30s who wandered the market on all fours like a dog or cat, their legs bent in such as way as to give them very limited usefulness, reaching quite a fast pace at times when crossing the street. If I was a doctor, I’m sure I would be fascinated and horrified by some of the medical conditions that have gone untreated and seem to be all around- strange growths on peoples faces I could only guess were tumors, limbs sticking out in ways they ought not to, and what I could only describe as very broad deformity, people with very small faces, missing or extra facial features… the kindof things that will stick in my memory for a long time and which would have been entirely inappropriate to photograph. I had come with only one real intent- to find locally recorded and manufactured cassette recordings of Sumbanese music, and had no idea what it might sound like.
