A DAY at the rams is as close as you'll get to hurling or rodeo in order to hear the views of Indonesia's rural heartland, near the country's textiles capital, Bandung. Smashing heads in short, refereed bouts, the rams are led off as proud prize fighters, most beasts wearing across their breast the owner's family or village name, riveted into a champion's leather belt, writes MARK GODFREY
Most of the ram managers are tea farmers in the foothills of the Parahyangan mountains of Indonesia’s most populous island, Java. Most say they voted last Thursday for the Democratic Party of incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The president’s popularity got his young, centrist party a wedge of votes that put him on the road to the presidential elections in July and might allow him to ditch his coalition partner, Golkar, the political machine of ex-dictator Suharto.
“SBY”, an acronym as much as a term of affection for the president, has a brain and a heart, was the consensus among the ram handlers, a very male mix of countrymen and their craggy old fathers who suck on clove cigarettes in between pairing up their beasts for a bout.
Indonesia’s third democratic election was won on economics and personalities. Yudhoyono’s spending on schools is popular.
Most children in this western end of Java go to secondary school. Few, however, in these parts go to college – most will pluck the tea leaves and prune the coffee trees which once made a fortune for the Dutch spice traders.
There’s a lot of talk about kerosene prices – still too high for family stoves, complain locals. There’s a subsidy for low-income families from rising fuel costs that half of those present don’t seem to have received.
But the overall view around the ram-ring is optimism. It’s an optimism helped by the year-round balminess and awesome tropical vistas of the region. While no one declares satisfaction, they say harvests and sales have been fair on the tea plantations and fields of clove trees that slope upwards from the ring built for the ram fight.
Down in Bandung on the television news there are flashes from election programmes to the chaos in Thailand, where Yudhyono is meeting fellow Asian leaders. After a decade that’s seen off dictatorship, bloodshed and tsunamis, it is Indonesia that looks more like southeast Asia’s leading light of democracy and prosperity. Not Thailand. It doesn’t have the latter’s infrastructure, but Indonesia increasingly has stability and a mature, confident democracy.
Bandung hosted a big conference itself: the Asia-Africa Congress in 1955.
Its pledges remain carved in marble outside the curvaceous Savoy Hotel built to house guests that included China’s premier Zhou Enlai and Sukarno, father of independent Indonesia. There’s a brave promise on that stone: “Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.”
Equality is conspicuous by its absence in Bandung itself. The handsome single-storey villas built in the early 20th century by the Dutch are now occupied by the local elite.
The postman delivering mail here puts it well: “The north of the city is for the rich, the south is for the poor. That’s how the Dutch designed the city.” The city has shifted northwards to service its wealthy citizens while it’s hard to find a place to sit on the main thoroughfare Jalan Asia Africa.
That’s because the cafes, teahouses and boutique hotels are dotted between the old Dutch villas and the hillside gardens to the city’s north. Garden centres groom plants for the villas.
Work is seasonal for the labourers and delivery people who live in tenements south of the city’s train station and subsist on a diet of nasi goring, the ubiquitous staple dish of fried rice. A collapse in western markets has slashed jobs in the textiles mills that usually keep the city in work.
Like the ram-fighting men, most Indonesians seem reluctant to debate the economic policies of their rulers. While Indonesia’s democracy is for real, politics in Indonesia remains more about personalities than policies. There’s plenty of people in Bandung with good words for Suharto, and for Megawati Soekarnoputri, president until 2004. The president always manages to look unruffled, and he’s always put down his predecessor Megawatito’s success to her father and her husband: one the country’s founding father, the other a successful businessman. It doesn’t help that she’s demonstratively less intellectual than SBY.
Yudhoyono been spending on roads, slums and schools. But aside from a clearly evolving national highway network and comfortable inter-city trains there’s not much to show in a land so blessed with natural bounty. That’s largely down to wastage of money, a corruption that’s shameless as most of Bandung’s citizens will openly admit.
Can corruption be curbed? Perhaps, particularly if SBY is allowed to rule without the disparate coalition partners he’s been leaning on until now. Politicians, however, have a bad reputation here.
A cook selling fried bananas off a griddle opposite Bandung’s signature building, which hosted the 1955 conference, smiled on explaining that the region’s richest man works in there – the governor. He dodged a question about the identity of the regions’s second richest citizen. “He [the governor] maybe isn’t the richest, that’s the president up in Jakarta!” Indonesia is living a hopeful time.
There’s stability, there’s economic growth. There’s terrible inequality but there’s hope. And you always have Sundays for ram fighting.