Torajan funerals to die.......

Elaborate Torajan funerals to die for
The last king of Toraja was 93 when he took his final breath in July 2003. Five years later, he's still part of the family, quietly reposing in a small room in his former palace.

By Paul Watson

Los Angeles Times

PREV of NEXT


PAUL WATSON / TPN

Eddy Sambolinggi, youngest son of the last Torajan king, keeps his dead father one floor above his museum of tribal artifacts.
BUNTU KALANDO, Indonesia — The last king of Toraja was 93 when he took his final breath in July 2003. Five years later, he's still part of the family, quietly reposing in a small room in his former palace.

By Torajan tradition, he isn't really dead. He's just "sick." The late monarch won't be gone for good until he has been laid to rest with traditional rites featuring the slaughter of water buffaloes, at least one of them a rare spotted specimen.

The unhurried passage from this world to the next isn't reserved for former rulers. It is central to the culture of the Torajans, an ethnic group in southern Sulawesi island whose customs are a hybrid of ancient tribal traditions and Protestant Christianity.

The dead wait months, even years, for their last rites while relatives negotiate funeral arrangements, everything from the right timing to allow mourners to travel long distances, to where they will stay and who will feed them.

Corpses once were dried with herbal elixirs and smoldering fires, but the old ways have died out, replaced by washtub embalming fluid made with formaldehyde.

A village mortician schooled in the old ways gave the late king's body the royal treatment with natural preservatives. It took more than 320 yards of cloth to wrap his mummy, a simple task compared with the complex preparations for his funeral.

"Torajans are very sensitive about this because the funeral is our last honor," said Eddy Sambolinggi, the youngest son of the last king, Puang Sambolinggi. "Everything has to be carefully planned."

In many ways, Torajans spend a lifetime preparing for their demise, saving for burial clothes and bamboo shelters for guests. They also budget for funeral donations to other families, while fattening up water buffaloes for sacrifice.

"Torajans," Sambolinggi, 56, said, "they live to die."

It has taken his family five years to agree on a send-off befitting Puang Sambolinggi, now planned for October. The farewell is shaping up to be the last grand funeral in Torajan history, the final chapter of a royal history that dates back centuries.

Up to 80 buffaloes will be sacrificed in front of tens of thousands of mourners. Just counting relatives, Sambolinggi said, there will be 100,000 guests, many of whom will journey hundreds of miles.

His father's reign saw the death of an ancient dynasty in Tana Toraja, or the Land of Toraja. He held the throne for only a year until, just days after Japan surrendered in August 1945 ending World War II, Indonesia declared independence from the Dutch and abolished tribal monarchies.



But tribal tradition lives on.

Anthropologists believe Torajans are descended from voyagers who sailed from southern China as early as 3,000 B.C. Though Christianity and the modern world have worn away at tradition, ancient beliefs called "aluk to dolo," or the way of the ancestors, still guide many Torajans, especially when someone dies.

Until the plans are settled and relatives bid their final farewells, the late king, wrapped in cloth and encased in a wooden coffin, lies just up the stairs from his youngest son's museum of tribal artifacts. Sambolinggi regularly talks to his father, he said, but silently, from his heart.

"For the past five years, he's been with us, sleeping upstairs," Sambolinggi said. "We still prepare his place at the dining table."

His father's remains will be sealed in a royal tomb carved out of the nearby Suaya cliff, where his brother-in-law's coffin was laid to rest July 15, just as dozens of royals have been through the centuries, including the late king's ancestors.

Life-size wooden dolls representing the dead stare down from balconies outside the tombs. Relatives greet them when they bring offerings, such as cigarettes, palm wine or bottled water.

Because Torajans take their obligations to the dead so seriously, parents who can't afford to donate a pig, let alone a buffalo, for sacrifice at a funeral often pledge an IOU, which their children must fulfill to maintain family honor.

With the funeral season running from June to October, the driest months of the year, sacrificial debts can quickly add up. An ordinary black water buffalo costs at least $5,500, a heavy price for Torajans, many of whom are rice farmers. A shortage of the finest spotted buffaloes has driven the price up 25 percent over last year, to almost $14,000.

Custom demands a minimum of six buffaloes at each funeral, but competition for status pushes the number higher.

Funerals have become so expensive that many young Torajans are moving away to cities, or other countries such as Malaysia, in search of better jobs so they can keep up with the demands as relatives die. An estimated 450,000 people live in Tana Toraja, and 200,000 others have left the region.

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company