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Paul Raffaele

Travel

Sleeping with Cannibals

Our intrepid reporter gets up close and personal with New Guinea natives
who say they still eat their fellow tribesmen.

By Paul Raffaele

Photographs by Paul Raffaele

Smithsonian magazine, September 2006

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For days I've been slogging through a rain-soaked jungle in Indonesian New
Guinea, on a quest to visit members of the Korowai tribe, among the last people
on earth to practice cannibalism. Soon after first light this morning I boarded
a pirogue, a canoe hacked out of a tree trunk, for the last stage of the
journey, along the twisting Ndeiram Kabur River. Now the four paddlers bend
their backs with vigor, knowing we will soon make camp for the night.

My guide, Kornelius Kembaren, has traveled among the Korowai for 13 years.
But even he has never been this far upriver, because, he says, some Korowai
threaten to kill outsiders who enter their territory. Some clans are said to
fear those of us with pale skin, and Kembaren says many Korowai have never laid
eyes on a white person. They call outsiders laleo ("ghost-demons").

Suddenly, screams erupt from around the bend. Moments later, I see a throng
of naked men brandishing bows and arrows on the riverbank. Kembaren murmurs to
the boatmen to stop paddling. "They're ordering us to come to their side of the
river," he whispers to me. "It looks bad, but we can't escape. They'd quickly
catch us if we tried."

As the tribesmen's uproar bangs at my ears, our pirogue glides toward the far
side of the river. "We don't want to hurt you," Kembaren shouts in Bahasa
Indonesia, which one of our boatmen translates into Korowai. "We come in peace."
Then two tribesmen slip into a pirogue and start paddling toward us. As they
near, I see that their arrows are barbed. "Keep calm," Kembaren says softly.

Cannibalism was practiced among prehistoric human beings, and it lingered
into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in Fiji.
But today the Korowai are among the very few tribes believed to eat human flesh.
They live about 100 miles inland from the Arafura Sea, which is where Michael
Rockefeller, a son of then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in
1961 while collecting artifacts from another Papuan tribe; his body was never
found. Most Korowai still live with little knowledge of the world beyond their
homelands and frequently feud with one another. Some are said to kill and eat
male witches they call khakhua.

The island of New Guinea, the second largest in the world after Greenland, is
a mountainous, sparsely populated tropical landmass divided between two
countries: the independent nation of Papua New Guinea in the east, and the
Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Irian Jaya in the west. The Korowai live
in southeastern Papua.

My journey begins at Bali, where I catch a flight across the Banda Sea to the
Papuan town of Timika; an American mining company's subsidiary, PT Freeport
Indonesia, operates the world's largest copper and gold mine nearby. The Free
Papua Movement, which consists of a few hundred rebels equipped with bows and
arrows, has been fighting for independence from Indonesia since 1964. Because
Indonesia has banned foreign journalists from visiting the province, I entered
as a tourist.

After a stopover in Timika, our jet climbs above a swampy marsh past the
airport and heads toward a high mountain. Beyond the coast, the sheer slopes
rise as high as 16,500 feet above sea level and stretch for 400 miles. Waiting
for me at Jayapura, a city of 200,000 on the northern coast near the border with
Papua New Guinea, is Kembaren, 46, a Sumatran who came to Papua seeking
adventure 16 years ago. He first visited the Korowai in 1993, and has come to
know much about their culture, including some of their language. He is clad in
khaki shorts and trekking boots, and his unflinching gaze and rock-hard jaw give
him the look of a drill sergeant.

The best estimate is that there are some 4,000 Korowai. Traditionally, they
have lived in treehouses, in groups of a dozen or so people in scattered
clearings in the jungle; their attachment to their treehouses and surrounding
land lies at the core of their identity, Smithsonian Institution anthropologist
Paul Taylor noted in his 1994 documentary film about them, Lords of the
Garden. Over the past few decades, however, some Korowai have moved to
settlements established by Dutch missionaries, and in more recent years, some
tourists have ventured into Korowai lands. But the deeper into the rain forest
one goes, the less exposure the Korowai have had to cultures alien to their
own.

After we fly from Jayapura southwest to Wamena, a jumping-off point in the
Papuan highlands, a wiry young Korowai approaches us. In Bahasa Indonesia, he
says that his name is Boas and that two years ago, eager to see life beyond his
treehouse, he hitched a ride on a charter flight from Yaniruma, a settlement at
the edge of Korowai territory. He has tried to return home, he says, but no one
will take him. Boas says a returning guide has told him that his father was so
upset by his son's absence that he has twice burned down his own treehouse. We
tell him he can come with us.

The next morning eight of us board a chartered Twin Otter, a workhorse whose
short takeoff and landing ability will get us to Yaniruma. Once we're airborne,
Kembaren shows me a map: spidery lines marking lowland rivers and thousands of
square miles of green jungle. Dutch missionaries who came to convert the Korowai
in the late 1970s called it "the hell in the south."

After 90 minutes we come in low, following the snaking Ndeiram Kabur River.
In the jungle below, Boas spots his father’s treehouse, which seems impossibly
high off the ground, like the nest of a giant bird. Boas, who wears a
daisy-yellow bonnet, a souvenir of “civilization,” hugs me in gratitude, and
tears trickle down his cheeks.

At Yaniruma, a line of stilt huts that Dutch missionaries established in
1979, we thump down on a dirt strip carved out of the jungle. Now, to my
surprise, Boas says he will postpone his homecoming to continue with us, lured
by the promise of adventure with a laleo, and he cheerfully lifts a sack of
foodstuffs onto his shoulders. As the pilot hurls the Twin Otter back into the
sky, a dozen Korowai men hoist our packs and supplies and trudge toward the
jungle in single file bound for the river. Most carry bows and arrows.

The Rev. Johannes Veldhuizen, a Dutch missionary with the Mission of the
Reformed Churches, first made contact with the Korowai in 1978 and dropped plans
to convert them to Christianity. "A very powerful mountain god warned the
Korowai that their world would be destroyed by an earthquake if outsiders came
into their land to change their customs," he told me by phone from the
Netherlands a few years ago. "So we went as guests, rather than as conquerors,
and never put any pressure on the Korowai to change their ways." The Rev. Gerrit
van Enk, another Dutch missionary and co-author of The Korowai of Irian
Jaya, coined the term "pacification line" for the imaginary border
separating Korowai clans accustomed to outsiders from those farther north. In a
separate phone interview from the Netherlands, he told me that he had never gone
beyond the pacification line because of possible danger from Korowai clans there
hostile to the presence of laleo in their territory.

1
2
3
4
5
6

For days I've been slogging through a rain-soaked jungle in Indonesian New
Guinea, on a quest to visit members of the Korowai tribe, among the last people
on earth to practice cannibalism. Soon after first light this morning I boarded
a pirogue, a canoe hacked out of a tree trunk, for the last stage of the
journey, along the twisting Ndeiram Kabur River. Now the four paddlers bend
their backs with vigor, knowing we will soon make camp for the night.

My guide, Kornelius Kembaren, has traveled among the Korowai for 13 years.
But even he has never been this far upriver, because, he says, some Korowai
threaten to kill outsiders who enter their territory. Some clans are said to
fear those of us with pale skin, and Kembaren says many Korowai have never laid
eyes on a white person. They call outsiders laleo ("ghost-demons").

Suddenly, screams erupt from around the bend. Moments later, I see a throng
of naked men brandishing bows and arrows on the riverbank. Kembaren murmurs to
the boatmen to stop paddling. "They're ordering us to come to their side of the
river," he whispers to me. "It looks bad, but we can't escape. They'd quickly
catch us if we tried."

As the tribesmen's uproar bangs at my ears, our pirogue glides toward the far
side of the river. "We don't want to hurt you," Kembaren shouts in Bahasa
Indonesia, which one of our boatmen translates into Korowai. "We come in peace."
Then two tribesmen slip into a pirogue and start paddling toward us. As they
near, I see that their arrows are barbed. "Keep calm," Kembaren says softly.

Cannibalism was practiced among prehistoric human beings, and it lingered
into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in Fiji.
But today the Korowai are among the very few tribes believed to eat human flesh.
They live about 100 miles inland from the Arafura Sea, which is where Michael
Rockefeller, a son of then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in
1961 while collecting artifacts from another Papuan tribe; his body was never
found. Most Korowai still live with little knowledge of the world beyond their
homelands and frequently feud with one another. Some are said to kill and eat
male witches they call khakhua.

The island of New Guinea, the second largest in the world after Greenland, is
a mountainous, sparsely populated tropical landmass divided between two
countries: the independent nation of Papua New Guinea in the east, and the
Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Irian Jaya in the west. The Korowai live
in southeastern Papua.

My journey begins at Bali, where I catch a flight across the Banda Sea to the
Papuan town of Timika; an American mining company's subsidiary, PT Freeport
Indonesia, operates the world's largest copper and gold mine nearby. The Free
Papua Movement, which consists of a few hundred rebels equipped with bows and
arrows, has been fighting for independence from Indonesia since 1964. Because
Indonesia has banned foreign journalists from visiting the province, I entered
as a tourist.

After a stopover in Timika, our jet climbs above a swampy marsh past the
airport and heads toward a high mountain. Beyond the coast, the sheer slopes
rise as high as 16,500 feet above sea level and stretch for 400 miles. Waiting
for me at Jayapura, a city of 200,000 on the northern coast near the border with
Papua New Guinea, is Kembaren, 46, a Sumatran who came to Papua seeking
adventure 16 years ago. He first visited the Korowai in 1993, and has come to
know much about their culture, including some of their language. He is clad in
khaki shorts and trekking boots, and his unflinching gaze and rock-hard jaw give
him the look of a drill sergeant.

The best estimate is that there are some 4,000 Korowai. Traditionally, they
have lived in treehouses, in groups of a dozen or so people in scattered
clearings in the jungle; their attachment to their treehouses and surrounding
land lies at the core of their identity, Smithsonian Institution anthropologist
Paul Taylor noted in his 1994 documentary film about them, Lords of the
Garden. Over the past few decades, however, some Korowai have moved to
settlements established by Dutch missionaries, and in more recent years, some
tourists have ventured into Korowai lands. But the deeper into the rain forest
one goes, the less exposure the Korowai have had to cultures alien to their
own.

After we fly from Jayapura southwest to Wamena, a jumping-off point in the
Papuan highlands, a wiry young Korowai approaches us. In Bahasa Indonesia, he
says that his name is Boas and that two years ago, eager to see life beyond his
treehouse, he hitched a ride on a charter flight from Yaniruma, a settlement at
the edge of Korowai territory. He has tried to return home, he says, but no one
will take him. Boas says a returning guide has told him that his father was so
upset by his son's absence that he has twice burned down his own treehouse. We
tell him he can come with us.

The next morning eight of us board a chartered Twin Otter, a workhorse whose
short takeoff and landing ability will get us to Yaniruma. Once we're airborne,
Kembaren shows me a map: spidery lines marking lowland rivers and thousands of
square miles of green jungle. Dutch missionaries who came to convert the Korowai
in the late 1970s called it "the hell in the south."

After 90 minutes we come in low, following the snaking Ndeiram Kabur River.
In the jungle below, Boas spots his father’s treehouse, which seems impossibly
high off the ground, like the nest of a giant bird. Boas, who wears a
daisy-yellow bonnet, a souvenir of “civilization,” hugs me in gratitude, and
tears trickle down his cheeks.

At Yaniruma, a line of stilt huts that Dutch missionaries established in
1979, we thump down on a dirt strip carved out of the jungle. Now, to my
surprise, Boas says he will postpone his homecoming to continue with us, lured
by the promise of adventure with a laleo, and he cheerfully lifts a sack of
foodstuffs onto his shoulders. As the pilot hurls the Twin Otter back into the
sky, a dozen Korowai men hoist our packs and supplies and trudge toward the
jungle in single file bound for the river. Most carry bows and arrows.

The Rev. Johannes Veldhuizen, a Dutch missionary with the Mission of the
Reformed Churches, first made contact with the Korowai in 1978 and dropped plans
to convert them to Christianity. "A very powerful mountain god warned the
Korowai that their world would be destroyed by an earthquake if outsiders came
into their land to change their customs," he told me by phone from the
Netherlands a few years ago. "So we went as guests, rather than as conquerors,
and never put any pressure on the Korowai to change their ways." The Rev. Gerrit
van Enk, another Dutch missionary and co-author of The Korowai of Irian
Jaya, coined the term "pacification line" for the imaginary border
separating Korowai clans accustomed to outsiders from those farther north. In a
separate phone interview from the Netherlands, he told me that he had never gone
beyond the pacification line because of possible danger from Korowai clans there
hostile to the presence of laleo in their territory.

As we pass through Yaniruma, I’m surprised that no Indonesian police officer
demands to see the government permit issued to me allowing me to proceed. "The
nearest police post is at Senggo, several days back along the river," Kembaren
explains. "Occasionally a medical worker or official comes here for a few days,
but they're too frightened to go deep into Korowai territory."

Entering the Korowai rain forest is like stepping into a giant watery cave.
With the bright sun overhead I breathe easily, but as the porters push through
the undergrowth, the tree canopy's dense weave plunges the world into a verdant
gloom. The heat is stifling and the air drips with humidity. This is the haunt
of giant spiders, killer snakes and lethal microbes. High in the canopy, parrots
screech as I follow the porters along a barely visible track winding around
rain-soaked trees and primeval palms. My shirt clings to my back, and I take
frequent swigs at my water bottle. The annual rainfall here is around 200
inches, making it one of the wettest places on earth. A sudden downpour sends
raindrops spearing through gaps in the canopy, but we keep walking.

The local Korowai have laid logs on the mud, and the barefoot porters cross
these with ease. But, desperately trying to balance as I edge along each log,
time and again I slip, stumble and fall into the sometimes waist-deep mud,
bruising and scratching my legs and arms. Slippery logs as long as ten yards
bridge the many dips in the land. Inching across like a tightrope walker, I
wonder how the porters would get me out of the jungle were I to fall and break a
leg. "What the hell am I doing here?" I keep muttering, though I know the
answer: I want to encounter a people who are said to still practice
cannibalism.

Hour melts into hour as we push on, stopping briefly now and then to rest.
With night near, my heart surges with relief when shafts of silvery light slip
through the trees ahead: a clearing. "It's Manggel," Kembaren says—another
village set up by Dutch missionaries. "We'll stay the night here."

Korowai children with beads about their necks come running to point and
giggle as I stagger into the village—several straw huts perched on stilts and
overlooking the river. I notice there are no old people here. "The Korowai have
hardly any medicine to combat the jungle diseases or cure battle wounds, and so
the death rate is high," Kembaren explains. "People rarely live to middle age."
As van Enk writes, Korowai routinely fall to interclan conflicts; diseases,
including malaria, tuberculosis, elephantiasis and anemia, and what he calls
"the khakhua complex." The Korowai have no knowledge of the deadly germs that
infest their jungles, and so believe that mysterious deaths must be caused by
khakhua, or witches who take on the form of men.

After we eat a dinner of river fish and rice, Boas joins me in a hut and sits
cross-legged on the thatched floor, his dark eyes reflecting the gleam from my
flashlight, our only source of light. Using Kembaren as translator, he explains
why the Korowai kill and eat their fellow tribesmen. It's because of the
khakhua, which comes disguised as a relative or friend of a person he wants to
kill. "The khakhua eats the victim's insides while he sleeps," Boas explains,
"replacing them with fireplace ash so the victim does not know he's being eaten.
The khakhua finally kills the person by shooting a magical arrow into his
heart." When a clan member dies, his or her male relatives and friends seize and
kill the khakhua. "Usually, the [dying] victim whispers to his relatives the
name of the man he knows is the khakhua," Boas says. "He may be from the same or
another treehouse."

I ask Boas whether the Korowai eat people for any other reason or eat the
bodies of enemies they've killed in battle. "Of course not," he replies, giving
me a funny look. "We don't eat humans, we only eat khakhua."

The killing and eating of khakhua has reportedly declined among tribespeople
in and near the settlements. Rupert Stasch, an anthropologist at Reed College in
Portland, Oregon, who has lived among the Korowai for 16 months and studied
their culture, writes in the journal Oceania that Korowai say they have
"given up" killing witches partly because they were growing ambivalent about the
practice and partly in reaction to several incidents with police. In one in the
early '90s, Stasch writes, a Yaniruma man killed his sister's husband for being
a khakhua. The police arrested the killer, an accomplice and a village head.
"The police rolled them around in barrels, made them stand overnight in a
leech-infested pond, and forced them to eat tobacco, chili peppers, animal
feces, and unripe papaya," he writes. Word of such treatment, combined with
Korowais' own ambivalence, prompted some to limit witch-killing even in places
where police do not venture.

Still, the eating of khakhua persists, according to my guide, Kembaren. "Many
khakhua are murdered and eaten each year," he says, citing information he says
he has gained from talking to Korowai who still live in treehouses.

On our third day of trekking, after hiking from soon after sunrise to dusk,
we reach Yafufla, another line of stilt huts set up by Dutch missionaries. That
night, Kembaren takes me to an open hut overlooking the river, and we sit by a
small campfire. Two men approach through the gloom, one in shorts, the other
naked save for a necklace of prized pigs' teeth and a leaf wrapped about the tip
of his penis. "That's Kilikili," Kembaren whispers, "the most notorious khakhua
killer." Kilikili carries a bow and barbed arrows. His eyes are empty of
expression, his lips are drawn in a grimace and he walks as soundlessly as a
shadow.

The other man, who turns out to be Kilikili's brother Bailom, pulls a human
skull from a bag. A jagged hole mars the forehead. "It's Bunop, the most recent
khakhua he killed," Kembaren says of the skull. "Bailom used a stone ax to split
the skull open to get at the brains." The guide's eyes dim. "He was one of my
best porters, a cheerful young man," he says.

Bailom passes the skull to me. I don't want to touch it, but neither do I
want to offend him. My blood chills at the feel of naked bone. I have read
stories and watched documentaries about the Korowai, but as far as I know none
of the reporters and filmmakers had ever gone as far upriver as we're about to
go, and none I know of had ever seen a khakhua's skull.

The fire's reflection flickers on the brothers' faces as Bailom tells me how
he killed the khakhua, who lived in Yafufla, two years ago. "Just before my
cousin died he told me that Bunop was a khakhua and was eating him from the
inside," he says, with Kembaren translating. "So we caught him, tied him up and
took him to a stream, where we shot arrows into him."

Bailom says that Bunop screamed for mercy all the way, protesting that he was
not a khakhua. But Bailom was unswayed. "My cousin was close to death when he
told me and would not lie," Bailom says.

At the stream, Bailom says, he used a stone ax to chop off the khakhua's
head. As he held it in the air and turned it away from the body, the others
chanted and dismembered Bunop's body. Bailom, making chopping movements with his
hand, explains: "We cut out his intestines and broke open the rib cage, chopped
off the right arm attached to the right rib cage, the left arm and left rib
cage, and then both legs."

The body parts, he says, were individually wrapped in banana leaves and
distributed among the clan members. "But I kept the head because it belongs to
the family that killed the khakhua," he says. "We cook the flesh like we cook
pig, placing palm leaves over the wrapped meat together with burning hot river
rocks to make steam."

Some readers may believe that these two are having me on—that they are just
telling a visitor what he wants to hear—and that the skull came from someone who
died from some other cause. But I believe they were telling the truth. I spent
eight days with Bailom, and everything else he told me proved factual. I also
checked with four other Yafufla men who said they had joined in the killing,
dismembering and eating of Bunop, and the details of their accounts mirrored
reports of khakhua cannibalism by Dutch missionaries who lived among the Korowai
for several years. Kembaren clearly accepted Bailom’s story as fact.

Around our campfire, Bailom tells me he feels no remorse. "Revenge is part of
our culture, so when the khakhua eats a person, the people eat the khakhua," he
says. (Taylor, the Smithsonian Institution anthropologist, has described
khakhua-eating as "part of a system of justice.") "It's normal," Bailom says. "I
don't feel sad I killed Bunop, even though he was a friend."

In cannibal folklore, told in numerous books and articles, human flesh is
said to be known as "long pig" because of its similar taste. When I mention
this, Bailom shakes his head. "Human flesh tastes like young cassowary," he
says, referring to a local ostrich-like bird. At a khakhua meal, he says, both
men and women—children do not attend—eat everything but bones, teeth, hair,
fingernails and toenails and the penis. "I like the taste of all the body
parts," Bailom says, "but the brains are my favorite." Kilikili nods in
agreement, his first response since he arrived.

When the khakhua is a member of the same clan, he is bound with rattan and
taken up to a day's march away to a stream near the treehouse of a friendly
clan. "When they find a khakhua too closely related for them to eat, they bring
him to us so we can kill and eat him," Bailom says.

He says he has personally killed four khakhua. And Kilikili? Bailom laughs.
"He says he'll tell you now the names of 8 khakhua he's killed," he replies,
"and if you come to his treehouse upriver, he'll tell you the names of the other
22."

I ask what they do with the bones.

"We place them by the tracks leading into the treehouse clearing, to warn our
enemies," Bailom says. "But the killer gets to keep the skull. After we eat the
khakhua, we beat loudly on our treehouse walls all night with sticks" to warn
other khakhua to stay away.

As we walk back to our hut, Kembaren confides that "years ago, when I was
making friends with the Korowai, a man here at Yafufla told me I'd have to eat
human flesh if they were to trust me. He gave me a chunk," he says. "It was a
bit tough but tasted good."

That night it takes me a long time to get to sleep.

The next morning Kembaren brings to the hut a 6-year-old boy named Wawa, who
is naked except for a necklace of beads. Unlike the other village children,
boisterous and smiling, Wawa is withdrawn and his eyes seem deeply sad. Kembaren
wraps an arm around him. "When Wawa's mother died last November—I think she had
TB, she was very sick, coughing and aching—people at his treehouse suspected him
of being a khakhua," he says. "His father died a few months earlier, and they
believed [Wawa] used sorcery to kill them both. His family was not powerful
enough to protect him at the treehouse, and so this January his uncle escaped
with Wawa, bringing him here, where the family is stronger." Does Wawa know the
threat he is facing? "He's heard about it from his relatives, but I don't think
he fully understands that people at his treehouse want to kill and eat him,
though they'll probably wait until he's older, about 14 or 15, before they try.
But while he stays at Yafufla, he should be safe."

Soon the porters heft our equipment and head toward the jungle. "We're taking
the easy way, by pirogue," Kembaren tells me. Bailom and Kilikili, each gripping
a bow and arrows, have joined the porters. "They know the clans upriver better
than our Yaniruma men," Kembaren explains.

Bailom shows me his arrows, each a yard-long shaft bound with vine to an
arrowhead designed for a specific prey. Pig arrowheads, he says, are
broad-bladed; those for birds, long and narrow. Fish arrowheads are pronged,
while the arrowheads for humans are each a hand's span of cassowary bone with
six or more barbs carved on each side—to ensure terrible damage when cut away
from the victim's flesh. Dark bloodstains coat these arrowheads.

I ask Kembaren if he is comfortable with the idea of two cannibals
accompanying us. "Most of the porters have probably eaten human flesh," he
answers with a smile.

Kembaren leads me down to the Ndeiram Kabur River, where we board a long,
slender pirogue. I settle in the middle, the sides pressing against my body. Two
Korowai paddlers stand at the stern, two more at the bow, and we push off,
steering close by the riverbank, where the water flow is slowest. Each time the
boatmen maneuver the pirogue around a sandbar, the strong current in the middle
of the river threatens to tip us over. Paddling upriver is tough, even for the
muscular boatmen, and they frequently break into Korowai song timed to the slap
of the paddles against the water, a yodeling chant that echoes along the
riverbank.

High green curtains of trees woven with tangled streamers of vine shield the
jungle. A siren scream of cicadas pierces the air. The day passes in a blur, and
night descends quickly.

And that's when we are accosted by the screaming men on the riverbank.
Kembaren refuses to come to their side of the river. "It's too dangerous," he
whispers. Now the two Korowai armed with bows and arrows are paddling a pirogue
toward us. I ask Kembaren if he has a gun. He shakes his head no.

As their pirogue bumps against ours, one of the men growls that laleo are
forbidden to enter their sacred river, and that my presence angers the spirits.
Korowai are animists, believing that powerful beings live in specific trees and
parts of rivers. The tribesman demands that we give the clan a pig to absolve
the sacrilege. A pig costs 350,000 rupiahs, or about $40. It's a Stone Age
shakedown. I count out the money and pass it to the man, who glances at the
Indonesian currency and grants us permission to pass.

What use is money to these people? I ask Kembaren as our boatmen paddle to
safety upriver. "It's useless here," he answers, "but whenever they get any
money, and that's rare, the clans use it to help pay bride prices for Korowai
girls living closer to Yaniruma. They understand the dangers of incest, and so
girls must marry into unrelated clans."

About an hour farther up the river, we pull up onto the bank, and I scramble
up a muddy slope, dragging myself over the slippery rise by grasping exposed
tree roots. Bailom and the porters are waiting for us and wearing worried faces.
Bailom says that the tribesmen knew we were coming because they had intercepted
the porters as they passed near their treehouses.

Would they really have killed us if we hadn't paid up? I ask Bailom, through
Kembaren. Bailom nods: "They'd have let you pass tonight because they knew you'd
have to return downriver. Then, they'd ambush you, some firing arrows from the
riverbank and others attacking at close range in their pirogues."

The porters string all but one of the tarpaulins over our supplies. Our
shelter for the night is four poles set in a square about four yards apart and
topped by a tarp with open sides. Soon after midnight a downpour drenches us.
The wind sends my teeth chattering, and I sit disconsolately hugging my knees.
Seeing me shivering, Boas pulls my body against his for warmth. As I drift off,
deeply fatigued, I have the strangest thought: this is the first time I've ever
slept with a cannibal.

We leave at first light, still soaked. At midday our pirogue reaches our
destination, a riverbank close by the treehouse, or khaim, of a Korowai
clan that Kembaren says has never before seen a white person. Our porters
arrived before us and have already built a rudimentary hut. "I sent a Korowai
friend here a few days ago to ask the clan to let us visit them," Kembaren says.
"Otherwise they'd have attacked us."

I ask why they've given permission for a laleo to enter their sacred land. "I
think they're as curious to see you, the ghost-demon, as you are to see them,"
Kembaren answered.

At midafternoon, Kembaren and I hike 30 minutes through dense jungle and ford
a deep stream. He points ahead to a treehouse that looks deserted. It perches on
a decapitated banyan tree, its floor a dense latticework of boughs and strips of
wood. It's about ten yards off the ground. "It belongs to the Letin clan," he
says. Korowai are formed into what anthropologists call patriclans, which
inhabit ancestral lands and trace ownership and genealogy through the male
line.

A young cassowary prances past, perhaps a family pet. A large pig, flushed
from its hiding place in the grass, dashes into the jungle. "Where are the
Korowai?" I ask. Kembaren points to the treehouse. "They’re waiting for us."

I can hear voices as I climb an almost vertical pole notched with footholds.
The interior of the treehouse is wreathed in a haze of smoke rent by beams of
sunlight. Young men are bunched on the floor near the entrance. Smoke from
hearth fires has coated the bark walls and sago-leaf ceiling, giving the hut a
sooty odor. A pair of stone axes, several bows and arrows and net bags are
tucked into the leafy rafters. The floor creaks as I settle cross-legged onto
it.

Four women and two children sit at the rear of the treehouse, the women
fashioning bags from vines and studiously ignoring me. "Men and women stay on
different sides of the treehouse and have their own hearths," says Kembaren.
Each hearth is made from strips of clay-coated rattan suspended over a hole in
the floor so that it can be quickly hacked loose, to fall to the ground, if a
fire starts to burn out of control.

A middle-aged man with a hard-muscled body and a bulldog face straddles the
gender dividing line. Speaking through Boas, Kembaren makes small talk about
crops, the weather and past feasts. The man grips his bow and arrows and avoids
my gaze. But now and then I catch him stealing glances in my direction. "That's
Lepeadon, the clan's khen-mengga-abül, or 'fierce man,'" Kembaren says.
The fierce man leads the clan in fights. Lepeadon looks up to the task.

"A clan of six men, four women, three boys and two girls live here," Kembaren
says. "The others have come from nearby treehouses to see their first
laleo."

After an hour of talk, the fierce man moves closer to me and, still
unsmiling, speaks. "I knew you were coming and expected to see a ghost, but now
I see you're just like us, a human," he says, as Boas translates to Kembaren and
Kembaren translates to me.

A youngster tries to yank my pants off, and he almost succeeds amid a gale of
laughter. I join in the laughing but keep a tight grip on my modesty. The Rev.
Johannes Veldhuizen had told me that Korowai he’d met had thought him a
ghost-demon until they spied him bathing in a stream and saw that he came
equipped with all the requisite parts of a yanop, or human being. Korowai
seemed to have a hard time understanding clothing. They call it
laleo-khal, "ghost-demon skin," and Veldhuizen told me they believed his
shirt and pants to be a magical epidermis that he could don or remove at
will.

"We shouldn't push the first meeting too long," Kembaren now tells me as he
rises to leave. Lepeadon follows us to the ground and grabs both my hands. He
begins bouncing up and down and chanting, "nemayokh" ("friend"). I keep
up with him in what seems a ritual farewell, and he swiftly increases the pace
until it is frenzied, before he suddenly stops, leaving me breathless.

"I've never seen that before," Kembaren says. "We've just experienced
something very special." It was certainly special to me. In four decades of
journeying among remote tribes, this is the first time I've encountered a clan
that has evidently never seen anyone as light-skinned as me. Enthralled, I find
my eyes tearing up as we return to our hut.

The next morning four Korowai women arrive at our hut carrying a squawking
green frog, several locusts and a spider they say they just caught in the
jungle. "They've brought your breakfast," Boas says, smiling as his gibe is
translated. Two years in a Papuan town has taught him that we laleo wrinkle our
noses at Korowai delicacies. The young women have circular scars the size of
large coins running the length of their arms, around the stomach and across
their breasts. "The marks make them look more beautiful," Boas says.

He explains how they are made, saying circular pieces of bark embers are
placed on the skin. It seems an odd way to add beauty to the female form, but no
more bizarre than tattoos, stiletto-heel shoes, Botox injections or the
not-so-ancient Chinese custom of slowly crushing infant girls' foot bones to
make their feet as small as possible.

Kembaren and I spend the morning talking to Lepeadon and the young men about
Korowai religion. Seeing spirits in nature, they find belief in a single god
puzzling. But they too recognize a powerful spirit, named Ginol, who created the
present world after having destroyed the previous four. For as long as the
tribal memory reaches back, elders sitting around fires have told the younger
ones that white-skinned ghost-demons will one day invade Korowai land. Once the
laleo arrive, Ginol will obliterate this fifth world. The land will split apart,
there will be fire and thunder, and mountains will drop from the sky. This world
will shatter, and a new one will take its place. The prophecy is, in a way,
bound to be fulfilled as more young Korowai move between their treehouses and
downriver settlements, which saddens me as I return to our hut for the
night.

The Korowai, believing that evil spirits are most active at night, usually
don’t venture out of their treehouses after the sun sets. They divide the day
into seven distinct periods—dawn, sunrise, midmorning, noon, midafternoon, dusk
and night. They use their bodies to count numbers. Lepeadon shows me how,
ticking off the fingers of his left hand, then touching his wrist, forearm,
elbow, upper arm, shoulder, neck, ear and the crown of the head, and moving down
the other arm. The tally comes to 25. For anything greater than that, the
Korowai start over and add the word laifu, meaning “turn around.”

In the afternoon I go with the clan to the sago palm fields to harvest their
staple food. Two men hack down a sago palm, each with a hand ax made from a
fist-size chunk of hard, dark stone sharpened at one end and lashed with vine to
a slim wooden handle. The men then pummel the sago pith to a pulp, which the
women sluice with water to produce a dough they mold into bite-size pieces and
grill.

A snake that falls from the toppling palm is swiftly killed. Lepeadon then
loops a length of rattan about a stick and rapidly pulls it to and fro next to
some shavings on the ground, producing tiny sparks that start a fire. Blowing
hard to fuel the growing flame, he places the snake under a pile of burning
wood. When the meat is charred, I'm offered a piece of it. It tastes like
chicken.

On our return to the treehouse, we pass banyan trees, with their dramatic,
aboveground root flares. The men slam their heels against these appendages,
producing a thumping sound that travels across the jungle. "That lets the people
at the treehouse know they're coming home, and how far away they are," Kembaren
tells me.

My three days with the clan pass swiftly. When I feel they trust me, I ask
when they last killed a khakhua. Lepeadon says it was near the time of the last
sago palm feast, when several hundred Korowai gathered to dance, eat vast
quantities of sago palm maggots, trade goods, chant fertility songs and let the
marriage-age youngsters eye one another. According to our porters, that dates
the killing to just over a year ago.

Lepeadon tells Boas he wants me to stay longer, but I have to return to
Yaniruma to meet the Twin Otter. As we board the pirogue, the fierce man squats
by the riverside but refuses to look at me. When the boatmen push away, he leaps
up, scowls, thrusts a cassowary-bone arrow across his bow, yanks on the rattan
string and aims at me. After a few moments, he smiles and lowers the bow—a
fierce man's way of saying goodbye.

In midafternoon, the boatmen steer the pirogue to the edge of a swamp forest
and tie it to a tree trunk. Boas leaps out and leads the way, setting a brisk
pace. After an hour’s trek, I reach a clearing about the size of two football
fields and planted with banana trees. Dominating it is a treehouse that soars
about 75 feet into the sky. Its springy floor rests on several natural columns,
tall trees cut off at the point where branches once flared out.

Boas is waiting for us. Next to him stands his father, Khanduop, a
middle-aged man clad in rattan strips about his waist and a leaf covering part
of his penis. He grabs my hand and thanks me for bringing his son home. He has
killed a large pig for the occasion, and Bailom, with what seems to me to be
superhuman strength, carries it on his back up a notched pole into the
treehouse. Inside, every nook and cranny is crammed with bones from previous
feasts—spiky fish skeletons, blockbuster pig jaws, the skulls of flying foxes
and rats. The bones dangle even from hooks strung along the ceiling, near
bundles of many-colored parrot and cassowary feathers. The Korowai believe that
the décor signals hospitality and prosperity.

I meet Yakor, a tall, kindly eyed tribesman from a treehouse upriver, who
squats by the fire with Khanduop, Bailom and Kilikili. Boas’ mother is dead, and
Khanduop, a fierce man, has married Yakor's sister. When the talk turns to
khakhua meals they have enjoyed, Khanduop's eyes light up. He's dined on many
khakhua, he says, and the taste is the most delicious of any creature he's ever
eaten.

The next morning the porters depart for the river, carrying our remaining
supplies. But before I leave, Khanduop wants to talk; his son and Kembaren
translate. "Boas has told me he'll live in Yaniruma with his brother, coming
back just for visits," he murmurs. Khanduop's gaze clouds. "The time of the true
Korowai is coming to an end, and that makes me very sad."

Boas gives his father a wan smile and walks with me to the pirogue for the
two-hour journey to Yaniruma, wearing his yellow bonnet as if it were a visa for
the 21st century.

Three years earlier I had visited the Korubo, an isolated indigenous tribe in
the Amazon, together with Sydney Possuelo, then director of Brazil's Department
for Isolated Indians [SMITHSONIAN, April 2005]. This question of what to do with
such peoples—whether to yank them into the present or leave them untouched in
their jungles and traditions—had troubled Possuelo for decades. "I believe we
should let them live in their own special worlds," he told me, "because once
they go downriver to the settlements and see what is to them the wonders and
magic of our lives, they never go back to live in a traditional way."

So it is with the Korowai. They have at most a generation left in their
traditional culture—one that includes practices that admittedly strike us as
abhorrent. Year by year the young men and women will drift to Yaniruma and other
settlements until only aging clan members are left in the treehouses. And at
that point Ginol's godly prophecy will reach its apocalyptic fulfillment, and
thunder and earthquakes of a kind will destroy the old Korowai world
forever.

Comments

"The Free Papua Movement (OPM) is widely believed to be the core of
opposition to the Indonesian Government in West Irian. But it is difficult to
track down the OPM as an organization, although not because its security is
tight or people unwilling to talk. On the contrary, everyone talks about the
OPM; it has few, if any, secrets, and many Irianese proudly proclaim they are
"members" of the OPM. A foreigner travelling in West Irian has no difficulty in
contacting anti-government activists. They stop you on the street and groups of
them gather around when you visit a native village; in short, no one is
reluctant to discuss the OPM and their reasons for disliking Indonesians." "The
OPM, however, does represent an amorphous mass of anti-Indonesia sentiment.
Card-carrying members of the OPM as such must be few, although partisans claim
that it has anywhere from 1500 to 5000, oe even 500,000 members." "Regarding the
magnitude of the opposition to Indonesian rule, probably a decided majority of
the Irianese people, and possibly 85 to 90 percent, are in sympathy with the
Free Papua cause or at least intensely dislike Indonesians." - U.S. Ambassador
Francis Galbraith 1969.

Posted by Andrew Johnson on January 24,2008 |
02:27PM

This is very interesting, and exciting! Is it possible to contact the author,
Paul Raffaele, to ask some further questions? I would like to write my
anthropology paper on cannibalism that is still being practiced and this tribe
really speaks to me. Thanks for a true report on the subject without unneccesary
disgust or jugement. Holly

Posted by Holly on January 28,2008 |
10:15AM

It pains me to here of another people who are going to loose their way of
life. Hopefully at least the elders in the tribe will be dead and gone before
civilization destroys their world. What a sad situation !

Posted by DENISE on February 11,2008 |
08:30AM

Such is the way of life. It fiercely perpetuates itself, only to be
vanquished by time. Mr. Raffaele, I enjoyed your article and photography. Thank
you for making me 'feel' the presence of your experience. Sounds like a 'one in
a lifetime offer'. Thank you Smithsonian!

Posted by Ife (ee-faye) on March 25,2008 |
07:51PM

What a truly facsinating and factual read!It is sad to think that there way
of life could very easily be destroyed and become part of history. However
fascinating they could be and however many treasures we could find amongst
tribes like the Korowai do we ever stop to think that we could be doing more
harm than good by disturbing them and wanting more!

Posted by Jo on March 26,2008 |
05:37PM

Hello All, An extremely interesting read, I in turn have decided to hike into
the heartlands of this country. I'm departing November, and am planning on
hiking into this trecherous territory. Please email me closer details on the
location of them, and the nearest civilised town for hiking thanks. Kalki
French, [email-masked]

Posted by Kalki French on April 23,2008 |
04:17AM

I wish these indigenous people could be taught the error of cannibalism while
retaining the other wonderful aspects of their culture. I can never believe that
cannibalism is acceptable anywhere in the world, in any people group, at any
time. I think that the practice should be stopped.

Posted by Julie on May 22,2008 |
07:43PM

Cannibalism is one of the worst crimes that can be committed towards a human
being. Although this story is highly interesting, we can see that these people
do not believe they are killing humans but another creature. It is for the
benefit of all humans that this way of life becomes history, and i hope it
will.

Posted by jamilah on June 2,2008 |
04:02AM

i like the picture and words. your the best article writer ever.

Posted by amanda on June 10,2008 |
01:59PM

It is truly amazing to read of such an interesting insight of a culture far
away from modern day civilization. No matter what their value systems are, it is
definitely praiseworthy to note that not everyone is trying to ape the world in
terms of being attracted to all its gadgets, gizmos and beliefs. And last but
not the least, kudos to such a brave author for allowing us to have a peek at
something like this.

Posted by Neel Das on July 10,2008 |
12:17PM

Mr. Raffaele is far braver than anyone I know. I hope he is able to
recuperate fully and can write many more interesting stories.

Posted by Colette Shannon on July 16,2008 |
12:29AM

do you have a web site that i can join about this stuff? i find this stuff
very interesting.

Posted by bluedemond on October 19,2008 |
06:42PM

Mr.Raffaele is a person with alot of courage. this article is an inspiration
to me,as i do believe in cannibalism. in my country India, i have seen a group
of holymen feeding on corpses.it is their believe by doing so they become
ageless. in near future i would like to meet other tribes who do practice
cannibalism.

Posted by Sayantan Das on October 30,2008 |
03:54AM

It is a wondeful work done by Mr.Raffaele .It is really amazing to know that
cannibalism is still followed in this world.The narration gives a clear picture
about the true lifestyle of Cannibals and also it brings out their values for
life,culture and tradition.The narration made me feel that i am one among the
travellers and i had the thrilling experience of being into a rainy dense
forest.Through this article it has come to limelight that eventhough the world
is taken over by advanced civilizations and modern practices there are people
who live far enough not to have an impact of these developments..."THREE CHEERS"
to the brave author for giving us a valuable note on our fellowmen who resembles
us in physique but are still with the stone age culture,character and
tradition!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by Thangalakshmi Ramakrishnan on February
27,2009 | 01:54PM

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