LIFE IN SUMATRA

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3967, 23 September 1930, Page 7

LIFE IN SUMATRA

LAND WHERE WOMEN RULE EASY TIME FOR MEN The healthiest, wealthiest, happiest, and best-governed primitive people on earth —the Menang-kabau of the central highlands of Sumatra —are ruled by their women. Their blessed condition is due to the fact that the women govern, hold the family purse strings, and, incidentally, do an equal ii not a greater share of the work. The men of this tribe have no homes of their own, but are permitted to spend their time under the roofs of their various wives. They have nothing to say about questions pertaining to the home, and they are not supposed to be related to their own children. The women harvest the crops, rake them to market, and pocket the money. The men get their board and what money their wives give them. But the women save the money and convert it into gold. When working

in the rice fields the average housewife of the Menang-kabau will be wearing a veritable treasure in gold pieces and other gold ornaments. The laws are made to please the womenfolk, and all descent and inheritance are through the mother LIVED IN JUNGLES. These are some of the striking observations of Mrs Mabel Cook Cole, who, with her husband, Dr Fay Cooper Cole, anthropologist, has lived in the jungles among pigmies and visited the courts of the Malay Sultans. She has perhaps seen more primitive peoples of the earth than any other woman. Dr Cole’s particular field of research is the wild peoples of the Southeastern Orient. His scientific expeditions have taken her to Java, Central Borneo, one of the least-known regions of the world; Nias, a little-known island off the coast of Sumatra, and the interior of the Philippines. Wherever Dr Cole has gone his wife has gone with him and lived the lives of the people whom they were studying. Very few white persons have ever visited the Menang-kabau. For 200 years this people held the Dutch at bay. Within recent years a few Dutch scientists have visited them, butDr and Mrs Cole are among the first, if not the first, English-speaking white persons to remain for any time among them. There are a million and a-half happy Malays living in the mountainous country of Central Sumatra. They earned their name Menang-kabau (won carabao) because their carabao, or water buffalo, won in a contest with the Javanese to determine which owned the best animals.

“ The Menang-kabau are the most highly developed of all the primitive peoples,” Mrs Cole said. “Dr Cole and I entered by way of the west coast of Sumatra and drove in an automobile fifty miles inland up to the centre of the Pedang Highland, which crosses the Equator. But because it is high the climate is ideal, and fevers prevalent in the lowlands are seldom known. Recently the Dutch have completed a paved highway over this route, and before long this fascinating region will be open to the tourist. In a way this is to he regi’etted, because at the present time the Menang-kabau are so happy and unspoiled. “ ALL-POWERFUL MOTHER.” “ We found it interesting that the matriarchal form of government was flourishing among this tribe, which is nominally Mohammedan. A Menangkabau home usually consists of one long front room, which is the family living room. Opening off from that in the back are the individual rooms of the mother and her daughters. The husband is permitted to visit his wife here. Each husband, according to the Mohammedan custom, can have four wives, but he must spend exactly the same amount of time with each wife, regardless of what his preferences and his prejudices may be.” “ But doesn’t this arrangement cause trouble? ” Mrs Cole was asked. “Most of the fusses and quarrels do seem to be about the preferences of husbands.” she laughed. “ But the women under the same roof seem to get along very well together. I ie.member having heard of but one quarrel between a mother and daughter, in

which case a separate house was built for the daughter. Jn discussing the matter the natives put it in '-heir usual poetic fashion. They said, ‘T he pot and the spoon had a fight,’ meaning that the mother and daughter had disagreed. “The}' use a great many parables or imaginative expressions in r ;heir ordinary conversation. For instance, they say, ‘ No matter how far a heron flies from home, he will always come back to his pools,’ which means that a son can always come home and sleep in his mother’s living room if he hasn’t his wives. “The head of the house is the matriarch. Her daughters and her daughter’s children are reared in her house. She is the head of the family. When the counsel of a male member of the family is deemed necessary it is not

a husband, but an eldest son or the mother’s brother who is called on to furnish it. But even after his advice has been given, it is not necessarily followed. The women literally have the last word in any question concerning the welfare of the family. “A brother, not a husband, is chosen by the woman to represent them at a government council, but the women attend the council also, and if their male representative does not act to suit them they recall him and send another. The men of the lower council choose one of their number to go to a higher council, but the women go along to that council also, and

again they can recall the representative if he does not please them. At no time do they relinquish their power in government matters to their menfolk. NOT HENPECKED. “ But the men are by no means henpecked in their personal freedom, and tlvey certainly do not have to work very hard. The distribution of work between men and women is about equal, with perhaps the heavier burden falling on the women. “Each man must help his wife in preparing the rice fields, and since most of them have four wives, they are kept pretty busy,” she said. “The sides of the mountains have been terraced, and the soil is exceedingly rich.

As a consequence, the people arc well fed —perhaps better led than any other tribe of Malay people. “ The husband must also help in repairing the houses of his wives or in building new houses. The woodwork of the houses is beautifully carved. But even with that duty imposed upon them, the men have lots of leisure time for dressing themselves up and attending cock lights, pigeon lights, and gambling places. The Malay is a great gambler, but when his weekly allowance from his wives has been lost he can gamble no further. As the result of this restraint placed by the hand of the matriarchs on the purse strings, there is little concentration of wealth in one family or individual, and all families are comfortably well off. “Their wealth is converted into gold coins, some of which are hammered into jewellery. The women wear these about their persons. “ Most of the women have gorgeous ceremonial robes, which are handed down from mother to daughter, many of them woven from solid gold threads, but, ordinarily, during working hours they wear dresses of white cloth they buy from traders. They wash their clothes in the muddy streams, and consequently they are soon dingy. Against such ugliness the gorgeousness of their jewellery stands out in strange contrast.” “PIN MONEY.”, “The Menang-kabau women are hard workers, but they have a good time, too. After their husbands have prepared the fields they stand knee-deep in the muddy flooded fields, and plant the rice, which they have already sprouted in beds near their houses. They must scare the birds away from the growing grain, and finally harvest it, thresh it, and take it to market. Incidentally, they collect the money for it. A husband gets bis board at the home of the wife he happens to he living with, and his weekly allotment—a sum determined by her generosity—which might be as much as 50 cents a week.

“The importance of the women of the tribe is nowhere made so evident as during a wedding ceremony, in which the groom hardly figures at all.” Mrs Cole said. He is present for- a short while on the first day for the religions man of the tribe to ask him some questions in accordance with the marriage ceremony prescribed in the Koran. That ends his part in the wedding, and he goes homo to his mother.

The feasting and dancing go on as long as the girl’s family can afford it. The bride, with her attendants, meanwhile takes this opportunity to call on her various relatives. “ 1 once attended a wedding which lasted eight days,” Mrs Cole related. “ When the feasting and dancing are over, the bride goes to his mother’s house and gets her husband, and takes him to her own home. Never in his entire life does the poor fellow own a home of his own.”