By Simeon Ugbodovon
Can you live with the dead? What a curious question. Someone might say but cemetery or morgue is the place for dead! Don’t we bury the dead again? Even then, it is not out of place to find out that many will surely develop goose pimples, scared to death at the sight of a corpse should they step into a mortuary. Like the cemetery, mortuary is the world of the death, left solitary away from the living. In many societies and culture, the dead, though tucked away in the grave, out of sight, their spirits are considered to still hoover around their people. Hence they invoke them.
Curiously there is a tribe that maintains physical contact with their dead. They cherish them, so to say.
Come along to Indonesia to meet the tribe called Toraja, a name derived from Buginese language term to riaja, meaning people of the upland. The tribe, whose population comprises Christians, Muslims and Animists, inhabit the mountainous region of South Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Torajans are famed for celebrating their dead with elaborate and expensive funeral rites, which include preserving and exhuming the dead, sacrifices, burial sites carved into rocky cliffs, massive peaked-roof traditional houses known as tongkonan, and colourful wood carvings. These funeral rites are so cherished by the Torajans that they are usually attended by hundreds of people and lasting for several days.
Torajans keep Fresh corpses at home and preserved, sometimes for years, until the family has enough money to pay for a funeral. The spirit of the dead is believed to linger in the world before the death ceremony is held. Afterward, the soul will begin its journey to Puya, the land of the spirits. The longer the deceased person remains at home, the more the family can save for the funeral — and the bigger and more expensive the ceremony can be. Elaborate funeral ceremonies can go on for days, 12 days, and include the sacrifices of dozens of buffalos and hundreds of pigs, ceremonies that could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The dead are not just only made to bask in the luxury of expensive funeral but can also be honoured with a ritual called ma’nene, here the Torajans exhume the bodies of deceased family members, long after their elaborate funerals, clean and leave them in the sun to dry. Afterwards, they are dressed in new clothes. It is a way of remembering the dead. This practice is rooted in the cultural belief that death is not an adieu between the dead and the living, as the spirit of the dead exists as a shield for families.
Take the ritual, Ma’nene, carried out every one, two or three years (or more, depending on the family’s consensus, for example, it is the belief that performing the rite will result in a better harvest in the following year
Legend traces the ritual of ma’nene’ to a hunter named Pong Rumasek, who, hundreds of years back, discovered an abandoned corpse while in the Torajan jungle. Rumasek, out of compassion, took care of the dead body and dressed it up in his clothes. That act led to Rumasek being endowed with good luck and bountiful harvests.
In some societies, in Nigeria, for examples, ceremonies are also held to commemorate the number of years their deceased departed, with feasting and drinking. However, unlike the practice among the Torajans, corpses of the departed are not exhumed, only their picture are displayed.
This wonder of Toraja has come to limelight with tourists seeking to glimpse the Torajan tradition with the dead.
Culled
