Beyond the coast, the sheer slopes rise as high as 16,500 feet above sea level and stretch for 400 miles. Because Indonesia has banned foreign journalists from visiting the province, I entered as a tourist.Īfter a stopover in Timika, our jet climbs above a swampy marsh past the airport and heads toward a high mountain. 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. 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 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. Some are said to kill and eat male witches they call khakhua. Most Korowai still live with little knowledge of the world beyond their homelands and frequently feud with one another. 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. But today the Korowai are among the very few tribes believed to eat human flesh. "Keep calm," Kembaren says softly.Ĭannibalism was practiced among prehistoric human beings, and it lingered into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in Fiji. As they near, I see that their arrows are barbed. "We come in peace." Then two tribesmen slip into a pirogue and start paddling toward us. "We don't want to hurt you," Kembaren shouts in Bahasa Indonesia, which one of our boatmen translates into Korowai. They'd quickly catch us if we tried."Īs the tribesmen's uproar bangs at my ears, our pirogue glides toward the far side of the river. "They're ordering us to come to their side of the river," he whispers to me. Kembaren murmurs to the boatmen to stop paddling. Moments later, I see a throng of naked men brandishing bows and arrows on the riverbank. Suddenly, screams erupt from around the bend. They call outsiders laleo ("ghost-demons"). 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. But even he has never been this far upriver, because, he says, some Korowai threaten to kill outsiders who enter their territory. My guide, Kornelius Kembaren, has traveled among the Korowai for 13 years. Now the four paddlers bend their backs with vigor, knowing we will soon make camp for the night. 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. 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.
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