There was a crowd gathering on the side of the street and everybody knows, that whatever is at the center has to be interesting, and so the crowd grew. I almost walked past without stopping, but then like everybody else my curiosity got the better of me. I pushed and jostled to get closer to the front of the crowd and counted my blessings that I was a head taller than everybody else, and then I saw it.
No that’s a lie. The first thing I saw was an unremarkable middle-aged man with close cropped hair and a goatee dressed in a traditional black costume and he was sitting down behind a box. I did a double take. Inside the box there were voodoo dolls made from palm trees, the skull of a toucan with its distinctive multi coloured beak and numerous bottles filled with strange black liquids.
Ducan, medicine man, witch doctor; there is a name for them in every language, yet despite living in Indonesia for four years I had never met one in person. I felt sure after watching Hollywood films like Indiana Jones that I was in the presence of an authentic medicine man. I was also pretty certain that voodoo had never come this far East, which meant that he’d probably been watching many of the same movies as me.
I had arrived at the end of his sales pitch and he was holding up one of the orange medical bottles filled with the suspicious black liquid. Whatever he said it cured, I wouldn’t have touched it with a bargepole, but people in the crowd behind me were desperate to buy the first bottle. In fact it looked like he had made his first, no, make that his second sale.
As soon as the first two people handed over money, others started to do the same. Trust you see is contagious, but I had seen this scene a dozen times played out around the streets of cities the world over. Instead of ‘stolen’ perfume however, this man was selling an elixir of youth, or maybe it was a cure for cancer. Whatever it was, it fitted nicely with the demands of his audience, because in less than five minutes his box was almost empty and he was ready to leave the scene.
Shaman Toraja