BIG READ: The divisions in the wake of the Wallace Line

We sailed slowly across the Makassar Strait from the east coast of Borneo towards the island of Sulawesi. Our destination, the city of Makassar, was still below the horizon in the distance somewhere. It was an uneventful passage, until someone mentioned that we had crossed the Wallace Line. I looked down at the deck, imagining the hull of our vessel, the ocean beneath it, the ocean floor and the imaginary line that runs across the bed of the Java Sea past Borneo, north into the Celebes Sea, passing the Philippines on the west, and south between the Indonesian Islands of Bali and Lombok, then into the Indian Ocean.

I looked up at the sky and smiled. It was like that moment when I stood on the equator, south of the Ecuadoran city of Quito, or the time I skated on a frozen pond near Tromso in the Arctic Circle. These are perfect moments that remind us of our place in the universe, how fortunate we are and yet how insignificant we are on our pale blue dot in the ever-expanding universe. It was Carl Sagan who inspired my interest in cosmology, before I drifted to astronomy and later physics. It was he who reminded us that we (humans) lived “on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people”.

Heading to Makassar, now, and with the Celebes Sea away on my left in the north, I recalled, again with a silly grin, the childhood days we spent at Makassar Beach in Cape Town, one of the very few beaches, never one of the better ones, where we were permitted to play. An old childhood friend lives, today, on a street named Celebes Close in Mitchells Plain near Makassar Beach. Makassar was the birthplace of Islam in SA. Sheikh Yusuf (Abadin Tadia Tjoessoep), exiled by the Dutch to the Cape in the late 17th century, pioneered the teaching of Islam. Makassar was also a refuge site for people who broke from enslavement in the Cape. Pringle Bay, in the Hangklip area on False Bay, was another sanctuary for enslaved people who fled the colonial settlements the Cape.

I came to Southeast Asia to get a fuller, more granular, socially grounded understanding of the large historical shift of global capitalist dominance from West to East, notionally from the US to China, that I had been studying in rather rarefied environments and texts over more than three decades. I also came here for the 10th time — this time to walk cautiously following the barest of traces on the lands and islands of my forebears — distant in the past, now, forever — the Malays who were brought to the Cape by Dutch colonists 350 years earlier.

It is the Wallace Line that captured my imagination on that Thursday.

An imaginary line

The Wallace Line is an imaginary transitional zone, a boundary of sorts, that runs through the Nusantara (“outer islands” in the Melayu language, which includes modern-day countries such as Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea) creating a “divide” with the Malay Archipelago on the eastern side and the Indo-Australian Archipelago on the western side. It serves as a type of barrier, an abrupt limit of distribution for many fish, bird and mammal groups that are abundant on one side of the line and largely absent on the other side.

This line was first identified, then drawn, in 1863 by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who stumbled onto the theory of evolution by natural selection at about the same time as Charles Darwin. Wallace’s hypothesis was based on observations across the thousands of islands of the Nusantara, where he noted a distinct divide between the fauna of Indonesia’s western islands, with animals visibly more of Asian origin, and animals on eastern Indonesian islands, where animals were Indo-Australasian. The species he encountered changed quite drastically beyond that point where the Wallace Line would be drawn.

From his observations, along this imaginary line, he discerned a process of natural selection, which he explained in his autobiography: “The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well-defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well-marked species, genera and higher groups of animals?”

The cause of the Wallace Line was a biogeographic phenomenon that resulted from the break-up of Gondwanaland, when South America and Africa were split from India-Antarctica-Australia about 140-million years before the present. “The present”, for what it’s worth, has been pegged to 1950, immediately after carbon dating was first discovered in the 1940s. Anyway before the Gondwanaland spilt, the Nusantara did not exist.

Thus wrote Wallace in On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago (1860): “The western and eastern islands of the archipelago belong to regions more distinct and contrasted than any other of the great zoological divisions of the globe. South America and Africa, separated by the Atlantic, do not differ so widely as Asia and Australia.”

Standing on the Wallace Line I was on a divide that has greater significance than conventional understanding of the biochemical and geochemical origins and evolution of life on earth, and of the earth itself. I wondered, as I did on the fringes of physics classes that I audited a long time ago, if the line could help us understand the moment in time when geochemistry became biochemistry, an event way beyond my cognition. I remember taking time out away from the topic when someone introduced the concept of “geo-biochemistry”. Sometimes things are just too complicated. Geo-biochemistry is a fascinating explanation of how life emerged on earth, exactly when there was an opportunity for it to do so. It was, of course, people and our social relations that interested me the most.

Savage communities

Here I was, nonetheless, drifting on the strait, towards Makassar, the city from whence Makassar in Cape Town got its name. A few weeks earlier I visited a small town called Tokai, in the Pendang District of Kedah, the rice bowl of Malaysia. I imagine that the suburb of Tokai in Cape Town got its name from Kedah, seat of the oldest unbroken independent kingship in the Muslim world and birthplace of the earliest Malay communities in the Nusantara.

Scientists have almost always been fascinated by the human diversity of insular Southeast Asia. The region inspired many variegated strategies of scientific inquiry. Over the past 200 years, Southeast Asia attracted medical experts, physical anthropologists, geneticists (who arrived more recently) and natural historians all intent on explaining the variety in human types and in communities. Also among the mostly European scientists were Dutch anthropologists, French craniologists, and British and German naturalist travellers. The Dutch had a strong colonial presence in the Nusantara until immediately after World War 2.

It was the Europeans who began to differentiate the phenotypes among the people of Southeast Asia. In some instances, human diversity was simplified, as it were, as the difference between people with frizzy hair and darker skins in the east, and light brown people with straight hair on the western islands — more or less in keeping with the east-west biological zones identified by Wallace. His line included the separation of Malays in the west from the Papuans in the east, along with his now famous faunal line, which separated the woodpeckers and orang-utans from cockatoos and wallabies.

Simultaneously, Wallace could not help himself from probing the “exotic” people of the Nusantara, which, he said, was “inhabited by a peculiar and interesting race of mankind — the Malay, found nowhere beyond the limits of this insular tract”.

The people on both sides of the Wallace Line were a multiracial, “motley, ignorant, bloodthirsty, thievish population” whose physical beauty was superior to that of Grecian statues, the European as reference point for colonial representation of people who apparently could not represent themselves. Wallace would fall asleep unprotected, in “a perfect social state”, he said, “with a sense of perfect security” amid “good-natured savages”.

This separation and identification, on either side of the boundary line that Wallace would identify, was pervasive across the colonial era, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Johann Reinhold and his son Georg Forster were naturalists (Reinhold was a polymath and naturalist who was a progenitor of anthropology) who travelled with James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific in 1772. They wrote about “two great varieties”, one “more fair, well limbed athletic, of a fine size and a kind, benevolent temper; the other blacker, the hair just beginning to become woolly and crisp, the body more slender and low, and their temper, if possible, more brisk, though somewhat mistrustful”.

The French explorer and naval officer Jules Dumont d’Urville, who commanded voyages of exploration across the South Pacific between 1826 and 1829, contrasted the black colour of Papuans with that of the “copper-coloured” Malays. John Crawfurd, a British colonial administrator at Yogyakarta during the British interregnum, between 1811 and 1816, identified two aboriginal races, more or less along the Wallace Line: a straight-haired “brown” and a woolly-haired “negro” race, latter of which he considered as the inferior one. In his book on the Papuans, George Windsor Earl repeated the idea of two races. He described the Papuans as less civilised though “physically superior to the [other] races of Southeast Asia”.

My reading of Wallace (a shallow read, to be sure) was that he was a child of Victorian Britain, and a contradiction at that. He would, for instance, refuse to lend his work to the “science” that led to colonial and racial prejudices, hierarchies and the construction (and manipulation) of boundaries between colonists and “natives”. He could not prevent it from serving colonial administrators. The racial divides shaped the work of colonial doctors, between the clean and the dirty, the sick and the healthy. Race and health became “entangled” and exploited categories and consequently formed the basis for cordons sanitaires, which restricted the movement of people — sometimes arbitrarily and often for class considerations.

Wallace was, after all, an early socialist and a heavy critic of Victorian society. The best, most trenchant critique of Victorian society (especially its fear of immigrants and more so of strong women) was in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. There was a time, also during the Victoria age, when sexual intercourse and masturbation were considered to be evil. At the height of colonialism in the 19th century, Stoker’s work was especially critical of Western fears of Easterners. It was one of Stoker’s protagonists, Jonathan Harker, who, on his way to Dracula’s castle, said: “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East.”

Sailing from the west of the Makassar Strait to the east, to the city of Makassar, my time in the region is rich in encounters with people and places, traditions, customs and cultural practices. All of these flowed into one kaleidoscope of ideas that fell around in random abstract, in coloured patterns that made no sense, until you look at them long enough, then sense emerges. The journey across the Makassar Strait was quite without incident, or meaning, until someone pointed out that we were crossing the Wallace Line. After Makassar, my travels would take me to Sumatra and the Malaysian state of Negeri Sembilan to spend time with the Minangkabau, the largest matrilineal society in the world and whose history and ways are embedded in the shapes of their built environment.