by Carl Hoffman
World War II changed all of that. Japan ousted the British and the Brookes, but when they resumed control, the days of empire were ending. James Brooke’s nephew turned Sarawak over to Britain in 1946; Peninsular Malaysia became an independent nation, the Federation of Malaya, eleven years later. And in 1963 Britain finally ceded Sarawak and Sabah too, leading to the creation of the Federation of Malaysia with the Borneo territory integrated into the new country as a whole.
Here Malaysian and Sarawak politics become complex: the territories of northwest Borneo (with the exception of the small kingdom of Brunei) suddenly became ruled for the first time by ethnic Muslim Malays in Kuala Lumpur who comprised more than half of the population and dominated the new country’s politics, but earned only 1 percent of the country’s income. For a century the Dayaks and Chinese and Malays of Sarawak (there minorities) had been more or less left alone under the protection of the Brookes and Britain. They’d had nothing to do with mainland politics. But now the Peninsular Malaysians saw Sarawak as a vast mine of oil and timber and gold. Three months before independence in 1963, the departing British government appointed the ministers of the new federal state of Sarawak: an Iban Dayak was named chief minister and a Malay born in Sarawak, Abdul Taib Mahmud, was named minister of development and labor.
For the first few years after independence the power in Sarawak remained dominated by the Iban and Chinese, with support from Britain, which maintained a garrison of soldiers there. But a power struggle ensued between the federal government dominated by mainland Malays in Kuala Lumpur and the local Malays in Sarawak, who in turn wanted to wrest power from the Iban. In 1966 the Malaysian government declared a state of emergency and dismissed the Iban chief minister. In the mayhem, Taib emerged as the minister of agriculture and forestry and deputy chief minister of Sarawak, soon rising to chief minister, a position he held with an iron grip for the next three decades.
Logging in Sarawak exploded. In his first six years in office Taib handed family members and political cronies logging concessions to more than seven million acres of virgin rain forest, much of it in the highlands of traditional Kelabit and Penan lands. In 1987 the Wall Street Journal reported that twenty-five concessions awarded by his uncle Rahman Ya’kub to friends and family were worth $4.2 billion. Six tropical timber conglomerates became giants overnight. In 1965 loggers cut down 2.3 million cubic meters of trees. To keep it sustainable, a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization forestry study undertaken in 1967 and published in 1972 recommended that Sarawak limit its annual timber harvest to no more than 4.4 million cubic meters. But by 1981 the number had climbed to 8.8 million cubic meters, and by 1991 to 19.4 million cubic meters. Annually, that is, year after year, a number that in 1987 hit 180 acres an hour.
All of which meant that within a year of Bruno’s jungle dream, timber companies began pushing into his paradise. Theoretically the logging was selective, taking only the biggest trees and leaving the rest of the forest intact. In reality it was impossible to harvest hundred-foot-tall trees ten feet and more in diameter out of a roadless, steep, wet, mountainous wilderness with a light footprint. Surveyors first tramped through the forest marking the towering old hardwoods. Roads followed, roads that snaked everywhere and roared with chain saws and bulldozers, followed by lumber camps full of workers and all of their logistical needs in what had been pristine forest. The trees were felled and then dragged through the jungle with heavy equipment, obliterating everything in their path, then loaded onto forty-ton logging trucks rumbling through the silence with another forty tons of timber on their backs.
Not long after Bruno’s arrival in 1984, logging companies began building a bridge over the Tutoh River, the first step to accessing the mountains and highlands stretching from Long Seridan to the Kalimantan border—the heart of the land in which the Eastern Penan had hunted and roamed for centuries, dotted with Kelabit Dayak settlements in and around the villages of Long Seridan and Long Napir. In a letter to his brother Peter on March 9, 1985, from Long Seridan, just eight months after his arrival, Bruno mentioned it for the first time. “Hi my dear brotherheart,” he wrote. “The jungle here is in danger. If there isn’t a miracle soon, the bulldozers will roll over the last untouched areas and in a few months they will reach Long Seridan. I’m trying to mobilize the Penan against it, and at best I would like to bust the important bridge under construction into a thousand pieces into the air. But for now I listen in the quietness.”
The appearance of loggers in a community was anything but simple or straightforward, and often contentious. Few community members, even tribal leaders, had the education or sophistication necessary to understand what was happening, what loggers proposed, what the ultimate effect would be on their lives, and if and how they might be compensated. Logging meant roads to the outside world and potential jobs and incomes for subsistence communities, not to mention the possibility of schools and the whole panopoly of development and its potential. And Dayaks were no different from any other people. They liked stuff. They wanted electricity and televisions and modern conveniences that made their lives less difficult.
But what did logging mean to their forests teeming with monkeys and wild boar, bear and civet and birds, and rivers full of fish? How could anyone who had not experienced it fully comprehend the answers to that question? Bruno was obsessed with life in the jungle—to him it was paradise—and desperate to escape consumerism and its existential ills. But he was a freak even in his own country.
In early 1976 loggers entered the village of Long Keseh on the Baram River, and the results were typical. “I had just completed my second-to-last year at secondary school in Marudi and had gone back to my village for the Christmas holidays when a large meeting was convened in the longhouse,” recalled Harrison Ngau, a Kelabit Dayak who graduated from law school and in 1980 founded Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM), the Malaysian branch of Friends of the Earth. “A timber company had been granted a logging concession for the land behind our longhouse. We knew nothing at all about it until WTK [the logging company] suddenly turned up with bulldozers, heavy machines and chainsaws. The people in our longhouse wanted to stop the loggers, but . . . many of them had never been to school.
“As the meeting was taking place,” said Ngau, “the people from WTK turned up with a pile of things to eat—biscuits [cookies] and Coca Cola. Everyone started to eat, and nothing more happened.” Whatever resistance the community felt vanished in a sugar rush of cookies and Coke, exotic delicacies to people who lived off fish and boar and simple fruits and vegetables. And, as was often the case, the community was hardly united in its opposition. Some people were against any and all logging, while some supported it, as long as they were compensated. In the case of Long Keseh, it turned out that two residents of the longhouse had formed a company with Taib’s nephew, which received a large payment from WTK when it granted the loggers the concession. In essence, men from within the longhouse had sold out their very own community. WTK eventually agreed to pay the longhouse 60 cents for every ton of timber taken from its communal forest, a pittance compared to the hundreds of dollars per ton the company earned.
Twenty years later nothing had changed. In December 1986 officials from the Samling Timber Company convened a meeting in the longhouse community of Long Anap. The heads of eleven nearby longhouses, most unable to read, were informed that Samling held the concession to their forest and logging was about to commence. After “a friendly talk,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “ten of them signed or put their thumbprints on an agreement saying that they wouldn’t interfere with the loggers. The agreement also bound the chiefs not to complain or seek compensation for water pollution, erosion, damage to the jungle, or the disappearance of wildlife. In return the timber company promised to pay small sums for any damaged fruit, coffee and cocoa trees, provided they once bore fruit. The company also offered each longhouse $800 annually for Christmas celebration money”—the value of two trees.
When Bruno expresse
d his first written anxieties about loggers approaching Penan lands in the spring of 1985, he had been among the Penan less than a year, and most of that had been divided between time in the forest within a few days’ walk from the Kelabit village of Long Seridan and the village itself, where he frequently returned to send mail. But he had gone remarkably deep remarkably fast, had penetrated the lives of wandering bands of remote nomads, and had become known and trusted by them in a way that no whites ever had.
In October 1984, a twenty-five-year-old Swiss man named Roger Graf lit out for a wander in Peninsular Malaysia, where he heard about the splendors of Sarawak and its Mulu caves and Gunung Mulu National Park. Like Bruno, he traveled by boat up the Baram River from Marudi, spending nights in Kenyah Dayak longhouses. At one, he met a Dayak working for the agriculture department who invited him on his rounds bringing fruit trees to Kenyah and Kelabit communities. The last village, he said, would be home to settled Penan. Graf jumped at the chance. They spent just a few hours in the Penan village—“the settled Dayaks thought of the Penan as uncultivated pigs and just wanted to get back to their own people,” Graf said—but the Penan there kept asking him if he knew the “orang ingris” (Englishman, in Malay) named Bruno. “It was a typical Swiss name and I thought maybe this guy might be Swiss,” Graf said, but he had no interest in trying to meet him. “I didn’t want to share my adventure with some other foreigner just like me; I wanted to imagine that I was the only one there!” But Graf was intrigued with the Penan and with the idea of finding real nomads, so when he got back to Miri he renewed his expiring visa and returned upriver to the Penan longhouse on his own.
A young boy and his father took Graf into the forest for a week, then deposited him in Long Seridan. There he met an itinerant Pakistani who traded broken watches to the Penan for gaharu, a fragrant wood that fetched high prices to Chinese dealers in cities along the coast. The Pakistani told Graf there was a helipad in the forest surrounded by a few houses the government used for its occasional contact with the Penan, where he was going in hopes of finding nomads, and he invited Graf along. “I was naïve,” Graf said. “It was terrible. We had no equipment. It was raining. After two days and one night in the forest we finally reached the place, but there were no Penan there.” They built their own raft and attempted to float down the Tutoh River to the Kelabit longhouse of Long Bedian, another disaster. “It was so fucking dangerous. I lost my glasses. The Pakistani couldn’t swim.” The raft was tossed in rapids and their luggage floated away and Graf had to save the Pakistani from drowning. “It was horrible.” Ironically, a camp of loggers saved them, and the next day, Christmas 1984, they reached Long Bedian. Bruno was there. “He was sitting with a family on one end of the longhouse and I was on the other, but we didn’t say anything to each other, didn’t even say ‘hello.’”
A few people from Long Seridan were visiting relatives in Long Bedian, and they invited Graf to return with them, a two-day trip by boat upriver. As they motored into the village there was Bruno again, standing in the middle of the Magoh River fishing with a cast net. The Kelabits stopped to greet him warmly and he and Roger met, briefly, for the first time. “It was like, ‘Oh shit! There’s this white guy again!’ I was so surprised and disappointed.”
Long Seridan had two longhouses, one on each side of the airstrip, and Roger stayed on one side and Bruno on the other, the two avoiding one another. But after a week the inevitable happened. Graf was invited across the airstrip one evening, where he again encountered Bruno. This time Bruno invited him to his room, which he shared with an elderly woman. He showed Graf his journals, lushly illustrated with bright watercolors and pencil sketches, beautiful, rich renditions of the Penan and snakes and moths and butterflies and monkeys. “I was impressed,” but the visit was short. “Mostly he wanted to know who I was, why I was there.”
A few days later Bruno appeared at Graf’s longhouse with a confession. He had managed somehow to steal Graf’s diary, read it, and put it back without Graf knowing. Graf was horrified, felt violated. What kind of man was this? Bruno apologized, said he felt bad, said he’d misjudged Graf and his intentions (gleaned from reading his diary), and offered to draw him a map to reach bands of still nomadic Penan.
Graf accepted the apologies and the map, and soon after packed his bags and started walking into the forest. “I always traveled with local people, but for some reason that time I was so stupid to believe I could do it on my own. I left by myself, but Bruno ran after me and said I was crazy, that if I waited a day, he would come with me.” Graf agreed and the two set off the following morning, Bruno impressing him again, over and over. Though still dressing in shorts and sometimes T-shirts, he was already walking barefoot. He seemed unbelievably strong and fit, impervious to mud or rain. Wherever they went, “we met the Penan and they all knew him and greeted him warmly,” his Penan language skills already well developed.
On their first day in the forest Graf was peeing on the banks of a river when two Penan men emerged on the opposite bank and started walking across the river. “They saw me and were frightened to death and ran away and I was scared too and I ran back to Bruno.” Reaching a settlement the next day, Graf found himself in a damp forest world of pet dogs and gibbons and black meat over smoking fires. Only women and children were there—the men were off hunting—“and of course Bruno told them the story and they found it so funny and laughed and laughed, and then the men came back, the same men who’d run from me, and they just couldn’t stop laughing too.” He and Bruno spent two weeks there, and “to be part of their life a little in that forest, it was the nicest experience of my whole life,” he said. Indeed, it changed his life. Soon, as the logging heated up, Graf became Bruno’s point man in Switzerland, dedicating much of the next fifteen years of his life to Bruno and the Penan. “People looked at Bruno as something special, a hero, a saint, but I met him in Sarawak and he stole my diary and that made him human, and for many years Georges Rüegg and I were the only ones who would stand up to Bruno.”
In 1980, in response to logging around the Apoh River, Kayan Dayak from three longhouses spontaneously entered a Samling Timber Company camp and threatened the employees—the first recorded local resistance to the surging logging activity. Police were called, but the police were themselves locals who refused to intervene. Eventually Samling agreed to pay a commission to a cooperative created by the longhouses. A handful of other instances of resistance erupted, but they were small, local, and all carried out by the settled, longhouse-dwelling Kayan, Kenyah, and Kelabit Dayaks, who had some political power and who by nature and culture were far more aggressive, not to mention wealthier and more educated, than the shy, reclusive Penan in the recesses of the forest.
Slowly, however, the rapidly accelerating logging could not be ignored and Bruno and the Penan who lived close to Long Seridan were drawn in. Since he was modest about his role in the ensuing struggle—he would always say he just played “secretary”—it is hard to know exactly how much he was responsible for. Certainly the Kelabits and Kenyah had already been showing signs of resisting, but there seems little doubt that the fire about to engulf Sarawak and the Penan involvement in it was stoked by Bruno.
His journals are only occasionally dated, but sometime early that spring he wrote the first entry mentioning the coming struggle. “Now we’re walking from the headwaters to the mouth of the Bare River for a meeting to plan a reservation in the forest. When we arrive in the evening, there are already Penan from the Siang to the Ubung River—the last jungle nomads are in constant worry about the destruction of their living space because of the logging. Wee of the Ubong River listens quietly to the fiery speeches. Large copper rings hang in his ears and many rattan bracelets adorn his arms and legs. I proposed to them to declare a reservation between the Tutoh-Magoh-Seridan River. . . . Yes, if all Penan would unite from the Tutoh to the Limbang River, a reservation would have decent dimensions. I said I was willing to play secretary for the Penan who don’t know how to
write if they themselves muster up the motivation necessary to fight.”
Soon after, in April 1985, a group of Penan and Kelabit—with Bruno by their side—met in Long Seridan and authored a letter to the government and logging companies proposing a thirty-two-hundred-square-kilometer protected area. “Here it’s raining cats and dogs, always floods,” he wrote to his family. “As we’ve dwelled really close, a two-day march from Long Seridan, I’ve dropped here to fix some things, finally send this packet . . . and make a plan for a huge forest reserve that the indigenous want to declare.”
Their proposal went unanswered. “Any appeals by the Penan . . . to representatives of the government,” Bruno noted in his journal, “always go nowhere,”
Bruno pushed harder. “Just yesterday I traveled from Long Seridan to Miri,” he noted to his brother, “to write articles to journals about the destruction of the rainforest and declarations to the government in the name of the indigenous peoples. And return on the fastest way to Long Seridan and get out of there into the jungle, because possibly I’ll get in trouble with the Malaysian government, and better get out of their way. Expulsion is pretty much assured.” Bruno sent pieces to most of the newspapers in Malaysia and Sarawak, none of which were printed.
