The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  Even as his political consciousness increased, he wandered farther into the forest for weeks at a time, deepening his connections with the Penan in ever remoter camps. He began trekking north and east for a week and more into the mountains of the upper reaches of the Limbang watershed, where he found Penan even more removed from modern life, though most over the years had had some contact with the government. There he met Along Sega, a respected Penan elder as resistant to change as Bruno. The two formed a close bond, Sega becoming Bruno’s role model and de facto father. “Big Man, that’s how he greeted me,” Bruno wrote in his journal. “He bowed and wanted to kiss my hand. I was embarrassed and told him to stop. . . . I said that I was only a small man and that he did not have to look up to me. After all, he could be my father. He then apologized and humbled himself. ‘I’m not a chief and I have no brains. The big ones all died off and I only speak for our clan because otherwise, nobody would speak up.’” The legs of Along’s grown son Tapit were mysteriously paralyzed, and he carried him “in a box with a small sitting board. Some parts of the terrain are steep and slippery. The path is a climb over fallen tree trunks and between thorny vines. Along keeps stopping, trying to catch his breath. Loathing in self-pity, he complains that his older son is of no help. Should I? No—I’m not a hero when it comes to carrying loads. But my [pack] is light and I see how the old man struggles. So I take on the living load and it’s going okay. ‘We’ll switch off again when we get to the stream,’ Along says. Worried that I am going to slip with my load, I put it down even before then. When I offer to wash Tapit on the river and use soap to get rid of his lice, he declines. ‘The water is too cold and the smell of soap is terrible.’”

  Bruno participated intimately in Penan daily life. Early one morning he was awakened: “A child wants to come into the world.” He watched as the pregnant woman’s husband bound a few thin branches together into a kind of seat with a hole in it under the high canopy of the trees. “The very pregnant woman with the gigantic stomach has covered her nakedness with a . . . dirty sarong. Her brothers, her husband, and her sons-in-law massage her stomach to press her downward. Again and again the woman is instructed to drink hot uwut water to heat up the body and enforce labor. ‘Drink, don’t fall sleep, don’t cry.’ The women only look, they don’t do anything.” Day turned to night; rain began falling; the woman labored on. “A young tree is pulled out of the ground and with mumbling the husband pulls it over her stomach and drops it between the seat she’s sitting on; this act according to Tiburon is supposed to speed up birth and to put the earth in a good mood. . . . Again and again rough-throated male voices issue the same command to the woman who’s moaning and drifting off.

  “The woman who is about forty is already a grandmother; finally the time has come. Four or five men support the woman’s back and they cover her entire stomach with hands. When the husband wants to look under the sarong, a woman standing next to him tips him away. ‘Mai jak!’ Not yet! Then finally we hear the crying voice of a child from the darkness below and the child has dropped down on the ground. When nobody actually seems to worry about the child lying in the dirt below, I myself reach under the birthing seat to bring the little one into the light and give him some warmth. But I barely hold the baby in my hands, when an upset choir yells at me, ‘Mai! Turud-la!’ And not knowing what’s going on I have to place the baby back into the darkness on the ground that’s covered with wet leaves and wood splinters. The dogs continuously circling around the birthing seat are shooed away. To warm the woman who’s given birth a fire has been started right next to her. Rain drips down from the leaves. For now, all attention is on the woman; they continue to massage her stomach until the placenta appears ten minutes later. Only then does the mother herself reach under the seat and take the baby. With a bamboo knife, she cuts the umbilical cord over a piece of wood near the placenta. With water she rinses blood and slime, leaves and dirt and wood, from the red-skinned baby, then she wraps a piece of her worn-out sarong around the baby’s stomach. Now, after all this tension, there is peace and quiet. With bright big eyes she looks at her baby and I feel connected to them. The next day the father asks me if they can give the newborn child my name.”

  As the outside world pressed in upon them from all quarters, as the nomads slowly began wearing T-shirts and shorts and wearing watches that often didn’t work as a form of modern jewelry, Bruno moved in the other direction, becoming more traditionally Penan than most of the Penan themselves. He shed his shorts and T-shirts and began wearing traditional fabric loincloths, sometimes even experimenting with ones made of beaten bark. He wore traditional bands of rattan just below his knees and bracelets covering his wrists. He cut his hair into a bowl cut, shaved high above his sideburns, in the oldest and most orthodox Penan style. “Huddled closely together, like a bunch of puppies,” he wrote one afternoon, “we stretch our lazy bones. With my head resting in grandfather’s lap, I enjoy simply being and thinking. A small boy is leaning on my stomach and has fallen asleep. Two little girls caress my hairy legs—there are clouds moving in the blue skies.”

  By May 1989 when this photo was taken, Bruno Manser dressed as a traditional Penan, with loincloth, poison arrow quiver, and blowpipe. (James Barclay)

  Eight

  In an age of mobile telephones and the Internet, it’s hard to imagine that news can travel across time and distance without them, period, much less in a remote place of rivers and miles of forest and mountains. But villages trade with other villages, Penan wander from settlement to settlement, and people everywhere in the world love to talk, trade stories and news, gossip and gawk. Kim Kardashian’s ninety-eight million Instagram followers and her concomitant wealth are simply a technologically enabled hyperexaggeration of that essential human trait. Western tourists and travelers were hardly uncommon in Sarawak, but most never made it out of the coastal cities of Kuching and Miri. The few who traveled upriver rarely made it past Mulu, and the barest handful visited relatively accessible longhouses or highland villages like Long Seridan or Long Napir. Roger Graf had been an exception, and even he had come, visited, and vanished, registering the barest blip in people’s lives. Bruno was different. Malaysia’s politically powerful and majority Muslims often looked down on the animist (and increasingly Christian) Dayaks and Chinese; the Dayaks and Chinese in turn looked down on the Penan. To Malaysians they were the lowest of the low, illiterate, disease-ridden, poverty-stricken creatures without culture, homes, clothing, little more than monkeys living in the forest. It was one thing to want to visit Dayak longhouse communities, but to live among the Penan? That was inconceivable to Malay elites.

  Which meant that word about this strange white man living in the forest had spread and spread quickly, from every Penan encampment to every longhouse to government officials throughout Sarawak. In early August 1985, James Ritchie, a Kuching, Sarawak–based Malaysian reporter for the New Straits Times, the largest newspaper in the country, was standing in a corral of government officials waiting for Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad to inaugurate the opening of a new dam, when a member of parliament asked Ritchie if he’d heard of the Orang Putih—white man—who was living with the Penan.

  “WHAT. . . . You must be joking,” recounted Ritchie in a sophomoric book about Bruno that serves as a useful window into how Malaysians saw him and his relations with the government.

  “I can’t tell you much because we don’t have anything on him,” a “senior police officer” said. “All we know is that he is a Caucasian and has been living with the Penan.”

  Later, Ritchie ran into the same police official, and asked him if “our white friend is still around?”

  “He is stirring a hornets nest in the logging country,” the official said. As Ritchie remembers it, describing his own growing fascination with Borneo, the official continued, “People say that he now looks like a Penan, lives like one and speaks Penan. Apparently the Penan think that he is some sort of a Rajah . . .” Ritchie continues, “When he said
that a picture of a white Tarzan and Jane with blonde and blue-eyed children came to my mind. I made up my mind that . . . my next assignment would be to track down this strange fellow. As a teenager I had this fantasy of meeting with a Yeti. . . . As such the story of a white man roving the forest . . . fired my imagination. If it was true, I must unravel the story about this wild man of Borneo.”

  To whites like Bruno and Michael Palmieri the wild men of Borneo were the indigenous people; to the Malays, the wild man of Borneo was a white.

  Malaysian newspapers are government-controlled, and throughout his career Ritchie alternated between working directly for Abdul Taib Mahmud and writing fawning newspaper stories touting the government’s official line. Ritchie became obsessed with Bruno, fearing him, repelled by him, fascinated by him, and for the next fifteen years he and Bruno played each other in a never-ending battle, Ritchie insinuating himself at every possible turn (he showed up unannounced and uninvited at Bruno’s brother’s wedding in Switzerland) all the while reporting on him to the government. For his part, Bruno was fully conscious of Ritchie’s loyalties and used him as a back channel to Malaysian officials.

  On December 1, 1985, Bruno wrote his brother, “For you it will still be November for six to seven more hours—which means by the time this letter reaches you Santa Claus will have long disappeared back into the forest—and I hope he hasn’t taken you with him in the empty potato bag. I’m joking, but I have a long face because I can’t report anything positive. At the moment I’m living in the jungle alone. . . . A logging hut went up into flames. Two nasty-minded Kelabits bad-mouthed me to the company as well as the government and police because of my activities concerning the realization of a forest reservation. As I’m without a visa, I’ve skipped an official meeting and have distanced myself here for now.”

  Undeterred, he ratcheted up the pressure on the government and logging industry by reaching out to Europe. In early 1986, back in Switzerland, Roger Graf began circulating a petition to “Save the Last Indigenous People of Sarawak.” Bruno sent a letter to Rolf Bokemeier, the editor of GEO, a popular National Geographic–like German magazine, detailing the plight of the Penan and inviting him to visit Sarawak and see for himself. And, for the first time, he and the Penan began discussing the idea of blockading logging roads.

  In April, Bruno and a cadre of Penan walked to Long Napir to garner support for their forest reserve idea from its Kelabit chiefs. A police inspector named Lores Matios, a native of Long Napir home for Easter, noticed a white man wearing “John Lennon glasses.” Upon learning his name, Matios radioed the Limbang police and at nine the next morning arrested Bruno for overstaying his visa. As they bumped along logging roads toward Limbang City in Matios’s Land Rover, Matios and his driver sat in front, with Bruno in the back with a third man, a rifle across his knees. Ninety minutes later, high on a ridge over the Limbang River, the Land Rover ran out of gas. Matios always carried a five-gallon canister in back; the driver stepped out to refuel. They were in the middle of nowhere, and Bruno was just some unarmed tourist who’d overstayed his visa with nowhere to run to. So Matios walked a few feet away to pee. Bruno followed him; he too had to go. No big deal. As Bruno peed over the ravine he watched the river, darkish brown, and then noticed a rocky, overgrown bulldozer path, blocked by fallen wood, just below. Bruno inhaled the sweet scent of a yellow bloom on a hanging vine, looked at the policemen. Both had big guts. “Should I?” he wondered. “Yes, flee now!” he thought. Matios was just a few steps away. “Do you want to follow me?” Bruno said out loud, a brazen taunt. The policemen looked confused. “Do you want to follow me?” Bruno said again, pointing to the overgrown bulldozer road. “I’m going to go that way.”

  “Mai!” Matios yelled, but Bruno was tearing into the underbrush down the mountain toward the river. Bang! a shot rang out. Bang! a second shot from a pistol the policeman had under his shirt.

  But Bruno was gone.

  He crashed through the tangle to the river, hopped from rock to rock along its bank, reclimbed the hill back to the road, crossed it behind Matios, and headed up into the mountains. What few things he had were stored back in a house in Long Seridan, including a small bag of letters and his journal. He had to recover it before the police did. “All I have to travel with are a pair of long pants, a belt, a pocketknife, a lighter, and a comb. I tie the long pants as a bundle behind my head and walk naked; the garment only holds me back and makes me sweat. With the pocket knife, I laboriously harvest a young uwut palm heart that quenches my thirst; it will be my only meal for two days.”

  Night fell. Darkness and a cold rain. He crouched under a few leaves until dawn. In the morning, he hiked down the mountain until reaching a logging road. This was unfamiliar territory, so he stayed on the road, dashing from one hiding place to another. Then, a bridge, with no cover for two hundred yards. “When a vehicle parks by the bridge, I have to laboriously make my way through steep terrain and timber wasteland, sinking into erosion mud up to my knees.”

  He bushwhacked through the night, heard the gurgling of a stream in the darkness. “Water! My dried-out throat is sticking together. But the enticing location is blocked by many logs and only after carefully feeling my way through it do I reach the water. I would like to sleep, but time is of the essence and so I turn around to head forward again. Then, suddenly, I see another inhabited camp on the road. It is impossible to circumvent it in the pitch-black night and so I sleep in the fallen wood above the road.

  “When I rub my eyes in the morning, I already see figures on the street. Like a lizard, I have to slide on my belly into the forest to avoid being seen. The land has been freshly torn up, and the sharp rocks and splintered wood in the path of the bulldozers hurts all the more. The leek-like scent of niekup fruit hangs over the mountain crests.”

  After two nights and two days he found himself on a path that he recognized. He followed it, hurrying, as the sun dropped low and the skies opened, inundating him. He’d eaten nothing but palm hearts for two days. At dusk he reached rice fields and a village not far from Long Seridan. “I wonder if the coast is clear . . . ? I carefully approach a hut, peek my head in near a fire pit, and give a sign. There—the old Ti-jon immediately climbs down from his hut, gives me a teary-eyed hug, and pulls me by my hand to quickly enter. Immediately, all of the inhabitants encircle me, I get hugged and welcomed warmly like a child that has been thought dead and has been found again.

  “They immediately bring me so much rice, sago, and game that I can’t possibly eat it all. The rumor of my escape, the shooting by the police, had already reached the village and they feared the worst. Only a few hours before, an armed police squad visited Long Ballau and left in the direction of Long Seridan; I am too late”—his journal and letters had been found and taken by the police.

  “Then they organize quickly; every inhabitant contributes something that I need to live in the jungle, and soon I’m equipped with bush knife, axe, sago, sleeping mats, blanket, shirt, flashlight and provisions. Siden, the village elder, gives me magic wax: one amulet is supposed to make [me] invisible; the other is supposed to divert enemy bullets from their target. Finally, I’m allowed to stretch out my bones in a rice storage shed to rest. But at three o’clock in the morning, I’m woken up again and told to eat—I’m still half asleep, but they are urging me to get going. After an unintended visit in the thicket, my guides find our companions, who take us across the Seridan River by boat—back into the pristine forest.”

  I’m sitting . . . alone in a lonely hut and the raindrops are falling from the nightly sky on the canopy,” he wrote his brother Peter a few days later. “Apart from a foot injury from some fierce thorn-tendrils I feel mediocre. A week ago I had a narrow escape from the cops, who are looking for me steadily, and I slipped through their fingers. But my studies, drawings, notes, letters, arrow-quiver, and blowpipe were stolen.”

  After they had gotten hold of him once, had seen his letters and journals, Bruno was suddenly no lon
ger a ghost, a rumor, to the police and government of Malaysia. Even worse, his escape embarrassed them. He was now a wanted man.

  Rolf Bokemeier, the editor from GEO, and a photographer arrived soon after his escape, and Bruno took them into the forest, showed them its haunting nobility and the effects of logging: the streams muddied and fish dead, the violently stripped hillsides, the ramshackle industrial logging camps, the shy nomads losing their home with nowhere to go. Those images were powerful, and the issue of saving the world’s rain forests and its indigenous people was becoming a cause célèbre around the world—Amazonian rubber tapper Chico Mendes had recently burst on the scene in Brazil, only to be assassinated two years later.

  But Bokemeier witnessed something more compelling, a living Western fantasy: Bruno himself. A white guy able to catch fish and snakes with his bare hands, who could hunt with a blowpipe and harvest and process sago, speak Penan, climb trees and forge streams and find his way unaided barefoot through dense tropical forest with freaky strength and power and stamina. It was the stuff of journalistic dreams, Tarzan come to life, Lawrence of Arabia leading the Bedouin, this time in the tropical jungle, a real living noble savage, this Penan Man whom you could talk to in flawless German—and French and English and Swiss German—who was “one of them” but “one of us” too, and soon Bruno’s legend exploded throughout Europe and the world in a full-color double-truck magazine spread.

  In a letter dated “18, June 1986, somewhere in the jungle,” Bruno wrote Roger Graf, “My only source of light is wild pig fat in the lid of my pan, and the wick is a piece of cloth. At the moment I ‘sleep’ through another malarial fog. Two nights I’ve fought with the demons. Every pulse in my temples is like an electroshock that almost brings my head to explosion . . . and every movement hurts; unfortunately there’s no medication anywhere, since it was stolen by the police . . . who now stray around in the area nearby. Tomorrow a Penan is traveling in the direction of Limbang and I don’t want to miss the opportunity to send a message along for you, you old warrior. I am having constant thoughts about the blockades. . . . All the participants can expect a good kick in the ass and maybe even prison . . . but we should try everything.