by Carl Hoffman
He pulled out rare, carved baby carriers with heart-shaped faces and eyes of bone, the faces remarkably similar to those on Dong Son–era bronze drums, traces of Austronesian wandering. Guardian figures of every shape and size. Six-foot-tall longhouse doors carved with winged dragons. Five-hundred-year-old ceramic jars. It wasn’t gold or emeralds or rubies, but it was every bit as valuable, treasure that in today’s dollars was worth millions.
When the boat was full, he headed back downstream for Samarinda. Riding low in the water, obviously carrying a big load, he was always careful to pile the roof high with cardboard boxes stuffed with baskets and bric-a-brac and leaves and whatever junk he could find, with the real cargo hidden under the ship’s deck boards. Police and military patrols occasionally stopped boats looking for contraband of any kind, especially if a boat sat low in the water. And of course, there were always thieves, hustlers; if anyone understood that Michael was carrying valuable treasure, not to mention cash, he’d be a ripe target. So he had to operate with care. With discretion.
In Samarinda he crated it all up and shipped it home to Bali. He had been gone two months. He would go home for another couple of months, then return again, and again, as long as his luck held. He was now bringing out more Dayak art than anyone, his house filled with precious, ancient objects. There were plenty of dealers around, but Michael had brought objects from the source itself, had touched the mystical Dayak and their wild lands, had disappeared for months at a time—this before mobile phones and the Internet—to emerge suddenly, unexpectedly, bearing those fruits of ivory and leaves of gold, sacred objects from the great tree of life in the metaphorical language of the Dayak. The things he brought back were fresh; they had power, manna, juju. “Whenever I got home I had this power in me that people could see. An aura. People were fascinated with my stories and my stuff and they wanted to touch and feel that thing that I was transporting from the jungle.”
Penan blockades, nothing but ragtag bands of Penan and Kelabit Dayaks in front of small limbs tied together, brought logging in Sarawak to a halt for months in 1987. (James Barclay)
Ten
After weeks hiding alone in the forest, Bruno needed company. It was the spring of 1987. “On secret paths and in the dark of night, I reach the small village at the edge of the logging road,” he wrote. “A cold wind blows over the mountain crest and into the embers of fire pits that are growing low; hardly anyone notices the visitor. Two or three women start organizing and soon a double wall and a tepa mat have been built and I disappear behind the wall. The moon stands like a tender sickle over the mountains. The cooking fires shine from the dark forest—the symbol of unified resistance. The jungle peoples have risen up.”
In January, not long after Bruno’s second escape, Malaysia’s newspapers received a press release: “A Message of the Penan people of the Tutoh and Limbang Rivers region to the people of Sarawak, Malaysia, and the world.” Roads were being constructed and timber removed without the consent of the Penan, it stated. Compensation was nonexistent, except for token handouts. All efforts of the Penan to have the Tutoh and Limbang Rivers region set aside as a communal forest reserve had failed. Petitions to the government were unanswered. The Penan had no other options. “The communities that signed the above declaration have decided to carry out a total blockade of all logging activities on their traditional tribal lands. . . . The blockade will commence on 23rd March, 1987, and will continue for as long as it is considered necessary.”
In a coordinated action, one hundred families of men, women, and children threw barricades in the middle of dirt logging roads at twelve key points, preventing trucks and workers from going in, or timber from getting out. They were nothing, really. Just thin trees mixed with typical Penan huts made from the same spindly trees, and cooking fires, erected across roads that were muddy brown slashes deep in the forest, manned by illiterate half-naked men and women carrying blowpipes, all standing in the way of forty-ton logging trucks and the bulldozers and chain saw–wielding men who filled them. Any one of the trucks could have driven right through the barricades. But that very power imbalance was in itself powerful, an iconic symbol of everything that was happening in Sarawak. It was visual and unmistakable, these people with nothing, standing in front of giant, modern machines operated, in essence, by the most powerful and richest men in Sarawak.
The Malaysian government and timber barons were shocked. Stunned. For as long as anyone could remember the Penan had been shy, subservient, uneducated, powerless, the lowest of the low. Other Dayak tribes, the Kenyah and Kayan and Kelabit, had occasionally resisted, but the Penan? They didn’t even have real homes, real villages, or a traditional hierarchical power structure or headmen. And those occasional earlier resistances had been isolated incidences; no one outside of Malaysia knew about them or cared, and they were easily broken by force or quick deals involving gifts or token compensation.
But these sudden blockades were altogether different, not least because they were far bigger and more widespread and broadcast around the world by Bruno’s growing network in Europe and within Sarawak itself. Troops and police, the lumber companies themselves, could overrun them in a second, but at what cost? Malaysia was a modern democracy in good standing with the world community, a nation of laws striving toward leadership in Southeast Asia. On paper, at least, those laws seemed clear: primary forest was under state control and was allocated for commercial logging. Sarawak Land Code recognized “native customary rights,” but only for land used by native communities prior to January 1, 1958. Use meant land cleared for farming or occupied by longhouse communities, including burial sites and rights of way and any other “lawful method.” But the Penan didn’t live in settled longhouses; the whole forest was their community, their land, their dead were scattered throughout the vast jungle and mountainsides, and they had cleared nothing prior to 1958. The Penan, in effect, were simply unaccounted for in Malaysian law.
Even worse, the blockades called attention to the way Taib, the chief minister of Sarawak, and James Wong, its minister of environment, and their families and cronies were the largest beneficiaries of this vast forest wealth. What laws were the Penan really breaking? And complicating an immediate response was the fact that most of the police, at least initially, were locals. “Police squads appear repeatedly at the locations of the disputes, doing their duty,” wrote Bruno. “But nobody is apprehended and they only admonish everyone not to use force. Luckily, even among the officials there are people that are sympathetic to the cause of the jungle people.” Still, there was an easy scapegoat: Bruno and his European henchmen. “The daily newspapers are full of headlines. Again, the illegal foreigner is blamed for everything to distract from what is important.”
In reality, Bruno’s role in the blockades was not straightforward. Shortly before his second arrest, he met a young Kelabit Dayak named Mutang Urud. Mutang was born in the late 1950s—he doesn’t know the exact date—into a large, high-caste family from Long Napir. A wave of fervent evangelical Christianity had swept through the Kelabit longhouse communities in the 1970s, and “I was part of that and our community was on the cusp of modernity,” he said. His father died when he was young and his three much older brothers went away to boarding school in Limbang, leaving him “quite sad, longing for my father, and when I was just seven I had to go into the forest to fish and get meat to help my family.” Like Bruno, like Michael Palmieri, he possessed an innate curiosity and wonder about the world, a daring hunger to know more. Long Napir lay in a valley surrounded by mountains, and “I often climbed forest trees to get fruit—I was known as the daring one—and I used to hang in the trees for a long time, wondering what was beyond the mountains. I had such a longing.”
When he was still small the family hosted an American Peace Corps volunteer for a year. Their guest told them about Buckingham Palace in London and skyscrapers in New York. “I had thought all white people were the same and that they all came from the same place. I didn’t even know
there was this place called America!” That this American was alone in their longhouse without his family was mind-boggling to the Dayak. “Why is this white person here? Don’t they have brothers and siblings who care about them? For us it was incomprehensible to believe that someone would go somewhere alone without their community.” But when news reached Long Napir that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, their guest broke down in tears. “I saw that he was human, that he really loved his president.”
Eventually Mutang’s brothers raised money for him to attend a series of inexpensive Chinese boarding schools in the downriver cities of Limbang and Lawas. After high school and then three years of business school in Kuala Lumpur, he won a contract cutting the grass at the Bintulu airport—an opportunity to employ fifteen people, mostly relatives from Long Napir. In the late 1960s his much older brother had drafted maps delineating traditional Kelabit lands, the key to establishing native customary ownership of the land and thus compensation for logging rights. Mutang was deeply religious, and he felt that what was happening with logging was a powerful injustice. “The biblical story of David was my model.” He had been instrumental in organizing some of the first Kelabit blockades, in which they’d unsuccessfully sought compensation for traditional gravesites that had been bulldozed. He met Sahabut Alam Malaysia’s Harrison Ngau, and had heard about Bruno, who’d stayed with his relatives back in the longhouse, when he applied for another contract to cut the grass around municipal roads of Limbang. He won that contract too, but a week later it was yanked away from him “because they said I was antilogging, antigovernment.” To be denied a livelihood was the breaking point for Mutang, who felt that a much bigger, more coordinated effort was needed, one that had to include not just the Kelabits, but the Penan.
It was the early fall of 1986, and “Bruno was constantly in the news,” Mutang recalled. While Bruno was rarely present at the blockades that ensued and always insisted he only played secretary to the Penan, his stature among the Penan was undisputed. Which complicated matters for Mutang, because Bruno’s first arrest had occurred in the Kelabit village of Long Napir—Mutang’s home—an incident that left the Penan, said Mutang, with a deep distrust of all “the settled communities, who were suspected collaborators with the authorities.” Mutang decided that in order to get the Penan to fully support big blockades, “I needed to meet with Bruno to get the authority to organize them. He was the guy who the Penan consulted. He was their adviser. He was the one who said you have to do this. And I was very curious about this white man who didn’t seem to care about his own family and who everybody said was so curious, always catching snakes and cicadas and drawing them.”
It is a revealing and even remarkable comment: an indigenous Kelabit Dayak saying that the key to recruiting the last nomads in Southeast Asia was some little white dude from Switzerland. The blockades and the ensuing political struggle could never have happened without leadership from native Sarawakians like Mutang and Harrison Ngau. They publicly led it and carried it forth, organizing its meetings and logistics and the tangled communications web within and without necessary to sustain and benefit it, and they were the ones who suffered most for it. They were fighting for their own land and their own communities within their own political structure, which they knew and understood, and without them it would have had no legitimacy. They were the ones who were putting their very freedom at risk, who were subject to local laws and cultural pressures and had no foreign passports to save them.
But the blockades—or more precisely the Penans’ participation in the blockades—might never have happened without Bruno. Bruno and the Penan themselves were Rorschach inkblots upon which people projected their fantasies, hopes, dreams. Idealizations about noble savages and idealizations about white, Western power were both equally at work, and you see this time and again with people like Bruno and Michael Palmieri. Bruno and the Penan fetishized each other. Bruno represented something for everyone, and it would ultimately be his tragic downfall, his inability to escape an identity, or lack of one, that he himself constructed. To Bruno the Penan were noble, untouched, uncorrupted, and he wanted to preserve them as such. “In a way,” said Lukas Straumann, the executive director of the Bruno Manser Fund, “Bruno was naïve; he saw the Penan as a people without history.” As time passed, and as he would soon convince Mutang, he increasingly hardened against anything short of a total ban on logging and a forest reserve big enough to let the remaining nomadic Eastern Penan live in their state of nature—ideally with him living in its Eden. Part of that was a belief that no fair compensation could ever be realized, that any attempts to negotiate a genuine fair share of the profits would be futile, but he was also a purist, a refugee from the world of compensation and profits and all that they might bring.
In a perfect world to Bruno the Penan would have seen him as just another Penan. One of them. A brother, a cousin, a son. A fellow hunter. No more, no less. Bruno had no aspirations to leadership of anything, much less a band of nomads he idolized for their very egalitarianism. But he was no more able to transcend and escape culture and history than the Penan themselves. For the Penan were no more untouched by history or no more living time capsules of an earlier form of humanity than any other people. Even uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon today aren’t really uncontacted at all, but small groups of people who broke away from larger bands to flee encroaching loggers and miners and settlers, to hide in the forest. There is increasing belief, too, that our view of the Amazon basin and its people as a world where small tribes like the Yanomami and Kayapo lived unchanged for millennia—that anthropologists’ first encounters with them were windows into an unchanged past—are incorrect. In fact, it appears that long ago population densities were far higher in the Amazon than today. Culture, as it turns out, is never static or purely linear.
In fact, by the time Bruno hiked into the forest, the Penan had been involved in a complex symbiotic relationship with the outside world for as long as anyone could remember. They were anything but untouched. Since at least the first European explorers encountered them, the Penan “occupied a specific niche in the economies of central Borneo,” writes the anthropologist Peter Brosius. They supplied forest products, everything from their finely woven rattan baskets and mats to damar resin used for fuel, to deer antlers and rhinoceros horn and bezoar stones (gallstones from gray langur monkeys) that were used in traditional medicines, to downriver Dayak tribes, which then found their way to the coast for export. In exchange they received metal for blowpipe spear points, cloth, salt, and tobacco. There is some evidence that, long ago, Penan didn’t even manufacture their own blowpipes, but acquired them through trade from longhouse Dayaks. Amid the warring Dayak tribes, “the presence of a Penan band in an area meant access to forest products and to the income generated by trade in those products,” according to Brosius. “Longhouse aristocrats were proprietary about ‘their’ Penan, and jealously guarded their prerogative to trade with certain groups. Various longhouses frequently competed to monopolize their relationships with particular Penan bands. Historical records detail numerous disputes brought to colonial authorities resulting from attempts by longhouse aristocrats to lure Penan from one watershed to another. In short, Penan were regarded by longhouse peoples as a form of wealth.
“The relationship between longhouse people and neighboring Penan was . . . highly paternalistic. Penan relied upon longhouse peoples to act as mediators with the outside world, the conduit by which both information and material goods from downriver reached them. This was a system maintained both by Penan timidity and by indebtedness to longhouse patrons.”
The Brooke regime had extended the paternalism, deepened it, protecting the Penan from their Dayak exploiters by regulating their relations and, in 1906, creating quarterly markets, called Tamu, where their exchanges with wily Dayak buyers occurred in front of government agents so the Dayaks couldn’t cheat them. The Brooke government also forbade Iban and Kenyah Dayaks from entering their lands to col
lect and hunt for themselves. The Penan existed in the first place probably not because they were simply the last, oldest, purest indigenous of Borneo, but because centuries before, they’d fled into the hills to escape their marauding, violent Dayak neighbors—and even then they had been almost indentured servants to them and their power. And who had liberated them? The White Rajah, James Brooke. For a century the Brooke family protected them, left them alone, wanted nothing from them but their jungle products, fairly priced, no less. World War II had suddenly ended that protection. The Malaysians who took over Sarawak and became the Penan’s new overlords were every bit as foreign to them as the British. But this time, these new foreigners thought of them as monkeys, people who were a slight to the new modern nation and at best needed to be dragged into the modern world and civilized and at worst had no rights at all. In a strange and ironic twist on imperialism and colonialism, the Eastern Penan of the upper Baram and Limbang and Tutoh watersheds looked upon the British as saviors, protectors; for them, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a golden time.
Though they seemed to be remote hunter-gatherers living out of time, even the remotest and oldest Penan knew of whites and the British and felt a mythological nostalgia for them. And then there appeared Bruno. This white man who spoke their language, who valued them, affirmed them, marveled at their ways, seemed fearless and comfortable with the forest, just like them. He was a brother, someone they trusted—after all, they called him Penan Man. But he wasn’t one of them; he was a white man, a westerner, and as such represented an outside power and affluence out of the Penan’s reach and from which he could never escape, that he could never wash off no matter what rivers he bathed in or how he cut his hair or how well he hunted. To the Penan he was more than just an odd, white Penan, he was a link to that golden time, the time of the White Rajahs. When he talked about saving the forest and encouraged the Penan to speak their minds and to resist the chain saws and bulldozers, they believed him, believed in him, saw him in a historical context. He dressed like them, spoke their language, but he had a power and privilege they could never have, and when he said they should rise up and speak for themselves and fight for their historical land, his belief and his presence strengthened them. Bruno gave them courage. Heart. They believed in the power of the white man, and his power gave them power. And that historical connection helps explain, too, the Malaysian government’s visceral reaction to him. Bruno stood at the very center of history, a character with a potent legacy, not just to the Penan, but to the Malay politicians like Mahathir Mohamad and Abdul Taib Mahmud, the very men who had brought the nation of Malaysia from shameful subservience to independence. To them he was the Brookes returned, the very essence of colonialism, an iconic threat to their dreams of independence and Malaysian self-determination.
