The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  After four hours we emerged from a narrow cut to a wide lake, and there, rising along one side of it, stood a two-story wood-framed longhouse painted white with blue trim. Wooden shingles covered the roof. A narrow verandah topped with rusting corrugated tin ran along the front, covering a boardwalk; beneath was a crowded array of cut wood, drying clothes, old plastic bottles, outboard motors, fishing nets, and huge orange plastic cisterns in front of every door, of which there were twelve. As longhouses went, it was small, about a hundred yards end to end. Tamin said it was seventy years old, but I thought, with its machine-cut planks, it was far newer.

  One long room ran its length, with a door every twenty feet or so into the apartments of individual families. It was dim, hot, smelled of wood; hardly anyone was around, save for a few women and little children. The nearest road was four hours away by boat. No electrical lines ran here, but generators supplied power and every apartment had a television and satellite dish. The men for the most part were away working across the border in Sarawak.

  The great conundrum of visiting villages and longhouses is the awkwardness. You are walking through people’s front doors into their living rooms unannounced, and you are expecting . . . what? That they’ll put on a dance for you? Draw you into their mystical worlds, show you their stories and secrets, open their cabinets and shake out their jars? Stop their lives for you? The dirty secret of village life is that there is nothing to do there, if you’re not integrated into the community and its daily rhythms. It can feel incredibly boring; time stops, the minutes tick by and you look at each other. It takes time and patience and repeated visits to pierce the awkwardness—it’s what Michael had specialized in for so many years. What lay behind the veil, behind the veneer of the eleven pots of garish plastic flowers surrounding the TV (draped in white muslin) in the living quarters of the couple who were our hosts? There were hints. Fetishes hung outside every doorway, clusters of twisted roots and honeycombs of bees and plastic water bottles holding little unrecognizable things, a tied mass of animist mysteries. Dangling from the eaves outside our host’s apartment—the sixty-something man and his wife, Michael said, were shamans—was a mobile-like hanging. A wooden box painted in red and green and yellow tree-of-life swirls, a classic Dayak motif, its ends carved, from which hung eight piñata-like figures in sparkling paper and foil. Next to it dangled a string of teeth, a knotted strand of rattan. Against two walls of their back room stood twenty ceramic jars three feet high, some with Aso dragons winding around them, some green, others brownish gold. One was unlike anything I’d seen before, a simple dark brown jar encircled by twin rows of raised dots that Michael said was old, really old. “Could be a thousand years,” he said. What was inside the jars? What made the couple shamans? I had no idea and we didn’t have the time or patience to find out.

  We sat and drank coffee and sweated and Michael talked a mile a minute, too fast for me to understand most of it. He whipped out his iPad, showed pictures of Iban textiles—that’s what the Iban were known for—but they all shook their heads. A woman sitting on the floor with a pile of freshly cut rattan was weaving floor mats—they covered much of the longhouse floor—and she pointed to them. “Want to buy one of these?”

  Within an hour he’d determined there was nothing old to buy here; either they didn’t have anything or whatever they did have lay tucked away and wasn’t for sale.

  We sweated. Drank more coffee. “I’ve tried to send off signals, but there’s nothing here. It’s sad. Before, the search for cargo kept me going. There was so much of it, and if there wasn’t anything at one village, there’d be something great at another. But now there’s nothing. I can’t stay here another night. It’s unbearable. It’s too hot and it’s too uncomfortable.”

  We bathed in the lake. We wandered the boardwalk. We met Lusan, a tiny aged man in baggy blue bikini underpants who was covered in traditional Iban tattoos. His shoulders bore seven-petaled flowers, a spiral in their center, the Bungai Terung, the flower of the eggplant. Dark black swirls covered his biceps and a four-pointed star over a crescent boatlike symbol decorated his thorax. More ink covered his back and calves. It was the very definition of tribal, marks carried by millions of young westerners around the world now, but these had been hand-tapped and each represented an important life event. The most interesting was the stylized frog on his throat, a mark of bravery, usually associated with head-hunting. Lusan said he was ninety. “I was born up near Malaysia,” he said. “Many Japanese came to Lake Sentarum and we killed them, took their heads!”

  Michael towered over him. “Which one hurt the most?” he asked.

  “They all hurt,” he said, “but this one”—he pointed to his throat—“this one hurt the most!” I wanted to know more, wanted to sit and talk, had so many questions. Not just to Lusan, but to everyone. But, embarrassed and shy—we’d caught him in his underpants, after all—he quickly tottered away.

  In the afternoon school let out and the longhouse filled with kids. The sound of villages is always the noise of a children’s playground, and they ran and leapt and dived in the lake, as Michael showed photos and tried to get kids to recite “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” We ate dinner in the back room of our hosts—fiddleheads of fern and tiny little minnows and white rice—and for some reason I asked if they ever ate crocodiles.

  “No!” Tamin jumped in. “Never. They’re family. My grandfather said when we died we’d come back as a crocodile. Same with barking deer and hornbill. They’re family. Our ancestors.”

  It was shallow, the barest hints of deeper tradition and culture, but I couldn’t get there, couldn’t dive in; I wanted so much more but it was like a slideshow passing before me that I couldn’t slow down. Maybe this was all there was, but I didn’t know, couldn’t tell. We didn’t have enough time, and I felt deeply frustrated.

  We spent a restless night on the floor, to the barking of dogs and voices carrying through the dark and the roosters exploding long before dawn. And soon after daybreak we climbed in the boat and sped away, empty-handed, both literally and metaphorically.

  We didn’t find anything in Badau, crossed the border in a taxi to the Malaysian city of Lubok Antu, found nothing of interest in a couple of shops there, and traveled up the Rajang River on a rusting Millennium Falcon–like high-powered riverboat with airline-style seats and a TV blaring Superman, past modern longhouses painted pink and purple and great rents in the green banks, where giant yellow tractors and loaders moved two-story piles of logs. We spent two nights in Kapit, which had been a few dusty blocks of unpaved streets, accessible only by river, back when Michael first traveled there, and was now a bustling city that he didn’t recognize, filled with traffic.

  I felt caught between my own prejudices and nostalgic desires. I wanted what had been, a world that was gone, not the landscape that was in front of me. Kapit, Lubok Antu, even Badau, weren’t forgotten backwaters, inaccessible and off the map, full of “natives” in exotic clothes and partaking in mysterious ceremonies and rituals. Well, that was the point—they were full of natives, Iban and other tribes were the very people around us, but they wore blue jeans and drove shiny Toyotas and went to church on Sunday. Kapit and the other places we’d passed through were cities on the rise, had money coursing through them. New buildings were going up on every block. Everyone had a new car, the latest mobile phone; they weren’t covered in tattoos, living in creaky old handcrafted longhouses lit by damar resin with skulls hanging from the rafters.

  I thought of Mahathir’s letter to Bruno, who had been smack in the center of one of the world’s most iconic and romantic islands undergoing profound change, and had fought so hard to stop it. The trip with Michael had been disheartening; we were combing through the wreckage of acculturation. Yet at least he had his memories, his adventures, his stories to tell, not to mention the carvings and textiles he had squirreled away and that lay under the beam of halogen lights that others could see in museums. I didn’t really want to
live in a traditional jungle longhouse for one year, much less six. I wanted to visit them. I wanted to say I’d been there, to revel in outside adulation for my adventurous spirit, but no, I didn’t want to be a Dayak and I didn’t want to be a Balinese and Michael didn’t want to be any of those things either. He was no purist, unlike Bruno. He loved the Dayak and their traditional culture, but he also loved the game, the hustle, the search for treasure and the sheer adventure of the hunt. He lived in Bali and was in many ways a stranger everywhere, but he loved American culture; in his eighth decade there he was leaning out into the wind on the narrow gunwales of an old riverboat in a pair of brightly striped cotton hippie pants, his hair flying, his face beaming. You could never go back. Not in time, not in culture, not to your old home country where you hadn’t lived for any extended time in fifty years. But you could enjoy the ride, and I had to admire Michael’s stamina and his passion for life. He was still at it, hadn’t given up. Was that stubbornness or blindness or was it adaptation and success, a kind of happiness?

  After three and a half weeks of travel we ended up in Kuching, in a lovely little hotel overlooking the river, lined with hundred-year-old two-story shopfronts and antique shops where, of course, everyone knew Michael. Kuching was the capital of Sarawak, and a rarity in fast-growing Asia, even more so in Borneo—a city where everything old hadn’t been bulldozed, where you could still feel a sense of history. The Astana, James Brooke’s original palace, lay across the river, and the Hiang Thian Siang Ti Chinese temple in blazing red, built in 1863, stood a few blocks from our hotel. Brooke had stood before it, and so had Bruno, whose last, increasingly mad attempts to save its forests had occurred on these very streets, and every dealer in Dayak tribal art frequently combed the city’s shops, for they were the hub where runners emptying the longhouses of Sarawak brought their treasure. Michael grew wistful in Kuching; it had changed so little that here he could feel, see, the past more clearly, could remember himself in specific places. He showed me the convent where he and the beautiful Fatima used to stay—they had divorced years ago, she’d returned to Los Angeles, and he was discreet about what happened—back in the early days when she traveled with him. Another shop he wanted to visit wasn’t open. “It’s never open and he never wants to sell anything,” Michael said, “but he’s got really fantastic stuff.” He finally made contact with the owner, who agreed to meet us.

  Richard Yang and his shop were different. Rather than a mad attic, as most were, it felt more like a gallery, its walls painted yellow, the floor Mexican tile, objects laid out with aesthetic care, old framed black-and-white photos of Kuching on the walls. Yang was sixty-eight, had a shaved head and a twinkle in his eyes, and spoke softly, as Michael ranged through the shop. “I worked for a company—it was 1977—and my colleague wanted an antique, so I went with him into a tribal art shop and I fell in love. I went every day, every night to that shop, and I bought with what little money I had, for myself, just for myself,” he told me. “Only what I loved. After a year I opened a small shop and still kept my job, but then after another year I quit that. Runners from all the little villages came and brought me beautiful things and I bought what I loved and I didn’t have a lot of money.” He paused. Smiled. “These things . . .” he said, falling silent again, “they were made with love. With beauty. With the heart.”

  “Michael,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe it. I have many things at my home and one day thieves came and they drilled under my floor and broke into my house and stole so many things. Beautiful things. Masterpieces. Luckily I had photos and my cousin went into a shop and saw one of my pieces. I went to the police, but they were afraid and refused to do anything. So I went to some other police and I had to pay, I paid 30,000 ringgit [about $6,700 U.S.] and they took care of it. I got 90 percent of it back.”

  He took a photo from his desk, showed it to Michael. An Iban pig stick, or tun tun babi, with a curving pregnant woman carved into the top, its patina dark black, shiny, glowing. “This is a beautiful piece. A masterpiece. One of the ones I got back.”

  “Want to sell that to me?” Michael said.

  “No,” Richard said, smiling. “It’s not for sale.” He took out another photo, of an Iban ikat textile, dark-wine red, its stylized figures sharp. “Another masterpiece, made with skill and patience and love. It will last forever. My whole life. The beauty. The culture. We see it and we want it, but for the woman who made it, she had no desire, unlike us. She had no desire, do you understand?”

  “That’s $100,000 U.S., easy,” Michael said. “You only need to find one of those in your life.”

  “The pity is this: the local people don’t appreciate it anymore,” said Richard. “It’s all gone. All gone to Western culture now. Money, money, money. They don’t have any money and they want it, they want to be just like Americans now. And Americans, they become rich and they want something to show off and they buy these, but there’s nothing left in the end. A Western person can’t appreciate this. Not really. They have no feeling. It’s priceless! It is civilization and it should be treated like a treasure, not a tablecloth hanging there on the wall.”

  “Richard, how much you sell me one piece? One piece!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have nothing to spare.”

  We all walked out and Richard pulled the shutter down and locked his shop that was never open and from which he refused to sell anything. “C’mon,” Michael said to me, “I’m hungry and I want to show you something.” We walked along the riverfront, cut inland for a block, and came to a roofed central square crowded with round Formica tables, a Chinese food court lined with stall after stall of fresh seafood on beds of ice. Fish. Clams and mussels. Little periwinkles. Squid, shrimp, and crabs, the bounty glistening next to piles of fern fiddleheads and little bok choi cabbages. In every little kitchen woks sizzled atop flaming stoves. “The tables used to be beautiful, shiny, and smooth ironwood,” Michael said. We pointed out what we wanted and sat down under bright fluorescent light to wait for it.

  “I walked in here one day in 1999,” Michael said. “There was a guy sitting at one of the tables alone. A Western tourist. A little guy with funny glasses. I said, ‘Hey! Where you from?’ ‘Switzerland,’ he said. He wasn’t very friendly. I think he thought I was just another tourist, which is what I thought he was.” But Michael, as I had seen, spoke to everyone and anyone; he was the master of striking up conversations and he couldn’t care less if people wanted to be left to their own devices—he jumped right in, always. “I told him I came to Borneo a lot, that I’d been all over, that I’d been up the Mahakam and the Kapuas and the Baram and into the Apo Kayan and when I spoke to the waitress he could see I spoke Malay and he brightened up, said he had been too. Said he’d spent a lot of time up in the mountains of Sarawak. It was nothing, really. We didn’t say anything profound. Just shot the shit. Two travelers out there in the world.”

  Only later did Michael realize he’d just met Bruno. It was the briefest of encounters, a mere coincidence. Yet it also felt, in hindsight, inevitable to me, a crossing of paths as natural as gravity, two almost parallel tracks that were destined to cross.

  One of the last photos of Bruno Manser before he vanished. “He’s communicating that everything is okay when nothing is okay,” said Georges Rüegg, one of his oldest friends.” (Bruno Manser Fund)

  Fifteen

  Jacques Christinet felt like Christopher Columbus. Even with his headlamp, he couldn’t see a thing. The forest was pitch black, wet, trees and brush and fallen, rotting logs everywhere, and Christinet kept slipping and falling, thorns catching on his arms and clothes. Blood flowed down his legs from countless swelling, purple-red leeches. He already had a deep gash on his calf, which Bruno had sewn up the day before.

  In the spring of 1996, Christinet was twenty-seven years old, with an angular face, intense green eyes, and the powerful, lean body of a climber. He lived in an unheated wooden shack without electricity in the mountains of Zermatt, Switzerlan
d, after several years of wandering in South America. “I had no family, no attachments, had lots of question marks in my life, felt depressed, and I was just doing risky, dangerous things.” He heard about Bruno, wrote him a letter, and a week later they walked along the Rhine in Basel together. “I was surprised by his aura. I could feel how this guy was special. When he spoke it was just so consistent and strong.” They walked, gazed at the clouds and the birds overhead, and Christinet told Bruno of his adventures. “About galloping on horseback in the middle of nowhere. About free-climbing mountains without harness or ropes.” At the end of the walk Christinet had found his savior.

  Now, here they were, hiking into the mountains and forests with a train of Penan bearing a thousand pounds of ten-inch steel nails on their backs, each carrying two boxes of sixty pounds each. They had shipped the nails separately from Singapore to Kuching, and then sneaked over the border from Brunei, rendezvousing with the nails in Limbang, where they met local contacts and drove up on logging roads into the mountains. In Brunei, before crossing over, the two had encountered a pilot in the Royal Brunei Air Force and Bruno talked his way onto a plane. “This guy thought we were two tourists and he agreed to take us up for a sightseeing flight. It was crazy. Bruno had a video camera and we’re up they’re flying around and the pilot said, ‘Do you know a guy named Bruno?’ and Bruno said, ‘No, who’s Bruno?’ Then Bruno asked him to fly over Sarawak—he wanted to film the logging—and the pilot said, ‘It’s forbidden, I can’t,’ and Bruno said, ‘Yes you can!’ and the guy did it. The radio started crackling, calling the pilot back while Bruno was filming the areas that were logged and still uncut and, I don’t know, but I don’t think the pilot was stupid—I think he knew it was Bruno and did it for him. That was Bruno.”