The Last Wild Men of Borneo Read online

  By the time of Michael’s forays, head-hunting had long been stamped out by Indonesian and Malaysian authorities (though it could and did flare up again, even as recently as 2001 during a period of ethnic strife), but 90 percent of the island remained virgin primary forest. Throughout its more distant reaches, houses and longhouse communities remained filled with pusaka, men and women still distended their earlobes with heavy brass weights, were covered in tattoos and hunted with blowpipes, and lived, they believed, in a mystical, magical world. But Michael arrived at a pivotal moment. Christian missionaries hungering for new souls were pushing farther into the interior, as were timber companies hungering for the great tropical hardwoods of its forests, and government officials came along with them. Modernity was creeping upriver. Traditional villages and cultures began to have access to cash and modern things, from transistor radios to electric light bulbs to Western medicine, and Michael could see the transformation happening, feel it, as he too pushed upriver.

  During their first forays in late 1974 and 1975, he and sometimes Fatima mostly stuck to the Mahakam River and its close tributaries—all relatively accessible—but in June 1976, he pushed deeper, alone, into Central Kalimantan for the first time, and his knowledge began to leap forward. He was still mostly looking for things he could sell at the flea market, baskets and necklaces and small trinkets, but he was increasingly taking note of larger pieces: jars and architectural elements and statues. Flying into Pangkalan Bun, he caught a scheduled boat one hundred miles up the Lamandau River to Nanga Bulik, and at 7 a.m. on June 21, 1976, he and three Dayaks headed up the Bulik River in a small, cramped dugout powered by a four-horsepower outboard and packed with supplies. They passed a lumber camp, a slash of treeless destruction in the jungle, presided over by roaring, giant yellow tracked engines with grippers piling huge gray tree trunks two stories high along the banks above the river, which was low and calm, and soon walled in green again. At first this logging didn’t really register for Michael; the view soon returned to normal, punctuated by bands of long-tailed monkeys parading along the banks. They motored for twelve hours. The engine broke down seven times, often in the middle of rapids, once dashing the boat backwards over a waterfall, and all Michael could think of was his near drowning a year and a half before. In the darkness of night they reached a village, and Michael slept on the dock. They pushed on again at dawn, turning up the Kawa River. At the next village he saw poles supporting upside-down ceramic jars, and as they continued they hit rapids through water so low they had to drag the boat over the rocks by hand. They passed “trees shimmering with monkeys,” Michael noted in his journal, others full of loud chattering flocks of green parrots, and spotted a wild boar rooting on the banks and a hornbill winging loudly overhead. By the time they reached Penopa it was “pitch black night and raining like hell,” and he was soaked. He slept in the boat.

  They continued upriver at dawn in a light drizzle—the sun soon came blasting out—past villages with colorfully painted houses with carved Aso figures perched on the front tips of the roofs, and half-naked women washing by the side of the river. It was thick with fish “leaping out of the water everywhere.” That night they finally reached their destination, Batu Kawa; from there Michael intended to strike out inland on foot. Immediately he was assaulted by villagers wanting obat—medicine. “Administered some anti-malaria pills, antibiotic eye ointment and cleaned and bandaged several wounds,” he noted in his diary. “Wish I had more obat. Not too many old objects here—no statues, some masks—average,” he wrote.

  He slept on the floor of a local’s house, and in the morning he traded tobacco for rice, coffee, and durian, and dispensed more medicine, and in the afternoon they hiked on, six miles through hilly, shaded bamboo forest over many small streams. The woods felt immense, endless, and yet filled with villages and people, and Michael loved being in it in a way he’d never felt in the deserts of Iran or even the chaotic beauty of Afghanistan, India, or Nepal. Those places had an edge, a danger, a hardness that was always on the horizon. In Afghanistan his Mercedes once had broken a fuel pump, and he’d been picked up by a VW van full of hippies that had subsequently been waylaid by bandits, the women raped inside the VW; he’d had to listen to their screams while the men held guns to his head. But Borneo had none of that harshness. The Dayaks were mostly gentle, and loved to laugh at him and to drink and dance, all in this overwhelmingly fertile place of rivers and trees and animals. Traveling through it was hard—he suffered heat and cold and rain and discomfort—but he loved it, embraced it in a way that most people never could.

  Michael slipped, smashing his knee on a rock, but kept on, arriving in the “charming and original” village of Penampakan to the “sweet and overwhelming” scent of durian, a fruit often described as smelling like vomit. Every house had a hornbill or water snake head carved in its roof, and instead of tombstones marking graves in the small cemetery stood ceramic jars. He administered more medicine and walked another four miles along a small river to Sepondon, which was also beautiful, old, untouched, free of any trash, and with few machine-made products. The villagers laughed at his hair, told him he was funny-looking. “Do you have obat? Do you have tobacco?” they asked. “Can’t understand; this obat getting out of control. Patched up six men, gave an eye ointment treatment, treated five toothaches with clove and gave three tiger balm massages.” His knee was swollen, and he was exhausted, but as he curled up on the floor of a little guesthouse, he felt happy.

  At dawn Michael woke to find twenty-five people standing around him, staring silently. He walked on, found the next village centered on a tall totem pole and two male wooden figures facing the river, but the village was mostly deserted, so he continued. His leg was so swollen he found it difficult to walk. By day’s end he’d covered twelve miles, arriving in a village of two thousand, where he passed out after drinking arak with the Javanese police officer and his cronies. Some houses had twenty-foot-high poles topped with upside-down jars and carved heads and two human-sized carved figures, a man and a woman. No one wanted to sell or trade for them, but he bartered some bracelets and tobacco for five baskets, a purse, one huge papaya, one coffee, and a bottle of honey. He smoked a joint, heard music, and wandered into the night, where he found a funeral celebration in full swing. To the banging of gongs, Michael jumped in and they urged glass after glass of tuak on him. The jungle turned “vibey: every wild dog in the kampong is howling at the sounds coming from inside the jungle—insects hissing and howling and groveling and snarling, peeping and creeping, like an orchestra, and the crickets—billions of them—are the loudest, with a hypnotic purrrr.” Suddenly in walked the hantus—ghosts—men draped in leaves, their faces covered in charcoal and chalk. One looked different and Michael suddenly realized the man was imitating him—with a white-painted face and black-painted mustache, holding an old transistor radio, and the man danced around the room holding the radio up like a camera, “pretending to take pictures of the roaringly drunk Dayaks and pretending to take notes with a pad and pen. Then he pulled out a dictionary and began translating words like old, broken, baskets, bracelets, mandaus, statues. His imitation of me was incredibly funny.”

  He awoke late, his head feeling like it had an ice pick sticking in it and his stomach riled. He revived himself by jumping in the river, followed by breakfast and a visit with the kepala kampong, the village headman. He sported a full chrome-plated grill—his teeth capped with silver—and three wives. Michael traded 3,000 rupiahs and five packages of looseleaf tobacco for an old blowpipe, and then fifteen bracelets for a basket of bamboo and rattan. At the cemetery he found women “wailing madly,” but when they saw Michael they yelled “Kodak!” and “laughed so hard they almost dropped the coffin.” He traded five more packets of tobacco for an old textile, all as the funeral ceremony raged—forty hours straight—and that night he again fell asleep to the banging of gongs and xylophones.

  By the time the sun rose, his room was crowded with people wanting
to trade baskets for bracelets, and after breakfast, he and his porters climbed in a boat for the trip back, this time by river, which was shallow and full of rocks, forcing them to drag the boat for hours. But when the river finally deepened, they drifted slowly without the engine; it felt like “gliding on a dark green mirror,” lovely, quiet, slow. Monkeys crowded the trees and birds screeched, and at the occasional rapid, they whooshed through, the driver at the bow impressing Michael with his deft paddling.

  On the long trip back downriver, he encountered “Surabaya Chinese Frankie,” a Jehovah’s Witness missionary, “who laid a heavy barrage of bible rap on me in perfectly great English, which I haven’t spoken in weeks. He also admits I’m a strange orang puti, not the usual surveyor or missionary that they see once in a while.” The village had no traditional Ngaju Dayak cemetery and he soon learned why: twelve years before, Catholic missionaries had come, replaced the year before by Frankie the Jehovah’s Witness. In pouring rain he walked to the next village, where he was happy to find no Christian influence yet. In its cemetery stood two male wooden figures, many coffins and jars and totem poles, and a special raised house for the bones of ancestors.

  By July 3 he was on the last leg of river to Pangkalan Bun. Rain hammered down, the sun broke out, more rain came, Borneo’s thick clouds rolling in and parting in constant motion. In new rain showers, as they turned up the Arat for the last five miles, the engine conked out again and again, forcing them to paddle the last mile. But the small city felt like New York, and that night he crashed on a soft bed draped in mosquito nets and wallowed in the luxury of it all.

  Michael didn’t rest long. Within a few days he took a flight to East Kalimantan and headed up the Mahakam again to Melak, arriving at 11 p.m. on July 8. It was late; he slept on the boat and woke up to find a rat stuck in his hair “squeaking and freaking.” In the morning he caught a ride on the back of a policeman’s motorcycle to the village of Borong Tangkak, where he encountered another missionary. “Father Kleiner avoided me at first, doesn’t like tourists,” but Michael was his usual persuasive self and finally the father relented and invited him to dinner. “He gives Kalimantan twenty five more years before it’s finished” from logging and mining.

  Michael chartered a motorbike and continued exploring surrounding villages, some with longhouses; this was the heart of Tunjung Benuaq Dayak territory, an area long rich in exquisite carvers, but coming under increasing outside pressure. He found villages full of large carved figures, wooden coffins carved with naga heads—the heads of water serpents—and longhouses whose pillars were carved with beautiful swirling figures. But he also found many villages with cut-off stumps where similar figures once rested. “I’m told that around 1970 many figures were cut down from their posts at the request of missionaries.” He wasn’t trying to buy most of these things himself, not yet, anyway, but he was taking note of them, asking questions about them, listening to stories and legends and recording it all in his diaries. At one longhouse “I spotted in the rafters an ironwood carved box decorated with fetishes and spider webs. I am told that this particular box contained heads.” He bought a bat tooth and bead necklace for 1,000 rupiahs, about 50 cents, added a spear to his collection, and headed back to Melak, arriving on July 12, market day. “Today I felt surely like a brother—many friends, good vibes. In the short time I’ve been here they’ve either seen me or heard about me—people today were not so shy and coming up to ask me if I wanted to buy things, for good prices.” A man took him back to his house, pulled out his “magic obat stash,” and proceeded to slice off pieces from two different miniature wooden statues for him, one to keep away ghosts while traveling through the jungle and one to protect him from poisoning. “He wrapped them up in old paper and told me to always carry them. Then he very secretly showed me another tiny wooden carved fetish of a man. It was given to him by the witch doctor, which he carries wherever he goes.”

  He spent several days waiting for the big riverboat to head downriver, but none came, “stalled out as usual in Kalimantan.” Finally he found a small one, full of familiar faces from villages he’d already visited, and they motored downriver “elbow to elbow, butt to butt, jam packed like sardines on the hardwood planks. My clothes are filthy, I’ve got a beard and I must look like hell and feel like it too, but I care little about my appearance at this point. I feel like part of the jungle I’m coming out of. Today was the day I was expected back in Bali, back into the bosom of my loved one, but for the last few nights it’s been almost impossible to sleep. I spent most of the evening on top of the boat—just me, the moon, the stars, the glistening river.”

  He arrived in Samarinda at five o’clock in the morning, proceeded on to Balikpapan, then checked in for a flight to Banjarmasin, there to fly to Surabaya and on to Bali. “Fifty kilos overweight. Big hassle, almost missed the flight.” He had been traveling for a month straight, by foot, riverboats big and small, motorcycle, bemos, buses, and airplane, with “one hundred and sixty pounds of treasure,” and he was “completely exhausted. Today my body feels like dying, like the machine is broken. My clothes are thrashed with holes, my shoes have turned from white to the color of earth, and I need sleep!”

  On July 18 he took wing from Borneo to Surabaya for the last leg home. “What a pleasure to fly. Now I’m ten thousand feet up looking down into the sweaty jungle.” He had a lot to process. He’d seen the Ngaju Dayak villages of Central Kalimantan for the first time, still full of jars and statues and carvings and funeral ceremonies, and he’d strengthened his relationships along the Mahakam in East Kalimantan in and around Melak. And he’d increasingly seen signs of logging and missionaries, signs that the traditional Dayak culture was starting to dissipate. Was he playing a hand in that acculturation? As he bathed in the freshness of the plane’s air-conditioning and the exhilaration he always felt when homeward bound after a new adventure, he wrote feverishly about the larger forces at work, the very ones that Bruno would soon be embroiled in. “Timber companies have been on the Mahakam since 1971 and have promised to provide health education and care for the Dayaks and to replace the trees they have cut down. Instead of complying with their agreements, they have taken the short cut by paying off official inspectors to save time and money that they should have spent conserving and caring for the land and its people. The end result of the savage rape is certain death for Dayaks. The once fertile soil in the areas exploited have now become either swamps or robbed of its natural topsoil. After those timber companies have cut down the last tree they’ll leave behind an unnatural graveyard. What was once a Lost Paradise will become a Dead Earth. Thousands of surveyors, timber people, mineral people, missionaries, merchants and government officials, plus transmigration islanders have come to Kalimantan to exploit it. Millions of dollars are being made by hungry profiteers while the officials who are hired by her people to keep Kalimantan still alive are turning their backs for payoffs so that the big companies can throw dirty punches to win the fight fast or make a quick billion or wash their hands quick so they can get out the mud or better yet before they see too much of what they have destroyed and start feeling guilty. The future of Kalimantan is too much for any human being to endure.”

  Logging road, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, 1980s. (Bruno Manser Fund)

  Seven

  To reach the Mulu caves and Gunung Mulu National Park when he first arrived in Sarawak, Bruno traveled from the coast by boat up the Baram and Tutoh rivers. Along the winding roads of brown water, he, like Michael, couldn’t avoid seeing patches of copper-colored earth carved out of the green forest, sudden industrial tears in the lush jungle piled high with tropical hardwoods, often roaring with skidders and loaders as big as houses. Logging along lower sections of Sarawak’s rivers had been happening piecemeal for decades, but the forests of Borneo were vast and the impact remained small overall.

  In the 1980s, however, logging drastically accelerated. To grasp why, it helps to understand the history and politics of Sarawak.

/>   For centuries, what is now Peninsular Malaysia consisted of independent Muslim sultanates. In the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, British colonial administrators took control of most of that territory. The island of Borneo remained its own universe, however, a place of little kingdoms and Chinese merchants along the coasts and Dayak tribesmen inland along the rivers. The Netherlands controlled the eastern three-quarters of the island and the sultan of Brunei the northwest quarter. In 1841 the sultan ceded much of what is now Sarawak to James Brooke, creating a strange little independent kingdom ruled by Brooke alone, who called himself the Rajah of Borneo.

  The Brookes’ reign in Sarawak is surely one of the oddest in history. While it was colonial and racist in the sense that a white overlord unilaterally ran the state, James Brooke had seized power and claimed his piece of Asia by attacking piracy and “saving” the local sultan of Brunei. Once declared rajah, he not only ended piracy but ruthlessly suppressed the powerful, marauding Ibans, whose head-hunting raids terrorized less powerful Kelabit, Kenyah, and Kayan Dayak tribes, and imposed a peace that the territory had never known. He loved Sarawak and its people, and to the indigenous tribes the White Rajah’s rule was more paternalistic than exploitative. The Penan, who for generations had traded forest products with the much more powerful, sophisticated, and violent downriver Dayaks, were often cheated, so Brooke instituted quarterly market days during which government officials monitored transactions on the Penan’s behalf. And as huge rubber plantations were created through much of colonial Southeast Asia and Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Brooke, who’d taken over Sarawak from his uncle James, said, “I hate the name of rubber. Congo rules cannot be tolerated in Sarawak.” For the most part, the Brookes ruled with benign neglect, leaving trade in the hands of independent locals. At the turn of the nineteenth century, at the height of European colonialism, the Brookes ruled Sarawak with just thirty Europeans.