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| Map of Borneo island |
Borneo is the native land of a large indigenous group, who is also a non-Muslim community, having a rich cultural background.
As this ethnic population lives on a territory mostly defined by its large rainforest, they are not well-known to the rest of the world. Most people have retained that they used to be head-hunters and that many had a tradition of elongating earlobes, mostly for women.
The Dayak of Kalimantan.
I first got acquainted with these peoples, when I lived in East Kalimantan in the 90s. At the time, I had been told that the earlobe
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| Wooden head |
tradition had been banished by the Indonesian Government.
Yet, a few months after I had settled in Balikpapan [Kalimantan Timur], I had the opportunity to take a trip down the Mahakam River, almost from its source, south of Sarawak, down to the river-mouth near Samarinda. There, deep inside the rainforest, I quickly found out that still many people kept on practicing the long-ear rite.
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| Dayak art |
In Kalimantan, they are known as the Dayak. Many have kept their animist belief, while others have been Christianized. One of the main reasons why they are still reluctant to Islam is that their food tradition is highly dependent on pork meat. They are hunters and fruit-gatherers because they live in the rainforest, where they can hunt wild boars for food. If at the time, most villages still displayed skulls, they had usually been replaced by monkey heads.
But here again, when you may think this tradition has been eradicated, here is a story I not only read in the newspapers at the time but also heard from the mouth of a female Filipino CNN reporter, who had been sent to Pontianak, in West Kalimantan [Kalimantan Barat]. It happened at the time when Indonesia was going through a period of serious internal troubles. The Indonesian Government had been trying to ease up the Javanese overpopulation by granting land to new settlers on Borneo. It also triggered the beginning of the first major forest fires. It was a consequence of an urge for farming lands. Unsurprisingly, it made the ethnic population angry and it was soon followed by acts of war. As the Dayak population fought against the newcomers, some acts of atrocity were committed randomly. The Filipino reporter had been sent with her team to Pontianak [Kalimantan Barat] to report on the events. They were about to leave after realizing they had come too late to testify on anything unusual. Since they felt the need to film the area for CNN, they saw a group of native boys playing football in an open stadium. So, they decided to film the scene as part of their report. At one point, the game came closer to the cameraman. This is when the CNN team realized that the ball was instead a human head freshly cut!…
During all my years in Kalimantan, I’ve had many encounters with the Dayak from Banjarmasin [Kalimantan Selatan] in the south to
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| Ikats |
Tarakan in the north, and from Pontianak in the west to Bontang in the east. I went numerous times on the Mahakam River, slept in longhouses, attended dances and cultural events, experienced the forest leeches, saw the blind dolphins of Melintang lake, visited the Tanggarong palace, and of course met many Dayaks. And while living there, I visited many antique shops exposing indigenous paraphernalia, which played the role of a sort of cultural showcase on the local culture!
If you respect people and their culture, they will always respect you too. While being in a rainforest village, I’ve never felt insecure because we were treated as guests, not enemies. The Dayak respect their environment, and this includes both the forest and its animals.
Borneo has had a long-lasting effect on the rest of my life. I have always felt it had been a fantastic opportunity to live there and to discover a completely different environment. This feeling may account for why I always go back there with great pleasure.
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| Dayak items |
Later on, as I moved to Peninsular Malaysia, I became more familiar with the two Eastern provinces of Malaysia: Sabah and Sarawak, which I visited on many occasions as well.
Borneo, which is the third-largest island in the world, has one of the most important rainforests in Southeast Asia. It is home to a rich and unique vegetal diversity, as well as the cradle of extraordinary animal life like the orangutans, lemurs, Proboscis monkeys, pygmy elephants, dwarf deer, and literally hundreds of bird or insect species. There are also high mountains. As a matter of fact, the highest peak in Southeast Asia is Mount Kinabalu (4,096m) in Sabah. It is interesting to know that its first ascender, in March 1851, was a British naturalist Hugh Low, whose story will be told further down while evoking a longhouse community in Sarawak.
The Bidayuh of Sarawak.
At this stage of the story, it may seem useful to clarify a bit of the ethnic groups living in Borneo.
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| Hats |
The native peoples of Borneo have received many different appellations according to their language or their location.
In Sarawak, the term Bidayuh is a generic name for several indigenous groups. Actually, it means ‘inhabitants of the land’. In the past, they had also been called the Klemantan people, which has provided the word ‘Kalimantan’, name of the Indonesian part of Borneo.
Sociologically speaking, there are two main groups: those who are the Land Dayak (Bidayuh) and those who are the Sea Dayak (Iban). This distinction seems to separate the upriver people (Orang Ulu) from those who live in towns or villages. The rainforest ethnic groups like the Kayan or Kenyah (Iban) live in small communities on hunting and rice cultivation. They live in longhouses (Uma Dado) and used to be fierce warriors and headhunters. They are usually recognizable by their tattoos and often have stretched earlobes (for both males and females).
In order to encounter the upriver Dayak in Sarawak, you must go south near the border with Kalimantan.
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| Model of a longhouse |
The first time I came across one of the Sarawak communities, was many years ago in Batang Ai National Park (Taman Negara Batang Ai). It is 275km away from Kuching and it takes about 5h to get there. It is a wildlife sanctuary with a huge lake, which is a water reservoir. At the time, it was possible to take a boat trip to visit a longhouse community in the rainforest.
On this latest journey, I visited the Annah Rais Bidayuh Longhouse in Padawan. It is over an hour’s drive south of Kuching, past the Semenggoh Nature Reserve.
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Road to Annah Rais
Longhouse |
First of all, the landscape becomes beautiful and dramatic as you approach the rainforest and the mountain range that separates Sarawak from Kalimantan. There is a small entrance fee of RM8.00 but you are greeted with a small glass of strong and tasty rice spirit!
This is what the official presentation says: “Built in the year 1818 at the foot of Mount Penrissen, famous for over 100 years, authentic & traditional Bidayuh (Land Dayak) longhouse tradition and culture”. The main interest is that the community still lives there. Each family has its own house on each side of the two long bamboo paths that make these longhouses. People are very friendly and eager to speak with you. Very few tourists visit this community. We met a retired former Malaysian Airline staff, who explained the Dayak culture. He mentioned Hugh Low (1824-1905), who was a naturalist and British administrator, who came to visit this community and wrote about it at the time. This longhouse community even has a showroom with traditional items. One of the rooms still keeps a collection of former skulls. The story goes that in the local culture, keeping the skull of an enemy was a way to appropriate his power and his spirit.
Borneo in Literature.
There are a few books that are worth mentioning about Borneo.
-‘Into the Heart of Borneo’ by Redmond O’Hanlon was published in 2009.
-The Polish sea captain, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), published his first novel in English in 1895. ‘Almayer’s Folly’ set on a life in the jungle of a Dutch trader, Kaspar Almayer. Joseph Conrad spent some time at Berau in East Kalimantan.
-Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) a Franco-British writer published a series of short stories in 1976, called ‘Borneo Stories’.
-Bruno Manser (1954-2000) was a Swiss environmental activist, who lived with the Penan tribe in Sarawak and who tried to fight to preserve the ethnic cultures as well as Borneo natural environment, endangered by excessive logging. He soon became Malaysia’s enemy nº1 and disappeared in the forest at the turn of the century. He wrote many books on Borneo. ‘Voices from the Rainforest: Testimonies of a Threatened People’ was published in 1996.
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| Redmond O'Hanlon |
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| Joseph Conrad |
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| W. Somerset Maugham |
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| Bruno Manse |
If I end up this account on the sad disappearance of a Swiss environmentalist, it is also to regret that Borneo keeps being threatened by the modern world: excessive burning or logging of the rainforest, the growth of cities like Kuching and the harmful industrialization impact on its unique environment.
True, there are still many conservation areas that try to preserve its wildlife, but at the current pace of modernization and of the state's eagerness for natural riches, it may soon not be enough.
Christian Sorand
Some interesting links:
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| Forested hills |
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| Sarawak River |
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| Longhouse bamboo pedestrian walk |
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| Skull collection |
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| Drying the rice |
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| Second longhouse |
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| Traditional house interior |
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| Village activity |
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| Giant night butterfly. |
