White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  ‘Your lot must have done it.’ I pointed out the article to Tong. He was a Bidayuh, what James Brooke would have called a Hill or Land Dayak. Tong had received a Christian education but gone back to the old ways.

  His morning risings were now quite complicated and required the participation of his wife and the sun and the sacrifice of several eggs. Tendrils of beautiful, swirling blue tattoos peeked out at wrist and neck from under his modish designer wear.

  He studied the newspaper and pouted. ‘No. This is Chinese stuff, mafia, you know. Just business, not like in the old days.’

  ‘What,’ I asked tentatively, ‘do people think of the old days, when the Brookes were in charge of Sarawak?’

  He smiled. ‘You’d have to ask my grandad, but I think he’d say that the Chinese liked them as good for business. The Malays disliked them at first then supported them because they kept them in power. We Bidayuh liked them because they protected us from the Iban. The Iban couldn’t agree and fought amongst themselves.’

  ‘And what about when Sarawak became part of Malaysia?’

  He smiled again and poured beer. ‘The Chinese liked that as good for business. The Malays were against it but then changed their minds because it kept them in power. We Bidayuh liked it because Malaysia protected us from the Iban. The Iban couldn’t agree and fought amongst themselves.’

  That seemed pretty conclusive.

  ‘Anyway. The best argument for Sarawak is to visit Brunei. If it hadn’t been for the Brookes we would be part of Brunei. Have you been?’ He sipped, shuddered at the coldness or perhaps the mere thought of Brunei, reached out and poured more.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I went one weekend from Miri. It was hard because no one ever wants to go to Brunei on Friday night, just get away from it. When I arrived, every flat surface was covered by migrant workers, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Filipinos, sleeping, bored out of their minds. When they got up, they staggered around yawning, staring with blank empty eyes, just wanting beer and sex and Brunei had made both illegal. Instead, they had a free funfair.’

  He nodded. ‘So … you see. Brunei is hostile to life. People don’t cross the border to Sarawak to have wild orgies and mad drugs. They just want to have a beer and walk along the beach holding a girl’s hand. What can be wrong with that? And things are so laid-back here compared to the rest of Malaysia. The Brookes gave us that.’

  ‘What about James Brooke?’ I asked. ‘He was … That is he didn’t … Look … He was …’ I couldn’t remember a polite term. In my very Indonesianised Malay I would have to call him an orang sakit, ‘a sick person’. I wasn’t going to do that. Then I recalled the punchline of a joke. ‘Pondan,’ I said. ‘He was a pondan.’ Then, in English, ‘It’s obvious he was gay.’

  Tong raised his eyebrows. ‘Really? They never told us that in the history books. Are you sure?’

  ‘Well,’ I hummed and ha’ed, not wanting to go into the whole thing. ‘He was strongly drawn to young boys and had no interest in women. Work it out for yourself.’

  There was something tickling at the back of my head. ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘Let me read something to you.’ I had brought along one of my favourite books of all time, Nine Dayak Nights by W. R. Geddes, a delightful, gently affectionate study of Tong’s people by a man who had obviously known them and lived with them and fallen totally in love with them. I dug in the index and found the passage I was looking for. ‘Here you are, Tong. Listen to this. Is it true? “The Land Dayaks are highly homosocial but they are rarely, if ever, homosexual, and I believe that in the first fact may lie at least part of the reason for the second. From the beginning of their lives to the end they can indulge freely their affectionate feelings, especially the protective parental affection the older persons have for the younger, and these feelings therefore never reach the intensity which inspires sexual desire.”’

  I felt a moment’s doubt. Perhaps, after all, this had been what James Brooke had been all about. The Land Dayaks had always been his favourite people. Perhaps their charm had lain in uniquely permitting this form of love, which lay at the core of his being, but was of a simple chastity unimaginable to dirty-minded Europeans such as myself. Perhaps …

  ‘Total crap,’ laughed Tong. ‘All the unmarried men have to sleep together in a Bidayuh house. What do you think they do at night when there are no girls around?’

  ‘But it says here …’

  ‘You’d better come with me,’ he sighed. ‘I have something to show you.’

  We rattled off on Tong’s motorbike through the middle of the Kuching night. Rain gleamed wet on the streets and fog ghosted across the river by the old Brooke fort – now a disco – and the Chinese temple. Across the river gleamed the white-painted Brooke palace, the astana, with its crenellations and towers and leaded windows, but what looked ridiculous was not this blatant English anomaly so much as the hi-tech concrete mosque added on the back by the new tenant, the Chief Minister. There were statues of cats everywhere on the roundabouts, simpering and cutesy or noble and independent. The whole city was in love with its name, Kuching – ‘cat’. ‘Have you been to the Museum of Pussy?’ Tong shouted over his shoulder. ‘In the Town Hall. You would like. It is very horrible.’ On our left, we flashed past the Chinese bazaar, then Rajah Charles’s mossy courthouse, like a prop from Gone with the Wind, then Rajah Vyner’s grandiloquent Post Office. On the hill was the National Museum, designed to look like a Normandy farmhouse by Rajah Charles’s French valet. Tong pulled up in a roar and a swirl of dust. It had not been raining here and the sudden still air was like a warm flannel over the face. He dumped his clattering helmet and led me up a Busby Berkeley staircase with gushing fountains and glowing, benodorous flowerbeds, towards a pillar lit in shades of deep red and green. It was the heroes’ monument.

  In the museum, further up the hill, were the received orthodoxies of Brooke rule as I had read them at school, but here was the revised, post-colonial version, with new heroes and the Brookes as inevitable villains. ‘When we joined Malaysia,’ nodded Tong, ‘they just couldn’t leave it alone. They wanted us all to feel resentful about the past, but that’s stupid. That’s just the way it was then. Maybe they thought that if we hated the Brookes we would have less time to be resentful about what they are doing to us now. So they took all the people who fought against Rajah James and Rajah Charles and called them national heroes and put them up there.’

  And there they all were, memorable from the pages of the white rajahs, with passport-type pictures cast in bronze. There was stubborn Rentap; Sawing, the killer of Fox and Steel; Liu Shanba, who led the Chinese insurrection which burned down the town; interfering Sherip Masahor; and for good measure a few contemporary political hacks had been tacked on to soak up some of the glory. At least they had put in James’s friend, the Datuk Patinggi Ali, but they weren’t at all happy about him. There were snotty remarks in Malay about ‘the Brooke regime’. And there, snuggled in amongst them, was Rosly bin Dhobie, assassin of Governor Duncan Stewart.

  Tong frowned. ‘Who is he? There is some theatrical troupe named after him that does stuff on Independence Day.

  ‘Come on. There is more. The children from Bishop McDougall’s school come here during the day to eat their noodles – I was a pupil – but at night it is different.’

  He took my hand and led me back down the steps and abruptly off to one side. At first I thought the sounds were mice and other creeping things. But the dark was busy with furtive doings, quite simply the place where love of the state gave way to the state of forbidden love. Young couples arrived every few minutes, mostly by motorbike, the girl on the back holding on tight. Some sat on the benches, clutching hands stickily, and gazed at the pale moonlight reflected in each other’s soft, brown eyes, but from the giggles and rhythmic thrashing of the shrubs it was clear that others indulged less lunar and more earthy passions.

  ‘There is more. This is a happening place.’

  ‘A happening place?’

  ‘Yes,
very happening. Careful now.’

  We stumbled further, over knee-jarring rough grass and past a row of ancient Chinese tombs, and toed our way down some steps in the darkness under the rustling trees. A line of young men were sitting, smoking demurely, on a low wall as at a tea dance. Tong peered along the row and gave a grunt of recognition, picked one up by the shoulders and hugged him.

  ‘My little brother, James,’ he said and introduced us. We shook hands and touched them to our hearts in greeting. ‘My brother,’ he explained, ‘is one of those gay Bidayuhs you anthropologists say don’t exist.’ He hugged him again. ‘Everybody knows, nobody minds. There is only one sadness, that he cannot know the joy of babies, but that is all right. James and his friend have adopted two of mine.’

  ‘James?’ I asked. ‘Was he named after … ?’

  Tong laughed. ‘No – after my uncle.’

  ‘Welcome to Sarawak Cultural Centre,’ said James with a huge grin. He was small, dark, very handsome. ‘The whole of Sarawak is here.’

  He walked down the row, marking each off by a pat on the shoulder. ‘Iban, Bidayuh, Melanau, Malay, Chinese, Kayan – I’m sorry, I don’t know you …’

  ‘Filipino,’ laughed a stocky little man. ‘I came across from Sabah.’

  ‘… Filipino … and this one …’

  The man at the end sat with the darkened visor of his crash helmet pulled down. ‘I’m not taking it off,’ he said with grim stubbornness, as though James had asked him to. ‘I’m well known in Kuching and I’m a married man.’

  James did a what-to-do? gesture with both arms. We sat. We smoked. I asked whether they knew about the private life of James Brooke. They didn’t – except one.

  ‘I heard something at university in Australia,’ he said airily. ‘Have you seen his portrait? Handsooome-lah.’

  I told them.

  ‘So our rajah loved us,’ said a quiet scholastic Malay, after a bit. ‘That makes me feel good.’

  ‘At least he wasn’t Australian,’ said James irrelevantly. ‘I was just telling about my trip to Bali. You know the Hulu Bar and that old Australian who does the act as a very ugly lady?’ He leaped lightly up onto the wall and strutted in fake arrogance amongst the gleaming eyes and teeth. ‘He did this biiiig number …’ his hips began to swivel and the wiry shoulders to rotate, ‘with a snake …’ he plucked an invisible serpent from the air – perhaps the ghost of one Frank McDougall had killed just yards from this spot – drew it up between his legs and caressed it with practised eroticism. ‘Ooh, he did the most disgusting things with that snake …’ He began to belt out the chorus of ‘I Will Survive’ in a light disco voice as the snake explored his gyrating body and wiggled from one hand across his chest and out over the other. Some of the girls appeared quizzically out of the darkness, smoothed their hair and began clapping and swaying. Their boyfriends followed, struggling into tight jeans and looking annoyed and frustrated. James writhed and grasped the back of his head in ecstasy, twined the snake around his neck and worked through a couple of hand-clapping verses – strutting and spasming towards the big diva finale. ‘I will survive. I will survive. Hey HEY—’ He stopped dead, grasped the snake with both hands, inserted the head in his mouth and made gagging, choking noises. The audience froze. He held up his hand and took the head out again.

  ‘The problem was, his act was so good, he did three encores. The poor snake couldn’t take it any more. It died. Maybe it died of shame.’ James’s assistant went suddenly limp in his hand and he flung it whirling into the bushes. The crowd erupted in cheers and screams of delight. Tong glowed with pride as his little brother danced sure-footedly along the wall, bowed and blew superstar kisses at his adoring public.

  ‘You shouldn’t laugh at animals like that,’ said the Iban, annoyed. ‘There will be a terrible reckoning for laughing at animals. You should never laugh at animals.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ smiled Tong, applauding hard and nodding up at the museum. ‘Relax. There is no harm in it. Look, he’s just following his rajah.’

  Chronology

  1803 Birth of James Brooke

  1834 First voyage to the east

  1839 Arrives in Sarawak

  1841 Assumes governorship

  1849 Battle of Batang Marau

  1854 Singapore inquiry

  1857 Chinese insurrection

  1863 Succession crisis

  1868 Death of James Brooke. Accession of Rajah Charles

  1888 British protectorate over Sarawak declared

  1905 Sarawak reaches greatest geographical size

  1917 Rajah Charles dies. Rajah Vyner accedes to throne

  1941 Japanese invade Sarawak

  1945 Australian troops liberate Sarawak

  1946 Rajah Vyner abdicates. Sarawak becomes a British colony

  1949 Governor Stewart stabbed

  1963 June: Sarawak becomes self-governing. September: Sarawak enters Federation of Malaysia

  1966 End of Indonesian confrontation policy

  Notes

  Chapter One

  1 British Library, Add. 45906.

  2 G. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.2.

  3 S. St John, The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, p.2.

  4 Jacob, op. cit., p.10.

  5 St John, op. cit., p.5.

  6 Jacob, op. cit., p.47.

  7 S. Brooke, Queen of the Headhunters, p.133.

  8 A. Ward, Rajah’s Servant, p.196.

  9 E. Hahn, James Brooke of Sarawak, p.20.

  10 Ibid.

  11 F. Marryat, Borneo and the Indian Archipelago, p.4.

  Chapter Two

  1 G. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.21.

  2 Ibid., p.14.

  3 Ibid., p.21.

  4 Ibid., p.23.

  5 Ibid., p.26.

  6 Ibid., p.27.

  7 S. St John, The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, p.182.

  8 C. Brooke, Ten Years in Sarawak, p.xiii.

  9 R. Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, p.132.

  10 Jacob, op. cit., p.33.

  11 St John, op. cit., p.376.

  12 Ibid., p.92.

  13 Jacob, op. cit., p.45.

  Chapter Three

  1 N. Tarling, The Burthen, the Risk and the Glory, p.13.

  2 G. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.33.

  3 Ibid., p.37.

  4 Ibid., p.39.

  5 Ibid., p.49.

  6 S. St John, The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, p.9.

  7 Jacob, op. cit., p.47.

  8 Ibid., p.69.

  9 G. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak, Vol. II, p.277.

  10 G. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.91.

  11 Ibid., p.54.

  Chapter Four

  1 H. Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy, Vol. I, p.165.

  2 S. St John, The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, p.20.

  3 J. Templer, The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., Rajah of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.85.

  Chapter Five

  1 H. Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy, Vol. I, p.157.

  2 Ibid., p.154.

  3 Ibid., p.163.

  4 Ibid., p.165.

  5 Ibid., p.145.

  6 J. Walker, ‘This Peculiar Acuteness of Feeling’, Borneo Research Bulletin, 1998, p.164.

  7 J. Templer, The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., Rajah of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.269.

  8 Keppel, op. cit., p.208.

  9 Ibid., p.171.

  10 Ibid., p.77.

  11 Ibid., p.195.

  12 Templer, op. cit., p.137.

  13 Keppel, op. cit., p.227.

  14 Ibid., p.50.

  Chapter Six

  1 J. Templer, The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., Rajah of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.116.

  2 Ibid., p.131.

  3 G. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.179.

  4 S. St John, Th
e Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, p.65.

  5 Templer, op. cit., p.123.

  6 H. Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy, Vol. I, p.139.

  7 J. Templer, The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., Rajah of Sarawak, Vol. II, p.17.

  8 Keppel, op. cit., p.321.

  9 St John, op. cit., p.69.

  10 Jacob, op. cit., p.70.

  Chapter Seven

  1 G. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.189.

  2 H. Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy, Vol. II, p.13.

  3 Ibid., p.18.

  4 Ibid., p.43.

  5 Ibid., p.55.

  6 Ibid., p.63.

  7 Ibid., p.65.

  8 Ibid., p.68.

  9 Ibid., p.70.

  10 F. Marryat, Borneo and the Indian Archipelago, p.15.

  11 J. Templer, The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.283.

  12 Marryat, op. cit., p.90.

  13 E. Hahn, James Brooke of Sarawak, p.101.

  14 J. Templer, The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, Vol. II, p.2.

  15 Keppel, op. cit., p.79.

  16 Ibid., p.92.

  17 Ibid., p.95.

  18 Ibid., p.110.

  19 Ibid., p.120.

  Chapter Eight

  1 H. Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy, Vol. II, p.158.

  2 G. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak, Vol. I, p.307.

  3 S. St John, The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, p.110.

  4 Ibid., p.111.

  5 Jacob, op. cit., p.321.

  6 R. Mundy, Narrative of Events in Borneo and Celebes, Down to the Occupation of Labuan: From the Journals of James Brooke, Esq., Rajah of Sarawak, and Governor of Labuan, Vol. II, p.93.

  Chapter Nine

  1 J. Templer, The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., Rajah of Sarawak, Vol. II, p.167.

  2 R. Reece, The Name of Brooke, p.63.