The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  In October 1986, Mutang went to see Bruno. Accompanied by his cousin, who shared his convictions and was a close trading partner with the Penan, he walked two and a half days from Long Napir to Long Seridan. “We avoided logging roads and slept secretly in Long Seridan, and then went by boat three hours down the Magoh” to where Bruno was hiding. “I came into the hut of Sala, who was a respected elder, and it was evening and Bruno was sitting down, talking and writing. He was wearing a loincloth and his hair was cut in the Penan style. He was gentle and calm and so miniature. I told him what I wanted to do and that I wanted all the Penan to support us and we talked all night and all the next morning and he wrote a letter for all the Penan, until I left for Long Seridan again that afternoon.”

  Bruno wrote of the encounter in his journal. “I give my friend the name Spring because his soul is as refreshing as water that bubbles over river rocks. He had already planned a blockade by the population of his home village Long Napir and hoped for an alliance with the Penan. The goal was to get compensation and profit sharing from the company destroying the land. I gave him my opinion that it was not worth fighting for money, which, as experience has shown, leads to betrayal among the villagers, and that an alliance with the Penan makes sense only if there is a unanimous demand for a forest reservation where logging is forbidden.” Bruno wrote that Mutang’s help was “a blessing” because he knew the bureaucracy and “can build bridges between the uneducated natives and the civilized power people in this fight. As a local, he can move about without restrictions; the government can’t stop him.”

  Bruno convinced Mutang for the first time that compensation and profit sharing wasn’t enough, that nothing short of a total ban on logging was the solution. Mutang became his chief contact, the conduit for all of his growing communications to Roger Graf and Georges Rüegg, and his family, in Switzerland, and the swarm of journalists in pilgrimage to see him when the blockades broke out.

  In one of the strange twists of their relationship, when Bruno fled the police in November the authorities once again came into possession of a trove of letters, including ones between Bruno and Mutang. Soon after, Mutang’s distant cousin, who was a policeman, contacted him and invited him for dinner in Bintulu. Mutang was suspicious, but wasn’t sure what to do and figured nothing could go wrong since it was his family. But he arrived to find not just his cousin but the head of Sarawak’s secret police there. “Bruno is an outsider,” they told him, “and it’s not in your interest to cooperate with him. You are a citizen of Sarawak and your allegiance is to your country, not to outsiders.” “They said hard things,” he said, “that they knew what I was doing seemed good, but that I had to be a good citizen.” He was stuck. Mutang became a police informer, a double agent, consistently reporting mundane details even as, he maintains, “I never betrayed Bruno.” And, indeed, he would not only be arrested again and spend weeks in jail without charges, but have to flee the country and seek political asylum in Canada.

  The first blockades broke out on cue in late March 1987, and soon more Penan joined and erected more obstructions—by October they had sprung up at twenty-three sites guarded by twenty-five hundred Penan, Kelabit, and Kenyah from twenty-six bands and settlements, and logging was brought to a standstill.

  Police and soldiers and logging workers, often Iban Dayaks, camped outside of the blockades, watching, waiting, cajoling, threatening, and hunting in the surrounding forest with shotguns and powerful lights, laying waste to the wildlife and food sources of the Penan. “The bulldozers are quiet now,” Bruno wrote in June. “The fuel reserves of WTK Company are exhausted.” A few loggers left the camps, but most, hoping the blockades would soon be lifted, hung around, hunting in the forest for recreation and food. “The virginal Magoh River is incredibly rich with fish and the Iban loggers . . . now attack these riches with nets, harpoons, poison, and self-made detonation devices. With sorrow and anger, the nomad looks on powerlessly as sago palms are cut down and the loggers now become direct competitors for food. The police and field force squads, which constantly surround the blockades, also go into the larders of the Penan to hunt. Equipped with halogen floodlights, they illuminate the embankments of the logging roads from their jeeps. The eyes of the blinded game glow and make for simple targets for the deadly bullets. At the blockade, Libai complains that the uniformed men shot six deer, two wild boars, and an anteater in a span of two nights and that they refused to give the natives part of their prey.”

  Officials came and went by helicopter. Penan women taunted their opponents by pulling up their sarongs and spreading their legs. “Furiously, some of the mad women throw off their sarongs,” Bruno wrote, “and sit with legs spread in front of the hoity-toity civilization, and some of them even pee . . . and the men they address turn their heads in embarrassment. ‘You probably think we are stupid to show our pussies?—No, there is a reason for this! Why should we talk and talk, over and over again, if you don’t listen to us anyway?!’ Indeed, the males are cut down to size when they look at the very place from which we all came into this world.”

  Bruno became famous overnight. Headlines about him exploded across the world; the twenty-four-page GEO piece was reprinted in Spain, Japan, South Africa, Italy, and Norway. Bruno ignited centuries of Western tropes as reporters and filmmakers and environmental activists flooded in, bent on seeing Bruno as much as covering the Penan and their shrinking forest. “He wears John Lennon spectacles and looks frail in rare photographs,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “He suffers from malaria and says he has survived three snakebites. Armed with a spear and a flute, however, Bruno Manser, a 32-year-old Swiss artist, has roamed Sarawak’s remotest jungles . . . and he has enlisted in their fight to save their tropical rain-forest homeland from logging-company chainsaws and bulldozers.

  “Officials in Sarawak, a state that is dominated by timber politics and money, have denounced Mr. Manser as a ‘Communist’ and a ‘Zionist.’ Malaysia’s largest newspaper . . . ridiculed him in an elaborate April Fools’ Day spoof.”

  “The Wild Man of Borneo Leads in Blowpipe War,” shouted the Observer in England. “To the government of Sarawak, North Borneo, Bruno Manser is a subversive. His picture has been circulated to jungle police posts. A squad of the State paramilitary Police Field Force is hunting him.

  “But to the Dayak tribesmen, many of them former head-hunters, he is Tuan Bruno, Chief Bruno, a Tarzan figure who is going to lead them to victory against the authorities who are taking away their land. It’s a battle of blowpipes against bulldozers, led by a man in the role of Robin Hood.”

  “Swiss Chieftain of the Blowpipe War,” blared the Swiss tabloid Blick. “Hunted mercilessly through the jungle inferno of Borneo and revered by the blowpipe warriors . . . Swiss Bruno Manser is one of the last great adventurers of our time.”

  James Ritchie helicoptered in to one blockade. “As we circled the blockaded area the Bell [helicopter] . . . set to land upon the restless natives. It was a pathetic sight—the visibly untidy and skimpily dressed Penan gathered there were living in flimsy and ramshackle open huts perched on a raised embankment near the blockade. When I met them, they appeared a disorganized rabble, who were quite unaware of what was happening around them. They were living off the surrounding area, but many had left their settlements for days and had not much food. It appeared as if all their hopes hinged on that slender piece of log lying across the dusty timber track; a sad, forlorn symbol of their protest, their hope of getting the forest reserve that Manser and his environmentalist friends were trying to pressure the government into.”

  In August Bruno wrote Roger Graf. “Doris and the photographer Harold from Stern [magazine] have left. Thanks to our friend ‘Spring’ who organized the meeting. . . . We had a good time together, but with this article I’ve realized that it’s less about the Penan and more about me—I am a bit disappointed that during the whole time the photographer only wanted to take pictures of me and showed less interest in damaged forests, huge tre
es, and Penan faces. But I played the game and made jumping jacks for Harold in front of the camera. I then laid it to Doris’s heart not to make a cult of personality around me, but to put the fight of the indigenous in the foreground.

  “In the next days, three other British journalists (BBC London) want to meet me, and in October for a full month a Swedish film group (four men from Stockholm) are coming.

  “Our friend Spring is on his way to KL [Kuala Lumpur] to get the money that Roger has raised for me and to buy a video recorder. So I hope to be less dependent on white journalists, whose arrival at the place of trouble is always problematic.”

  The whole thing was growing; to turn it into an effective, worldwide media campaign required a new level of coordination. But Bruno was a wanted man somewhere in a trackless jungle. The blockades were a stain the Malaysian government wanted to hide. Reporters couldn’t just fly in and travel upriver or by road to see him; immigration officials were on the alert; police manned roadblocks along logging roads to the blockades and forest beyond. Reporters had to be sneaked in from Brunei or Kalimantan or by sea, and then Bruno had to be located. Activists and reporters in Europe needed to be in contact with Bruno; letters, audio, and videotapes had to flow in and out.

  Before any of them really understood it, grasped its all-consuming energy, Mutang and Roger Graf and Georges Rüegg found themselves dedicating their lives to Bruno and the Penan, even as they all had full-time jobs themselves. “I was his friend, not an environmental activist,” said Rüegg, “but slowly it just grew bigger.” Georges had a friend in Penang, Malaysia, and he created a “letter bridge”: Bruno got things to Mutang, who sent them to Penang, where they were sent on to Georges in Switzerland. “Letters, tapes, thousands of pages of his diary, they would all come to me and I’d send them on to Roger or to Erich and Aga,” said Mutang. Soon the friends started communicating by fax, Georges running to the neighborhood post office to send twenty pages to Penang, where it would then be printed and sent to Mutang. “People were calling me, faxing me, writing me, from France, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, America,” said Georges, “and my phone bill was three thousand Swiss francs a month! It took more and more time!” And to keep it all going required an increasing amount of money. Bruno wanted nothing to do with money, but Georges insisted, making Bruno sign a power of attorney appointing him Bruno’s agent.

  As his friends worked overtime in Switzerland and the blockades unfolded, Bruno roamed the forest alone, only occasionally visiting the blockades themselves. “I’ve built a hideaway in the inhospitable terrain of the gorge,” he wrote. “Even a trained police squad would hardly come upon this inhospitable place where every step is laborious. The Limbang River is said to be wild farther toward the headwaters of the mouth of the Rayah River. There are deep ponds between steep rock shoulders and you cannot follow the water—I was told to stay away from the area. Forbidden things are enticing and one day I set out on an excursion after my friends have gone down the valley to block the logging companies. My only equipment are small shorts, a knife, and a bush knife. I plan on circumventing the gorge by land and then swimming down the valley. I have to climb high up a mountain and then steeply back down on the other side until I reach the stream. There are traces of wild boar and deer. The sky gets more and more black while picking jakah palm heart and I suddenly get worried: what if there will be high water while I’m swimming down valley in the gorge, with no way to escape?

  “I hurry down the mountain until I reach the banks of the Limbang River, put the palm heart in the back of my shorts, and swim downriver. My Penan friends exaggerated a bit: the inhospitable and hard-to-walk riverbanks are no obstacle for the swimmer. I leave the water above the rapids and circumvent them, only to hop back into the water below the rapids. The threatening clouds lift and I leisurely swim on my back down the valley.”

  A pattern developed that would be repeated over the next thirteen years: Bruno’s actions and passions and obsessions inspired others, who did the heavy support of logistics and communications and dedicated their lives to him and his cause, even as he often disappeared for days at a time to indulge his nomadic curiosity.

  The Malaysian government fought back. In June, after Sahabat Alam Malaysia brought twelve Penans to Kuala Lumpur to meet with ministers, it invited its own delegation of Western Penan to the capital. With cameras clicking, it offered them a powerboat and cash payments. Penans “say yes to logging,” dutifully reported the Borneo Post the next day. But they had been settled for years; it blamed the Kelabit Dayaks and semi-settled Penan’s shifting slash-and-burn rice cultivation for far more destruction of the forest than “selective” logging.

  Finally, in October, the government began moving against the blockades, dismantling them in exchange for vague promises of everything from money to outboard motors to typewriters to a forest preserve, none of which were given out. Forty-two Kayan were arrested at one blockade. “In pressing heat and sand flies,” Bruno wrote Roger Graf, “some hundred armed men are scanning the jungle close to the blockades, searching for me. So the fearful Penan have urged me to leave the area for about two to three weeks. During this time, the hopeless opened up the blockades and allowed the company to transport about 4,000 tons of logged timber down to the valley.

  “At the moment my head is humming from all those talks, news, lack of sleep and sticky heat . . . and the demoralized, partly hungry Penan are said to have given in, after being led through prayer by the government representatives—without any written guarantee, compensation, or whatever.”

  A few weeks later the Sarawak State Legislative Assembly passed an amendment to the Sarawak Forest Ordinance making it illegal to obstruct a logging road, irrespective of the legal status of the land, punishable by up to two years in prison and a 6,000-Malaysian-ringgit fine. “The Europeans should blame the Penans instead of the Government for destroying the forests,” Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad told the New Straits Times, “but of course, they would rather blame the Government and logging concessionaires. And the Penan should stop moving from place to place for shifting cultivation but instead stay in one area and manage the land properly.”

  “Govt to Act Against Swiss Fugitive,” declared the Straits Times in Singapore on November 25. “‘Malaysia will take stern action against Swiss fugitive Bruno Manser, who has been declared a subversive element, a Sarawak state minister has said. Appropriate action will be taken against him once he is arrested,’ Minister for Industrial Development Abang Johari Abang Openg said on Monday. Mr Abang Johari said that local sympathisers ‘who are involved in harbouring Manser are liable to face legal action.’”

  Nevertheless, throughout 1988 new blockades sprang up and more filmmakers and outsiders poured in. In July the European Parliament passed a resolution limiting the import of Malaysian timber (a plan later rejected by the European Commission). In November eleven Penan and Kelabit were arrested at a blockade near Long Napir, followed by twenty-one Penan in December. In January even more blockades sprang up, followed by the rapid arrest at five sites of 105 Penan, who were held in custody for two weeks. Harrison Ngau was arrested.

  And, it was said, the government had placed a $15,000 bounty on Bruno.

  He was, of course, nowhere to be found. Throughout 1988 he wandered and fished and hunted. He wrote thousands of words in his journal, cajoled the Penan to not give in, to keep the faith and erect new blockades. He went weeks without contact even with Mutang, who continued to sneak activists and journalists and filmmakers in, often from Brunei. They carried letters in to Bruno, ferried his letters out. His mood rose and fell. He managed to get a video camera and began shooting hours of tape of the Penan, which he smuggled out to Roger Graf and Georges Rüegg in Switzerland. His letters show a growing sense of political sophistication and clandestine operations, as his network—abetted by his Swiss friends—grew around the world.

  Bruno had been gone for five and a half years now. He was increasingly worried about his pare
nts’ health, the constant pressure from the Malaysian police, and doing something that might tip the balance for the Penan. He pondered turning himself in, an action that he believed might force the government’s hand. And he continued to behave recklessly, wandering alone for long periods in the steepest mountains and deepest forest where a single mishap, a broken leg, a twisted ankle, a branch falling on his head—the most common Penan injury—might be deadly. And now he wasn’t just catching pythons, but the deadliest snake in the forest: pit vipers. “In the company of two families, we go up the mountain into barely touched headwaters. Up on a crest is a poisonous green snake, located a bit up high on a path that is bordered by uwut palm trees. As I attempt to catch the reptile, my friends warn me and turn away and continue on their path. I am wondrously looking at the reptile. It looks mad and furiously out of a perpendicular pupil. I grab it by the neck and it turns and convulses and widely opens its mouth, even spreading each of its jaws and opening its toxic teeth. After I commit it to paper, I give the sulking reptile its freedom. One of the Penan calls the snake with the thick head and high arched back ‘Utin Tassa.’ A ten-year-old girl died the day after she was bitten. A boy had thrown the snake, which had been beaten and was assumed to be dead, after the girl to scare the girl.”