by Carl Hoffman
“He was so small but he seemed like a giant,” said Martin Vosseler, a physician who went to see that first event.
“He smelled special,” said Ruedi Suter, a journalist. “Like a shepherd. His clothes were self-made and rough homespun, but his words were so simple and direct you understood immediately what he wanted to say.”
“He was like Jesus Christ,” said Jacques Christinet, a mountaineer who when he was twenty-seven glommed on to Bruno during a period of dangerous, self-destructive risk taking—“psychological suicide,” as he put it. “People just followed him, and I was one of them. He didn’t have to convince people. That was Bruno. He dragged people in with no effort. He was a magnet. A funnel. A spin of energy. But when you went with Bruno you risked your life.”
Now that he was back, the struggle and its organizing logistics escalated a hundredfold. Every environmental activist and human rights campaigner wanted to meet him. Thousands of pages of faxes were pouring into and out of Graf’s office (he worked at a small publishing company that let him campaign as long as he got his work done) and Georges Rüegg’s house, from all over the world. Phone calls at any hour of day or night. Both had jobs but worked full-time for Bruno and the cause for free. Bruno’s correspondence became a flood, page after page of letters written on trains, in people’s houses, at 2 a.m., 4 a.m., always with a personal touch in the language of brotherhood and struggle, skillfully urging his followers on even as he and Georges and Roger built an international movement. “Dear brothers and sisters, let the big spirit touch you,” he wrote to Anja Licht in Australia.
By June protests were breaking out in Australia, and Bruno flew to join them. By July one hundred organizations in more than thirty countries conducted twenty-four-hour hunger strikes in front of Malaysian embassies. “Sisters and Brothers in struggle,” he wrote to a group of activists in Australia. “I am just touched by you, the Australian activists supporting the Penan people. If you do such a long fast, please eat one spoon of honey a day to strengthen your body. . . . Myself I feel a bit weak and empty after all these tasks and travels with lack of sleep. I am longing for the songs of nature, but cannot rest yet as long as there is no moratorium achieved. The light of the spirit may touch our souls and strengthen our circle.”
With the help of volunteers around the world, Bruno organized the Voices for the Borneo Rainforests World Tour. Over six weeks he escorted two Penans and Mutang Urud to twenty-five cities in thirteen countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, raising awareness for the hoped-for moratorium on September 1. More press, more fame. In the United States, he and Mutang and the Penans met Vice President Al Gore, who in 1992 pushed through a toothless resolution in the Senate “calling upon the Government of Malaysia to act immediately” to defend the land of its “indigenous peoples” and asking Japan to investigate its logging companies. In Canada, Bruno met with the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons. In France, he and Mutang met First Lady Danielle Mitterrand. In London, they spoke before twenty thousand people at a Grateful Dead concert in Wembley Stadium. In Germany, they met Klaus Töpfer, environment minister. In Japan, the minister of environment apologized for Japan’s hunger for tropical hardwood.
Women fell at his feet. “Thanks for your phone a moment ago,” he wrote in English on the train from Basel to Aarau on August 20, just before the start of the tour, to Beth Lischeron, the Canadian volunteer who directed it. “Too short to ask you about what is more essential for you and me and more touching than all others: Are you going to be mother and myself father? You’re really a beautiful woman—and I was just overwhelmed by your femininity and loved you. When I saw you standing there as a human being with your own personality with your own center, that’s the moment! Being enthusiastic and join [sic] for a beautiful night is of course much easier than joining the path of life for the whole future. . . . For my own experience I have to state that a man-woman relation has in my whole past always been secondary. Maybe I turned too independent as to go the way back; maybe I have other tasks.” It was a classic Dear John letter. Behind the beautiful words and emotions, beyond the beautiful night, he was blowing her off. He didn’t want a relationship, but wanted to keep her in the fight, and she assented.
A German publishing company brought out Penan: Voices from the Borneo Rainforest, a selection of Bruno’s drawings mated with emotional Penan laments about the destruction of their Eden. On the World Tour he met Wade Davis, a Harvard-educated Canadian ethnobotanist, whose sister-in-law was married to Senator Jay Rockefeller and whose Serpent and the Rainbow, a narrative exploring the culture and pharmacology of Haitian voodoo, had been a bestselling book and was made into a movie. Although Davis was trained as a scientist, it was as a writer and raconteur bringing attention to endangered indigenous people and their sacred worlds that he became well known, largely from his perch as an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. He soon took up the Penan’s cause and eloquently romanticized them in a series of books and articles, transforming a people with deep knowledge of their forest home into heroes of environmental wisdom and spiritual insight.
In reality the Penan conserved their forest not because doing so fit into some overarching age-old spiritual and ethical wisdom but because all they had were machetes and blowguns and they were few in number. The Eastern Penan had vague notions of mutually beneficial sago tree ownership and conservation and a general knowledge of the plants around them, but little conservation ethic in the Western sense. They were so attuned to their bellies—their survival depended on it—and hunting was so deeply ingrained in their psyches and sense of purpose and joy that they routinely killed anything in their path, even if their stomachs were full or they had too much meat to carry. “Generally, the natives shoot at anything that moves,” Bruno wrote. “If he had a gun and bullets, he’d shoot five boars in one day without being able to utilize them properly.” Bruno was always trying to persuade them to kill only what they needed, an idea that seemed laughable to them. And he was dumbfounded when, for the first time, he saw his Penan companions spot a tree laden with fruit and voraciously cut it down. As Western writers and filmmakers and environmentalists flooded into Sarawak, the Penan themselves learned to parrot ideas and concepts of importance to their Western visitors. The anthropologist Peter Brosius writes how Davis took Brosius’s research into Penan sago harvesting and use of medicinal plants and embellished his “description with reference to a form of ecological etherealism that is derived entirely from the Western romantic tradition and has little relation to any set of ideas that would be recognizable to Penan.”
Davis wrote a long, moving feature about Bruno for Outside magazine, which in 1991 named Bruno its Outsider of the Year. In a four-page single-spaced letter he urged Bruno to sell his life story to Hollywood. “I realize Bruno that you are besieged with offers and surrounded by well-intentioned advice and that some part of you must want only to retreat into the wilderness of the spirit. But I write these words to you in a sincerity and as someone who has felt the same ebb and flow of desires, the same sense of being under siege by people trying to reinvent who I am or draw energy for their lives off of myself.
“My sense is that you have, for better or for worse, entered into a course of action, a current of history that now has taken on a life of its own. Whether you like it or not, your immediate fate has been tied to that of your Penan brothers and sisters. Your passions and dreams can never be realized until their lands and their future are secured. And we all know that one of the few strategies we have is to raise the profile of the tragedy so high that it cannot be ignored. I take that as a given—I know that you do not like having the spotlight upon you—it runs against everything you believe, everything you seek. Yet you must also know that, for whatever reasons, you are and have become the metaphor, the vehicle, through which people in Europe, North America, and Australia reach an understanding of who the Penan are and what it is that is being sacrificed upon this altar of greed.”
On June 20, 1991, Bruno received an executed option contract from Warner Bros., negotiated by the William Morris Agency, and, soon after, a check for $27,000 after his agent’s cut. The option was extended in 1996 for an additional $20,000. The film would never be made; Bruno objected to the initial script, because the studio, in the words of its writer, David Franzoni, “wanted the Bruno character to represent an EVERYMAN . . . an arrogant slightly obnoxious Western Man who will be won over by the Penan,” and then the director, Art Linson, had a “falling out” with Warner Bros. Bruno wrote to Steven Spielberg in 1994, “From shepherd-life in the Swiss Alps to the last virgin jungles in Borneo: I heard that you have shown interest once to make a motion picture about my adventures there and the peaceful battle to safe [sic] some of that paradise, home to the Penan nomads. Your film ‘Schindler’s List’ has convinced me. You are the best director to make it the best film! There are lots of impressing adventures not yet included in the script, which reflect the power of true life.”
Bruno couldn’t sit still. At the G7 Summit in London in June 1991, he somehow pierced the security cordon and chained himself to the top of a thirty-foot-high lamppost outside Westminster Abbey, dangling a banner that read G7? SARAWAK? FOREST? DESTRUCTION? HUMAN RIGHTS! VIOLATIONS! MORATORIUM NOW!, “further enhancing his status as Europe’s newest environmental celebrity,” reported the New York Times. The police cut him loose after ninety minutes and arrested him. “They sat me down at a table and asked me what I was protesting against,” Bruno told the Times. “I pointed to the table and said: ‘This is what I am protesting against. I am protesting the fact that you have this table made out of wood from the rainforest.’”
In Sarawak, more blockades broke out, with five hundred Penan blocking the road. Bruno sent money to Mutang, who increasingly felt afraid for his own safety. “I was nervous, there were a lot of rumors,” Mutang said. But Bruno urged him on. “Brother,” he wrote, “So happy to know that you are well and did not loose [sic] your smile in the hard times! International support slowly is rising, but it’s just a question of time, and soon action, to safe [sic] as much as possible. Try your best to keep the spirit of the people up!”
Mutang’s fears, however, were justified. On February 5, 1992, at 11:30 p.m., while sitting at home in Miri, he was arrested by eight plainclothed policemen and taken to his office, where the police went through his files until dawn. Then they locked him in Miri’s prison. “I saw so many things. Shit and pee everywhere. You had to lie down in your underwear. No blankets. It was cold. I couldn’t sleep. I had a Bible and they took it away. They came in the early morning and kicked or punched me.” After a week he was made to dress, was bundled into a Land Rover and driven to Kuching. Ten miles from town they stopped at a police station. Outside of the car men in black clothes talked, whispered, “making me really nervous. Are they going to kill me? I felt like a chicken about to be slaughtered.” He was transferred to another Land Rover with one of the black-clothed officers, who told him to lie down with his head on his lap. They put a black bag over his head. “We drove and drove, we just went around and around.” After an hour or two, he can’t remember, they stopped. “Stand up. Left, right, jump, they were teasing me.” In a narrow, windowless room they removed the bag, and the chief of the special branch interrogated him. “They wanted to know everything, wanted me to write about all of my contacts, and it went on for two nights with no sleep. They’d leave and come back. ‘Mutang, you know how it is,’ they said. ‘You could be kept for three weeks or three months . . . But if you cooperate . . .’ I had no communications with anyone, no lawyer.”
With Mutang in prison, the Federal Reserve Unit of the Malaysian security services cleared the latest blockade. Pressure on Malaysia was mounting from all directions, and on March 3, 1992, Bruno received a personal letter from Mahathir Mohamed, the prime minister of Malaysia. “Herr Manser,” it read. “If any Penan or policeman gets killed or wounded in the course of restoring law and order in Sarawak, you will have to take the blame. It is you and your kind who instigated the Penans to take the law into their own hands. . . .
“As a Swiss living in the laps [sic] of luxury with the world’s highest standard of living, it is the height of arrogance for you to advocate that the Penans live on maggots and monkeys in their miserable huts, subjected to all kinds of diseases. It is fine for you to spend a short holiday taking the Penan way of life and then returning to the heated comfort of your Swiss chalet. But do you really expect the Penans to subsist on monkeys until the year 2500 or 3000 or forever? Have they no right to a better way of life? What right have you to condemn them to a primitive life forever?
“Your Swiss ancestors were hunters also. But you are now one of the most ‘advanced’ people living in beautiful Alpine villages, with plenty of leisure and very high income. But you want to deny even a slight rise in the standard of living for the Penans and other Malaysians. The Penans may tell you that their primitive life is what they like. That is because they are not given a chance to live a better life like the other tribes in Sarawak. Those of the Penans who have left the jungle are educated and are earning a better living have no wish to return to their primitive ways. You are trying to deny them their chance for a better life so that you can enjoy studying primitive peoples the way you study animals. Penans are people and they should be respected as people. If you had a chance to be educated and live a better life, they too deserve that chance.
“Stop being arrogant and thinking that it is the white man’s burden to decide the fate of the peoples in this world.”
It was an extraordinary letter, revealing just how deeply Bruno had gotten under the skin of the Malaysian government. But it also cut to the heart of a complex issue, exposing both the blatant racism and self-serving interests of the Malaysian majority and that majority’s profound resentment of the West, its former colonial overlord, which had grown rich off its colony’s natural resources. Bruno, in essence, wanted to stop time. From his vantage point, it was clear: the quality of Penan traditional life, a world in which food was plentiful and free for the taking, in which family bands lived close, intimate lives from birth until death, in a rich, unsullied environment always without a time clock or a boss or the constant empty quest for consumer goods, was far superior. That’s what all those people wandering around Bali with their yoga mats and buying up the Dayaks’ traditional art were in search of, after all. A spiritual connection with nature and each other and the great mysteries of life that science and reason and consumerism had snuffed out as surely as pouring water on a fire. Bruno could see that because he’d lived in the other world. But the Penan hadn’t. And there were, of course, benefits to development: Health care. Longevity. Life in so many ways was easier with a solid roof and a warm bed and rice in the larder, not to mention education, literacy, and the powers that potentially came with them. Theoretically at least, education meant mobility, choices, a self-consciousness that the Penan didn’t have. Who was Bruno or any rich Western environmental activist to deny the Penan that opportunity? In the best of all worlds the Penan could decide for themselves. But can a people who can’t read or write and knew nothing of the larger world make informed decisions? It was the essential conundrum of white efforts to save rain forests and indigenous peoples throughout the world. To westerners Bruno was a selfless savior and the Penan the quintessence of noble savages. To the Malaysian government they were a primitive embarrassment who needed to be saved from their own primitiveness (a process that not incidentally meant enormous profits for Malaysia’s elites).
Both, of course, were exaggerations.
On the very same day that Mahathir wrote Bruno, Mutang was brought to court, released, and rearrested that afternoon and again interrogated “day and night. They showed me electrical wires and said, ‘Look!’” After two weeks he was suddenly made to shower and dress, blindfolded, taken by car to the VIP lounge of the Kuching airport, and, in handcuffs, put on a plane to Miri “surrounded by cops on all sides
.” Landing in Miri, he was taken to court, where he found his sister and a lawyer waiting. After a frantic international campaign for his freedom, he was once again released and then immediately rearrested until, at five that evening, he walked free after nearly a month. But Malaysia was no longer safe for him. “My lawyer said I had to go, that the next time I got arrested it would be worse.” He grabbed his passport and some books and clothes and went into hiding at a friend’s house, leaving by ferry the day after to Brunei, where he stayed for a week. By luck, he’d been invited to speak in New York, an invitation that included a visa. Leaving his country, his family, the Kelabit Dayak man, born in a rice shed on the edge of the jungle in the Borneo highlands, fled to New York. Soon after, thanks to American supporters and Al Gore, he received a ten-year visa to the United States.
In June he rendezvoused for the first time in two years with Bruno at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. There, one of the most improbable meetings ever to occur took place: Bruno Manser and the prime minister of Malaysia sat down for an hour. Bruno left the meeting “depressed—I realized that Dr. Mahathir cannot or does not want to face the true situation and my wish to touch his heart on behalf of the Penan was not (yet) fulfilled at this first meeting.”
Then, straight out of the meeting, Bruno traveled to the top of the 120-foot-tall statue of Christ the Redeemer on the Corcovado high above the bay, and, in tandem, paraglided into Macarena Stadium, which was packed with a hundred thousand fans watching a soccer match, trailing a banner proclaiming: FROM BORNEO TO BRAZIL! SAVE THE RAINFOREST! RESPECT THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE!
In December Mutang spoke to the UN General Assembly in New York. Soon after, partly due to the efforts of Wade Davis, the University of British Columbia offered him a full scholarship for a four-year degree in art and anthropology. He accepted and moved to Vancouver. “I wanted to go back home, that was where the fight was, but no one could be seen working with me. What could I do? I was depressed for several years.”