Headhunters of Borneo

 

There is a sense of isolation and oriental intrigue about Sarawak; dense jungle, swampy rainforests, humidity, and prodigious amounts of rain dissuade tourists from visiting its ex-headhunting Iban and Dayak tribes. There are very few roads, so most transportation for goods and people is by watercraft along its labyrinth of rivers that empty out into the South China Sea.

 

    We had landed at the capital of Kuching during a violent monsoonal storm. We needed a few days to acclimatise to the overbearing heat and heavy humidity, so we found lodgings at a local Anglican Mission. 

My purpose for being in Sarawak was to take Jean to the remote village of Nanga Kamalee, where, as a 22-year-old traventurer, I had previously visited during Indonesia's undeclared war of ‘Confrontation’ with Malaysia.

 

 

   Despite the country’s newfound wealth from oil and timber – much of which is remitted back to Malaya – it remains an unspoilt and fascinating country. It has a ruggedness and mystery that no doubt first attracted British adventurer James Brooke, who in 1838 helped the local Sultanate of Brunei put down an uprising. His reward was having the area of Sarawak ceded to him.

 

    As Governor and self-appointed Rajah, he pulled the area together as a country, banned the practice of headhunting and eventually stopped warfare between the local Iban and Dayak tribes. He and the descendants of the Brooke family ruled the land until the late 1940s, when it gained independence and merged with Malaysia.

 

 

    From Kuching, we journeyed north from Kuching along the coast to Sarikei by fast patrol boat, where a change of boat took us to an overnight stop in Sibu; a bustling market town.

 

    A further two-hour journey by a skinny ‘river bus’ up the Rajang River brought us to the last outpost of Kapit. We were hoping to obtain a Government Permit and a guide to transport us further inland to the Iban village of Nanga Kamalee.

 

    The tiny trading post of Kapit was originally a garrison town set up in 1880 by the Brooke family to separate the Iban and Orang Ulu tribes from warring. Today, despite its primitive isolation and inaccessibility by road, it has an inordinate number of BMWs and Mercedes owned by successful Chinese traders whose wealth comes from acting as middlemen between the logging and palm-oil enterprises further along the numerous branches of the Rajang River.

 

    We were fortunate to meet David Chuo, the president of the local Jaycees, who with his fellow members made our few days sojourn all the more informative and enjoyable.

 

    It was more by luck than judgement that we found our guide slowly getting well and truly sizzled in the bar of a local market. He was an indigenous headmaster of a primary school located close to the village we were heading for. He and his assistant were in town on a buying trip for his school and agreed to take us upriver provided we helped him load up his boat.

 

    His ‘boat' was a narrow, seven-metre canoe with a long-tail outboard motor, to which we precariously had to ‘plank-walk’ across several rolling logs to carry his assortment of purchases: a large second-hand fridge, a one metre glass aquarium with three live fish, two protesting ducks and boxes of foodstuff. A newly recruited teacher with his trunk of worldly goods also joined us.

 

 

    Once loaded we set off up the fast running Rajang River in our quest to revisit some of Borneo’s ex-headhunters. It was a painfully slow journey against the flow, which took many hours of squatting, bailing, and gripping the edge of our unstable and overloaded canoe. We bounced and battled against currents and rapids, constantly dodging around hidden rocks and floating logs.

 

    Occasional rest stops were made on sand bars infested with mosquitos and sand flies. Fresh rambutan fruit or a shared bottle of beer was usually passed around.

 

    We arrived late afternoon at a collection of wooden huts with corrugated tin roofs perched high up in a clearing on the riverbank away from possible flooding. It was our host’s school: it catered for children who arrived in family canoes on a Monday morning and were picked up to return to their villages on Friday night.

 

    It was becoming dark, a storm crashed around us and it was too late to continue upriver. Our guide’s family prepared a rice-based meal for us whilst we unpacked our sleeping bags and mosquito net to set up camp on the floor of an outbuilding. 

 

    The following morning, we were taken a short distance upriver to the village of Nanga Kamalee where we were left with neither a guide nor an interpreter.

 

 

    An Iban village is comprised of a single communal ‘longhouse’ built on high stilts on the banks of the rivers; some are so large they can hold several hundred families. Nanga Kamalee, however was small and held about forty families, each having its own spacious self-contained single room, outside of which, running the full length of the longhouse, was a covered common veranda, about 20-foot wide, used for socializing or working on crafts and net repairs.

 

    Our unannounced visit was greeted with interest but with guarded curiosity by the tribe. We soon broke down any barriers when I produced photographs I had taken of children on a previous visit. These children were now grown up and parents in their own right.

 

    We were made welcome and invited to stay overnight in the headman’s family unit: a large open-plan room used by his extended family for eating, sleeping, food preparation, and relaxation. It was in many ways much the same as I had experienced years before; however, I was pleased to see that conditions of hygiene, comfort, and clothing had since improved greatly.

 

    Despite the lack of verbal communication, we spent a wonderful evening, hilariously entertaining the village with western party games, harmonica music, and sing-a-longs.

 

    Our hosts were a little unsure of what to do with us the following morning, so they took us back to the river to wait on a sandbar for a passing boat.

 

    Although we were a little disappointed not to have stayed longer at Nanga Kamalee, it was perhaps very fortuitous, because despite a four hour wait, the first boat to come along offering a lift was not returning down river, but heading even further away from civilisation. We jumped aboard and soon found ourselves in another unusual situation … to be continued next time.