Mackenzie, one of a handful of foreigners to speak Penan fluently, said that any groups who wanted to settle should have as many generations as they needed to make the momentous transition.
“To force them to make it brutally in a few years, it’s almost beyond the capacity of human beings to make that leap. It’s as if you or I were dropped down in the middle of the primary jungle and forced to survive,” he said.
On a sliver of hilltop not far from the blockade, Sagong’s tribe from the district of Ba Marong has constructed three sturdy open-sided huts, raised from the ground and built of saplings and bamboo lashed together with vines.
In a tropical downpour that drenched the canopy and turned the ground to mud, they sat serenely with their children — including a five-month-old baby — who, despite these most basic conditions were clean, dry and healthy.
Playing with a baby monkey that the family kept as a pet, Sagong’s daughter Nili smiled and shook her head when she was asked whether she liked this life in the rainforest.
“I would like to go to school,” she said shyly.
These days few Penan still sport the traditional bowl-shaped haircut, woven bamboo hats, brightly beaded necklaces and stretched earlobes that sometimes dangle near the shoulders.
In his baseball cap paired with a purple loincloth, and bare chest marked with tattoos including Christian images, snakes and a skull and crossbones, Sagong laughed when asked about his appearance.
“I’m a new generation, I don’t dress like that,” he said as he stood next to his father-in-law, who wore a monkey tooth around his neck, bunches of woven bangles, and played a bamboo nose flute.
“For us the jungle was our bank, we survived without money. Our life depended on the sago palm and wild animals and for generations we have lived like this,” said the older man, Ngau Anyi.
Sagong said his own band of 27 people wanted help to establish a proper house with access to schools and medical care, while still having the chance to hunt and gather in the forest.
“Our wish is to have our own village, to do farming,” he said. “We see other settlements and that’s what we want. We have to spend a lot of time building huts and moving around. It’s a hard life.”
The plight of the Penan was made famous in the 1980s by environmental activist Bruno Manser, who waged a crusade to protect their way of life and fend off the loggers. He vanished in 2000 — many suspect foul play.
Manser lived with a group of nomadic Penan from 1984 to 1990 and learnt to speak Penan as well as how to survive in the jungle, while gathering a huge amount of botanical and cultural information.
“We have been accused of being against development, of wanting to keep the Penan in a museum,” said Lukas Straumann, director of the Bruno Manser Fund, which continues to campaign for the people of the rainforests.
“Maybe there was a little bit of truth to that. But what we hear from the Penan is that they want development, to participate in modern life, but it has to be development at their own pace,” he said.
RSS