Previously, the missionary had travelled through Sarawak’s lively festival season, crossing rough rivers to visit poor Christian families and joining an Iban longhouse celebration where old rites mixed with rock and roll. He met an ageing jungle fighter with proud memories of the war, heard tales of the hard early days in Kuala Belait, and returned through the forest for the school festivities. At Marudi’s famous regatta, he watched tradition, business and politics meet on the broad river, while the old glamour of the celebrations slowly began to fade.
Marudi attracted all kinds of visitors. Often a government minister would arrive on a fact-finding tour. We as local community leaders would get an invitation to come and listen. The governor arrived once in his steam yacht, a relic of the Brooke era. In recognition of their Devon roots they named it “Lorna Doone”. The ministers were of course politicians first and foremost; the attraction to them of the Baram was that both the State Assemblyman and the MP for the national parliament in Kuala Lumpur were in the SUPP, or the Sarawak United People Party, the opposition. For this reason the area was kept at a very low level of development; schools, roads, clinics were substandard compared to other parts of the country. Our representatives, both intelligent and articulate, were of the Borneo Evangelical Church who had financed their teacher training overseas. They returned with the desire to see that their people got justice. In the end they went over to the government party rather than suffer to see their area deliberately denied development. It is easy for us to judge but they held out for many years at great personal trouble for themselves and families.
It was commonplace both in Sarawak but especially in Sabah after the state election for some assemblymen to change sides. At one time in Sabah, so many went over that the whole election results were upset. To be an opposition MP means to be denied any access to the media: to be liable to face trumped up charges especially of corruption. Since corruption was institutionalised, this was an easy charge to make. Then there was the possibility of prison and financial ruin. In Malaysia and Singapore, where things were more sophisticated, the same purpose could be achieved through the cover of legality. Any loophole would be exploited to prevent an opposition MP from taking his seat. The Mother of Parliaments has spawned some strange offspring.
Other visitors included professors from faraway universities with a book in view. They came laden with tape-recorders and notebooks and sat for weeks in longhouses in fairly primitive surroundings and poor diet to record for posterity the vast variety of Baram languages. They earned our respect. Normally, they would repay the house by supplying food which was eagerly accepted. These houses are poor.
Then there was the recent phenomenon of what are today called the “bagpackers”. These came and swung their way through the country, living on the people with never an idea of making repayment. Borneo hospitality demands that the stranger is welcome and is never asked when he is leaving. These were a great burden. Occasionally we would get a chance to have a word with them; they were footloose, obviously with money to be able to travel so far, with no sense of responsibility. We would remind them of the great hardship that these poor people suffered when outsiders came and stayed too long.
The most impressive person I ever met was the Paramount Chief of the Kenyahs and Kayans. He lived upriver in the big longhouse of Long San. These tribes are aristocratic and observe very carefully all the rules pertaining to the administering of authority. All the heads of the longhouses obeyed him to the letter. With his gentle eyes, one could never suspect him of being able to pour torrents of wrath on recalcitrants. He bore authority easily everywhere he went, whether in Whitehall, Kuala Lumpur or a humble longhouse. He was one of the signatories of the act proclaiming the new state of Malaysia. Illiterate as all his contemporaries were, he had a fantastic memory; everything was punctuated by lines such as “the time of the great sickness,” or “the great flood,” or some such events which were definite historical dates. My time on the Baram passed swiftly, so full of things happening, that I almost forgot the bishop’s words that I would have to return to Brunei the following year. In fact, he himself had never mentioned this again at the different times I had met him. None of his consultors had brought it up to me in conversation. I began to forget. At the end of the school year in December, he wrote to me “very grateful . . . wonderful work . . . in Baram. . . now, more pressing responsibility awaits. . .”. So there it was. This was to be the end of the carefree life that I had enjoyed; the visits to the longhouses, all the lovely people and of course my MHM companions. It was in such a contrast to life in Brunei; the pressure of school, competitiveness, timetables. Ah well! Still I was so grateful to get this chance to see life in a primitive society and to be able to help the children to rise from their poverty to get a good start in life.
