Light at the Edge of the World (14 page)

Along the trail, Asik pointed out leaves that heal, others that kill, and magical herbs believed to empower hunting dogs and dispel the forces of darkness. There are trees that produce rare resins and gums for trade with itinerant merchants, vines that yield twine and fibre for baskets, a liana that smoulders for days and allows for the transport of fire.

The most important plant of all is the sago palm, the tree of life. Already that morning, Asik had cut down a stand. Now, on a bed of fresh leaves, he split the sections
of trunk in half lengthwise and, with a slow steady rhythm, pounded the soft pith. Leached with water, the pith yields a thick paste, which is dried into sago flour, the main staple of the nomads. In an afternoon, Asik and Juna secured enough food for a week.

Two nights later, close to dusk, we sat by a fire as Tu‘o cooked the head of a wild pig. Everything we hear, he explained, is an element of a language of the spirit. Thunder is the embodiment of
balei ja‘ au
, the most powerful magic in the woods. Trees bloom when they sense the song of the peacock pheasant. Birdcalls heard from a certain direction bear good tidings; the same sounds heard from a different direction are a harbinger of ill. Entire hunting parties can be turned back by the call of a banded king-fisher, the cry of a bat hawk.

Asik emerged from the forest, his face badly scratched and bleeding from an encounter with a thorny vine as he hunted monitor lizards in the canopy. Tu‘o laughed as Asik recalled his folly: an entire day on the trail and nothing to show for it. Asik's nephew Gemuk appeared. Surprised to find us in his home, he poured a basket of rambutans at our feet, fruits that had taken hours to gather. Other Penan returned with baskets of
buaa nakan
fruits to roast, wild mushrooms for soup, hearts of palm and succulent greens. Sharing for the Penan is an ingrained reflex. When
Gemuk announced that not one but two wild pigs had been killed, Asik roared with delight. “Don't be hungry. Good to be full.”

Moments later, there was a shout from the ridge. Two other families had arrived, just as a tremendous thunder-storm cracked open the sky. In the midst of the downpour, they erected
lamin
, shelters built in an hour that will house them for a month. The men and boys cut poles and rattan to build the frame; the women gathered palm leaves to be sewn into thatch. A fire was kindled. Infants huddled beneath leaves while older children assisted their parents. Lakei Padeng is Asik's stepfather, an old man known as “black face.” I watched as he emptied the rattan backpacks. Two families—five adults, eleven children—together possessed a kettle, a wok, several sharpening stones, dart quivers and blowpipes, sleeping mats, an axe, a few ragged clothes, a tin box and key, two flashlights, a cassette player, three tapes, eight dogs, two monkeys.

“The Penan are so profoundly different,” Ian remarked later that night. “They have no writing, so their total vocabulary at any one time is the knowledge of the best storyteller. There is one word for ‘he,' ‘she,' and ‘it,' but six for ‘we.' There are at least eight words for sago, because it is the plant that allows them to survive. Sharing is an obligation, so there is no word for ‘thank you.' They can name
hundreds of trees but there is no word for ‘forest.' Their universe is divided between
tana‘ lihep
,
tana‘ lalun
—‘land of shade,' ‘land of abundance'—and
tana‘ tasa'
, ‘land that has been destroyed.' ”

Language provides clues to a complex social world utterly different from that of sedentary peoples. The nomadic Penan have no sense of time, know nothing of paid employment, of poverty. They have no notion of work as a burden, as opposed to leisure as recreation. For them, there is only life, the daily round. Children learn not in school but through experience, often at the side of their parents. With families and individuals dispersed much of the time throughout the forest, everyone must be self-sufficient, capable of doing every task. Thus, there are no specialists and little hierarchy. As in many hunting societies, direct criticism of another is frowned upon, for the priority always is the solidarity of the group. Should conflict lead to a schism and families go their separate ways for prolonged periods, both groups may starve for want of sufficient hunters.

The greatest contrast between the Penan and ourselves may well be the value that they place on community. Since they carry everything on their backs, they have no incentive to accumulate material objects. They measure wealth not by the extent of their possessions but by the strength
of their relationships. It is the simple result of adaptation, though the consequences are profound. In our tradition, we long ago liberated the individual, a decisive shift in orientation that David Maybury-Lewis has described as the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom, for in doing so, we severed the obligations of kin and community that, for better and for worse, constrain the individual in traditional societies. In glorifying the self, we did away with community. The consequences we encounter everyday in the streets of our cities. An American child grows up believing, for example, that homelessness is a regrettable but inevitable feature of life. A child of the nomadic Penan, by contrast, is taught that a poor man shames us all.

“In the place they want us to live,” Asik said, referring to the Malaysian policy of encouraging the Penan to settle in places like Long Iman, “the sago is gone, the trees have been destroyed, and all the land is ruined. The animals are gone, the rivers are muddy. Here we sleep on hard logs, but we have plenty to eat.”

Addressing a meeting of European and Asian leaders in 1990, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia remarked: “It is our policy to eventually bring all jungle dwellers into the mainstream ...There is nothing romantic about these helpless, half-starved and disease-ridden people.”

“We don't want them running around like animals,” said James Wong, Sarawak's minister for housing and public health. “No one has the ethical right to deprive the Penan of the right to assimilation into Malaysian society.”

It is a struggle to reconcile such a statement with the desolate reality of Long Iman, the image of Asik in the forest, or the memory of his children frolicking in the clear stream beneath the shade of giant ferns. While a number of individual Penan have benefited from the economic development of the past thirty years and the population has more than doubled, largely because of improvements in basic health care, for the majority in the longhouses, there has only been impoverishment. Throughout the homeland of the Penan, the sago and rattan, the palms, lianas and fruit trees lie crushed on the forest floor. The hornbill has fled with the pheasants, and as the trees fall, a unique vision of life is fading in a single generation.

 

WHEN I RETURNED from Borneo, I spoke with David Maybury-Lewis, who, like so many anthropologists, was both appalled by the policies of the Malaysian government and deeply sympathetic with the plight of the Penan, which he viewed as symptomatic of a global dilemma. “Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned,” he noted, “but ethnocide, the destruction of
a people's way of life, is not only not condemned when it comes to indigenous peoples, it is advocated as appropriate policy.”

The Malaysians want to emancipate the Penan from their backwardness, which means freeing them from who they actually are. Indigenous peoples such as the Penan are said to stand in the way of development, which becomes grounds for dispossessing them and destroying their way of life. Their disappearance is then described as inevitable, as such archaic folk cannot be expected to survive in the modern world.

The idea that indigenous societies are incapable of change and bound to fade away is wrong, according to Maybury-Lewis. What needs to be considered is the very notion that nations have an inherent right to do what they choose to ancient peoples within their boundaries. Malaysia, like many modern countries, was formed from the residue of a colonial empire, and in the days before the British, the land now called Sarawak, located 500 miles (800 km) across the South China Sea, had few ties with the states of the Malay Peninsula. The Federation of Malaysia is not yet forty years old, and this time span does not, in any moral or ethical sense, grant it the right to abuse, in the name of national sovereignty, human rights and natural resources of global significance.

Malaysia is but one example. Indonesia, a nation of fourteen thousand islands with a population of more than 200 million, has three hundred ethnic groups whose only common historical experience was Dutch rule. For most inhabitants of the vast archipelago, independence meant only that one colonial master was replaced with another. Those living in the outer reaches of Indonesia, in Irian Jaya and Sumatra, Timor and the Moluccas, want little to do with Javanese rule, and efforts to establish a national presence through forced migration and other government programs have sparked ethnic violence throughout the land, most notably in Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo.

The entire map of Africa is delineated by boundaries, many of which have no historical resonance and reflect only the arbitrary legacy of colonialism. Wars rage over much of the continent as power shifts between local factions, military thugs for the most part, who manage to momentarily control the local flow of wealth, gold, diamonds, oil, and thus secure access to arms. National governments claim to speak for peoples they have no moral or political justification to represent. International organizations, keen to offer aid, yet often motivated by arbitrary agendas, apply solutions to situations they little comprehend, invoking remedies for problems not infrequently of their own making.

“In so many ways Daniel Bell was right,” Maybury-Lewis added, referring to the well known Harvard sociologist: “The nation state has become too small for the big problems of the world, and too big for the little problems of the world. Too often we meddle with lives we barely understand.”

Like so much of what he had told me over the years, I carried these words away, certain that one day they would come back to me, as indeed they did, the first time I travelled to East Africa.

 

STUDDED WITH CRATER lakes and blanketed by lush forests that are home to the largest elephants in Africa, Mount Marsabit stands as a fertile sentinel above the barren sands of northern Kenya. To the east, a flat horizon reaches to Somalia. To the south and west lies the Kaisut Desert, and beyond are the Ndoto Mountains, a rim of peaks rising 8500 feet (2600 m) above the white heat of the lowlands. For thousands of years, pastoral nomads thrived here because they and their animals travelled lightly on the land. Mobility was the key to survival. Drought, the long hunger that descends ruthlessly from a searing sky, was not a cruel anomaly but a constant if unpredictable feature of life and climate. Surviving drought was the essential challenge that made the desert peoples of Kenya who they are: Turkana and Boran, Rendille, Samburu, Ariaal and Gabra.

In the wake of a series of devastating droughts in the 1970 s and 1980 s, along with famine induced by ethnic conflict and war in neighbouring Ethiopia and Somalia, international organizations arrived by the score to distribute relief. Mission posts with clinics, churches, schools, and free food drew the people from the parched land. At the same time, and despite evidence to the contrary, it became accepted in development circles that the nomads themselves were to blame for degrading their environment through overgrazing. In 1976, the United Nations launched a multimillion-dollar effort to encourage two of the tribes, in particular, the closely related Rendille and Ariaal, to settle and enter a cash economy, reducing the size of their herds by selling stock. This dovetailed with the interests of those Kenyans who considered nomads a symbol of the past and saw education and modernization as the key to the country's future.

For the ten thousand Ariaal herders, circumstances for the most part were not so dire that they were forced to settle. Neither fully Samburu nor Rendille, the Ariaal are a remarkable fusion that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Decimated by famine, a splinter group of Rendille, camel herders from the Kaisut Desert, moved to the marginal lands in the shadow of the Ndoto Mountains, where they established close relations with the Samburu, a cattle-raising people of the highlands. Adopting the ways of the

Samburu yet retaining many Rendille customs, speaking both languages, the Ariaal had the best of both worlds. On the western flank of Mount Marsabit and in the Ndoto foothills, where water could almost always be found, they kept cattle, while far below in the desert, their camels foraged in the shade of frail acacias. As Kenyans say, the Ariaal have the bones of Rendille, but their meat is Samburu. Thus, they secured their survival.

The Rendille, by contrast, thirty thousand strong and totally dependent on their camels, suffered terrible losses in the droughts and drifted by the thousand toward the relief camps. By 1985 , more than 75 per cent of the tribe lived in destitution around the lowland towns of Korr and Kargi, their well-being inextricably linked to mission handouts.

 

WRAPPED IN A red shawl, an old man with a wizened face and earlobes studded in gold reached for my hand and nonchalantly spat into the upturned palm. “It's a sign of greeting,” explained Kevin Smith, a young American anthropologist, as we walked with one of his clan brothers, his closest Ariaal friend, Jonathan Lengalen, through Karare, a community on the southern slope of Mount Marsabit. With a full moon over the grassland, Jonathan led us along a chalky trail to his
manyatta
, a cluster of domed shelters built of branches and mud, cow dung and
hides. From the shadows emerged the warriors, tall and thin, their long hair woven in tight braids dyed red with ochre and fat. Their bodies shone with decoration. All carried weapons, swords sheathed in leather, wooden clubs, iron spears, the odd assault rifle. Already, they were singing, deep resonant chants that drew the young girls, equally beautiful in beads and ochre, into the clearing. As the warriors moved forward, slapping the girls with their hair and leaping into the air with the grace of gazelles, their spears flashed in the moonlight.