Empowering Sarawakians through History, Part 2.

By Bunga Pakma

Though Borneo sits smack in the middle of the South China Sea, and voyages to and from Borneo were more serious affairs than island-hopping in most of the Archipelago, Borneo was never cut off from the world outside. Archaeology shows that trade flowed Borneo in both directions between Borneo and China, the Peninsula, and other islands. Indirect routes connected Borneo with India.

Brunei was the principal port of the north coast of Borneo. Its connections with China were formed over 1,000 years ago. Brunei was the first SE Asian state to be observed by Westerners when the remnants of Magellan’s fleet sheltered in 1521 on the first voyage around the earth. The ship’s historian, Antonio Pigafetta, wrote a detailed account of the Sultan’s court, stressing its wealth. Despite his glowing description, Europeans rarely visited for another 300 years afterwards.

Chinese migrants were present in the Sambas area of West Kalimantan during the 17^th century, perhaps as refugees after the collapse of the Ming in 1644. By 1750, Bornean-born Chinese occupied with mining had established several kongsi in the west of Borneo, among them Bau near Kuching. These independent “commercial republics” based on mutual respect and cooperation and the rule of law (securely founded in Chinese literate tradition) add a fourth pattern of social organization to the three—Indic kingship, longhouse polity and primitive communism—we have already seen existed in Borneo.

We must make one more point about the relationship of geography and power in Borneo. Borneo island is culturally a whole. The tribes of the island are diverse in many ways, yet also share many cultural features in common. The great and small rivers served as the main highways of travel within the island. It is not hard to paddle a boat up and down a river, but when one reaches the ultimate ulu one either stops or hauls the boat and its contents over the mountains. That is difficult. Thus power and influence tended to be confined within the drainage-systems of the various rivers and bounded by the mountains that defined the watershed. The sea offered the only easy way of getting from one sector of the island to another, although the Orang Ulu ignored boats and boundaries altogether and walked where they pleased.

The political divisions of present-day Borneo are still determined by this fact of geography.

Enter the Europeans

A few cargoes of Borneo pepper reached England and Holland during the time of the Spice Trade, but let’s skip over that. By 1820, the world’s population had grown to over one billion and the Industrial Revolution was beginning radically to transform Europe. Also by 1820, Europeans had two massive “world” wars whose battles took place on almost every continent of the earth. It is not my job to place blame. Globalization had been underway since Columbus and population and technological growth ensured that the pressure and tempo of European expansion grew also.

In 1812, the Dutch East India Company captured Sambas. Control over West Kalimantan shifted to the Dutch government, which ruled by indirect means through nominally “independent” sultans. In 1839 James Brooke came to Sarawak. His story has been told many times. Its main point is that by doing a favour to the Sultan of Brunei, the Sultan created Brooke Rajah of Sarawak. Rajah was what Brooke considered himself to be, not a colonist, not a snatch-and-grab man, but the legitimate king of the country. Being a romantic and idealistic man, he wanted to do kingship right. Whether he actually did so we could spend years talking about.

The Brooke Raj

I wish to acknowledge my debt to Prof. Emeritus Bob Reece of Murdoch University. His magnificent The Name of Brooke has given me most of my information and many insights in what follows.

A big problem with autocratic rule, no matter how beneficent it seems to be, is that kings don’t last forever. Somebody’s got to take over, and the squabbles for succession are always embarrassing, often sordid and frequently violent. After a tussle that reached the sordid and nasty level James’s nephew Charles inherited the raj.

Charles may have been—as a historian says—“one sick puppy” in his days of jungle fighting, yet as he matured he showed remarkable concern for the welfare of Sarawak and energy and ingenuity in his goal of transforming Sarawak into a state that could take an equal place with any other in the 20^th century world about to be.

Charles detested imperialism. All around him, in Peninsular Malaysia and in the Dutch East Indies, he saw European rulers open up their colonies to foreign capitalists. The Dutch established enormous mono-crop plantations which exploited the dirt-cheap labour of the Javanese. In Semenanjung, the Brits found the Malays neither numerous enough nor pliable enough for easy exploitation, so they imported the dirt-cheap labour of indentured workers, in great numbers, from India or Ceylon. Because plantations cannot turn a profit without cheap labour—or outright slavery, as in the Americas—a plantation economy corrupts and destroys societies. Well in advance, Charles foresaw the war that would be WW2 and the anti-colonial wars that followed.

Charles’s dream was to build Sarawak’s economy on a nation of hardworking and prosperous small-holders. He tried many kinds of crops, coffee, tea, tobacco, potatoes, and finally got lucky with pepper and rubber. In 1910 oil began to be produced in Miri. Sarawak experienced a boom in the early 1900s, and Charles began plans to improve Sarawak’s infrastructure with, among other things, piped water, a railway and radio communication.

Another problem with hereditary autocratic régimes is that sooner or later a weak ruler comes along. In Sarawak’s case this was sooner. Charles died in 1917 and his son Vyner succeeded. Vyner, while exceedingly jealous of his title and privileges as Rajah, never took Sarawak seriously.

His father, recognizing that one man could never effectively rule a whole country in the coming century, had instituted a framework of guidance and control into the government in the interests of modernization, fairness, accountability and efficiency. Vyner resented these innovations as a hindrance to his absolute authority. While the GNP of Sarawak was gradually increasing (as it increased, despite the Depression, up to the Japanese invasion), Vyner did not put in place the expertise and government machinery to turn it to the public benefit.

Vyner’s Officers and Residents—all Brits of course— because of the difficulty of communication had become accustomed to wield authority as little kings in their Districts. The Outstation Service resented the bureaucrats in Kuching and lost no opportunity to hinder any step to change the status quo. The clan of European “rural gentry” may have claimed to uphold the “Brooke Tradition” with its promises of holding Sarawak in trusteeship for the Natives, but they liked lording it over “naked savages.” Charles Brooke was a man with no illusions about himself or anybody else. He knew better than to regard Sarawak’s peoples as Noble Savages to be kept as they were. Charles had ambitions and a sense of responsibility. Vyner sneered at himself with false irony as a “little tin god” and threw up his hands.

And what about the Natives in this situation of bickering, stagnation and gridlock? They were treated by the government, as Prof. Reece says, with “benign neglect,” which might well be described as the only policy the unimaginative Rajah could come up with.

Only one man did any serious thinking about Sarawak’s direction in the decade before WW2. Cyril Le Gros Clark, Secretary for Chinese Affairs, wrote and published in 1935 a survey which became known as the Blue Report. Le Gros Clark pointedly assumed that Sarawakians would at last take control of their own country, and recommended that—

“Education, guided upon sane lines and coordinated with the life and livelihood of the people, should form . . . the key-note of future administrative policy of Sarawak.”

Reece quotes a book-review from the 1 Dec issue of the Sarawak Gazette. The anonymous writer agreed with Le Gros Clark’s assessment of the future:

At the present moment, Sarawak stands at the crossroads. For better or worse, conditions have changed and are rapidly changing, and the “zoo” idea is now an anachronism that can no longer be tolerated if the natives are to get the square deal to which they are entitled. Sarawak has ceased to be an oasis of peace in an age of hustling materialism; no longer can it be regarded as a kind of sanctuary where natives can live a life of idyllic simplicity untroubled by echoes from the outside world . . . It is our duty to face this fact, and to endeavour to fit the natives for the struggle that lies before them—the struggle to adapt themselves to the new world which is being opened up to them. . .

These words could have been spoken today. Charles had foreseen the time when capitalist exploiters would descend in all their ruthless their ruthlessness. Le Gros Clark had a plan to give Sarawakians arms to defend themselves and their freedom. Little did they expect that the danger would come from within.

Five years after writing of the above, the Japanese had captured Kuching and the Brooke Raj had evaporated, leaving behind little more than a romantic legend and—at least—a population that had not been made serfs. Le Gros Clark was interned at Batu Lintang. In June 1945 the Japanese took him to Keningau, and shot him along with several others.

courtesy of Horbill Unleashed