Malay Archipelago for the fourth time, studying my third copy of Bartholomew’s map spread out on a lumpy bed in Semporna. Its significations had changed for me; it had become a document that recorded part of my personal history.
The real discovery I made on my first trip to Indonesia was the language. I struggled with the alien scripts and elusive tones of the mainland, and progressed no further than ‘hello, how much, thank you’. I could ask, ‘where is …?’ in Urdu or Thai, but I would not understand the answer. I had become illiterate once more. Indonesian Malay was a gift in comparison. There are no tones and it uses Roman letters which are pronounced as they are written (apart from ‘c’ = ‘ch’). That was not the end of the good news. There are no tenses. The verbs do not conjugate. The nouns do not decline. There are neither genders nor agreements. Plural nouns, where the context is ambiguous or the number indefinite, are formed by reduplication of the singular. There were signs of more complex grammar lurking in the use of a number of prefixes and suffixes, but for a beginner the rewards are almost instant. Learn the words for ‘what’ (apa), ‘to want’ (mau) and ‘to drink’ (minum), say them one after another – apa mau minum? – and wonder at the unnecessary grammar and syntax English requires to ask the same question, ‘What do you want to drink?’ In six weeks I had learned enough of the language to make me want to learn more. Approximately 250 million people speak Malay.
By the time of my third visit to Indonesia my Malay was competent. I had become very interested in the country’s tribal peoples after a journey to Siberut Island off the west coast of Sumatra. It is an island some seventy miles long and thirty-five miles wide, covered in the main by rainforest. In the company of a trader in scented wood (who spoke no English) I crossed the island from east to west on foot and by dug-out canoe, stopping at the long houses of the Mentawai clans, a tribe of animist hunter-gatherers. I was entranced by their serene self-sufficiency and their harmonious relationship with the jungle.
On this third visit, I tried to repeat the experience in Sulawesi, where I met disappointment and the Wana people, slash-and-burn farmers who are turning a national park into a patch of weeds. I travelled with the park’s sole warden, Iksan, who was as despondent as I. We were glad to leave the Morowali Reserve, returning to Kolonodale the day before ‘Idu’l-Fitri, the Muslim feast at the end of Ramadan. Despite the fact that neither of us was Muslim we were invited to take part in the celebrations, making a tour of the town with a group of men and being invited to eat in every home. By the time we came to the water village, the houses built on stilts out over the shallows, I wondered how I could eat another thing. We were offered tea and cake in a spacious house made of milled timber belonging to a Bajo family.
I had heard of the Bajo people before, a tribe of semi-nomadic boat-dwelling fishermen to be found in the eastern archipelago. Their name even appeared on the map; the principal port of western Flores is called Labuanbajo, ‘Harbour of the Bajo’. It did not surprise me to find members of the group living in a house in Kolonodale – the Indonesian government has long pursued a policy of settling its traditionally itinerant peoples – but the head of the family told me that he had been born on a boat, and that he had relatives who still pursued the Sea Gypsy way of life. To hear that there were people who practised nomadic hunting and gathering on the sea not far from where I was sitting, refusing more cake, excited an instant desire in me to find these people, to travel with them. I started planning my next visit to the islands before I had even left.
They say Sabah looks like a dog’s head – an observation that can only be made from a map or from space. Semporna was there on the lower jaw. (The rest of Borneo does not look like the rest of a dog.) My final destination, Mabul Island, was too small to feature.
I met Robert Lo, owner of the Sipadan-Mabul Resort, at the World Travel Market in London. He was there on the ‘Sabah – Borneo’s Paradise’ stand to promote his diving operation, to which he always referred as ‘SMART’. My first researches into South East Asia’s boat-dwellers had shown me that their distribution had been much more widespread than I had imagined and that Sabah was one of the places that might still have a completely maritime population. I asked him about Sea Gypsies, out of curiosity as much as anything, but he said, sure, there were lots that anchored near Mabul. ‘I let them use my island to build their boats, to have their weddings, to take their water. Their chief, Panglima Sarani, he’s a good man. I can introduce you.’ He gave me a Sabah Tourism Promotion Corporation brochure advertising the Regatta Lepa Lepa in Semporna, an event which purported to conserve and celebrate ‘one of the exotic culture’[sic], that of the Bajau Laut. My plans had found their focus.
Naturally I had doubts about how authentic such a pageant might be, and they strengthened hourly from the moment I was handed the STPC press-pack in Kota Kinabalu. I would be wearing neither the ‘one of the exotic culture’ T-shirt, nor the Regatta Lepa Lepa baseball cap. Later, on the drive from Tawau to Semporna, I had cause to disbelieve their promotional map of the state.
It was the sort of cartoon map that is handed out at the entrances to theme parks, portraying an enchanted grove brimming with attractions. There were happy climbers on Mt Kinabalu and happy tribespeople waving from their long house and happy divers at Sipadan. Even the wildlife was happy, charismatic mega-fauna peering out from amongst the florets of a forest that covered the whole state. As the minibus left Tawau, I waited for the jungle to start, but it did not; oil-palm plantations spread as far as Semporna.
The Regatta Lepa Lepa was indeed as contrived a piece of hokum as I have ever seen. Not a single Bajau Laut person took part. The lépa-lépa is their traditional houseboat, and there had been several examples on parade for the beauty contest, but none was owned or lived on by a Bajau Laut family. The winning entry had been commissioned by the STPC from a boat-builder on Bum Bum Island. There was no doubting the skill of the wright, nor the authenticity of the craft’s beautiful form, but using the decorated sail as advertising space for his business detracted somewhat from the overall effect. The other events – various boat races, tugs-of-war and catch-the-duck – left me cold.
Corporal Ujan of the Marine Police called me over to their office. I had had a couple of beers with him on my first night in town. It was good to see a familiar face amongst all the uniforms. Security had been ‘beefed up’ for the Regatta. Semporna had been visited twice by raiders from the Philippines within the last month. Ujan had important news.
‘You know the Pala’u man you were looking for?’ I had been told over dinner in Kota Kinabalu with the director of the Bajau Cultural Association, Said Hinayat, that I should not call the Bajau Laut ‘Pala’u’ as it was insulting. Sensibilities in Semporna were not so delicate. ‘That’s him. That’s Panglima Sarani over there.’ Ujan pointed to a jetty not fifty yards away. ‘He’s the old man sitting down mending his fishing net.’
There were two figures on the jetty working on the net. All the doubts and worries that had accumulated along the way on my journey to this point – questions about whether I would be accepted, could communicate, endure – all would be answered in the next few minutes. I stepped onto the decking. Neither looked up at my approach. They were both old, grizzled, and the one facing me was small and looked frail, until I was close enough to see the sinews standing out on his forearms. I thought he must be Sarani – the other had a broad back and powerful shoulders and seemed younger in his body. They were both wearing sleeveless shirts and blue baggy fisherman’s trousers that fasten at the waist like a sarong.
I spoke his name. The man with his back to me turned. He did not seem surprised to see a white man who addressed him in Malay. I squatted down beside him and looked into his weatherbeaten face, his hair stiff with salt, skin almost as dark as his eyes, his lips stained red with betel-juice. I introduced myself. I explained that I was interested
