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Penan

The nomadic hunter-gatherer Penan are one of the last such groups in South East Asia. Out of the 10,000 Penan living in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, Borneo, only 200 nomadic people are left.

Small groups of nomads move through a land of dense forest, narrow steep-sided valleys and fast flowing streams in the north-east of the state. Penan material culture is changing (western clothing is dominant, everyone has plastic tarpaulins), but the nomads still rely on the forest to provide most of what they need, from blowpipes to flour.

The Penan are a gentle and softly spoken people with a highly egalitarian society and little gender division. There's a headman, and respect is given to elders but there is no real hierarchy, just a strong communal bond, which manifests itself in a meticulous process of sharing. Nomadic Penan move in groups of up to 40 people, but groups form and split regularly as sago palm flour and game is sought from different areas in their territory (roughly 100 sq miles on average).

The nomadic Penan have been greatly affected by large-scale selective logging, in the late 1970s. More recently the creation of palm oil and acacia wood plantations has caused concern. Since the 1980s various Penan groups, both settled and nomadic, have campaigned against the logging - erecting blockades and sometimes being arrested. A well-orchestrated media campaign, originally led by passionate activist Ìý meant that their plight was raised at the UN General Assembly and the Rio Earth summit. Penan leaders have also met Al Gore and Prince Charles.

A few concessions were made, but as the media spotlight moved on the logging continued. It's been estimated that at least 70% of Sarawak's primary forest has been licensed for logging and in some places there have been two or three logging passes in 25 years. The forest to which the Penan are perfectly adapted, has been radically altered. They have a deep emotional response to the change in light, sound, smell and temperature of the forest, nuances that outsiders over look. Everything from hunting to collecting medicinal plants and clean water is becoming much more difficult.

Penan Culture

Groups of nomadic Penan move through distinct clan territories, some groups are just a family of five or six, others have up to 30 people.

Every month or so the Penan leave their old selap (huts) and exhausted sago supplies and move to another patch of forest, where a fresh camp is established. Possessions are few and everything is carried in simple, strong backpacks made from rattan (which is taken from palm leaves). Even small children have packs to carry. Selap are made from thick poles tied together with rattan strips. Typically the floors are four feet off the ground. Above a hearth of mud are two wooden racks for storing cooking equipment and drying fire wood. Each family usually has one hut for living and a smaller one for sleeping. The roofs are no longer made from giant palm leaves, which are now apparently scarce, but tarpaulins.

More nomadic Penan are now setting up semi-permanent settlements to which they return after visiting satellite sago harvesting camps for a few weeks at a time. Some communities are experimenting with farming, but this accelerates the move away from a nomadic life in the forest: the more farming you do, the less time is spent hunting and gathering and the more farming you need to do. Nomadic Penan are not natural farmers and failures can lead to increased hunger. Disease in settled communities can also leave the Penan vulnerable.


Material Culture
Only Penan elders dress in anything approaching traditional dress, with chawats (loin cloths), bands on their legs and wrists and large holes in their earlobes (but often nothing plugging them). Traditional tattoos are now uncommon, but crude DIY tattoos (almost like prison tattoos) are not. Few Penan now go barefoot, most wear cheap, plastic football boots with rounded studs, which are perceived to be the best thing in the jungle, but don't keep the leeches out.

Despite their western looks Penan bush craft is immediately apparent. The forest is utilised incredibly quickly to provide, cups, water containers, repairs to carriers, food and shelter when the need arises.


Hunting
The Bornean bearded pig bears the brunt of Penan hunting activity. In the past widespread fruiting of forest trees would lead to an explosion in the bearded pig population, but the loss of these trees and opening up of the forest to hunters from outside has led to a population decline. Barking deer is another popular game animal, as is the long-tailed and pig-tailed macaque, but the Penan will eat just about any animal including small birds and squirrels, which are thought of as delicacies.

Many Penan often use blowpipes to hunt, but killing a bearded pig with a blowpipe is very difficult and requires strong poison unless you want to track it for days before it falls (more difficult in secondary forest). Shotguns are obviously more efficient, but are far more expensive to own and permits are needed.

Penan hunt by tracking, but February through to April they sometimes use a hunting technique called mejong. A hunter hides in a tree close to a fruiting tropical oak and waits for the evening when he can prey upon feeding bearded pigs. The meat of the animals feeding on these nuts has great flavour, not unlike expensive Spanish and Italian hams.

The rhino is long gone from Sarawak, but the Penan are still wary of other wildlife. (recently declared a 'new species') is shy and seldom seen, but to the Penan, the sun bear is the most dangerous animal thanks to its ability to roll into a ball and bounce down hills to chase after them.

The Penan have hunting rights within Mulu National Park and the newly established . A process of enlarging the latter has begun, but there are practical and political obstacles to overcome.


Blowpipes
Penan blowpipes, called keleput, are about 6 feet long and made from one solid piece of hard wood, often iron wood, in about 2 weeks. The hole is made using a long metal bar with a screwdriver-like tip, which is simply driven into the wood and turned, over and over. The Penan often build a jig for this.

Attached to the end of the blowpipe is a metal spear head, attached with rattan and rubber-like resin. This is used for finishing off large wounded animals and offers protection from wild beasts. Many Penan clans had a blacksmith once, but now these spears are bought from outsiders. Much shorter blowpipes are sometimes made for hunting at close range in dense forest.


Poison Darts
The bark of the tajem tree is cut to extract a milky latex that is warmed over a fire to produce the poison for Penan darts. Sometimes a new batch is started with a little of an old one or other ingredients like chilli. Tajem interferes with the functioning of the heart, causing lethal arrhythmias. There are a number of antidotes to the poison, the most common being drawn from a type of tree creeper.

Blowpipe darts are made from palm fronds with a lightweight stopper to make an air-tight seal. Darts with metal tips (cut from tin cans) are used for big game like deer and bearded pig, whilst those for small game are simply sharpened before being dipped in poison.


Knives
The Penan carry two knives. The first, a poeh, is large and machete-like and used frequently. The second, much smaller knife, is a called a darhad and is used for cutting meat, whittling blowpipe darts and fine work. Both knives are carried close together in separate sheathes, sometimes wooden, now often plastic.


Forest Sign Language
The Penan like their secrets and have a complex sign language for use in the jungle. A bent twig stuck in the trail may simply say 'we went this way', but complex arrangements of cut twigs, sticks and folded leaves can tell the Penan anything from the state of the hunting locally to whether the person leaving the sign is in a good mood.


Sago
Making sago flour is a communal activity, with men, women and children all taking part. Sago palms can grow up to 12 metres high producing a number of trunks. These are rolled down to a water source, split and their cores pummelled with wooden tools. The pulp is then tipped onto rattan mats supported by a wooden frame and stamped on, much like pressing grapes. Eventually the filtered and condensed starch juice forms a thick paste and can be transported back to camp where it is dried in blocks above a fire before being shared out.


Spiritual Beliefs
The Penan have been converting to Christianity since the 1930s. The Penan were often told that Christianity was a religion of protection, and for them it is often the act of prayer that counts (which mirrors the invocation of spirits), not the belief itself. Belief in myths and spirits are still very strong in some places, although traditional creation myths and concepts of heaven and hell are seldom discussed.

Festivals are not part of traditional Penan culture, but blood pacts were once undertaken, usually as part of political agreements between Penan leaders and neighbouring tribes. Rituals varied, but in some cases leaders would shed blood onto tobacco and then smoke it together, thus consuming each other's blood and preventing future conflict. A breach of this pact was believed to cause the vomiting of blood and a violent death.

Similar rituals relate to banishing bad luck in hunting trips or to end a period of unsuccessful hunts. By smearing their blood onto a sago leaf, folding it and burying it some hunters believe they can change their fortune.


Trade and Forest Products
Three or four times a year during colonial times the British government arranged trading missions called tamu close to the forests of the Penan. These tamu were supervised by a colonial official who regulated trade and insured fair treatment for the Penan. For this reason the British are remembered fondly for protecting the forest.

At the tamu they offered forest products like damar (now used in eco-paints), rattan mats and baskets, rhino horn, gaharu wood (or eagle-wood), wild rubber, monkey gallstones (for Chinese medicine), bills of hornbills, skins, deer antlers and of course meat. These were traded for manufactured good like knives, cooking pots and shotguns – some Penan still own colonial era shotguns.

None of these forest products are now abundant, but many Penan will sell surplus meat to logging camps, make rattan items and collect when they find it. This dark, scented wood is found as a special growth in the trunk of the Aquilinia gaharu tree. The growth is triggered in response to injury, a fungal infection or possibly insect activity. Many unsuccessful efforts have been made to domesticate the process.

Gaharu is used as incense, for medicinal and religious purposes, and as a perfume in the Middle East, China, Taiwan and Japan. The Penan can get very good money for a kilo of high quality gaharu, but that can take years to accumulate.

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Logging

Sarawak was blessed with a high density of large, valuable Dipterocarp trees, which were the first ones to be extracted. Now a huge proportion of Sarawak's primary forest has been logged at least once, and over time smaller and smaller trees have been taken in different logging passes. One reason for this is to produce plywood and other processed timber. The Sarawak government places a strong emphasis on processing timber to maximise local profits. Since industrial logging began in the late 1970s technology has evolved to allow smaller logs to be processed, which is deemed essential to keep up with the demand from Japan, India and the Far East – only a small percentage of Sarawak timber makes its way to Europe and the USA.

The companies carrying out selective logging in Sarawak use bulldozers to clear tracks through the forest and along steep ridges so that specific tree species can be cut and extracted. Logging crews (and their families) live in wooden huts on giant skids that are dragged between locations. These techniques were pioneered by James Wong, former Sarawak minister for the Environment and Tourism.

It's a bitter irony that whilst building tracks along ridges is seen as good logging practice in the rest of the world, in Sarawak it destroys a lot of sago palm, a staple of the Penan. Badly planned trails are a recipe for landslides, erosion and silting watercourses.

Once the giant trees were removed and the canopy opened, the remaining plant life, bursting towards the sunlight, undergoes some rapid growth which in places has created bushy secondary forest. Game is harder to spot and track, plants useful to the Penan are less plentiful and vital sago palms less abundant. The removal of large fruiting trees takes away a food source for the Penan and the game. At the same time logging roads give hunting access to non-Penan hunters.

As Sarawak's natural forests become less productive large areas are being assigned for acacia and palm oil plantation. In economic terms this makes perfect sense. Acacia trees can grow 15m in seven years and can re-grow from stumps, so they are very profitable over the long term. Palm oil is the most productive of all edible oil-producing plants and a possible biofuel . Malaysia produces 50% of the world's palm oil, a trade worth billions, and by 2010 the Sarawak government hopes to double palm oil plantations to 1 million hectares.

Sarawak's timber industry is worth around £1 billion a year. Some commentators maintain that logging in Sarawak has always been run by commercial imperatives and profit maximisation in order to enable the development that will . In development terms this would seem to be a logical trade off, but the marginalised Penan would beg to differ.


Opposition to Logging
Opposition to logging was fierce in the 1980s. Today the picture is more mixed. Some settled Penan villages see that a positive attitude to logging provides jobs, free transport, cash compensation, material goods and other assistance. Other communities have an ambivalent attitude to the logging, opposing logging but turning to logging companies for help, even if this means setting up a blockade as a negotiating tool. Confrontation with the loggers is usually non-violent.

The Sarawak government has often stated its desire to address the issue and bring development to the Penan. There is a minister, Alfred Jabu, with responsibility for the Penan. Penan communities who have chosen to settle have schools and clinics, and Penan children do receive some financial help to attend school, but anecdotal evidence suggests that hand outs from logging companies has much to do with this development.

Almost all nomadic Penan oppose logging and there is a huge gap of understanding and trust between the Penan and government. At heart, the government can't understand why anyone would want to live in the jungle and the Penan believe that the government cannot be trusted. In their experience logging only brings disaster and they believe that if they leave the forest they will lose it completely. What’s more, whilst they see secondary forest as bad, having their territories converted into plantation is a catastrophe.


Sustainable Logging?
Most experts agree that sustainable logging means cutting 4 - 10 trees per hectare in cycles of between 25 and 40. Studies elsewhere in Borneo show that in a perfectly managed forest, sustainable logging need not affect biodiversity: roughly one third of species decline in abundance, one third rise in abundance and about a third stay the same. However, repeated logging passes do have a detrimental effect.

The provides the international gold standard for sustainable logging, which should be environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable. Ideally FSC forest is one that can be harvested productively for generations. The Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC) is sub-FSC, but does recognise the need to address the Native Customary Rights (see section following), but there’s only one MTCC concession in Sarawak, which has complete authority over its timber industry.

The makes much of the sustainability of its forest reserves. However, some observers believe that the low number of big trees being brought out of the forest and the increasing trend to convert degraded forest into plantation is evidence that the natural forests of Sarawak are becoming exhausted as a commercial resource.

Malaysia is currently negotiating a action plan with the EU which aims to eradicate illegal logging and raise forestry standards in countries exporting timber to Europe. It remains to be seen how any European supervision will impact on the logging in Sarawak, which exports little timber to Europe.


Native Customary Rights (NCR)
The Sarawak government claims that under State law no group of people can actually lay claim to a stretch of land unless they can prove that they cultivated it before 1958. Quite a few communities have NCR over farmland, but getting NCR over rainforest has so far proved very difficult. However, some people working on land rights issues say that the state government's interpretation of the law is too narrow, and hunting, gathering and the use of jungle produce should also be used to demonstrate a claim to land.

In 2001 Rumah Nor, an Iban community, won a landmark NCR high court case that was filed against the state government and Borneo Pulp and Paper. The case was turned over upon appeal, but the court confirmed that native NCR takes precedent over all later legislation.

Mapping of a community by NGOs and local communities using hand-held GPS units has been seen as key to land rights cases. However, the Sarawak government has changed the law so that no land survey is acceptable unless conducted by licensed professionals who are registered with the Land Surveyor's Board, a policy that's not seen widely as helpful to future NCR cases. For now the Penan have no prospect of proving a claim to their ancestral land.

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