Word: penan
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...Manser's story is really the tale of the Penan, a people out of time, the last hunter-gatherers in Asia. Once masters of a seemingly endless rain forest that covers Borneo, almost all of the 9,000 Penan have given up the struggle against what must once have seemed a ludicrous impossibility: that loggers would sweep through all but a tiny fraction of Sarawak's forests, polluting rivers, driving animals away and bulldozing the trees and plants that for centuries have served as the Penan's medicine cabinet, toolbox and larder. There are barely 200 fully nomadic Penan left...
...Sarawak province in a motorized hang glider. According to Roger Graf, who joined Manser in the mid-1980s to try to stop logging in Sarawak, where the tribe is based, all that's really certain is that Manser was very close to giving up on Sarawak and his Penan friends. "He said this was his last trip," says Graf, who abandoned the struggle in 1996; he now works as an administrator and publicist for the Zurich Zoo. "He told me, 'If I don't do it this time the battle is lost...
...simply have given up on life. "I know Bruno and I know what was in his mind," says Graf. "He knew some of the Penan were selling their land to the loggers. He had seen some of his best friends abandon their traditional clothes and, for the first time, don T shirts and shoes. Everywhere, he saw logging." Manser was an idealist, the kind of earnest campaigner who makes people uncomfortable, who goes too far, a man described by one Swiss friend as half child, half hero, a man who would never abandon the fight for his friends. But even...
...Along is the last of his kind in the Penan community living near the confluence of the Limbang and Adang rivers near Sarawak's eastern border with Indonesia. Along has remained in the same area for more than a year, an eon for a nomadic Penan, but stubbornly refuses to move into one of the new villages inhabited by his tribesmen. His hope is that Manser will appear: this is the rendezvous spot mentioned in one of the Swiss friend's last messages...
...Along builds a new home of wood and thatch in the forest every few weeks or months, depending on the availability of game. He dresses in traditional Penan attire, a loincloth that covers his genitalia but leaves his muscular buttocks bare. His feet are disproportionately large and splayed, never having been confined by shoes. He wears necklaces fashioned from rattan and brightly colored beads, the bezel of a gilded wristwatch glinting incongruously beneath a mass of twine bracelets. (The watch has stopped at 3:50.) When he was young, his earlobes were distended by heavy weights. They now hang...