Seven-Tenths (31 page)

Left to himself, the Bajau’s is a peaceful, shy, somewhat nomadic way of life which is as highly specialised as that of the Eskimos. It would be a mistake to romanticise it, though. Bajau living has always been extremely hard, often dangerous, lonely and beset with disease. The traditional family unit was a married couple and their children in a low-roofed boat. Depending on season, preferred fishing grounds, family events (mainly marriages and deaths) and sheer
whim, the boats either formed parts of flotillas, floating villages or went their own separate ways for months on end. They tended to put ashore only for drinking water, firewood and cassava; otherwise it was a life at sea in all weathers. It was also a life largely spent crouching: squatting to cook, squatting to eat, squatting to fish. To this day older Bajau can still be seen who walk on land with a gait as characteristic and graceless as a duck’s, their lower limbs slightly atrophied from a lifetime’s hunkering down.

The conditions in these boats, where they still exist today, can become squalid, to say the least. It is not merely that if there are infants and toddlers aboard the bilges soon give the craft the atmosphere of a floating urinal. All sorts of vegetable ends, cooking scraps and fish guts fester there as well, brewing up in the tropical climate so that the liquid, when glimpsed between plank and thwart, can be seen fizzing. This is baled out at anchor in shallows, but on the high seas is often allowed to build up, and for a perfectly good reason. Since Bajau men spend a good deal of time overboard cutting seaweed and diving for
tripang
and pearl oysters the last thing they want to do is lay a trail of offal and attract sharks. This would be a determining factor for any sea dweller in the tropics and, indeed, is noted in a curious account by an Englishman, Leopold Ainsworth, of trying to run a timber business in the Mergui archipelago in the 1920s.
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The sea gypsies he knew there, and whom he tried to introduce to the idea of paid labour on land, called themselves ‘Mawken’, which he translates as ‘seadrowned’. The boats and habits of the Seadrowned People of the Mergui archipelago seem to have been not much different from those of the Bajau, which is hardly surprising given the similarity of the conditions. The Mawken, too, gave an account of their origins which told of persecution by Burmese hill tribes from the north and Malay pirates from the south squeezing them off the land and into the sea. They also offered this as an explanation of why they had no interest or skill in cultivation, merely picking up fruit or an occasional wild pig when passing an island. According to Ainsworth the Mawken seemed to exist on seafood, rice and opium. The Sulu nomads mostly eat cassava as their
staple, only the wealthier tribes and classes relying on rice. I never saw opium, but marijuana is widely smoked.

Malnutrition is a common consequence of this way of life, partly because the diet is unvarying but also because the choicest fish are mostly reserved for sale while the fisherman himself subsists on scraps, shells and the coarser varieties. Combined with the lack of sanitation this leads to a high incidence among the Bajau of tuberculosis, malaria, infant diarrhoea and infestations, to all of which their resistance is slight. This seems ironic, even contradictory, in view of the extraordinary physical fitness and imperviousness to cold needed by men free-diving to up to 100 metres for pearl oysters. Even greater depths are claimed, and although so far as I know nobody has ever bothered to measure them exactly, such dives have to be placed against the current world record of 105 metres,
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especially since these are working dives during which shells, lobsters or sea cucumbers are gathered. Before diving the men often swig a mixture of canned milk beaten up with little ‘native’ eggs and lemon juice and eat bananas. They say this makes them resistant to the cold.
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Young Bajau, particularly children and adolescents, often have the bleached, tawny hair of people who spend their lives in and out of the sea. Some even approach a dusky blondness which, amid uniformly black Asian hair, is very striking indeed and a sure guide to that person’s way of life and social status. No doubt it is Western culture, and specifically cinematic images of Californian or Australian beach culture, which equates this with the very pinnacle of healthy living (or did before skin cancer was mentioned). In South-East Asia, though, it speaks of a life of poverty and often malnutrition lived beyond the least shadow of a classroom, with intestinal worms and scabies as constant companions.

Even in the 1960s, when anthropologists like H. Arlo Nimmo were undertaking classic studies of the Bajau, their landward trend was obvious. The entirely floating life on houseboats was being relinquished for a tentative one in stilt huts which represented the placing of a wary toe on the very edge of land. Like their Samal cousins, certain Bajau always did build communities of huts on stilts in shallow offshore areas, each hut joined to the next by sagging walkways. The difference between them was that while Samal villages always had a gangway leading ashore, Bajau villages did not. There were other signs, too, of a culture becoming less isolate.

This was what Nimmo wrote a quarter of a century ago, and since then the drift to land has become almost total, except for a few isolated cases. Yet his prediction of ‘amalgamation’ has certainly not come about, if this means the adoption of land-based social habits and values. To this day the whole problem of how the Bajau can be integrated remains unsolved. They are mostly unconvinced by the idea of education, so are often unwilling to send their children to school. Nor do they seem keen to learn new skills. And as for taking part in any social or political activity, it has proved almost impossible to interest them. They suffer, in short, from an admirable lack of ambition. Their relationship with the sea is so strong they give the impression of being only flimsily attached to land, and might leave again tomorrow if conditions became any worse. Maybe the sea itself is by the way; perhaps what they have in their blood is a nomadic indifference to roots. This might explain their amiable remoteness, their strange innocence. Since they have never owned property ashore they have always remained free of contaminating land squabbles,
battles with landlords and developers, crippling rents and tribal annexations. At the first sign of trouble an entire settlement of Bajau may be discovered to have left overnight, in silence, their abandoned huts creaking slightly in the tide and their low craft already invisible over the horizon.

What has done most in recent years to change the Bajau’s way of life is violence. No anthropologist writing in the 1960s foresaw that persecution would increasingly drive them ashore and that the shore with its press and clutter of people, its social cross-currents and complexities would prove a very mixed blessing. Nobody guessed they might have to inhabit a strange no man’s land, an intertidal zone. But then, nobody realised to what an extent the Sulu archipelago would become a battleground. In 1974 Ferdinand Marcos sent in the armed forces of the Philippines against the MNLF. In the fighting of early February that year, most of the town of Jolo was destroyed and its population forced to take to the hills. Henceforth, the best that reigned in Sulu was armed stalemate broken by violent guerrilla and military engagements, until today’s state of undeclared anarchy was reached. The great influx of weapons into the area, together with financial support for the MNLF from abroad as well as the money brought by lucrative smuggling and trade links with Malaysia, meant that the dominant tribe became more dominant still.

In recent years anyone has been able to acquire an M-16. If all else fails, one can easily bribe one’s way into the army and acquire the weapon that way. M-16s are constantly ‘lost’ as soon as they are issued, and often the new recruit only waits until the weapon is in his hands before defecting. Armed with an M-16 it is simple to steal a boat. Anybody with an M-16 and a
bangka
can go straight into business on his own account as a pirate. It is a vilely dangerous living, to be sure, and the sharks must have grown very fat in the straits between the islands, but it is a way of life sanctioned by tradition and facilitated by the times.

The result for the unarmed, peaceable Bajau has been disaster. Whereas once they could fish at night using hurricane lamps and Coleman lanterns, they now dare not for fear of attracting pirates.
A further disadvantage is that the pirate craft frequently have engines powerful enough to outrun the Philippine navy and coastguard patrols and whereas once the Bajau might have used superior seamanship to avoid trouble they are now helpless. So if anything has reconciled some of them to land and its unfamiliar ways it is the need to defend themselves. It is not Islam, nor free education by the Oblate Fathers, nor offers of health care, nor any amount of blandishments and promises which have changed the Bajau’s horizon in Sulu. It is violence, and the necessity of earning enough to buy an M-16 and an engine in order to counter it.

Presumably, nomadism – whether of Bedouin or Eskimos or sea gypsies – is everywhere in decline. In order to survive, nomads need large tracts of unoccupied territory where there is no serious competition for their source of food, and such areas must be growing fewer. Besides, modern governments increasingly dislike ‘floating populations’ who seem ignorant of their control and who drift uncaringly across their borders and frontiers as if they did not exist. All centralisation is a threat to the periphery, and minor tribes which fall outside even the periphery tend to become fair game. It is a short step from being a minority to becoming marginal and then officially outlawed.

Even under average conditions, nomadic life is harsh, while a single stroke of ill fortune such as drought, epidemic, civil war, an oil spill or volcanic eruption can bring a people to the edge of extinction. To sentimentalise nomads is not a patronage they need. With an Armalite at last in their hands and deep memories of catalogues of injustice, they do not necessarily behave better than anyone else. What they retain, though, is priceless: a genuine remnant of the knowledge which has served the various species of
Homo
throughout his history. This knowledge is already lost to industrialised man and in this present century will be lost to the human race for good. It is a particular way of being in a landscape, of coexisting with ocean and land which takes account of minutiae we no longer know how to observe and maybe now cannot see at all.

There is a link between nomads and pirates and even smugglers. It has partly to do with living in a world beyond boundaries, but also with a detailed knowledge of that world which goes beyond mere geography. Pirates are simply seagoing versions of highway men or brigands; each calculates that his knowledge of the locality will be superior to that of any forces officialdom sends out to capture him. But in between moments of intense danger and excitement must be stretches of considerable solitude, and some sea pirates must themselves have a near-nomadic existence. After all, piracy need only be a sideline. At its lowest level, such as that which has all but driven the Bajau to land, it is a matter of rat-poor fishermen preying on other rat-poor fishermen for the simplest things, like a day’s catch or a dugout boat. I am sure that half the wanderers who landed on ‘Tiwarik’ when I was there were neither particularly fishermen nor pirates nor smugglers but all three as occasion demanded. They might be best described as opportunistic nomads, and what characterised them all was that they were highly self-sufficient. It was not a luxurious life they led, but they were utterly at home in it. First and last, they were born boat people. All had that adhesive agility common to those who grow up barefoot on very small craft. Most had the tawny streaks in their hair, the bleached expression and frown lines of those who have squinted constantly at glaring horizons. All were skilled with dynamite, hook and line or woven fish traps. None was scared of man or beast but they were truly frightened of
mumu
, sea spirits and omens.

In its immense navigational complexity and its lavish range of hiding places, a tropical archipelago is ideal pirate territory, and piracy has been established for centuries in insular South-East Asia. Some pirates achieved fame and most Filipinos know the story of Lim Ah Hong, the Chinese pirate who in 1574 even raided Manila itself and came close to unseating the fledgling Spanish colonial administration. His name lives on, less for nationalistic reasons than because of a vast treasure he allegedly hid and which has been looked for ever since. (A treasure is, of course, any proper pirate’s true legacy.) Down in Sulu, in Borneo and the East Indies, piracy always flourished well. This was partly because
it was Muslim territory, with a complex assortment of fiefdoms and sultanates never brought under full control by any colonial power. When various Sulu potentates made alliances with their counterparts in Mindanao, the entire Philippine archipelago became prey to Islamic pirate junks. The more regular the colonists’ shipping and trading became, the better the pickings, until by the nineteenth century piracy had reached epidemic proportions. ‘From Mindanao to Sumatra, countless White travellers recorded their fears of, and warnings about, the savage marauders of the archipelago who thrived on massacre, violation and rapine.’
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In 1830 Stamford Raffles himself had found ‘no vessel safe, no flag respected’.

Today’s predominantly Tausug descendants of those pirates who infested Sulu are merely carrying on a long ingrained tradition. Naturally, piracy can hardly thrive without victims, and in default of galleons carrying Spanish gold from Mexico there are interisland launches carrying people with wallets and cargoes of goods for Chinese traders. There are also the boats which run regularly between Jolo and Labuan Island in Malaysia, taking advantage of barter trade agreements under which copra and handicrafts are swapped for electronic goods, textiles and canned food. It may sound small-time, but each round trip can be worth up to £100,000, and certainly those concerned take it seriously enough. At the very end of January 1991, pirates killed twelve Sulu barter traders in a single concerted raid. As for smuggling, there is a brisk trade out of Sulu in marijuana, which also goes to Malaysia. This seemed unlikely enough, given that country’s famously draconian penalties for drug dealing; but as I was succinctly told, ‘Malaysia’s a big place.’ In return, ‘blue seal’ American cigarettes are smuggled back and are on open sale throughout Sulu and Zamboanga.