The Longhouse

Life in Sabah has moved at an incredible rate over the past century. In the late 19th century, when Britain first laid claim, the state was mostly unspoiled rainforest. In the 1930s, when Agnes Keith wrote about her expat life as the wife of a forestry official, she included descriptions of children who'd never worn clothing, travelling from town to town via sea because there were no roads, and meeting headhunters living less than a day's boat journey from Sandakan. In post-war 1948, Kota Kinabalu was still a small collection of stilted water villages, colonial homes and shophouses. In the 1970s, David Attenborough made most of the journey to Mount Kinabalu on dirt tracks - the national road to Ranau was only paved in the 1980s. I met a man recently who used to be the Ranau doctor in the late 1990s - he used to travel to one of my schools by boat once a month. It took him two days to get there, a week to treat everyone, and two days to return to Ranau. It now takes me 3 hours by car.

One of the main casualties of this rapid expansion (apart from the traffic jams in KK, a city made for the few cars of the British elite post-WWII, and which now make me cry when I have to drive there) has been, of course, traditional lifestyles. The tribe around Kudat in the north of the state is known as the Rungus - they are related to the Dusun of the Ranau area, but with one significant difference: while the Dusun build wooden stilted houses, one per family, the Rungus, until quite recently, lived in longhouses. A longhouse is exactly what it says on the tin: a long house. There was one in each village, and all the villagers lived inside it. Think of it as being one, long, covered street of terraced homes. Except that it's the only street in the village. And the terraced homes are just single rooms. And it's raised two metres above the ground. Oh yeah, and that sound you hear on the palm-leaf roof? That's a ten-foot snake, and perhaps a few monkeys. 

Okay, so not your average English countryside village then.

Last month I went to see one of the last surviving examples of a longhouse. The villagers were living in one until just a couple of years ago, when a fire burnt it down. Afraid to move back in, they built separate houses for each family - which still mimic the structure of the longhouse, but give each family a better chance of surviving a fire started by a neighbour.

So: the longhouse.

It's really rather beautiful. It can be built in 2 weeks by a group of men ("Not women?" I said. "No," said our guide, "the women are too busy with the cooking.") from entirely local and completely free resources - mainly bamboo, but also wood and palm leaves. This one also used bark for the walls of the rooms.

Most Rungus lived in longhouses of 30 to 50 rooms. Each family gets one room - and when I say room, I do mean just that: a room.

In Sarawak, the longhouse will get extended backwards; when a child marries, a room gets built at the rear for the couple. In Sabah, the longhouse gets extended sideways; a newly-wed couple will build a room at the end of the row of rooms, where they will raise their own family. But from birth to marriage, the whole family lives out their lives in this single room, mattresses on the raised platform at the back, a small cooking area at the front, storage above the ceiling bars. The back wall is made of widely-spaced sticks, truly enabling one to feel as if they are separated from the wild, dangerous, scary, dark jungle by a few sticks. Um.

Social life extends out into the communal area, a strip on the other side of the 'street', where the inhabitants gather to sing, play the gongs, make crafts, talk and carry out religious rites.

This last is still carried out in many parts of Sarawak, although it's largely dead here in Sabah. I met a traveller who had attended a rite in a Sarawakian longhouse, alongside a British family. He admitted to laughing inside when a woman brought out a chicken to be sung over, and one of the British kids asked anxiously, "Mummy, what are they going to do?" The mother replied, "I think they're just going to bless it and then put it outside again." It was an optimistic guess, and one which I  guess the child will always hold her mum accountable for, particularly during therapy sessions trying to overcome her horror of blood.

It must have been a pretty remarkable style of living - your friends and family just a thin wall away, and plenty of properly traditional drinking of an evening (believe me, prior to Islam arriving in Sabah, Sabahan people could drink a Zimbabwean under the table, and that is saying something.)