From Kuching to the Kelabit Highlands I check out life in Borneo's Longhouses
Christopher, a Bidayuh tribesman, was born in a longhouse. "But not like this one," he says, looking around. "This is a modern longhouse. Our longhouse was in the jungle. There was nothing. No toilet. No air-conditioning. I can't sleep without air-conditioning!"
Variations of the longhouse are the traditional home for the majority of Sarawakian ethnic groups. Multiple families share the longhouse sort of like a horizontal apartment block or barracks with a common living and kitchen area. In the past, each room, or 'bilik', housed a family, usually multi-generational with maybe 4-5 children. If the family got too large, when sons brought home their wives and started their own families, they would add another room. Consequently, longhouses can be long, hundreds of meters long, even turning corners. Modern longhouses though are much shorter, with only 3 or 4 sharing families.
In the old days, as the water needed to be carried in a bamboo tube from the river, there were no luxuries like flushing toilets and showers. The toilet was a hole in the floor and the waste fell under the house. Modern longhouses are less basic than that but still pretty much off the grid, relying on tank water, septic tanks and generators or solar power.
The biggest change to the longhouse community is the shift from communal living. Today, longhouses have their own kitchen and living/dining extensions. The communal hallway is now just an entry point. Yet, in the Kelabit highlands town of Bario, for the most part, people do still live in the longhouse.
Bario Asai is the oldest longhouse in Bario, dating back to the 1960s. Prior to this, the community would have occupied other longhouses they built in the general area as they lived out a semi-nomadic existence within the bounds of their territory.
In contrast, many of Bario's other longhouse communities, like my host Stephen's, were moved to Bario by the Malaysian government for security reasons during the 1960s confrontations with Indonesia. They subsequently stayed on. Though this has raised difficult ownership rights issues over the ancestral lands they were forced to leave behind.
The nearby Kelabit village of Pa Lungan broke away from the longhouse model one or two generations ago. As the story goes, the father of my host Supang became irritated by his longhouse neighbours noise and moved out, building a home of his own down by the river. He was eventually enticed back to the village, but only on the proviso he was allowed to live in a separate house. This started a bit of a trend. Now the entire village, 26 families, live in separate homes, clustered in a circle around the church, with their rice paddies between.
Today, many Sarawakians live in individual housing. Modern life has brought them to the cities where they live with neighbours who are not only unrelated to them, but are of different ethnic groups. And yet, that hasn't spelled the end to the longhouse tradition. Right across Sarawak, longhouse heritage is still maintained through modern apartments being built in a low-rise longhouse style, rather than the vertical towers common in all other Malaysian states.
Many even have air-conditioning.
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