Joannes R Labunda was one of the earliest members of NBHE and one of the most active ones. He returned to God on 12 November 2011 and he will be sorely missed. He left us with a treasure trove of stories of which we think he would want us to share. After all, NBHE is all about preserving and sharing. Rest well dear friend.
Gosh! My dear friends! Thank you for all your prayers and well wishes! I miss you guys (that includes gals) too and keep myself entertained following up with all your running commentaries! Will explain my absence from this important group as soon as I am able! Thanks again and Nite. - 18 August 2011
Hi guys, I too heard about that long breasted ghost and I will ask my mum the name. I am a bit indisposed at the moment but I can't resist telling you about the ghost that my friend and I saw when we were kids. I would have been about 10 or 11 at the time and my friend Gerald Masudal was perhaps 4 years older. This happened in Lutong one day when Gerard's adoptive father Anthony Jomikik had been drinking at our house at Jalan Merikan. By about 5.30 pm he was quite drunk and told my mum that he wanted to go home because Gerard was alone in the house and they were yet to cook dinner. Mum told him she had already slaughtered a chicken and had started on dinner for everyone and told him that I would go fetch Gerard from their house which was less than half a mile away on the other side of town. So off I went on my stepfather's brand new Raleigh gentleman bicycle which I had just learned how to ride! It was still light on the way home. Gerard was riding the bicycle with me sitting behind on the spring carrier. I was so small then my feet reached only on the nuts of the hub. There is a club called the Lutong Recreation Club between our houses nearer to theirs than ours. This was one of our favourite haunts and we knew every inch of the grounds. We got to the white picket fence separating the carpark in the front from the playground at the back where at the end there were two Jambu trees growing side by side about 15 feet tall. As Gerard entered the open gate on the picket fence, he suddenly jumped off the bicycle and scooted off to the front of the Club. I fell over to the left still entangled in the bicycle. I had no idea what was going on but as I extricated myself from the machine I looked up ahead and saw a man in white standing between the two Jambu trees and he stood equally tall! I quickly picked up the bicycle and pushed it back to the front where Gerard stood ashen faced and hugging one of the two pillars that supported the roof over the stairs. All he said was "Did you see it?" We ran across the dancing floor of the Club to peer through the glass louvers but the apparition had disappeared. Eerily, we heard dogs howling in the distance. After that we took the main road home! - 16 August 2011
My late grandfather Bernard Mojikon was a primary school teacher at St Michael's Penampang before the War and he had a house at Tuavon. At one time he was transferred to Tambunan to start a Mission school there. So he had to uproot his family and took his wife, my mum who was about 10 at the time, and a couple of her brothers and sister who had been born then and set off up the bridle path to Tambunan. It was literally an uphill journey. There travelled with a larger group but my grandparents had to "baboi" the younger kids when they could no longer walk! That was besides carrying the Singaging containing their precious few possessions and all the food for themselves enough for the journey. My mum took her share of the load and said it took them SEVEN days and SEVEN nights to reach Tambunan! Along the way they slept in makeshift shelters some already provided and some they had to hurriedly make for the nite! My grandfather bought a piece of land next to the school he started and built himself a house with local materials and they lived there for one or two years. After he completed his work on the school my grandfather returned down the same bridle path with his family to Penampang. He donated the land and the house in Tambunan he had built to the school. In Tuavon he also donated the hillock on which the Sigar now stands, but this was the original site of The Society of Kadazan and was where Tun Fuad was picked as the Kadazan leader. - 12 August 2011
When I was a Stipendiary Magistrate in Miri, Sarawak I had a circuit to attend to and from Miri I would travel to the outlying sub-districts to sit in the Courts there, at Limbang, Lawas, Marudi, Niah and Bintulu and once we had to travel by boat deep into the Ulu right up to Long Lama for an exhumation in an Iban graveyard. Sometimes I would spend a week in one station. Anyway, at Marudi the court was in the old Fort from the days of the Brookes and a large part of it was solidly built out of belian. I quite forget the name of the Fort, Alice or Margaret or something, but on this particular day about 200 ulu people, mostly Kayans and Kenyah but with some Kelabits thrown in were gathered around the courtyard. Apparently some of them had walked for days to reach Marudi and some had come from far off tributaries of the Baram in their boats. A lot were in native attire and armed. They had all been charged with illegal felling and squatting on government land! The Court was packed too and when sessions began the Court Clerk called the name of the first Defendant to verify that he was in attendance. Perhaps they did not have NRICs in those days or the natives did not bother to carry them on their person...but at the call of Ding Wan, about ten of them stood up all claiming to be Ding Wan! I told them to sit down amidst an uproar of laughter. Then, the next on the list was, strangely enough, Wan Ding! Another 8 people stood up all claiming to be Wan Ding! Before the laughter could begin again, I quickly asked the Public Prosecutor if it was possible for him to identify the right Ding Wan and or Wan Ding in the Court. He said no, so I discharged all of them for lack of identification! - 12 August 2011
Some natives in the Bakam-Bekenu areas were also charged at my Court in Miri for the same forest offences. When I arrived in the morning on the day of reckoning a large spectacular group of natives numbering in the hundreds were encamped under the two Flame of the Forest trees outside the Court which was in the Govt office building on the side next to the Resident's office. My "alma mater" St Joseph's Primary School was located behind this Govt Office building so it was very much "terra familia" for me as was the whole of Miri town. I was proud to find myself suddenly sitting as a Magistrate in the town I grew up in. Inside the Courthouse it was packed like sardines. The Defendants readily admitted to staying on the land and cutting down trees there. Without exceptions they said it was ancestral land but had since become Govt property. Since they admitted to the charges against them I had no choice but to convict all of them. In sentencing I routinely asked them whether they had jobs and all that. I found out that mostly they each owned only a couple of blackened pots, a parang, maybe a shotgun, a few dogs! I said to them that given the facts of the case I had no choice but to find them all guilty as charged! Under the circumstances, considering their honest efforts to attend my court all the way from their longhouses in the Ulu and in the light of their poverty, I said I would impose a fine of RM10.00 on each of them and that if they defaulted in paying the fine, they would be jailed for a day! I also bound them by a good behaviour bond for a year! I don't remember whether they paid the fines but that was the year when my senior in school, R S, won the seat for Parliament in that constituency! - 12 August 2011
The full name of N is Homo Neanderthal or a human type of the Neander Valley where they were first discovered. The human that is thought to have wiped them out is Homo Sapiens (Cro Magnon) because they were thought more intelligent than H N and looked much like us whereas the H N had more distinguishing features like thick brow bridges. We are today Homo Sapiens Sapiens but I think not twice as intelligent as Homo Sapiens! The Homo label was used first for Homo Habilis -I think- "Handy man" because he had stone tools! Then - to keep the line straight - Homo Erectus - Homo Neanderthal. There are a few intriguing fossils indicating sub types in between and before but they are really controversial specimens. It is a great debate still raging when man became human. We separated from the Chimpanzee I think anytime between 7 -15 millions years ago, I can't remember exactly. Less than 2 % of our genes are different! Today it is believed that there was not only one species of man in the past. - 10 August 2011
I wouldn't say "purest" of HSS but certainly the original human breed. Having said that though, there are more different evolutionary human offshoots-i am unsure if subspecies is the correct classification-in Africa than elsewhere, where the genes show a rather boring consistency because they were all descended from at most two specific kinds of HE and or HS who left at different epochs! Anyhow, evolution is amazingly in that a black man 200kya is now born a caucasian or a mongoloid! Nobody can explain why life is so magical! - 10 August 2011
I think the Neanderthals were so heavily built that no humans today would dare dream of wrestling one of them but I remember telling someone that I won't be surprised if they mated, knowing men! Sorry, and Women! - 11 August 2011
So I don't think the N were slave material. It would not have been easy subduing them...after all they hunted the Mammoth! I think the weather changed too much for them and the more adaptive HS (Cro Magnon) thrived instead. That there are N genes in all of us today suggests that it was indeed almost immediately after HS left Africa that the interbreeding began, so it seems HS and N did live together, even if the N females were the more frequent to be found in HS settlements. This new findings change the whole human scenario from 200kya on. - 11 August 2011
The research is not clear whether the DNA are from down the mitochondria (and so female) line but I think they will soon sort that out... - 11 August 2011
Siou, Justin. The full scientific name would be Homo Neanderthalensis ...something like that. I wanted to highlight that N was Homo...oop! - 11 August 2011
Sonsomido...ha ha! I remember it well. I forget the words but the melody I know by heart!
I also liked the flute music...I thought it was brilliant!
Sonsomido and the flute melody...though the latter was a dirge...brings tears to my eyes!
Celine, I think not because before the War there was no need for such songs. We didn't think we had to be patriotic - we do that only when we are in danger of losing the country - we just took it for granted that it WAS our country. No question about it! That was our attitude.
I think there are few people in the world who would stop whatever they might be doing to listen with rapt attention and breaths held whenever a mournful and plaintive melody on a bamboo flute floats out of the radio...they listened silently as the announcer recites the sudden demise of so and so from somewhere in the country! That was our family then! - 10 August 2011
You can find information on the Flag in the link: The British North Borneo Company administered British North Borneo from 1881 until its official demise (pace the Japanese occupation) in 1948. The shield on the coat of arms shows a lion above a dhow. The crest shows two human arms grasping a flag flying to the right. One of these arms appears to be that of a Caucasian and the other that of a person of darker hue. A deliberate and obvious choice, I feel. The small flag grasped by those arms was that of the Governor of British North Borneo as flown from about 1882 to about 1910. It was yellow with a red lion passant facing to the left as one looks at it.
After 1910 or so, the Governor flew the Union defaced with a yellow disc upon which was the same red lion. The disc was not surrounded by the usual garland as the Governor was appointed by the Board of Directors of the Company, rather than by the Crown. Notwithstanding this change to the gubernatorial flag, the small flag in the crest of the coat of arms remained that of the Governor pre-1910.
When the British North Borneo Company ceded control after the Second World War, the territory became a British colony. The flag of the Governor, from this point on an appointee of the Crown, changed again. The Union was now defaced not by the badge of the Company, but by the crest of the Company's coat of arms in a white disc surrounded by a garland. I have seen this flag (a scaled-down version for use upon a motor car) in the National Police Museum at Kuala Lumpur and I am pretty sure that the small flag grasped by the two arms in the crest was no longer the pre-1910 Governor's flag, but the Union Flag itself.
When British North Borneo acceded to the Malaysian Federation as the state of Sabah in 1963, the coat of arms was modified. The lion and dhow disappeared from the shield, but the two-armed crest was retained. Today, those same two arms grasp the current flag of Sabah. - 10 August 2011
You might want to know that Datuk Joe (Manjaji) began in the Police Force and he was subsequently "appointed" as the first MP for Penampang. I don't know the years but he was also a well known boxer and later became a journalist for Sabah Times. He and his family had to spend two years in HK to escape Tun Mustapha's wrath! I have had the privilege to read some of his letters and articles as well as some correspondences by Lothar. I was pleasantly surprised at their fluency in the English Language. Of course they also wrote in Kadazan. Like his father Datuk Joe was a patriot through and through! - 8 August 2011
Justin (that's nicer than FJW), this is only my imagination as I don't think there would be any documents or artifacts existing today to help explain why the Chinese decided to turn local in KP. But we do know that the Chinese have been coming around to this part of the world - 'poli' or 'puni' as they call it in their Annals - since the 9th century and even probably before the 6th century. It is even likely that they have been visiting us ever since they invented the junk! We also know that they came for trade of course, but we might forget that they were firstly seamen and would need to anchor in a safe harbour, the best of which was the Brunei Bay. I used to sail and I know that this is very necessary if you are on a boat and you wished to avoid being buffeted by the waves or blown onto the rocks or capsized by the prevailing Monsoon winds and occasional hurricanes. I read somewhere that are about 2500 junks at the bottom of the South China Sea today. Anyway, before I digress further, I do believe that trade is the principal reason why Brunei grew into a Sultanate. But many of these Chinese sailors and traders who came to Brunei primarily to trade also jumped ship and stayed behind, not only in Kota Batu in Brunei but in nearby Kuala Penyu, and even further up the coastline wherever suitable anchorages were available. They stayed behind to act as middlemen as the Chinese are wont to do in business! They would became comparatively wealthy and it is no surprise that the lusty local Kuala Penyu wenches (excuse the expression - no pun intended) would be mightily attracted to them. With a thriving business, a hardworking wife or wives and dozens of tiny tots running around the established gudang in Kuala Penyu surrounded by a large extended family, anyone would find it hard to return to China where one was more than likely to starve or worse be conscripted into war and killed. Furthermore, many of these extended families would have had relatives in Brunei, so would it not be good business sense to change your name so that you are now related to, say, a cousin of the Pengiran, or perhaps a Pehin? But since this would have been going on for more than a thousand years, I would agree that the majority if not all the original residents of Kuala Penyu and even Brunei have Chinese blood in them. Do you know that at one time a very large swatch of the land around Brunei were cleared for pepper plantations owned by Chinese. They say you can still distinguish the plantation area today if you fly over Brunei. - 7 August 2011
I don't think the Priest had anything to do with it. The British did not like them very much it would seem. In 1936 the Orang Putih DO of Penampang (no doubt egged on by the Mission) complained to the Orang Putih Resident of Jesselton that the Chinese should not be allowed in Penampang since they were teaching the locals how to distill arak and to gamble away their hard earned money!!! This prompted the angry Chinese community in Penampang, in cahoots with the Jesselton Chinese Chamber of Commerce, to draft a petition to the Resident singed by more than a 130 of them in which they stated that they had been here for several generations and were locals too. They said this included the two headmen OKK Lojunga (Tan Sri Richard's and YA Duncan's great grandfather and from whose big bungalow Lothar was taken by the Japs -see Celine Daya's post) and OKK Missi of Hungab who both readily admitted to be Chinese of Chinese descent. I think Danny Wong got the story in one of his books. - 7 August 2011
Justin, What we are doing now, collecting and discussing facts, exchanging stories, views and opinions, looking over evidence and historical details, generally devoting our precious time away from other pursuits - that to me is part of our beloved history too. Our pioneering efforts need only to be written down somewhere and we know we can't really leave that task to someone else less dedicated! That is no wishful thinking here at all but you are pointing in the right direction. Hehe! Let's see how big a group we can muster to meet Lynette! - 8 August 2011
Tina, I am half way though your book....your early escapades and the lost world you describe do remind me so much of my own early childhood. I suppose that would be so since at the time we were all still basically rice-planting peasants, although my grandfather was also a schoolteacher at St Michael in Penampang! My step father (Stan Golokin's father) was also a policeman from Tambunan --there's a picture of him just like the photo of your dad in uniform. He was in the Signal department but he went to work for what was at the time Sarawak Shell Oilfield Ltd in Lutong, 7 miles from Miri town. That was where I grew up and did all my schooling. But I were born in Guunsing 41 days after you so less than two months separate us. But unlike you, I was the eldest in a family of 9 including Morley who died in childhood of a hole in the heart. So I was in Seus' shoes really though it would seem as the eldest daughter you also had to shoulder many chores not unfamiliar to me! When I was in in Lutong it was my task to be tinker, tailor soldier jack of all trade - kitchen help, housemaid, gardener, nanny and all that you had to do too, including shopping which I liked cos I could then buy marbles and also treat myself to some sweets. The worst was changing nappies and looking after my siblings who came out all in a row without respite! In Tuavon I would volunteer actually to fetch water from the river as it was an opportunity to wade in the clear water and perhaps to catch a few shrimps hiding under the rocks. The river was nearby and often we had to be called back home under loud threats of a severe beating - "pataiyon kuiyoyu au kouno muli do boino" - but though I would be shivering and blue in the lips as I scrambled home I was never actually beaten. I am intrigued that your Dad could play the violin since my stepfather was a good kronchong singer and could accompany himself on the guitar. I could go on....but let me finish your book! - 7 August 2011
Gosh Tina, we must be twin spirits! One day I was alone on the Tuavon side and spied two young girls sitting on the sandbank on the other side. I was only about 4 then and hadn't yet learn to swim. So this happened about 1955. I tried crossing the river on foot a little upstream from where the girls were sitting. It was deep in the middle of the river so I stepped over a sandy ledge and suddenly went under and was quickly carried along downstream by the current. By the time the two girls realised what had happened and jumped in to pull me out I was already near the botung at the corner and had drunk a lot of water along the way. I remember flailing in the darkness below trying to get to the surface and was shivering uncontrollably and blue in the lips from the near fatal misadventure. I have always wondered who those girls were that it was worth for me to risk an untimely watery demise. There have been two other occasions when I nearly drowned but I will tell you about that next time. You did say in your book that you went to Penampang but what were you doing in Tuavon? - 7 August 2011
Wow, you came when I left. I wonder whether you know my family clan in Tuavon. My mum is Vinik the eldest of Bernard Mojikon's children and perhaps my grandfather taught you in St Michael, but surely you and or your mum would have had friends from my Kampong since everyone went to the Kasigui shops! You are right, it was just before is the water intake point and the botung was on the other side of the river. I believe those mermaids were sent from Nampasan. I was told then that I had guardian angels around me cos they couldn't believe how I managed to survive scraps like that. - 7 August 2011
Ah Jude, the Denisovans were the archiac humans who went north into Siberia ... and after interbreeding with the proto - austronesians from down in China and further south probably went on into America, etc. I read about them but forgot the name! Thanks for the clarification. - 7 August 2011
Hehe, thank you Celine. History is never dry if it is your own. When you indulge in that, sooner or later you find that you need also to know the history of other people in order to understand your own...it's a long process of self discovery actually! But you win't realise it in a classroom - 7 August 2011
It is not known whether Neandertal (American spelling) and archiac Humans (Cro Magnon Man) could interbreed although knowing men they would have tried anyway when they were living side by side. It is very probable they are different species. The idea that there could had been more than one species of humans is a defensible one, esp during the Australopithecine period (afarensis, africanus -gracile against robust). The Leakeys' theory of the origin of the human family have basically fallen out of favour now...and we do have a more complicated evolutionary line than was thought by them..."Lucy" I think was the beginning of it all... I have many books on this: All the Leakey books and also Donald Johanson's "Lucy" and "The Neandertal Enigma" by James Shreeve, etc. This is my favourite past time. - 7 August 2011
Yes Jude, the first human exodus out of Africa was about 2mya while we were still Homo Erectus. They probably gave rise to the Neandertal, etc. who existed before 200Kya though the Neandertal seem to have lasted a bit longer until archair humans arrived. In Africa Homo Erectus evolved into archiac humans and again left Africa 200kya. That's why we have the Homo Erectus in Asia before 200kya and the proto-Austranesians after 200ka. That's the theory that I know, at least. - 7 August 2011
Do you know Celine that a few days or weeks before the Petagas massacre the Japs who occupied the Lojunga Bungalow at Kg Kuai (near my house now) had called Lothar to the said house. Lothar and his Penampang colleagues were secretly planning a reprisal and they had sharpened their weapons in readiness for the day but unfortunately there were spies amongst them who leaked the plan to the Japs. Lothar bravely went anyway. At the river bank Datuk Joe Manjaji who was merely a boy then and who had insisted on following his father to the house was dissuaded from proceeding and was hurriedly taken away in a boat upstream. That was the last that anyone saw of Lothar. Danny Wong the local Historian came to interview Jane Manjaji and Lothar is mentioned in one of his recent books on Sabah, I can't remember which one. I will check and post. - 7 August 2011
I have always wondered why we were so fond of our "colonial masters" to the extent of becoming anglophiles while the Malays had endless conflicts instead. I think you guys are right. We were the wild men of Borneo and did not have any masters at the time. But whatever their intentions, the British left us pretty much alone and taught us government and law and justice and generally how to be civilized in but a few generations. That's a tremendous step forward for our people and I think many of our elders would have been sorry to see them leave. It's the same in Sarawak. The Dayak natives really loved the Brookes! I have a few books on them as well as an almost complete set of the Sarawak Museum Journal up to about 1970 which I ordered from the SM. I used to read them for entertainment! I also have a few original copies of books on Sarawak written before 1900. When I was attending primary mission school in Miri, I had already read and was greatly moved by poems by the likes of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Blake and the writings of Dickens, Chesterton, Macauley and even, I think, Thomas Hardy in our Royal Readers! Those were mostly excerpts and not the complete works, but it whetted my appetite for English literature and things British! Of course, I devoured Beatrice Potter (I was fascinated by her drawings of animals), Enid Blyton and the Williams series (can remember the author) etc to be had in the surprisingly large library there...so all my imagination were English though I was still Dusun and the only one in my class to come from Sabah. I wanted to be a writer too, then! This influence went on till the 6th form cos of the books in the library there donated by the previous British people when they left! I owe them my entire education! - 7 August 2011
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