The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure 
by Carl Hoffman.
William Morrow, 347 pp., £14.74, March 2019, 978 0 06 243905 5
Read More
Show All

You need to log in or subscribe to read more articles

Subscribe and get unlimited access to our complete archive

Subscribe

Like rock stars​ and a certain kind of actor, heroes of moral struggle face difficulties as they age. Principled self-sacrifice is tough to sustain over a lifetime, and those who spend years on a pedestal frequently end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going at it with the same intensity at 45. People get tired and lonely, or lazy and corrupt. Awareness of complexity and nuance blurs to grey the beautiful blacks and whites of moral certainty. And what if the struggle becomes hopeless and the battle is lost? No case better illustrates the problem than that of Bruno Manser.

For a few years before and after 1990, he was one of the most famous activists in the world, who almost single-handedly drew international attention to one of the 20th century’s great environmental crimes: the destruction of the ancient primary rainforests of Sarawak in Borneo by logging companies owned by cronies of the Malaysian government. At the time, it was the most fashionable of environmental causes. There were international petitions and boycotts; Prince Charles and Al Gore were outspoken in their support. The campaign pivoted around the figure of Manser, the ‘Wild Man of Borneo’ or ‘Swiss Tarzan’, whose life possessed a Conradian glamour rarely glimpsed in an age of jet travel and media saturation.

Manser, intriguingly described as a ‘Swiss cowherd’, spent years in Sarawak living among the Penan, one of the last populations of genuine nomads in the world. For six years, he wore a loincloth, hunted with a blowpipe, lived off snake and monkey meat, and directed the Penan in their struggle against the logging companies that were stripping the rainforests where the nomads roamed. Armed police hunted him through the jungle; the Malaysian government, it was said, had put a bounty on his head. He was captured, and escaped. Eventually he was smuggled back to Switzerland, after which the campaign lost momentum. The Malaysian government and its logging companies were immovable; the jungle dwindled ever further and more and more of the nomadic Penan were forced into settlements. Finally, in the first months of the 21st century, Manser sneaked back into Sarawak. While trekking alone through the jungle, he vanished without a trace.

Many Malaysians assumed that he had deliberately gone to ground and was biding his time in preparation for a new stunt. The Penan believed he had been murdered by the Malaysians or their thugs. His friends and supporters suspected a tragic accident, and mobilised a helicopter in repeated searches of the dense and remote forest highlands. Almost two decades later, not a trace of Bruno Manser has been found.

Please login or subscribe to read the full article.

Login

Send Letters To:

The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences