Why Do They Call The Island Borneo?

We’re just back in the hotel after a tour of this lovely city of about 500,000 on the banks of the Sarawak river. This huge island is called Borneo because way back in the 1800s, a British explorer came up the shore and a man was husking a coconut, or a ‘Borneo.’ Where are we?’, he asked, and the man just replied that this was a coconut. Hence the name Borneo, that is the name of the entire island, the third biggest after Greenland and Madagascar.

Most of the land mass on the bottom is now Indonesia, but up here on the top, is Sarawak, see the map here. The air is clear and the humidity high, the lawns are manicured and well taken care of. We drove past China town, and the Malay village, and to a museum where we found stuffed snakes, birds and fish.

Upstairs, we toured an exhibit that showed long houses, the dwellings still favored by the Iban and other tribes in the jungles of Sarawak. Today they have satellite dishes and flush toilets, but back then it was a little more primitive. On the ceiling human skulls were draped in netting, dozens of them, taken by headhunters who did an 1800s version of ethnic cleansing, killing their enemies and putting their skulls up there to be smoked by the fire.

Our guide Ambrose Nalo told us that though he is an Iban, he has no body art, the famous tattoos of his ancestors. These were etched on people’s knuckles, they crafted little skulls to indicate how many kills each man could claim, and this attracted Iban women. Today he said you need more like the ‘Three Cs: Credit cards, a car and a condo.”

Like Australia, this part of the world doesn’t feel like it is suffering from the recession and the pains of bad loans, layoffs and a tough economy. Instead, they are building a massive new parliament building, relocating a grimy fish market away from the riverfront and putting in new walkways, and we see condos and new hotels going up. “There is very little crime here,” said Ambrose, “we don’t have many problems with illegal immigrants since there is no beach front where people might enter.”

Of course part of this low crime might have to do with the capital punishment and strict jail time that is meted out for drug smuggling and theft. In today’s Borneo Post, a headline said ‘Castrate Rapists: Dr Ng’ which described a top minister’s view on the solution to cut down on rape crimes. Rape is rising significantly here, and this might be the way to stop it, Dr. Ng suggests.