Settlement of a tribal dispute (North Borneo
This short note by R.H.W. Beresford-Peirse, then District Officer of Sandakan, documents the resolution of a decades-old head-hunting feud between the Rumanau Alab and Mangkahak peoples of the Kinabatangan River headwaters in North Borneo (p. 221).
Summary
The account traces the dispute from its origin in head-hunting raids over seventy years earlier, through a partially completed bangun (compensation) settlement that was interrupted by a smallpox epidemic, to its re-ignition in 1951 when a drunken Mangkahak man refused to sit with Rumanau headmen at a Governor’s party (pp. 221–222). Beresford-Peirse presided over the formal settlement proceedings at the Tamu Tahun at Tongod in May 1953, assisted by the D.A.D.O. and two panglimas, with eleven old headmen as advisers and a crowd of over two hundred onlookers (p. 222). After ten days of prior hearings and a three-hour session at Tongod, the parties agreed to a bolodop (river endurance) test to determine which side was lying about the death toll; the Mangkahak withdrew the challenge overnight and agreed to pay the reduced bangun list (pp. 222–223).
The note concludes with the sumpah ceremony, in which both sides swore never to fight again, never to raise the bangun question again, to permit inter-marriage, and to acknowledge allegiance to the Queen and Her Government, sealing the oath by killing a fowl on a billian post and smearing its blood over the post (p. 223).