Bruno Manser, center, believed he had found "paradise" among the nomadic Penan tribe of northeastern Borneo
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A day later, there is less doubt in Along's mind. Stalking through a patch of ruined forest an hour from his camp where the bulldozers and chainsaws had just completed a sweep, Along jabs his spear into the glistening red stump of what was once a 100-m meranti tree. "I'll kill the next man who cuts a tree here," he shouts to the empty jungle.
When manser entered the forest in 1984, around 45% of Sarawak's primary forest was untouched. By the time he disappeared, the figure was 5%. "He didn't want to go back," says Peter Manser, his 44-year-old brother. "Bruno had many other things he wanted to do, other people to meet and places to explore: Siberia and South America. But he had no choice. He knew the situation was desperate and that time was running out fast for the Penan."
It was a paradoxical situation for Manser: he had spent almost his entire life preparing himself to live in the wild with people like the Penan, people who were pure, living "close to their source," as he once wrote. When he was a boy, "Bruno made a bed on our balcony out of branches and ferns and slept in it even in autumn and winter," says his sister Monica. "That was normal. It was just the way Bruno was. My parents, our family, we were all used to it." She sits amid geraniums, coffee cups and delicate chocolate cakes on the balcony of her small apartment in a suburb of the family's hometown, Basel, the black rattan Penan bracelets on her wrists the only sign that she is something other than an ordinary Swiss housewife.
Manser was the only one in the family to finish school (where he once said he felt "like a cow ... just rechewing the food fed to me as a pupil.") After he graduated, Manser went to the mountains to learn from the shepherds and farmers. When his high-school diploma arrived, he fed it into the flames of a potbellied iron stove.
He stayed in the hills for 12 years, herding cows and making cheese, seeking work and knowledge of the old ways: how to work wood and leather, tan hides, stitch clothes. Monica remembers visiting her brother and coming across a cow that had fallen in a ditch and broken a leg. Manser cut its throat and, with Monica's help, butchered and skinned it on the spot. In 1984, Manser went to a university library to read up on denizens of the rain forest. As he wrote later: "I just came across a tribe whose name is the Penan people, a nomadic hunter and gatherer society. And then one day I decided I would go and try and live there for a couple of years." After several false starts and brushes with death in the forestonce he got lost and ran out of food; another time he was violently ill after eating a poisonous palm hearthe finally met up with two nomadic Penan. They did their best to ignore him but, as his friend and colleague John Kuenzli says: "Bruno had a thicker skin than anyone I have ever met." He followed the nomadic group like a lost puppy, and, after some weeks, they took him in.
It was Manser's dream. He spent his time recording everything, sketching the pattern of a cicada's wing, how a dead gibbon's hands were tied so the animal could be carried, how the Penan drilled holes to make a blowpipe.
And the whole six years he was there, he later recalled: "I didn't once see two Penan quarrel with each other. I didn't even see one person shouting at another person. I didn't even see somebody ... interrupted while speaking."
Of course there were things Manser didn't say too loudly: that life expectancy for the Penan was estimated to be only in the high thirties; that, except in the best of times, hunger was a constant presence, malnutrition and disease not far behind; that it was a deadly place to bring up children. Manser himself nearly died twice, once from malaria and later from a snakebite. Still, he had found his "paradise," as he called it, a place where he finally felt at home, "like the child in the belly of the mother."
Like most paradises, however, Sarawak had its Satan: the loggers invaded, unchecked, and the Penan asked Manser for help. He was reluctant. "I just wanted to hunt with the Penan and make drawings of lovely animals and so on," he said in 1999. "I knew if I got involved I would be biting into a sour apple." He became what he called "their secretary," putting their complaints and demands into letters, usually in English, to logging executives and government officials.
Inevitably, the "white Tarzan" began to draw press notice, as well as the less admiring attention of the Malaysian government. After several ethnic groups in Sarawak's interior started blockading roads to prevent access by logging companies, the Malaysian government blasted Manser as an ignorant Westerner interfering in the country's internal affairs and sent the police to catch him. On the run almost permanently, he was captured twice, but managed to escape both times, the second by jumping out of a police Land Rover and diving into a river. Manser said shots were fired at him. He also lost all the notebooks and drawings he had done in the preceding four years.
By 1990, Manser realized that his increasing notoriety gave the Malaysian government a convenient scapegoat. (The Penan "cannot be allowed to become anthropological specimens for foreigners to gawk at," Mahathir once thundered.) Friends in the environmental movement convinced Manser he could make an impact by campaigning in Europe. And so, with a new haircut and a forged passport, he flew out of Sarawak and launched a campaign to stop the destruction of Sarawak's forest. In 1993, he and Martin Vosscer, a physician friend, went on a hunger strike in front of the Swiss parliament in Bern. Vosscer pulled out after 40 days but Manser insisted on continuing and "nearly died," Vosscer says, only agreeing to stop the fast after 60 days at his mother's request.
The hunger strike, Vosscer says, failed to achieve its aima complete ban on the import of tropical hardwoods in Switzerlandbut it did reap publicity. Manser, and the Penan, became famous, particularly in Switzerland and France, where tropical hardwood use started to decline. Al Gore introduced a resolution to the U.S. Senate condemning logging in Sarawak. Britain's Prince Charles described the treatment of the Penan as "genocide." He got more notice from Malaysia, too: Mahathir wrote to Manser, telling him it was "about time that you stop your arrogance and your intolerable European superiority. You are no better than the Penan."
Despite such pyrotechnics, Manser was aware that, as he himself described it, his efforts were having "less than zero" effect where it countedin Sarawak itself. Logging continued at a furious rate throughout the 1990s, only slowing during the Asian economic crisis near the end of the decade. The knowledge of his failure haunted Manser. Never comfortable in Switzerland, or in the endless round of international conference halls, always missing the forest but dreading returning to it, Manser spent half of each year trying to forget the burden of campaigning, trekking to meet the nomadic Pygmies in Africa, walking for weeks across the Alps. He returned to Sarawak, or tried to, almost every year, crossing over from Indonesia or Brunei. And as the situation there worsened and international attention shifted away, particularly during the Asian economic crisis, his tactics and risks grew more desperate.