Learning from the Perak Man

IN Malaysia, politics is the hottest topic but archaeology is not. In Malaysia, sustainability is the buzz word in universities and among climate change fighters, but the significance of the oldest discovered skeletal remains of a human being does not make headline news or get buzzed about on social media. Why is this so?

In this article, I would like to paint a different picture about the 10,000-year-old Perak Man – discovered in Lenggong, site of the oldest known place of human activity in the peninsula – and what he could teach us about modern day politics and the idea of sustainability.

First, politics.

In present day Malaysia, politics surround the definition of one particular race and the creation of a contentious social classification, the “bumiputra”. Simply put, our politics has surrounded itself with the simplistic narrative that one race or classification of people were here first and thus that race merits special educational, economic and administrative specialties.

But who exactly was here first? The hated word “pendatang” (immigrant) has been thrown about by one race against all others by none other than parliamentarians and even opportunist academics that have created a quagmire of mistrust and hatred among the people of this country.

The Perak Man was here first, that is undeniable. He was here before the first Raja Melayu who was of animistic or Hindu faith or Buddhist belief. So what race or social classification was the Perak Man?

For me, the question of history from the perspective of spirituality is the silliest and the most ridiculous one. First of all, who knows for a fact who came first or stayed the longest? Secondly, who decides what classification of race or people should the first communities be allocated to? Who were the many “first communities” that peopled the peninsula?

In Malaysia, history seems stuck in a post-Islam presence. This was politically decided, it was never a fact. Laksamana Cheng Ho, or Zhang He, came during the times of Parameswara and it was said that the Princess Hang Li Po came with a delegation of Chinese courtiers and handmaidens several decades later. What of the mix of races then? Why is the definition of pendatang relegated only to the influx of Chinese in the 18th century with the tin mining industry?

Thus, as the Perak Man would observe, who was the bumiputra and who were the pendatang?

My ancestry goes back only 150 years and my ancestors hailed from Pattani in Thailand. My wife’s family tree can be traced back only four generations to when her great-great-grandfather came to these lands as a 10-year-old boy from Minangkabau in Sumatra, Indonesia. Thus, the politics of original inhabitants and immigrants fall apart in the face of the 10,000-year history of the Perak Man and his tribes and families after that.

Thus, if our education had been more focused on the archaeology of the remains of the ancient dwellers even older than the Sri Vijayan and Majapahit eras, we might have become a more accepting nation of each other’s ancestry and the politics of bumiputra would never have been blown up into a conflict.

Sustainability and the environment seem to be buzz words these days. Universities are filled with research proposals and papers in paid journals glorifying these two terms.

Yet at the same time we read about the desecration of the Tasik Chini Forest in Pahang and the stripping of the forest in Bukit Cerakah, Selangor.

In Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley, climate change is being blamed for the frequent flash floods every time it rains for more than two hours.

Rapid and uncontrolled urban development making green areas disappear as well as the degazetting of flood retention ponds are explained away by both civil servants and politicians as “climate change” that has brought about too much rain.

That our natural environment will soon threaten our lives because of our own folly and arrogance is simply a matter of when and no longer if.

The Perak Man lived with his environment. He did not possess the bulldozers nor the greed of condominium developers helped by corrupt officials to destroy the hand that fed his family.

That sort of living with the environment 10,000 years ago was probably passed on to the Orang Asli of today who are struggling to find food in the forest that shelters and feeds them.

We, as modern Malaysians, still continue our industry-based education and ignore the environmentally-friendly ways of the Orang Asli and other indigenous people. To many of us, these ways are “primitive” and as archaic as the Perak Man.

Our ideas of sustainability are totally unconnected to our modern economy, education and way of life. Politicians run the country by plundering the environment and then call on race and religion to get re-elected. And they do get re-elected – on those very issues.

Environmental issues and sustainability will never win against popular racial and religious narratives of false morality and superficial historical perspectives. If the Perak Man were alive today, he and his family would die of starvation or of poisoning from polluted rivers like Sungai Kim Kim in Johor.

The Perak Man and the archaeological sites in Lenggong, Perak, can serve both as a warning and as a solution to how we are to progress into the future. The politics of who came here first and who was here the longest should no longer be relevant as an issue within a 10,000-year span of history and not just a mere 800 years of story about a race and a religion.

And the Perak Man had left a legacy of living with the environment that we can still appreciate today if only our eyes could be open to new possibilities of surviving with and not against the natural environment gifted to us by God.

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor of Architecture at the Tan Sri Omar Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Studies at UCSI University. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.