On the wings of education
“Did you read it?” he asks. By ‘it’, he’s referring to the book that’s on the table between us. From Longhouse to Capital is Moggie’s memoir of sorts, detailing his early upbringing in the interiors of Sarawak, his pursuit of a formal education in a number of boarding schools scattered through the state, separated from his parents at a young age; his early career as a civil servant and after entering politics, his meteoric rise to assemblyman, member of Parliament, Sarawak state minister and finally, federal cabinet minister. One of the early stalwarts of Malaysian politics, Moggie’s last post before his retirement in 2004 was as Minister of Energy, Communication & Multimedia.
“I must confess Tan Sri, I don’t know much about politics,” I confide, revealing my ignorance haltingly. He waves his hands dismissively and answers with another chuckle: “That’s okay, I don’t want to talk about that!”
“That part is boring!” chips in his wife, Puan Sri Elizabeth Moggie and he chortles. Coffee first, she insists and bustles over us. “Can I have a cup too, darling?” he asks, grinning. Their conversation is peppered with the incessant, good-humoured bickering characteristic of long relationships. He teases her and when she retorts, he laughs.
The smell of black coffee wafts through the air, and Elizabeth points me to a plate of curry puffs. “These are really good. You must try it!” she insists. The hospitality is so warm and disarming, it immediately puts me at ease. The night I spent poring over his book as if studying for an exam before meeting this affable politician now seems like an unnecessary gambit. He sits back in his chair with a smile, like a benevolent host, ready to tell me stories of the past. His past, in particular. oir,” he says, adding: “It was finally rebuilt when I completed my book. That’s why I thought it was a good context to add to my story.”
After a brief pause, he continues halfwistfully: “It’s no longer the same however.” The newly-built structure is modern, he adds, and on the ground without the trademark stilts that longhouses are famous for.
“But it’s not the same one anyway,” chips in Elizabeth. “When I first went to Sarawak to meet his family for the first time, they were not living in the original longhouse. They were living in a dampa which is a temporary small dwelling that the Ibans would erect when they were building a new longhouse,” she recalls, adding: “I never got to see the original longhouse that he was brought up in.”
Rumah Perpetua Lika was one of the three offshoots of the former occupants of Rumah Nyumboh, the original longhouse where Moggie and his siblings were born and raised in. As families grew in size, he writes, they split into groups and built new longhouses. Longhouse communities back in the days, he elaborates, revolved around the cycle of shifting cultivation. “Most longhouse residents would be padi planters or have small plots of rubber trees. In addition to that, some families would plant pepper. Planting padi would be the centre of most families’ activities when I was boy.”
His memories of his longhouse childhood are hazy, Moggie admits but there are some snippets that he recalls. Time moves differently in rural Sarawak. “Longhouse communities didn’t worry about the exactness of time,” he remarks, smiling. ‘There were always people in the longhouse.” he writes. ‘The ruai served as a covered play area, where children played hide-and-seek and chased each other under the benign watch of grandparents who tended to chores such as weaving mats, repairing old baskets or tending to the drying padi on the uncovered verandah (tanju).’
Those memories remain as they were — mere snippets — as he would explain: “My father recognised the importance of education and so I was sent to school at an early age. I was never fully immersed in the usual childhood upbringing in a longhouse but the time spent there during my early years and the school holidays was sufficient to imprint a memory of the life of a subsistence farming family.”
Moggie’s father, Irok anak Bagong, was a simple farmer without education. “My father never went to school. Nobody from his generation around our area went to school,” he says simply.
However, Irok was the deputy tuai rumah (longhouse chief) and assisted his father-in-law Nyumboh in dealing with the government and helped him arbitrate disputes involving the occupants of their longhouse and those from neighbouring longhouses. “Because he dealt with government officials, and met civil servants and junior school teachers, he began to see that education was important. He decided to send all of us to school,” recalls Moggie, adding: “In our own village, we were the first batch to go to school.”
Education for rural communities back in the days was, and still remains, a luxury, paid with the price of having parents parting with their young children for basic education. Children have to travel a distance to stay in boarding schools, some as early as six or seven years old. “We had to be independent at a young age. I was around eight or nine at that time,” recalls Moggie, adding: “We did our own cooking and generally had to take care of ourselves. About once a week, my father would make that journey from the longhouse to provide my brother and me with some food items like fish or meat. We foraged for vegetables such as ferns (paku pakis) in the nearby jungle.”
Seeing my incredulous face, he smiles, shrugging his shoulders, before saying: “It was the only school available at the time. We all had to go there and become boarders. Our longhouse was so far away.” Thinking of my own childhood and schooling days, I murmur: “I feel so spoilt,” and he responds: “That’s why it’s important for my children and grandchildren to understand this is how I started.”
“Do you remind your children about your difficult schooling years?” I ask.
“Well, they’d just respond, “Yeah, we’ve heard this all before. That was then. This is now!”” he replies, chuckling heartily.
His pursuit of education led Moggie further away from his family. From his early beginnings at St. Francis Xavier’s School in Kanowit, he went on to the Batu Lintang School in far-away Kuching for his Primary Five. “My mother wasn’t pleased when I told her the news,” writes Moggie. “She had never travelled beyond the longhouse except to go to the bazaar at Kanowit. But my father believed that it was an opportunity