There’s something remarkable about a life well lived. Of the stories brimming within and lessons learnt. Of paths taken and trails blazed. It was the 13th century Persian poet Rumi who said: “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” Is he perhaps debunking his own myth? I ask and Tan Sri Datuk Amar Leo Moggie anak Irok throws his head back and chuckles mirthfully.
In the shadowed recesses of Moggie’s home, the muted rays of the sun flood onto an array of pastries and coffee cups arranged on a wide dining table. He turned 77 last October and at first glance, looks just like any elderly man, diminutive in stature, clad in a pair of slacks and a plain white shirt. And yet he’s so much more. Moggie’s glittering career in civil service and politics was hallmarked by his profound interest in the welfare of his constituents, and when he rises to greet me, it’s that immediate sense of humanity that he radiates.
The smile is quite simply, luminous and exudes warmth. His hand reaches to clasp mine in a firm handshake, in a way you suspect, it has reached out over a lifetime. And his eyes, crinkled at the edges, radiate humour. Tentative, inquisitive eyes as though all the rock-like certainties of youth have been smoothed over life’s tide, replaced by a kind of permanent question mark. Perhaps that’s what wisdom brings: uncertainty.
“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.
Longhouse memories
The book starts off with the burning of a longhouse. On the evening of July 26, Moggie received a phone call from Kuching bearing the news that his 10-year-old family longhouse, Rumah Perpetua Lika, home to 29 families had been completely razed to the ground by a fire.
Communal living has always been a cornerstone of village life, he shares. The longhouse is the most well-known type of indigenous architecture, especially in Sarawak. They’re made up of a series of individual raised pile houses (or ‘apartments’) constructed together in a row.
“It seemed like a fitting start to my book. It burnt around the same time when I was thinking of writing my memoir,” 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 half-wistfully: “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.”
Travails of education
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 not to be missed.” From Kuching, Moggie went on to study at Tanjung Lobang, Miri in 1957 and finally ended up at St. Joseph School, Kuching where he completed his Sixth Form.
Upon completing his Sixth form, Moggie applied for a job as a Sarawak administrative officer. “I was there for only two weeks when the results were announced. When I realised I achieved a full certificate, I immediately applied to the Sarawak government for a scholarship to enter university.”
He was selected for a scholarship under the Colombo Plan. The Colombo Plan was mooted when foreign ministers of seven countries under the British Commonwealth – Britain, Canada, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand – agreed to provide foreign aid and technical assistance to countries of Asia and the Pacific. The scholarship that Moggie received was one of the many programmes under the Colombo Plan. He went on to obtain a Bachelor of Arts in History.
“And that’s where you met your wife!”I say and he grins. “Yes, Elizabeth Penn Compton (as she was known then) was my junior. As scholarship students, we were well provided for, so I lent her most of my basic textbooks. My flatmates were also reasonable cooks and she used to be one of our regular guests at our evening meals,” he says, adding cheekily: “You know when they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, well, it applies to women too!”
Glittering career
Moggie insists that his career path from the early years as a District Officer of Kapit, to eventually joining politics wasn’t planned. “I just made most of the opportunities given to me. I never intended to go into politics!”
‘The district officer was a man for all seasons, a jack-of-all-trades. He was a one stop centre before that term found its way into popular jargon. He was the face of government. Politics had not yet impinged on his role, not in district administration. His days were full but they were also fulfilling,” writes Moggie. “I was district officer for just over two years but I enjoyed every minute of it,” he recalls.
He moved on to become director of the Borneo Literature Bureau (“I had no knowledge whatsoever about book publishing!”) and eventually ended up reporting at the Chief Minister’s Office where he was one of the key aides to Datuk Tawi Sli, Sarawak’s second chief minister. Moggie took a brief interlude to complete his Masters at Penn State University before returning to assume the role of deputy general manager of the Borneo Development Corporation (BDC), a property developer involved in building residential housing, light industrial estates and commercial shophouses. It was during that period that he was earmarked by Chief Minister Abdul Rahman Ya’kub as a potential political candidate to represent Barisan Nasional in Kanowit.
“I was increasingly persuaded by the thought that politics provided a channel to effect changes in society,” he writes. Realising that there was a strong undercurrent of discontent within the Dayak community against the government, Moggie decided to join the opposition instead.
That marked the early beginnings of what was to be a long stellar career in politics, which included being appointed a state minister under the third Chief Minister, Tun Abdul Rahman Ya’kub, and finally a federal minister serving under three of Malaysia’s prime ministers.
But Moggie isn’t interested in delving into his political background, much to my relief. “It wasn’t meant to be a discourse on my political career,” he insists, adding: “Although it seems to have eclipsed the rest of my story, it’s really not been the focus of my book.”
I can’t help but agree. Much has been talked about with regards to his political journey, but remarkably little has been said about the young boy in rural Kanowit, Sarawak and his father who foresaw how education would give his children wings to traverse beyond the borders of the longhouse and achieve better things for themselves. “Those are the little stories,” he says softly as he walks me to my car, “and those stories matter.”
FROM LONGHOUSE TO CAPITAL (RECOLLECTIONS)
Author: Leo Moggie
Publisher: MPH Publishing
283 pages