The pagan tribes of Borneo - Get a Free Blog Here

WAR 185
moving, and more prone to attack groups of the
enemy encountered on farms or on the river. Like
the I bans, the Kenyahs make peace more readily
than the Kayans, who nurse their grievances and
seek redress after long intervals of time.
The I bans conduct their warfare less systematically,
and with far less discipline than the Kayans
and Kenyahs. An attack upon a house or village by
Ibans is usually made in very large force ; the party
is more of the nature of a rabble than of an army
each man acts independently. They seek above
all things to take heads, to which they attach an
extravagant value, unlike the Kayans and Kenyahs
who seek heads primarily for the service of their
funeral rites ; and they not infrequently attack a
house and kill a large number of its inmates in a
perfectly wanton manner, and for no other motive
that the desire to obtain heads. This passion for
heads leads them sometimes into acts of gross
treachery and brutality. The Ibans being great
wanderers, small parties of them, engaged perhaps
in working jungle produce, will settle for some
weeks in a household of Klemantans, and, after
being received hospitably, and sometimes even after
contracting marriages with members of the household,
will seize an opportunity, when most of the
men of the house are from home, to take the heads
of all the men, women, and children who remain,
and to flee with them to their own distant homes.
So strong is this morbid desire of the Ibans to
obtain human heads, that a war-party will sometimes
rob the tombs of the villages of other tribes and,
after smoking the stolen heads of the corpses, will
bring them home in triumph with glowing accounts
of the stout resistance offered by the victims.
Their attitude in this matter is well expressed by a
saying current among them, namely, ** Why should
we eat the hard caked rice from the edge of the
;