The Rise and Demise of Kadazan Nationalism

Abstract

Writing in June 1960 Donald Stephens, editor of the North Borneo News and Sabah Times , remarked that “… the Penampang Kadazans have seldom found much favour in official circles because of the bit of education they possess and because of the courage they have in fighting for their rights.” Certainly the observations of British North Borneo Chartered Company officials and others in the past often included disparaging comparisons between the then-called “Dusun” people of the Penampang, Papar and Membakut areas south of Jesselton (now Kota Kinabalu), and the more tractable people of Tuaran to the north. Owen Rutter, for instance, delivered himself in 1922 of the opinion that “The Dusuns of Tuaran … are … the pleasantest of the lowland Dusuns, just as the people of Papar and Membakut are the most objectionable.” He went on to describe an incident occurring in 1910 in which the people of Papar led a protest movement against the sale of land by the Chartered Company to rubber companies. They contended that such compensation as they had received for fruit trees and ancestral graves was inadequate, and that the land itself was their heritage for which they should also be paid. “At one time”, wrote Rutter, “the agitation movement threatened to spread to Tuaran, but the good people of the district did not appreciate squandering on legal charges the comfortable sum they had extracted from the Tuaran Rubber Estate for their fruit trees, and the Papar envoys went home practically empty-handed.” K. G. Tregonning, alluding to the same incident, merely says “At Papar, a notorious trouble-maker, strongly influenced by the long-established Roman Catholic mission there, found for the Christian Dusuns imaginary faults in the change from traditional tenure.”