Who invented word pangait in Borneo?

                               pix of human skulls

I would like to talk about the word pangait, I notice the spelling keeps on changing from pangait,panggait to even pengait, and perhaps soon it will change to Penangites- Penang people.

I would say the correct spelling is pangait.

First, the word pangait is very much Borneo’s word by the sound of it. Hear across the ethnics in this island it must be pangait not pengait. In Sabah people are not used to say é as much as people from the Peninsula.

How and who created the infamous word pangait God knows, I’ve no inkling.

All I knew of pangait in Malay, in as far as Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei are concerned pangait means hooky metal or wood- like instrument or even akin to parang.

People use it for harvesting palm oil seeds or coconuts or papayas, usually with long handle.

Unfortunately in Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei when we say pangait it also means something else which is always associated with someone chopping someone’s head. In other words, it’s the head, which is most significance than the body.

I also have no idea how pangaiting taking place all I know and I understand that pangait’s job is to kill and kidnap the victim. There is no clear indication as to whether the hooky instrument is ever used at all.

By the way, pangait-not the instrument but the person doing the killing, and usually isn’t originated locally. They were outsiders or might even foreigners.

In the Brunei Bay area typical pangait are known to be of Indian complexion-dark skinned people. Strange. They are hired by the authorities or even hired by the government of the day to chop citizens’ heads. The head is very valuable used as ritual, buried behind or under the bridge or under the buildings.

So the story goes occasionally whenever someone is missing in the neighbourhood that must be taken by pangait.

In the 60s I knew one an old lady disappeared in Sipitang and has never been found until today, people said the caused of her disappearance was by pangait.

Pangait believers believed when they are lots of bridges being built then the panggait would be rampant. Never walk alone in lonely place.

By burying human heads under the bridge would prolong the life span of the bridges or buildings.

I remember when I was a kid my dad was saying to me but I wasn’t sure whether it was only meant as joke or he wanted to frighten me. He once saw a few pangaits loitering in his 30 acres rubber plantation, one had dark complexion while the other two were very brown.

According to him he was very familiar with the plantation-after all his property if that pangaits were looking for him, he said had no problem in outwitting them. He was in fact watching the movement of the three pangaits from the rock top with a shotgun lent to him by his relative without being noticed. That’s perhaps the closest story about pangait that I knew of.

To cut the story short, I was one day at a talk about the origin of the Dusun, where the speaker prophesied that the Dusun came from Baram River in Sarawak moving upward to Sabah, they were the earlier pangaits in Borneo.

Surely there is a contradiction with many elders who said that the earlier pangaits were the Murut or Dayak group and couldn’t be the black skinned foreigners as I mentioned earlier nor could it be the earlier Dusun from Baram River.

I said, since the main business of pangait was chopping human heads, the pangaits could have started together by the invention of parang, as parang basically metal or iron.

The earlier discovery of metal parang in Borneo was in the cave somewhere in the East Coast of North Borneo, now Sabah. I therefore couldn’t imagine pangait used wood to chop someone’s head.

So pangait was originated from the East Coast of Sabah?

by kandayan