Kwijau Erotic

The Kwijau are one of the smaller peoples within Sabah's large Kadazan-Dusun family, and the clearest thing that sets them apart is their speech. Kuijau, as the language is usually written, belongs to the Dusunic branch of the Austronesian languages of northern Borneo. It shares a great deal with other Dusun varieties but is distinct enough to mark its speakers as a people of their own. Their home is the Keningau area in the interior of Malaysian Borneo, the upland plain between the Crocker Range and the Trus Madi highlands, well inland from the coast. It has always been shared country. Murut communities, whose languages form a separate branch, live across the same district, and Keningau town draws Chinese traders, Malay civil servants and migrants from all over the state. Malay is the language of school, government and most business, and like nearly every small language in Borneo, Kuijau has to compete with it at home. The Kwijau have lived through the same turns as the rest of interior Sabah: rule by the British North Borneo Chartered Company, Japanese occupation during the Second World War, and entry into Malaysia in 1963, which brought roads, schools and a steady pull toward wage work in town.

Most Kwijau today are Christians, split between Catholic and Protestant churches, alongside a Muslim minority. The older religious world has not vanished so much as settled into the calendar. Rice was once treated as a living thing with a spirit of its own, and Kaamatan, the harvest festival held across Sabah every May, carries that idea into the present in a form churchgoers can share: gongs, rice wine served from jars, dancing and thanks for the crop. Less known outside Sabah is sogit, the Kadazan-Dusun principle that a serious wrong, such as adultery or a grave insult, upsets the balance of the whole community. It has to be made good with a payment, traditionally an animal such as a pig or a buffalo, before ordinary life can resume. This is not folklore saved for festivals. Sabah still runs Native Courts that hear customary disputes, so adat can land in front of a native chief and carry real consequences. Day to day, many families still grow rice and work smallholdings on the plain, while others commute into Keningau or have moved to Kota Kinabalu. They keep their village ties alive through weddings, funerals and the May harvest season.