Maniq Erotic

Southern Thai villagers have long called the Maniq Ngo Pa, "forest rambutan," a nickname that comes from their tightly curled hair. They have also been called Sakai, a word many now hear as an insult. The Maniq number only a few hundred, and they are one of very few peoples in Thailand who still live, for at least part of the year, by moving camp through the rainforest. Their home is the Banthat range, the hills where Trang, Satun, Phatthalung and Songkhla provinces meet. A smaller community that settled long ago lives farther south in Yala. They are the Thai branch of the Semang, the forest foragers of the Malay Peninsula, whose roots there go deeper than those of their Thai and Malay neighbors.

Language sets them apart. In the Banthat hills the Maniq speak Ten'edn, also known as Tonga' or Mos. In Yala they speak Kensiu. Both are Aslian languages of the Austroasiatic family, which makes them distant relatives of Khmer and Vietnamese, even though everyone around them speaks Southern Thai or Malay. Most Maniq also get by in Southern Thai when they trade.

Camp life is built to move. A band puts up lean-to shelters of bamboo and broad leaves and stays as long as game, wild yams and fruit hold out. Then it walks on and leaves the old site to the forest. Hunters take monkeys, squirrels and birds with bamboo blowpipes and poisoned darts, a skill still passed from one generation to the next. Rattan, honey and medicinal plants go out to Thai markets in exchange for rice, tobacco, cloth and metal tools. Their animist beliefs are tied to the same ground: the forest holds spirits that must be respected, and daily choices about where to camp and what to take are made with them in mind.

In 1905 an odd episode tied the Maniq to the Thai court. King Chulalongkorn brought a Maniq boy named Khanung from the south to Bangkok and raised him in the palace. The king then wrote Ngo Pa, a verse drama about love and jealousy among the forest people, which fixed the Maniq in the Thai imagination for generations.

The pressures on them now are ordinary and relentless. Rubber and oil palm plantations have eaten into the forest, and many families spend long stretches near villages, taking wage work or settling in fixed communities. Many Maniq received Thai identity cards only in recent years. The cards bring schools and clinics within reach, and they also pull the camps a little closer to the road.