Of all the leaders of longhouse communities in the valley of the Tinjar, Aban Jau stands out not only because of his hubris, but also because his career straddled the period when Upriver People lost their turbulent independence and came under colonial control.

In his rehabilitation of the humbled Aban Jau as “A Rob Roy of Sarawak,” Charles Hose quotes several of his “picturesque sayings.” Among them is this remark, half plaint, half boast:

Picturesque as his wording may be, Aban Jau's argument was perfectly reasonable. As far as he was concerned, the political manoeuvring between Rajah Brooke, the Foreign Office in London, and the Sultan in Brunei, leading up to the “cession” of “Baram,” was absolutely meaningless. The annexation of the whole watershed had no more legal basis than any other colonial land grab.

The protest fell, of course, on deaf ears, but it reveals something of the world in which Aban Jau grew up, a world divided between those who did and did not live “inside the Sultan's fence.” Since that was the world in which the institutions of longhouse life were shaped, it is now necessary to turn attention to the nature and location of the fence.