Murder Most Foul The Kalabakan Massacre 1890

Author: Danny Wong Tze Ken
Publisher: UM Press
ISBN: 9789674884451
Weight: 248 g
Pages: 136 pp
Year: 2025
Price: RM46

Set in a remote corner of Sabah, Malaysia, during the final decade of the nineteen century, this book reconstructs a little-known episode from the high noon of imperialism. The narrative unfolds in the years leading up to the killing of a European trader and culminates in the violent destruction of an upriver Indigenous community, an event that occurred in a region then scarcely touched by European presence.

At the centre of the study are the Tangaras, a Murut subgroup inhabiting the Kuamut and Kalabakan river regions of south-eastern Sabah, near the frontier of Dutch Borneo (Kalimantan). The story evolve around a European trader who married a Tangara woman and was later found dead under ambiguous circumstances. His brother, a colonial officer, subsequently mounted an expedition to determine the cause of death, an undertaking that ended not in clarity but in the massacre of the Tangara community. Framed at the time as a necessary punitive action against a "rebellious" tribe, the operation exemplified the asymmetries of power and the discursive justifications of empire.

This book re-examines the expedition, its motivations, and its aftermath, drawing on archival materials and Indigenous perspectives to illuminate a historical moment long overshadowed by colonial narratives. In doing so, it seeks to recover the silenced voices of the Tangara people and to restore complexity to a past too readily simplified and obscured.