Page 22 - Malaysia by John Russel Denyes

THE PEOPLE OF MALAYSIA

An understanding of the peoples of Malaysia
calls for the classifying of them under the two
heads of indigenous and immigrants. The im-
migrants come from all parts of the world, but
especially from India and China. The indigenous
peoples are all of the general Malayan stock. All
are small people, averaging somewhere about four
feet ten to five feet three inches tall, with black
hair running from woolly to straight, and with a
coffee-brown complexion. Their civilization varies
from the barbarism of the tree-dwellers to that of
the advanced Javanese.

Tree On the Malay Peninsula, living most-
Dwellers ly far up in the mountain fastnesses,
are some twenty-five thousand or so of
a pygmy race of people who make their homes in
the tops of trees or in rude shelters under over-
hanging rocks. Ethnologists have grouped these
people into three families, the Semang, the Sakais
and the Jakuns. These three groups resemble
each other in that they are about four feet ten
inches tall, and are of the same brown color, but
the hair reveals radically different origin. The
Semang have the distinctly negroid cast of fea-
tures and the kinky hair. The Sakais have wavy
hair and their features resemble the Veddas of
Ceylon. The Jakuns have straight hair, but
otherwise seem to be rather closely allied to the
negroid stock.
The pygmys make for themselves rude shelters
of grass or palm leaves in the branches of large
trees, they can hardly be said to be homes. They
have traditions which prevent them from living
more than five days in one place. They live in

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