Edmund Langgu Saga: A Dayak Voice That Endures and the Moral Memory of a People

Edmund Langgu Saga (left) and me, the author (to the reader’s right).

By Masri Sareb Putra

I count myself fortunate to have met Edmund Langgu Saga in person. He is one of the Dayak figures I include in my book 101 Tokoh Dayak, published in 2025, pages 60 to 62. We met in mid-August 2024 at a restaurant in Kuching, accompanied by Patricia Ganing and Clemence Entiri. 

The encounter was unhurried and reflective, closer to a sharing of memory than a formal interview, and it confirmed the depth of experience that years of public service and cultural stewardship had given him.

From the Longhouse to Parliament

Edmund Langgu Saga belongs to a generation of Sarawakian leaders whose political consciousness was formed not in party headquarters or elite institutions, but in the rhythms of longhouse life, river travel, and communal responsibility. Born in 1936 in Rumah Ulak, along Sungai Kelampai in the Saratok district, his worldview was shaped early by Iban social ethics, where leadership is measured less by command than by trust, wisdom, and service to the community.

Before politics claimed him, Langgu was trained as a teacher at Batu Lintang Teachers’ College in Kuching. This formative experience left a permanent imprint on his public persona. He spoke with clarity rather than bombast, explained rather than imposed, and carried into politics a pedagogical instinct that valued listening as much as speaking. Teaching, for him, was not a detour before politics, but a foundation for it.

When he entered parliamentary politics in 1971 as Member of Parliament for Saratok, the constituency itself was newly created. Representing a largely rural electorate, Langgu quickly emerged as a figure who understood the everyday anxieties of people living at the margins of national development plans. Roads, schools, land security, and agricultural livelihoods were not abstract policy categories to him, but lived realities. He would go on to defend the Saratok seat for five consecutive terms, serving until 1986, an unusually long tenure that reflected deep electoral trust.

His rise coincided with a formative period in Malaysia’s political history, when federal authority was consolidating and East Malaysian voices were often peripheral. Yet Langgu was no peripheral figure. Between 1974 and 1975, he served as Leader of the Opposition in the Dewan Rakyat, succeeding James Wong Kim Min and preceding Lim Kit Siang. For a Sarawakian Dayak politician to hold this position at that time was both rare and symbolically significant, signalling that national debate could no longer be confined to Peninsular concerns alone.

Governing Between Centre and Periphery

Langgu’s political career cannot be reduced to oppositional rhetoric alone. He also governed from within. From 1978 to 1982, he served as Deputy Minister of Agriculture at the federal level, working under Shariff Ahmad and later Abdul Manan Othman. This portfolio placed him at the uneasy intersection of federal agricultural policy and the ecological, cultural, and economic realities of Borneo.

Agriculture in Sarawak was never merely a technical matter. It was bound up with customary land rights, shifting cultivation, communal labour, and ecological balance. Langgu understood that policy imported wholesale from the Peninsula often sat uneasily with these realities. His role, as he himself once suggested, was not to romanticise tradition, but to translate it into terms legible to the federal bureaucracy, while also ensuring that development did not erase the moral economy of rural life.

At the state level, he served as a Member of the Sarawak State Legislative Assembly for Krian from 1983 to 1991. This dual experience, federal and state, allowed him to operate as a bridge between layers of power that frequently misunderstood one another. He knew how policies were drafted in Putrajaya, and he knew how they landed, sometimes awkwardly, in longhouses along the rivers of Sarawak.

Politically, his journey crossed several important Dayak-based parties. He served as Secretary-General of the Sarawak National Party and later as Vice-President of the Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak. These roles reflected both the aspirations and the internal fractures of Dayak political organisation in the late twentieth century. Although he contested and won the 1978 general election under the Barisan Nasional banner, his political identity was never narrowly partisan. He was seen, above all, as a Dayak leader whose legitimacy came from cultural grounding rather than coalition arithmetic.

A Custodian of Iban Language and Literature

If politics defined Edmund Langgu Saga’s public visibility, it is his contribution to Iban language and literature that has secured his enduring intellectual stature. In Malaysia, he is widely regarded as a leading authority on the Iban language, not merely as a spoken medium, but as a literary and civilisational system. His knowledge encompasses grammar, vocabulary, oral poetry, ritual speech, traditional songs, proverbs, and the linguistic forms embedded in adat, or customary law.

In front of the door of Edmund Langgu Saga’s bilik in a Dayak longhouse in Sarawak.

What distinguishes Langgu from many commentators is the depth and coherence of his understanding. He does not treat language as a static object of study, but as a living archive of history, ethics, and social order. For him, a proverb is never just a saying; it is condensed philosophy. A ritual chant is not performance alone, but a mnemonic device carrying generations of ecological and moral knowledge.

Because of this, scholars, researchers, and cultural practitioners regularly seek him out. When faced with contested meanings, archaic terms, or culturally sensitive passages in Iban texts, many experts defer to his judgment. His counsel is valued precisely because it is neither speculative nor performative. It is grounded in long familiarity, lived practice, and a disciplined respect for linguistic precision.

In academic discussions of Iban literature and oral tradition, his name functions almost as a point of reference. Younger researchers cite him, senior scholars consult him, and cultural institutions rely on his interpretations. In a field where written documentation is often fragmentary, Langgu stands as a living repository, able to contextualise texts within the social worlds that produced them.

Legacy Beyond Office

Today, Edmund Langgu Saga has long stepped away from electoral politics. He serves as an adviser to the Tun Jugah Foundation and remains active as a writer and cultural contributor. Yet retirement, in his case, does not signal withdrawal. It marks a transition from formal authority to moral and intellectual stewardship.

In lectures, public talks, and informal conversations, he continues to articulate the values embedded in Iban culture with clarity and restraint. He speaks of law not merely as statute, but as ethical order; of history not merely as chronology, but as memory with responsibility. Those who listen closely often remark that his reflections carry the cadence of someone who has inhabited multiple worlds without losing his centre.

His life reminds us that political leadership need not end when office does. Influence can persist through language, teaching, and the quiet labour of transmission. In an age increasingly dominated by speed, spectacle, and forgetfulness, Edmund Langgu Saga represents a different tradition of public life, one in which authority is earned slowly, carried lightly, and ultimately placed in service of continuity.

Meeting him in Kuching in August 2024 made this clear. The conversation ranged easily from parliamentary history to Iban proverbs, from agricultural policy to ancestral law. There was no need for grand statements. His presence itself testified to a life spent mediating between past and present, between community and state, between spoken memory and written record.

In that sense, Edmund Langgu Saga stands not only as a figure of Sarawakian and Malaysian history, but as a reminder of what political and intellectual integrity can look like when rooted firmly in culture, language, and lived experience.