Even in the still of the jungle thicket in this the farthest corner of the southernmost province of Thailand there lies a potential for violence one cannot ignore. Small pinprick assaults in the form of shootings or bombings – and the sometimes equally bloody extra-judicial reprisals that are meted out – have peppered almost daily now a region that should be known for its chain of majestic limestone outcrops, pristine sands and deserted islands that dot the peninsular.

And though it may be discreditable that the ongoing conflict between armed separatists and the state in the South is so underreported – if only one looks at the volume of killings, lest one considers the victims: school teachers as much as military personnel – there is arguably another lesser-known paralysing force at work. Utilising the threat the resistance poses, an almost equally alarming weapon employed in the troubles is what Noam Chomsky calls the ‘culture of fear’. The Southern Thailand insurgency is a convenient conflict that represents the perfect opportunity for the state to give comfort to the South in the form of security – though at a severe and debilitating cost. Thailand’s poorest region, the South, is providing the state its biggest excuse to line its coffers – at the expense of its own livelihood.

The really ugly truth here is the seeming abandonment of the beautiful provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala – the provincial capital of the latter known as Thailand’s cleanest city – under martial law, effectively off-limits to the tourist as the fear propaganda sustains beyond reasonable concerns for safety. Bangkok profits from the continuing supply of arms and security personnel, while increasingly zealous xenophobic claims regarding the true nature of Thai ethnicity (primarily a weapon of the capital’s colour-coded political war) help perpetuate the demonising myth that the Muslim Malay minority in the South truly is part of what Edward Said has referred to as ‘the other’.

Against this increasingly catastrophic socio-political landscape, seeking refuge from logging and agricultural expansion in small pockets deep in the Betong district of Yala, exist the Mani (มันนิ), a Negrito tribe indigenous to Thailand it is believed have lived here in relative isolation for several thousand (and possibly even as much as seventy thousand) years. Though the origins of the Mani, like all Negrito tribes, is much debated – with some displaying physical traits akin to the Pygmy, the Australian Aboriginal, the Melanesian and even peoples of central India – there is increasing (but not conclusive) genetic evidence (and obviously clear physical evidence) that the Negrito groups represent the descendants of the earliest modern humans to migrate from Africa to the Malay peninsula.

In a nation obsessed with skin-whitening cream as much as sovereign rights it is, of course, most ironic that the first true inhabitants of Thailand are in fact ancestors of the sub-Saharan African. This is unquestionably invaluable, just even alone for the context it provides, bringing into stark relief the notion that we are all guests on whatever soil we are standing.

For the the peaceful hunter-gatherer Mani, choosing to live in a more primitive existence, relatively untainted and undisturbed, they can be considered conscious refugees from modernity itself. And given the escalating race-based hatred in the region, which the Rohingya refugee crisis has illustrated, the further dislocation that the Southern conflict provides is perhaps in fact, for them at least, even fortuitous.

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