Malaysians have been freaking out and flipping out all day because apparently, Angelina Jolie is in Malaysia. In Sabah, East Malaysia, to be precise.
A post, complete with a picture of the actress/filmmaker speaking to what looks like a village elderly, shared by the Kamek Miak Sarawak Facebook page, suggested that she was in the country. The caption of the post read:
Dikhabarkan Angelina Jolie sekarang berada di Kota Marudu Sabah. Tidak diketahui apa tujuan beliau ke sana. Selepas Kota Marudu “kemungkinan” beliau akan ke Sarawak melawat tempat-tempat yang menarik sekitar Kuching, Bintulu dan Miri…
Translation: Angelina Jolie is rumoured to be in Kota Marudu Sabah. It is not known what she is there for. After Kota Marudu, there’s a ” possibility” that she will go to Sarawak to visit places of interest around Kuching, Bintulu, and Miri..
As at time of writing, the post has been shared over 1,400 times and has received over 7,400 likes.
In case you didn’t know, Kota Marudu is a town and district located in the Kudat Division of the state of Sabah, Malaysia.
Kota Marudu was formerly known as “Bandau”, which derives from the Kadazan-Dusun word “Mondou”. In native folklore, a Mondou is a mythical buffalo-like creature. The district was renamed “Kota Marudu” after a fort built by local warrior Shariff Osman at Marudu Bay to protect the area from British colonists.
The main ethnic groups represented in Kota Marudu are the Dusun (particularly the Kimaragang Dusun, Talantang Kota Marudu and Tobilung), Rungus, Bajau, Orang Sungai and the Chinese (particularly the Hakka and Hokkien dialect groups). There is also a significant number of Suluk people, whom the descendant of earlier settler of Limau-limauan, Kudat which in early day move by the seashore to Marudu bay from Kudat.
Now, aside from being an A-list Hollywood celebrity and filmmaker, Angelina Jolie is also known for her humanitarian work. She promotes various causes, including conservation, education, and women’s rights, and is most noted for her advocacy on behalf of refugees as a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
For her efforts, she has received a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and an honorary damehood of the Order of St Michael and St George (DCMG), among other honors.
She has been known to travel to countries such as Cambodia, Turkey, Lebanon, Africa, Afghanistan, and other war zones in the world. So what exactly would bring her to Malaysia? Is she really in Kota Marudu, Sabah?
As much as we’d like to believe that she’s “within reach”, sorry peeps, she’s not here. A quick check via Google told us that the image Kamek Miak Sarawak used was from a PEOPLE coverage of Angelina Jolie meeting a 90-year-old Myanmar refugee at the Ja Mai Kaung Baptist refugee camp in Myitkyina.
It was part of Angelina Jolie’s humanitarian trip to South East Asia where she also met Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
Again, let’s not believe just about everything/anything that we read online, shall we? But also hope that Angelina Jolie will make a trip to Malaysia sometime in the near future 🙂
Sources: PEOPLE, The Star, Kota Marudu Wiki.
