ROGUE KINGS AND DIVINE QUEENS IN CENTRAL SULAWESI AND GUINEA-BISSAU

Abstract

Retrospective narratives about stranger-kings obtained from fieldwork among the Lauje in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and the Manjaco in Guinea-Bissau, Africa, are examined against the historical record in order to question the levels of violence in communities where stranger-kings reigned. It is argued that information used by earlier scholars is perspectival rather than factual because it is steeped in a ‘politics of difference’ rhetoric. This binary rhetoric is used to convince audiences that stranger-kings are good or bad, depending on the narrator's point of view. Such accounts fail to reflect the nuanced roles stranger-kings played in communities, unless a number of perspectives are compared and contrasted. The conclusion is that assumptions about violence in native communities, and whether stranger-kings reduce or exacerbate conflict, are based on binary, oversimplified characterizations produced both by colonial authorities and by ‘natives’ who wish to dominate their economic and political world with rhetoric about ‘evil others’.

Notes

¹In large part, the context in which Henley's stranger-kings are characterised as moral and rational is a time when Dutch dominion over commerce was highly contested in the Indies and in Europe. Thus it is likely that the documents cited by Henley reflect a particular moral agenda.

²In the 1970s Jan Vansina was at the forefront of historians acknowledging the validity of indigenous history, even if unwritten. Vansina (1962) referred to written documents as history, consciously transmitted lore as ‘oral tradition’, and personal recollections as ‘living history’. Vansina (2000) has since questioned his earlier comparisons of oral traditions to texts. I thus bypass the whole debate and use the phrase ‘retrospective narrative’.

³The pirates were often emissaries from kingdoms in the far away Spice Islands (Ternate or Tobungku) and the Philippines (Sulu) or Sulawesi (Bone, Banggai, Luwu and Cina) (Velthoen 2005; Bulbeck and Caldwell 2000).

⁸It is probable that this man was not Kaili, but Bugis, who were known for trading brass trays and dominating others (Ammarell 2002: 56). Because of the fear many from central Sulawesi have of Bugis, Makasar and Mandar, ethnic links to south Sulawesi are hidden.

⁴A minor Bugis kingdom situated in the western Cenrana Valley that ceased to exist after c.1670 (Bulbeck and Caldwell 2000) but which occurs as a central toponym in the Bugis epic poem La Galigo (Koolhof 1999). This suggests that Siamae Sanji's tale does not draw directly on a remembered past. Puang is a Bugis or Mandar title.

⁵In 1679 the Tobello of Ternate signed a treaty preventing them from trading with Minahasans of north Sulawesi as the VOC wished to monopolise Minahasan trade (Henley 1998; Schouten 2002). It is possible this brought them to central Sulawesi on raids. It is likely the Tobello, Bugis and Mandar were competing for trade and raiding access to upland villages in central Sulawesi where no Dutch claimed dominion (Schrieke 1955–57; Pelras 1996; Acciaioli 1998, 2000; Ammarell 2002; Gibson 2005).

⁶Other historians writing about Southeast Asian state formation (Reid 1983; Wyatt 1984; Kathirithamby-Wells 1992; Andaya 1997; Wolters 1999; Heidhues 2001; Day 2002) characterise the 18th century as the Asian dark ages. The European presence put pressure on leaders to increase the supply of commodities and slaves (Reid 1983; Sutherland 1983; Warren 1981, 2002; Watson 1980).

⁷Warren addresses the role firearms played in the predatory tactics of slave-raiding communities and suggests that food shortages in the 19th century may have led to armed raids by predatory kingdoms from south Sulawesi (1980: 186–87, 250–55). Many authors disagree with Warren's analysis, including Henley (2000) and Sutherland (2004).

⁹For instance, in the 1850 contract, the ‘queen of Tinombo’ (who lived in Dusunan) agreed to send five bunches of rice from each field and 50 labourers from each village for a month of gold mining in Tuladenggi near Moutong (AG 9312/91).

¹⁰Van der Hart (1850: 219) says ‘when we have people sign new contracts they do not have to pay us with gold, they can pay […] in agricultural products. We put the Bugis in charge of them to ensure payment’. Documents of this period remark that the ‘Bugis are cruel to the local Alifoeroe’ (upland Lauje), once again underlining the fear factor.

¹¹That these nobles in Tinombo were acquiescent to Dutch authority is evident in a letter (AG 9312/91) sent to the Resident of Manado asking him to intervene in cases where the Gorontalo ruler was reportedly extorting money and labour from Tinombo. The Tinombo leaders may have been using this complaint as a way to claim autonomy from the Gorontalo. It could also be a way to diffuse blame for their own coercion of labourers sent to the Gorontalo. The tensions are brought on by the Dutch presence in the region, and are not essential to local society.

¹²The binary also appears within contemporary political discourse regarding immigrants (depicted as disease-mongering murderers) and locals (depicted as loving, peaceful and healing).

¹³At the Center of the Sea, the spiritual palace of the stranger-king, the supreme spirits are the stranger-king's parents, ‘the mother and father’ of the prayer. A similar set of spiritual parents exists for the divine ruler at the Center of the Earth or the Inscribed Rock (Polu Irandu).

¹⁴ Alaenye and Lelenye are filler words in Lauje prayers. Roughly translated they mean ‘it is said’ and signify antiquated speech. There are many instances in this prayer, but I have just translated it once for brevity's sake.

¹⁵ Up until the 19th century iron tools were acquired through exchange. The neighbouring Balanta, in search of commodities to exchange for these tools, began selling those of their own people who were unable to pay judicial fines (Hawthorne 2001).

¹⁶ It is not clear whether these stranger-kings were imposed by Portuguese force, or whether Bassarel farmers felt compelled through bullying and extortion to install the kings to protect their land and capital investments.

¹⁷Gable (1990: 462) quotes a man who claimed that the Manjaco in Pecis still performed this act in the 1920s. It was associated with the king's status as a ‘rain priest’. This resonates with Jan Muller's description of the Jukun kingship in Nigeria (de Heusch 1982). Arens (1979) demonstrates how communities in history have always vilified others by accusing them of cannibalism.

¹⁸I say this with a caveat, for in Gable's (2003) article on kings he ends with a provocative question, wondering if the ethos of negativity expressed by the Manjaco might indeed be a form of democracy and therefore an aggressive form of civility. I think he is right on this point though the body of his work does not allow for Manjaco to be civil at all.

¹⁹Hobbes claims that primitives are in a constant state of ‘Warre’ due to their innate aggression. It is only when a divine ruler, a monarch – with an orderly and rational perspective – takes over that the short, brutish and nasty lives of primitives can become orderly and peaceful.